Product Description

Guild Wars is a new kind of MMORPG experience. It eliminates the less exciting aspects of world-map play by using a mission-based design, while still keeping the features that make massive online role-players great. Make new allies in towns or outposts, form a party, and then go tackle a quest together. Your party always has its own unique copy of the quest map, so camping, kill-stealing, and long lines to complete quests are all things of the past. As you play out your quest, you have an unprecedented level of freedom: Your magic can build bridges and open up new pathways, or it can burn down forests and villages. Best of all, you'll never meet new players only to discover that you can't play with them or compete against them because their characters are on a different server than yours -- in Guild Wars, all characters live in one seamless world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4067 in Video Games
• Brand: NCsoft
• Model: FG-XP-00050-1
• Released on: 2005-04-28
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.75" h x 5.25" w x 7.50" l, .88 pounds

Features

• After learning the game and building up your first character, you can jump right in to head-to-head competition or guild warfare
• Choose from a wide range of professions - Master nature as an Elementalist, serve divine spirits as a Monk, subvert with charisma as a Mesmer - along with more traditional classes like Necomancer, Ranger and Warrior
• The game includes integrated support for guilds, with guild banners and halls, chat rooms and forums -- guilds can challenge other guilds to battle, compete for control of key parts of the world, and be ranked on a worldwide ladder
• Unique streaming technology means no more patches -- new content is always being streamed to you directly, for new challenges and a continually changing world

From the Manufacturer
Guild Wars takes the best elements of today's massively multiplayer online games and combines them with a new mission-based design that eliminates the tedium of those games. You can meet new friends in towns or outposts, form a party, and then go tackle a quest together. Your party always has its own unique copy of the quest map, so camping, kill-stealing, and long lines to complete quests are all things of the past. Within a quest you have unprecedented freedom and power to manipulate the world around you: your magic can build bridges and open up new pathways, or it can burn down forests and tear the ground asunder.

You don't have to spend countless hours on a leveling treadmill to get to the interesting parts of the game, because combat is designed to be strategically interesting and challenging right from the beginning. You don't have to spend hours running around the world to prepare for a quest, because Guild Wars allows you to instantly travel to the beginning of any quest that you've previously unlocked. You'll never spend days playing only to discover that choices you made early on have left you with a permanently uncompetitive character, because the unique skill system in Guild Wars allows infinite experimentation but doesn't allow bad decisions to ruin a character. And you'll never meet new players only to discover that you can't play with them or compete against them because their characters are on a different server than yours; in Guild Wars, all characters live in one seamless world.

Built for Competition

After learning the game and building up your first character, you may choose to test your skills in head-to-head competition or guild warfare. The game is designed to reward player skill and teamwork, not time spent playing, so you won't need to spend hundreds of hours leveling up your character to compete.

The game includes integrated support for guilds, with guild banners and halls, chat rooms and forums. Guilds can challenge other guilds to battle, compete for control of key parts of the world, and be ranked on a worldwide ladder.

Unique Streaming Technology

ArenaNet's unique streaming technology forever eliminates the concept of patching a game. You don't have to wait a month for the next big patch to experience new content. Instead, the game constantly and intelligently streams new content to your computer in the background while you play. The world can change continually. This allows us to build a much more dynamic game world than any that has existed before.

Customer Reviews

Solid game - encourages teaming & PVP, not powerleveling
Guild Wars is a very solid MMORPG that strongly encourages team play. The graphics are top-notch (if not up to the cartoon levels of World of Warcraft), the play addicting, and it's well-balanced. With no monthly fee, it's one of the best bargains in the MMORPG world. I take off a star and a half for the forced team aspect as well as the focus on pure fighting versus creating a world, but add 1 back for the value proposition so give this 4 and half stars, or a 4/5 fun/overall split.

