I had tried Guild Wars when it was first released and it just didn’t grab me but about a year ago, after being bored with my current game, I gave it another shot and bought the Guild Wars Trilogy
I started a character in the Nightfall campaign and was hooked. I think the reason GW didn’t grab me the first time was the lack of storage space. I am a packrat and love to save things just in case I need them. And the game at that point was not packrat friendly. But now that a few years have past, they added a few ways to increase your inventory and let you trade between your characters.
What makes Guild Wars different from WoW, and Everquest, etc?
Most games make you rush through to hit top level as fast as you can to get to the end game content…where all the cool stuff is, so people skip reading text, and could care less about the story. In GW, it doesnt take long to hit level 20 – I might have hit level 20 after doing quests and exploring maybe 12 overland areas. How many areas do you think there are to explore? 33? Nope – Everquest 2 has 33 overland zones. 60? NOPE! World of Warcraft has 58 overland zones. How about 180!? Yes – GW has over 180 overland zones. Ive been playing off and on for a year and I still have not been to every zone! To be fair – GW has 18 dungeon zones – Wow has 74 instances and EQ2 has 105 dungeon zones. Total Zones (not including towns or pvp arenas) GW – 201 : WoW – 134 : EQ2 – 138
This basically makes the most of the game END GAME content. It takes very little time to catch up to your friends. So now you don’t have people worried about being top level. You can spend your time working on the quest and story lines. Another nice part about GW is the ability to Map Travel to any town or outpost instantly if you have already visited there. So no running or flying (or at least not much running) to meet up with friends of guildmates and get to where you want to go.
Another thing that makes GW different is the Weapons and Armor. There are no elite super awesome, legendary, ultimate weapons in the game. Everyone has the same base stats on the armor they choose to wear. You can tweak the properties a bit and customize it to match your skills, add armor, health, energy, etc but all the bonus items are pretty much accessible to everyone either by finding an item and taking off the bonuses to put on your stuff, or buying it from a vendor, or another player. Players can craft or purchase other styles of armor in the different zones….some are very costly or take a long time to get the materials, but even that armor has the same stats and properties as the low cost armors. This makes it so people are never way overpowered than each other making skill the deciding factor, not equipment, but yet everyone can be different. You can also dye your armor and weapons.
There are Unique weapons that are very rare that people love….but there is usually a way to recreate that weapon using parts of other weapons you find…so again – even the rare unique weapons don’t hold any advantage except to say, look! I have a named weapon!!!!
The next part is really cool. In Wow, as a warrior tank, I used on average, 26 buttons to tank a pack of trash or a boss. I also had food buff, potion, bandage, drink buttons. Harvesting buttons, crafting buttons. Buttons Buttons Buttons Buttons Buttons! Now In Wow each made sense when to use them, they all had a purpose. Moving onto EQ2, I played a monk and basically had a row of buttons that I hit one at a time during the fight from left to right and then would play whack-a-mole when they refreshed. I might have had 18 buttons that did damage, some pure damage from fists, some pure damage from feet, some damage plus knockdown, some damage plus stun. Basically all those buttons could have been cut down to 6 buttons and just refreshed faster. I did not like the whack-a-mole game in EQ2.
In GW you get 8 buttons. That’s IT! You have lots of skills and can keep buying and learning more, but you only get to use 8 at a time! So many possibilities when you go out to hunt! Do you want to do heavy single target damage? Do you want to AOE? More Debuffs? More Buffs for you and your team? Want a heal thrown in there? How about 2 heals and a rez? The combinations are endless! To make it even more fun and varied, you not only get to be 1 profession but 2…and that second profession isnt limited to 1, but to any of the other 9 and you can switch whenever you want before you leave town. Over 1300 skills to play with. Buy as many as you want or hunt them down and capture them.
I play a Ritualist. They are known for there use of summoned spirits to do damage, heal, debuff…etc. I can go out and be heavy DPS and let my spirits tank, or I can convert to heal mode and be the main healer for the team. I can also chose not to use spirits and use my lightning AoE attacks or my weapon buffs. That’s just the Ritual side of me…I can mix that up with elementalist skills, or I can be part ranger and shoot arrows and use my ritualist weapon buffs to increase my arrow damage. All these combinations can be saved for loading whenever you feel in the mood to try a different playstyle.
