RSS Feed
| Guild Wars (PC) | ||
| Publisher: NCsoft | Developer: ArenaNet | |
| Genre: Persistent Online RPG | Release Date: 04/26/2005 | |
WHEN YOU THINK OF PvP COMBAT in an online RPG, chances are, images of the most degrading forms of griefing come to mind: being teased, chased, ganked, and subsequently corpse-camped by a group of pre-teens with too much time on their hands, and the best equipment farmed gold can buy. Save for the few games built exclusively around PvP combat, the potential for compelling, competitive content is largely squandered on MMOs. So it's not a moment too soon that Guild Wars comes upon us.
Guild Wars is all about PvP in a fair, sporting sense: groups of skilled players battling it out in organized, controlled events, and those with the strongest strategies and most cohesive teams prevail. It's like an RPG version of Counter-Strike. Surprisingly, the non-PvP elements are just as engaging. In order to build your character into a competitive powerhouse, you have to go through tons of compelling, cooperative content. Not only does doing so reward you with the actual, tangible character abilities that you'll need to compete, but it'll also trains you to work within the context of a tight, organized group. Many of the challenges that Guild Wars puts forth are pretty demanding, so if your groups don't work as cohesive units, you won't see very much success.
Even more interesting, Guild Wars has no monthly fees, further separating it from the other MMO products on the market today. Instead, the development team hopes to release an expansion pack every six months or so.
In the end, Guild Wars fires on all cylinders, with an impeccable technical implementation, gorgeous graphics, and a daunting multitude of things to do in both cooperative and competitive play. This is not a title for everyone, but it's definitely a breath of fresh air. In the spirit of Guild Wars tag-team cooperative play, we're turning loose two reviewers: Miguel Lopez and Dave "Fargo" Kosak.
Miguel: ArenaNet held quite a few preview events for the Guild Wars leading up to its launch, so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into going in. I'll admit that I anticipated the launch to be rougher than it was, so it was a pleasant surprise to see the game's slick, streaming technology working as smoothly as it did. The most I remember waiting for the game to load anything -- ever -- was five minutes, and that was on launch day. From that point on, there was nary a technical hitch. I've been disconnected once or twice, but in the context of MMOs -- especially ones as young as Guild Wars -- that's remarkably infrequent. As crazy as it sounds, ArenaNet's "stream-as-you-play" network model works like magic. It made installation a breeze, and I imagine that any subsequent updates to the game will be hardly noticeable on the players' end.
The game is immediately accessible, too. You're basically bombarded with easy, rewarding tasks the minute you log into the world, and these do a decent job of familiarizing you with how the game works. Granted, things get a bit more complex as you progress -- eventually becoming downright arcane, some would argue -- but to its credit, the game at least tries to make the early-goings as palatable as possible for newbies. The statistical particulars of character customization do get a bit confusing, and the quests and missions more challenging, however, but in both cases, the penalties for making the wrong decisions are never too extreme. If you misallocate some attribute points early on, you can always reset them once you've become more informed. And if you fail at a mission, you just respawn in town, free to give it another go with no penalty whatsoever.
It's not all about killing your fellow man -- Guild Wars has a solid PvE game as well.
Fargo: Yep. Technologically, Guild Wars is solid. I've had no disconnections like the ones Miguel described, and lag has been infrequent. Meanwhile, Guild Wars is almost constantly streaming me content, including continual updates and tweaks. This is the future of MMOs.
As for the beginner game experience, Guild Wars is no World of Warcraft. The learning curve is steeper and the rewards come slower. But, it's still pretty satisfying: you learn the basic of combat right away and before long you're learning how to combine your skills together for interesting effects. Interestingly, the "prologue" for the game can take as long as eight to ten hours depending on how many quests you decide to do. You're introduced to an idyllic world ("We all remember the day it happened," a voiceover explains, hinting that something terrible is to come). After you get to know the place and decide to advance to the next part of the game -- KERBLAM! The place gets jacked in a massive disaster. Afterwards, you can explore the same countryside, only two years of game time have gone by and the place is destroyed. It gives you a real sense of history and a feeling of discovery as you revisit old locations or find out what happened to characters you met in the prologue... That's good storytelling, and I wish the rest of the game had that level of drama.
