Deep, addictive, and fun PvP and PvE gameplay create a unique experience that follows its own rules for online gaming.
User Rating: 9.4 | Guild Wars (Special Edition) PC
Guild Wars comes to us with an excellent pedigree, having been designed and developed by ex-Blizzard programmers who created the still-addictive Diablo II to computers around the world. And while Guild Wars provides a mixed bag of experiences, what is consistent throughout is that it’s an incredibly fun and addictive gaming experience. Nominally, the game is a Massively-Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game (MMORPG), but it breaks the mold in seemingly every way. Instead of a traditional MMORPG, in which the entire world is populated by the population of players, Guild Wars only allows interaction within the town zones. Once you discover a town zone, you can freely teleport between those zones, allowing players to leap across the world without having to resort to time-consuming journeys or expensive transports. And there are no crafting skills that become the heart of MMORPG play. Your character is focused on combat, and combat alone. Leaving a town zone, however, is when the differences from a traditional MMORPG become apparent. Each party, formed in town, receives an instanced version of the game world, with their own copy of the adventure area, monsters, and treasure drops. The instanced gaming zones provide for a double-edged sword, really. On the plus side, it eliminates practices such as kill-stealing, quest lines, griefing, player killing, and zerging, all of plague traditional MMORPG’s. On the minus side, however, it means you can never “meet up” with a party in the wilderness, and if your internet connection fails mid-adventure, you can’t rejoin your party. The other advantage that Guild Wars has over a traditional MMORPG is the lack of monthly fee. Your initial game purchase allows unlimited online play with up to four characters. In addition to the fee-free play, Guild Wars has been updated frequently through a unique streaming technology, which allows game updates to be applied without the need to download and install a patch. Since its release, item quality has been tweaked, skills have been updated and balanced, and other incremental improvements have been made. And as I write this, the free “Sorrow’s Furnace” update is due out soon, which promises new adventure areas, opponents, items, and more. The sheer volume of updates that are being provided for a game without a monthly fee is impressive, rewarding players with balanced and new content. The graphics present in the game are quite impressive, both in their graphical polish and the extent to which they support the game. Characters and enemies are rendered with acumen, allowing easy identification and clean animations that bring the environments to life. On top of that, skills and attacks have unique animations and lighting effects. This not only provides a few more graphical touches to impress players, but also has a distinct effect on gameplay, as you can easily identify which skill is being used by an enemy, and perhaps interrupt that action. With the proper hardware, boss enemies feature a menacing glow effect, so you know who to avoid if you’re weak. Equally impressive about the game’s graphics engine is the range of machines on which it’ll run. While lower-end machines won’t get all the graphical bells and whistles, and won’t be able to run the game smoothly at a high resolution, they will still run the game. This means that players on a budget, once again tying into the lack of a monthly fee, won’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on their computer systems in order to join the world of Guild Wars. The music featured in the game is good for the most part, composed by Jeremy Soule. The songs are all out of the same vein, and can get a bit repetitive over time, but do provide a variety of themes from majestic crescendos to mysterious chords. The game has also been developed in conjunction with DirectSong, a game music expansion service, through which players can purchase and download new music that is not only playable on your favorite media player, but also integrates into the game. It’s a clever idea that can help bring new music to the game. But great graphics and music mean nothing without a fantastic game to drive them. Here, there are two distinct sides to the coin. The Player vs. Environment game (PvE) follows your character through a storyline involving the fall of your home kingdom and your character’s role in a world-spanning adventure. You’ll be able to select two of the six professions, one of which is your primary profession, gaining a unique attribute, and one of which is a secondary profession. This provides for a wide variety of gaming options through the combination of professions, and the selection of which attributes to put points towards. For example, you could create a Ranger/Elementalist, excelling at dealing damage from range. Or you could create a Necromancer/Warrior, surrounding yourself with minions and taking the fight to your opponents in melee combat. Or a Monk/Mesmer, who heals fellow party members and steals energy to fuel her healing from enemies. The PvE game