A little less than three weeks back I purchased Guild Wars. The thought of an MMO without a subscription cost intrigued me, and knowing the game was developed by many of the folks behind Diablo II, I was sure I had a winner. I was right insofar as I find the game to be most excellent, but oh-so wrong about the MMO aspect. Guild Wars falls into its own neat little category. I'd like to call it the SMORPG, or Selectively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. Y'see, it's entirely possible to play through the entirety of Guild Wars without ever grouping with humans. You'll be forced into limited social contact in the groups and the outposts. Most of it will be spamming for trade items, running, or "LFG 4 quest". You surely can find some genuinely good players and make some friends in-game. You can also eschew any social interaction and use the hirelings you find in the towns and outposts to be big meat shields. They're ineffective, but if you're that anti-social or impatient they can drag their feet to get the job done. When you do decide you're pro-human-interaction, it's with a limited number of people. Initially you can only have two characters in a party. This expands to four, then six, and I do imagine it gets larger. Shh, I'm new, and I'm not in far enough yet that I can say definitively. Try and make friends with people you quest with, find a good guild (or found your own if you're up for a lot of responsibility), and continue to keep an ever-growing list of good contacts in-game. This is important in any online game. With this game I find it most important to find and talk with people with similar interests within the game so you have a few people to farm goods, run people, do skill quests, or even just chat with. You can do the game without people, sure, but with good people (and you WILL find good people) it gets exponentially better. This game is really fun if you know people already playing. I found it very daunting starting out initially not knowing anyone who played. I was lost in a game in a genre that was unfamiliar territory at best. Eventually you figure out things, little by little, and it just compounds into an excellent experience in all aspects. it's graphically stunning, the gameplay is excellent, the character class builds are a ton of fun to build up and rebuild, and I imagine you can always create your own experiments for adding new gameplay to Guild Wars. I currently have a Ranger/Monk, Elementalist/Mesmer, and Warrior/Monk, and they're all fun to play in their own ways. I can pick up a different character if I feel like a change of pace. One of the aspects that I find greatly refreshing and sometimes frustrating is the party system in Guild Wars. When you set out from a hub space that can have hundreds of users, you effectively cut yourself off from everyone not in your party. There's no random interaction, no unexpected PvP, and not a great chance to meet random players and help them for quests. You're stuck with your party until you go back to one of the towns. And if the party members leave, you can't recruit any additional players. I'm a huge proponent of meeting friends in games, but I'm also very grateful that there aren't problems like in public Diablo II games with idiots trying to player-kill or using a myriad of foul language. It's more good than bad, I think, but it's definitely something that makes it clear-cut that this is not an MMO. All that said, I am absolutely loving this game. I was initially apprehensive about trying out a game style that would be very unfamiliar. It turned out to be a very worthwhile purchase. I would suggest this game to people who enjoyed Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, Gauntlet, Diablo II, or similar games. Just don't go in expecting an MMO. It's not, but it really is so much the better for it. If you're looking for in-game friends feel free to add my main character, Pipkin Hase.