This is a tough game to master with no outright 'uber' classes. Players choose 2 of 6 fairly standard basic professions (1 tank, 1 mezzer, 1 healer/defender, 2 nukers, 1 mezzer/nuker) with the second profession lacking one of the strongest attributes of the primary (including which armor you can wear and runes you can use). As you level, besides gaining hit points you do two things - specialize in the various basic class attributes and gain access to the real key: skills. You're limited to a certain number of active skills while in combat, so strategy and careful character building take precedence over getting to level 20. Experience to buy skills can be gained through basic PvE, missions, or PvP. Using a small set of skills wisely along with picking and choosing your attribute development is far more important than getting all the 75 skills available to each profession. This is definitely not a game that is easy to blindly powerlevel.

Cleverly designed, this sidesteps a lot of the problems surrounding the genre. Rather than deal with constant kill stealing, maps and missions are instanced, and you don't have to spend a whole slug of time traveling between regions. (Once you've been to a locale, boom, it's yours.) Recovery time is minimal as is non-combat time. You don't need to spend time harvesting mats and begging a friend to make your next weapon. Instead, kill things, complete missions, and you can bring mats straight to the NPC crafter to make a custom weapon (that can only be equipped by you, likely eliminating much of the secondary market for gear in this game.)

My reservations are four fold but minor. First, the way to truly advance in this game is through missions - and the only way to accomplish many missions is in a balanced team. Thus, you're basically forced to group despite the nominal ability to solo. This really means you have to figure out proper character development early - rather tough with your first few characters until you find a good guild, and frankly, sometimes many of us feel like playing solo. Second, the lack of any real crafting system here means you fight...and fight...and fight. CoH has done well with a similar model (without the PvP aspect) and it's worked well - not to mention the biggest headaches in most MMORPGs are the messes created with a bad item creation system - but if you enjoy socializing more than fighting (the typical harvester/crafter) this isn't the game for you. Third, the game really revolves around PvP much more than PvE for the above reasons - so if you're looking for a game without conflict, this isn't it. Finally, while the focus on instanced events does prevent many of the problems found in most other MMORPGs, it also reduces the multiplayer aspect except in non-instanced locales like towns. The net effect of all of these is to slightly dilute the 'world' aspect, and for those looking for total immersion this may not be a perfect match.

Still, this is a great game and deserves 4 1/2 stars, and if you're looking for an alternative to the hordes of WoW that strongly encourages teaming this should be at the top of your list. One final note: this actually runs quite well even on my soon-to-be discarded Athlon 1100 and is geared towards doing well on slightly older systems - and even 56k modems! - unlike most new games. Big plus.

Engaging Team-Based Play
Guild Wars has been touted as being revolutionary in several ways. For those that haven't read the game overview, these can be summarized as follows:

1. Doesn't require immense amounts of time to be really 'fun.'
2. Little or no time spent doing repetitive tasks and travel.
3. Competitive guild-based play, with custom guilds.
4. No monthly fees and dynamic content change/addition.

The last point is of great interest to many people (myself included) in that this is the first MMORPG to be completely free of fees. However, everyone knows expansions are planned, so this is only 'kind-of sort-of' true.

Though you don't do repetitive tasks like gathering food or resources, to find anything remotely useful you do have to kill enemies over and over again. Additionally, the travel waypoints are sometimes very spread out, so you are still going to do a lot of walking. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, however (more on that later).

The level cap is 20, and it's true that this doesn't make it very hard to become as powerful as you'll ever get. In PVP only mode, you start at 20, so you spend no time at all building up a character. However, this doesn't mean you can become level 20 overnight- it does take quite a while, and the quests are challenging enough that you will likely need (human) help.

That said, this game is definitely built for guild-based play. The designers say that solo play is optional, but truth be told it probably isn't. Now that the main features have been addressed, a general overview of the game is in order.

The only 'MM' part of the game is towns. While in towns you can see other players in the same district, form your party, trade items, start quests, and configure your skills (a maximum of 8 can be used at one time). You can also take along henchmen if you want to fill out a party or go solo.