features a myriad of quests, as well as special Cooperative Missions that advance the storyline through objectives. While most of the quests can be accomplished, with varying degrees of difficulty, with any group of players, the Missions tend to be slightly more difficult. In order to have a reasonable chance of success with the missions, you’ll need a well-balanced team of characters. While this does provide for quite a bit of strategy when it comes to preparation, it also means it can be hard to find good groups unless you are part of a good circle of friends or guild. One thing that plagued the developers’ previous outing, Diablo II, was item stealing. Monster drops were simply free-for-alls, which was a plague for ranged attackers, as the melee attackers could simply scarf up all the loot before anyone else could get to it. While some groups overcame this through house rules, the truth was that in “unsanctioned” online play, the system was badly broken. Guild Wars addresses this by assigning drops to players in the game during the PvE game. By reserving drops for a player, it prevents loot-stealing, and allows the players to continue to focus on playing the game, rather than grabbing items. Gold drops are split equally between all party members. It’s a system that works well, allowing everyone from healers to casters to melee tanks to have a fair shake at getting good loot. Guild Wars also features a robust Player vs. Player (PvP) game. Normally, Player Killing is disallowed, until you enter one of the many arenas featured in the game. Depending on the arena, you could be a part of a random four-person team, or a prearranged team. There is also a tournament that provides a wide variety of match types for eight-person teams, as well as a Guild vs. Guild (GvG) match that pits you as either the attacker or defender of your Guild Hall. The same principles of character creation apply, and are probably even more important for success against better teams. A balanced team is one that more efficiently protects and deals damage than its opponent. And those are the teams that are usually successful. PvE characters can be used for PvP play, though anything short of the level 20 maximum level will probably fail miserably in the more advanced arenas. If you don’t have the time or the inclination to play through the PvE game, you can also create a level 20 PvP-only character. These characters can unlock skills and items by spending Faction that is earned in PvP combat, allowing PvP characters to advance in a similar manner as PvE characters. Skills are the core of any character in Guild Wars, be it PvP or PvE. Skills are earned in PvE by finishing quests or purchasing them from a trainer, and are unlocked in PvP by earning that skill in PvP or purchasing it with earned Faction. Each character can only change their skills in town, and can only equip 8 skills at a time. Because of this limitation, it is very difficult for a single character to become a jack-of-all-trades. For example, a warrior might load up on damage dealing and evasion skills, but be devoid of any good healing skills. Likewise, a monk might have great healing spells, but little ability to deal and avoid damage. The skill system also requires a bit of strategy to effectively use combinations. For example, one of the Elementalist’s skills deals a set amount of damage to a target, regardless of armor or level, but will remove any negative conditions applied to the target. With a team that depends on those conditions to dispatch enemies, this skill is obviously not a good choice. When combined with the many different possibilities for character professions, the possibilities are nearly endless. Between the combination of characters, and the engaging skill system, Guild Wars turns out to be a highly deep game. The PvE game has a long, engaging storyline, with challenging missions and areas that remain a challenge even after the storyline is finished. This is furthered by the character system, which allows you to respec your character’s attributes at any time, making sure that you’re never locked into one type of character path. Players are encouraged to try different paths, and are never prevented from doing so within the limitations of the system. The PvP game is also incredibly fun, because of the ongoing chess match that happens in the arenas. For example, a team that relies on enchantments and hexes would be at a terrible disadvantage against a team that specialized in enchantment and hex removal. It’s a constantly-evolving landscape of combat, which keeps things fresh and exciting every time you log into the game. In closing, while Guild Wars isn’t your traditional MMORPG, in many ways, it’s better. The lack of a monthly fee should appeal to both individuals who simply want to play the PvE storyline, as well as casual players who don’t devote weeks on end to gaming to get the most out of a $15 monthly fee. And the excellent skill and character system allows for a great deal of depth in the gameplay, allowing each player to find a character that they enjoy playing without having to invest hours on end to creating new characters. In short, Guild Wars is an incredibly addicting game that almost anyone can enjoy. 
