A good game but those yearning for another game equal in depth and fun to Diablo series will be disappointed.

User Rating: 8.2 | Guild Wars (Special Edition) PC
By xts3 | Review Date:
A good game but those yearning for another game equal in fun to Diablo will be disappointed. The loot and skill attribute systems are not as fleshed out or as deep as diablo's, the game really falls flat in terms of loot and items, levels and power gaming we all came to love with the Diablo series and hasn't been matched since. Guild wars starts out promising enough with it's lavishly rendered graphics and opening cutscene with amazing almost tolkien-esque heavenly music you'd think you were hearing during a sequence in the movie The Lord of the rings : The fellowship of the rings. The game itself seems pretty extravagantly promising at first as you play the game; there are lots and lots of skills and monsters to whack, lush graphics and huge landscapes. The developers at Arena.net took a clue from blizzards Diablo team that in order for you to get most people to do quests you need experience, items and skill rewards as most people just don’t give much of a darn about "questing" if there is not a significant incentive to do so. Since in game quests are not going to contain the full motion video and acting cutscenes and voiceovers of the main story like in most RPG’s simply because its too much work and financially impossible for game developers with the current state of technology in the age we live in. The first problem and I think it’s a glaring one, is that many reviewers who reviewed the game may have never figured out how to move on out of the Pre-Searing Ascalon. The problem is that when you first start the game you begin in the newbie area but it’s not obvious how to get out of it without asking around. What happens in the beginning of the game you are required to pick up two classes, a main class and a sub class. Once you do get a subclass you will be asked if you want to make this change permanent. Then once you’ve made it permanent you have to go and talk to Tydus by the gate back in Pre-searing (i.e. not destroyed) ascalon to go to the start of the map real game world. After you get out of the pre-searing ascalon the game starts to take off. The world is absolutely enormous and the amounts of skills available for the different characters are quite large for the majority of the characters but some problems you’ll notice will come up later in the game once you’ve gotten through most of the game which I will get to later. The in game missions (the actual “levels”) for Guild wars are pretty decent and straightforward, they play exactly like missions/quests in other console games where you are thrown into a level and you have objectives to fulfill during the mission / level. Inside the missions they have in-game cutscenes along the way, either at the beginning of the mission, during it when you do some objective, or at the end. They all serve to enhance the game and they get the job done but wont be winning any awards anytime soon. All the games story cutscenes takes place rendered inside the game and inside the main events and missions. The voice acting is well done considering that most voice acting in video games; even the lauded Final fantasy X is pretty atrocious for most game characters. They are serviceable and good enough, no one should really have any complaints. Now an RPG like guild wars whose focus is on skills, leveling up and action should have had way more in the way of gear and magical items and a much deeper skill tree (skills you invest points in from your level ups to upgrade your other skills). This is where Guild wars starts to suffer in the late game, almost everything in guild wars is not really rare or differentiated enough from regular items to spend time even looking for them, even if it is blue (magical), purple (semi-rare magical), and gold (unique), almost all of these items are bland, and undifferentiated from normal or common magical weapons. They all end up blending together; the regular and magical items frequently are better then unique and purple magic items. This leaves you feeling the depth of the gear, loot and magic items system is really shallow and uninspired because the game developers obsession with game balance for their player versus player arena’s. So the single player game ends up suffering as you have less and less a reason to keep fighting monsters the higher level you become, and once you hit level 20 and finish the game you’ll pretty much put away the game if you have no interest in player versus player. The other problem is the higher level you go, the more you’ll question the lack of skill points you have to invest in those skills trees of your main attributes to make your subclass skills worthwhile. Many subclasses are impossible for certain class combinations simply do to the enormous amount of skill points you have to invest to get skills anywhere near powerful enough to justify the insane mana cost for some character types because they lack energy points or the fast energy recharge (recharge is denoted with “>” arrows on the mana and health bars in the game). Warriors pretty much have to forgo heavy magic users such as elementalist or Mesmer as subclass unless they use only the cheapest of spells or equip +energy items, which take up slots for more useful effects for your main class. Another other problem is that the game developers got it into their heads that making runes with “debuffs” as well as “buffs” was cool. Sorry no one likes items that give you a +1 or +2 to some skill and then take away -50 hp, sorry that just doesn’t wash well with game players. Seeing a negative attribute on an item that takes away from your main character statistics is a big no no, for a game. No one is going to want to reduce the efficacy of their character. Yet another complaint is that applying runes, the system is so limited as to be nearly useless. You can only apply one rune at a time to one piece of armor at a time, so say you have +1 to some skill and +1 to some other skill, you can’t put more then one rune on one piece of armor and you only have 4 pieces to place them, head, chest, legs, feet. You can forget about applying them to weapons and shields, runes don’t work on weapons and shields (or wands and frost artifacts, etc for magic users). Lastly you can only take 8 skills into battle or outside world, which you can only change inside towns, which really limits the amount of tactics you have at your disposal while fighting enemies on the field which really detracts from the game. You have all those skills but can only take 8 with you to fight with during an outing. This is where Guild wars falls flat in that you’ll be hanging onto only 8 at a times throughout the entire game. This was done in order to “balance” the player versus player aspect of the game, so once again the developers are sacrificing single player game play for multiplayer balance reasons, which ends up reducing the fun to be had in the single player portion of the game. All in all, despite my greivances, Guild wars is a good game, just not a great one. It's wonderful experience your first time through, but after that or you reach really the highest levels it gets old really fast.

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