You can leave town one of two ways- by walking through a portal or by starting a mission. The missions address the main quest and often take you to major cities, thus saving you the trouble of walking. They also reward you with experience and skill points. Quests are separate from these, and reward you with experience, skills, and items. In general, the mission and quest design is well done, but you will find the occasional glitch- some of which can force you to repeat one. When in a quest area, a pointer will show where the next objective is.

PVP can be done at arenas, and there's a level cap for each to prevent overly unfair competition. You get experience and (if you play enough) fame for winning matches. This is always a team-based mode, and teams are selected either at random or by party assignment. In RP mode, however, it's quite possible to get far superior equipment than your competition, and thus have a massive edge in combat. A winning team will continue to play matches, and the game doesn't seem very good at auto-balancing the parties.

While exploring the wilds, you'll encounter many and varied monsters, which range in classes and difficulty. Most come in groups, and usually are too dangerous or numerous to solo. This is where my first complaint shows up. Frankly, the henchman AI is beyond pathetic, which is why playing with other people is generally advisable (on occasion, however, I've found human players that are worse in that regard than the henchmen. Such is life). If you're in a party, you'll divide the gold, experience, and spoils. This applies to henchmen party members as well.

Exploration is really the meat of the game. I've done PVP, but it gets old pretty fast- especially if you keep ending up in a poorly balanced team, which seems to happen alarmingly often. You also get no loot for winning, and nobody really cares about fame. The wilderness areas are very well done, with excellent graphics and accompanying music. The world is massive, and the monsters are hard enough that you have to think about what skills you take- and what your fellow party members are taking. Unlike many other RPGs, a bunch of offensive-oriented people each doing their own thing will likely meet a very quick demise. Guild Wars really forces you to coordinate (especially with healing others and focusing to take down hard enemies) and punishes you if you fail to do so. I personally find this a welcome change in direction.

If you should happen to die, you can either wait for a party member to revive you, or (if everyone's dead) you'll respawn at an altar. Sometimes these are placed in very awkward places, which does need to be addressed. You don't lose items, but suffer a 'death penalty' that reduces your health and energy up to 60% (15% per death). You can work this off by gaining experience, killing boss monsters, or completing mission objectives. Going to a town negates the penalty, and this is highly advisable if you get to 60%. Nevertheless, sometimes you really can't go back to town, because leaving an area causes all monsters to repopulate. This can lead parties to conduct suicide raids, in which the sole objective is to kill at least one more monster blocking the way to that quest goal. At times it can be rather frustrating- especially with the more difficult quests. Since the max level is 20 and many monsters are higher, even if you're an experienced player you will likely die scores of times doing quests and missions.

As for character customization, you have a choice of skills in which to invest points (a max of 200, which each successively level costing more), and you can design guild capes and dye items various colors. This, aside from the standard appearance choices at character generation and of course equipment, is about all that makes you unique. If you decide you want to change your skills, you can acquire 'refund points' by gaining experience. These let you reallocate skill points. There are six classes to pick from, and you can have one 'sub-class' that gives you access to some skills from another. This is a permanent choice, so it's best to choose wisely.

The classes in general are quite well balanced, but there is a 'paper rock scissors' arrangement there. That is, Rangers dominate Elementalists, Warriors dominate Rangers, Necromancers dominate Warriors, etc. If you know what you're fighting, there are skills designed to counter every other class, but some are necessarily better than others. Usually you'll learn what to pick the hard way. Fortunately, there's unlimited refund points available, and you can quite quickly rebuild your character if you decide to just junk it all.

In sum, Guild Wars isn't an easy game. This is especially true if you're not a team player and don't like to make friends online. The bottom line is, this isn't a game for everyone. I personally like the party-based exploration and missions, but I know some others that despise it. If you haven't played in the beta and aren't sure which sort of player you are, I'd advise you to get the game and find out. Since there isn't a monthly fee, it won't hurt too badly to try, and- if you decide to quit- you won't feel like you're losing something you paid for by ditching your characters.

