Guild Wars has story missions which are instanced, fairly long missions with accompanying cutscenes. There are lots of sidequests which have text-based deliveries, but the main campaigns are all done with in-game cutscenes.
one of the cool things they added in the third campaign was heroes, which are AI buddies that you outfit with weapons and skills, tailoring them to your own needs/tastes. Very late on they even added the ability to conscript your other characters as heroes, calling them "mercenary heroes," which is pretty cool.
By far what I appreciated about GW was the depth of the skills and how many different ways you can play a single character. So, take my Ranger...sometimes I would play as a beastmaster, wielding a staff, choosing a dire evolution pet (you can grow pets to three different stat lines - damage, health or balanced) and focusing on pet attack skills. I might go traditional archer, where I liked to use a kindle-conjure build, with conjure flame from the elementalist profession and trip and dual shots for my primary damage source. Or, for fun, I might run dual daggers with a spider pet and poison-based assassin combos. There's just so many ways to play.
The second best thing was the complexity of the enemies and their scripting. Each area feels like it has a specific character. Most online RPGs, enemies just look different and the devs don't even bother to worry about strengths, weaknesses or any kind of variance, getting lazy to the point where you can apply bleeds even to boxes (rift?). In GW you really have to think about what kind of enemies you're going to fight before you decide on your build going in. Thankfully the devs added a template system which allows you to save builds and trade with other players, easily subbing them in and out with a drop down menu while in an outpost. But, for example, if you're in Kryta, you're dealing with undead, so conditions, minion mastery, all that kinds of stuff is useless because skeletons don't bleed and you can't make flesh golems out of bones. If you're going up against Mursaat as a tank, you better thing about damage mitigation for defense, because damage avoidance skills, usually stances, don't work very well against mursaat front line fighters. I can't describe how many modern ORPGs and MMOs fail at creating this kind of complexity and it's a shame.
Anyway, loved GW...put ridiculous amounts of time into it...something like 4800 hours over five or six years if i remember right.
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