Quests! I have yet to get a quest that tells me to go find 10 rat tails and bring them back or kill x number of bears and come back. Most are going out to help someone, or defending a position, getting to a new area. Most give you an objective which consists of doing several things. There are 4 main primary storyline quests that are just one huge long strung out quest which will give you the lore of a certain part of the GW world. You will also come across NPCs that will have their own side story and quests. Some of these characters will join you.
Another unique thing about Guild Wars are the Henchman and Heroes. You can play through GW without ever playing with another live person. Before you leave town – there are NPCs standing around called Henchmen that you can invite to your team. You can grab a tank type, a healer type, and a caster, and then zone out into the world. These NPCs will follow you around and fight with you. Keeping you healed, interrupting creatures that attack you, buffing the teams…just like normal players would. Some zones let you have 4 in a team, some up to 8.
Heroes are NPCs that you find along the way as you finish quests. These NPCs you can customize just like you can customize yourself. You can change their skills, their secondary professions, change the bonuses on their armor, give them different weapons. You can also micro manage them out in the field by telling them where to stand, whether they are aggressive, passive or defensive. You can even tell them who to target and what skill to use. You can only have 3 out at a time – so if you are alone and want a full team of 8, you will need to grab henchmen to fill out your party. This makes the game so easy to just pop in and get stuff done. No waiting for people to get ready or get repaired, or people not showing up. Using NPCs to do the most difficult of places may not work…sometime a full team of thinking humans works best.
Once you complete a full campaign area, you unlock Hard Mode! You can go into all the zones you have done and try them again, this time the mobs hit harder, faster, and are smarter, they also will not sit there and beat on one target, and they will move out of AoEs, but the loot is better, and you get more points towards title tracks, which can give you more skills or buffs in certain areas. Another added difficulty is that you can only die so many times before you are booted from the area and have to start over. This make the replay much more of a challenge.
A lot of games have different Shards or Servers you have to pick from to play on…making it impossible for you to play with people that are not on the same server as you are. Guild Wars is one server. There are different versions of each town or outpost where people can meet so if it does get crowded, to avoid lag, a second instance of that town will be created, but it is easy to jump from version to version if a friend happens to want to meet up with you and happens to be in a different instance.
In Wow, you move seamlessly from zone to zone with no loading. In GW you always get a loading screen when you zone. You may think this is dumb, but it actually is a neat way to do it and zoning takes just a few seconds. The advantage here is when you leave a town and go into an explorable area, you and your team are the only ones in that zone. It creates your own personal instance of that zone. No one there to kill steal, the quest creature you are sent to kill will always be there waiting for you….no taking turns, no one farming a bunch of creatures you need to kill. Also some zones will change a bit depending on what quests you currently have. So the only time you need to deal with other players is in towns and outposts.
Onto PvP. You can PvP on your PvE character or you can create a PvP only character. If you do make a PvP only character, they are automatically top level, and you can customize their armor with any bonus you have previously found in the game. You can also use any skills you bought or gained in the game as you PvE’d. As you PvP, you gain faction points which you can then use to buy more skills or bonus items for your weapons and armor. This makes switching from profession to profession very easy. You can save skill set ups and armor set ups for quick loading after character creation. And all faction and items gained are per account, so you can just delete your new PvP only character and make a new one without the loss of anything.
What might seem like the best part of Guild Wars to most is that it is FREE to play. You buy the initial game and then you don’t spend a dime after that. No opening and closing your account if you don’t feel like playing…it is always there for you to return to when you feel like it. They do have a store for things like more character slots, more bank slots, makeovers and name changes, you can buy skill and armor bonus unlocks for PvP only characters if you just want GW for the PvP part of the game and don’t wish to PvE to gain skills and bonuses. They also sell some costume packs that are appearance only.
Guild Wars 2 is coming out next year some time, but plain ole Guild wars is a great game. If you are bored with your current game, give Guild Wars a try! I don’t think you will be disappointed. If you do pop in – look for me on Sweet Isabliss.