Awesome game.
First things first - this game is not for everybody. It's not your traditional MMORPG, in fact, it's officially a CORPG (Cooperative Online Role Playing Game). If you're looking for a game for farming and grinding, look elsewhere. You can reach the maximum level(20) in 2-3 days of hard playing, and the most powerful weapons and armor can be earned in a few hours of farming.

PvE:

The main reason GW is not a true MMO is because it's instanced - that is, outside of the cities, your party will have the world to yourselves. This is both annoying and rewarding. You cannot meet random people out in the world, which, I'll admit, I miss at times. At the same time, however, there are no annoying people disturbing you, and there are no people telling you to "back off, this is my farming spot," ect.

The instance feature also allows GW to have an overarching storyline, which is suprisingly good. Though it is a traditional sort of fantasy story (good vs. evil, light vs. dark ect), GW adds freshness to it with fairly unusual/original races and characters such as Charr, or Tengu, and interesting plot twists.

Though the world is instanced, that doesn't mean you must play it alone. You can form a party of players, opt to bring a party of AI henchmen, or make a combination of both. Throughout the missions and quests, you'll be reliant on your party to defeat your foes and keep your team alive. As the name of the game implies, guilds are an important factor in the game. Guild members often help each other out in missions or quests, trade or donate items, or simply give advice.

As I said earlier, grinding and leveling are not big features of this game. After a while, you will find that you've finished the storyline, and have all the highest level equipment. So, are you finished?

No way. For starters there are also "bonus" objectives to each mission, many people spend time going back to finish up the ones they haven't done or weren't able to complete at the time. There are tons of "Elite" skills to unlock, which require you to defeat a certain boss to obtain. There are also a goodly number of Titles for you to earn. For example, there's the Tyrian Grandmaster Cartographer title, for exploring 100% of the Tyrian continent, a feat that can take weeks or even months to accomplish. There are also difficult dungeons such as the Underworld or the Fissure of Woe that will require a coordinated team to complete. And of course, you could make a new character (you start with 4 character slots, extra slots cost $10 each), and play the game over again, with a completely different character type.

PvP:

Guild Wars gives you the option of creating a PvP-only character. These characters are the maximum level, have the best equipment availible to them, and all the skills that you've unlocked at their disposal. This means that a "good player" is not one that's spent countless hours farming for his godly armor and weapons, but rather one that knows the game well, knows his character, and works well with his or her team.

In other games, you may have 20 or more skills for your use. In Guild Wars, while you may choose from a myriad of skills to put in your 8-slot bar, once you leave town or enter the arena, you can't change your bar around. So, people devise skillsets, or "builds" whose skills compliment eachother, some of which are so brilliant that they become common knowledge and thousands of other people begin to use them. Guild Wars' system also gives you flexibility - you can be a Smiting monk one game and a Healing monk the next.

This concept carries over to the 8 player teams as well. The availability of the PvP character and the ease of changing your PvE/RP character's role means that you don't have 8 independant characters that randomly attack enemies, you have a team where each player has a specific role, and you coordinate your every move. Voice communication is a must for almost every team.

The result of this system is the most coopertive, coordinated, complex, and rewarding PvP I've ever experienced. Teams look for weaknesses in the other team's build, and exploit them. They split their team into two groups, attack, counterattack, and feint, and use maneuvers to give themselves the advantage. Often, the coordination and teamwork of a team is the most important factor in a game, teams that looked certain to lose have been known to pull off ingenious tactics that earn them the win. High ranked guilds and players are well known, and there's an Observer mode (affectionately dubbed "Guild Wars TV") where players can view top-ranked guilds' matches. Tactics and builds are hotly debated in forums and ingame, for the initiated and the newbie alike.

Overall, this is the best game I've bought in my life.