Guild Wars

I came into Guild Wars hearing good things from my friends, and was excited to try it out. I am heavily into the World of Warcraft endgame raiding scene, and was likewise into the Everquest raiding content — I hoped that Guild Wars would be an interesting departure from the standard raiding drudgery and endgame grind. What follows are my impressions of the game after playing it on and off for about 2 weeks.

I installed Guild Wars on my second gaming box, a 3Ghz P4 with 1 Gig of RAM and a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra video card. The initial install of the game was perhaps the fastest install of a major MMOG I have ever done—the game is installed from 2 CDs, and then downloads more content and patches on the initial running. The entire process took less than 15 minutes (there was no download lag for any of the content or game updates), and I was up and creating characters in about 20 minutes.

The character creation process is fairly standard, with one small twist; you can choose to make your normal PvE character, or make a PvP only character. As a complete novice to the game, I chose to make a PvE character first, and I would highly, highly recommend doing that same for anyone interested in trying the game. Other than that, character creation is like any other MMOG/RPG type game I have ever played–you choose a profession from amongst 6 choices and you pick how your character will look. There are no PC races other than human at this time, so the most interesting choice you have in that regards is picking male or female. I picked my toons based on how hot the female models of the profession looked, so my first two character were Necromancer and Elementalist. I later tried out Ranger and Warrior, mainly to get a feel for the profession, not because the models were particularly enticing. The two professions I did not take as a primary profession were Mesmer and Monk, though I did dual-profession as both later on. The character ‘look’ options were fairly standard—you were able to change your hair color, hair style, skin tone, face, etc. The options were enough to make fairly varied characters, but were no where near as customizable as Everquest 2. After a few minutes picking my profession based solely on the name (the profession descriptions were relatively undescriptive, though if you are familiar with any RPG style game, you can make a fairly accurate guess as to each professions strength), and spending a few more minutes making my toon beautiful, I was into the game!

Zoning in took a minute or so, as it had to download the area, but it loaded fairly quickly, and there was little lag. My initial impressions were that the graphics were pretty good, but they had a surreal quality, kind of like a brighter Morrowind. Characters were very detailed, with moving clothing and dynamic shadows. Everything had a very East-Asian flavor, from the character looks, to the environment, to the armor and weapons used by players and NPCs. There was little to no lag in any aspect of the game, except on initial load into highly populated areas (like Ascalon), though even this lag was a joy to bear compared to Lagforge.

After looking around a bit, and trying to run around awkwardly, I actually had to look at the manual to try and figure out the interface. Everything is completely backwards in Guild Wars, at least if you are used to standard MMOG interfaces like World of Warcraft. Once I was able to get used to the actual controls to look and move around, things were a lot easier. Click to move is enabled by default in the UI, which is relatively unfortunate, because every interactable item (NPCs, PCs, items on the ground, whatever) are treated somewhat like URLs, with small links under them. This was problematic because the links were very small, and would fade as the game thought they went out of context (which generally meant that you moved the mouse cursor a centimeter away from the item). So if you missed the tiny URL-like link, you find yourself running all over the place because of the click-to-move setting.

Once my initial confusion with moving around and looking at stuff was over, I was able to actually look at the interface. The interface had standard elements, like a mini-map, a chat window, and a bar for skills (which wasn’t filled with much as a newbie). The UI elements all seemed too small, and hard to get information from—the chat window, for example, was very small, and had very light colored text on a light background, which made reading difficult. Not that there was much of worth to read—the chat was standard newbie zone fare, from random guild advertisements to the standard epeen waggling.

Once I was more familiar with the interface and controls, I started moving around looking for stuff to do. I figured that since I was in a newbie zone, there would be newbie mobs to kill and newbie quests to run. Well, sorta. Telling the difference between PCs and NPCs was hard, since the only visual difference was the color of the small link that pops up when you mouse over a toon. I ran around until I found an NPC with a green exclamation over his head (Yay a quest indicator!) and clicked on his URL. This brought up a fairly standard chat dialog, and I was off on my first quest. Only I had no idea where to go. Luckily (or nicely done), the mini-map had an arrow pointing me towards my quest goal (which was to talk to my profession trainer), and the large map had a star on it pointing out where I needed to go (though the terrain in between was greyed out. So I ran to my profession trainer, and she asked me to go kill some bugs for her.

Dutifully, I ran off and looked for bugs to kill, and found them down by the river. Combat, at least newbie combat, was a let down. You click on something and hit the space bar to attack, and then watch as you magically lob blobs of something at a bug. There was little to no interaction, and the combat graphics were a real snore. But despite this, I was able to kill my quota of bugs, and continued on my newbie career.  One of your next steps is to determine what you want to dual-profession as—again you have little to no information to work with, other than the name of the profession and a brief description. I have no idea if you can skip the dual-profession bit: I never did. Dual professions is pretty cool though, because you can make a melee character that can heal herself, or a blaster that can drain energy from enemies, etc.

Once you have completed the whole dual-profession bit, and completed some newbie quests, you are instructed to enter the arena. You are then placed in a queue to enter (I never had to wait more than a few minutes for this), enter an arena with three or four other newbies in a group, and you PvP against another group of newbies. This was perhaps the most chaotic and utterly pointless PvP I’ve ever done. Once an end point is reached (I’m not sure what determined this), you run with your group through a scripted PvE encounter, and once you have beaten it, you see a short movie, and enter the game proper.

This is the first place that you really see one of the neat concepts of the game: streaming content. Whenever you enter a new zone, or a zone you have been to has changed, the game downloads the new content on the fly, while you are zoning. Zoning brings up a generic splash screen, and generally took less than 30 seconds, even with the downloads. The good news, also, is that zoning is relatively infrequent, unless you are doing stuff close to major points of interest. The games outerworld zones were very large, and incredibly sparsely populated with players—so rare were player sightings that I think all the outerworld zones are instanced to the group you are in, which is a pretty cool concept, though you miss out on a lot of interactivity that way.

Moving around these outerworld areas (and in the cities as well) reveals one of my biggest gripes about the game—the world environment was very linear. You were forced to stick to paths of the game’s choosing, because you couldn’t run everywhere. You couldn’t jump off of cliffs, or even down small hills, or run up them, etc. There are plenty of wide open spaces, so it doesn’t feel cramped, but the lack of ability to move about freely was frustrating. It also allowed for the ability to get trapped, which I suppose is a potential tactical aspect of the game, but was annoying more than anything, in my play testing. You are not able to run through player and NPC models, and it was easy to get stuck between invisible environmental constraints and other players or henchmen in your group, or get stuck in an invisible corner by multiple mobs.

Henchmen are the greatest $!*% ever, in my humble opinion. I’m a big fan of soloing in any MMOG, and based on the nature of Guild Wars encounters, soloing would be incredibly difficult without help. In any of the major cities or quest areas you can ‘hire’ henchmen to join your group to fill out missing slots or adventuring needs. Henchmen can be any one of the major class prototypes, so you can hire a healer, a tank, or a dps, as needed. Henchmen take XP and some loot, but I didn’t find that a problem, considering I was able to do encounters I wouldn’t have a chance to do alone. I was able to complete many quests, and I got a lot of experience and cash with my trusty henchmen. They weren’t the brightest group of folks I’ve grouped with, but they got the job done.

OK, so henchmen are great, but what about the encounters makes them necessary? Battles in PvE seemed completely random most of the time. Encounters were spawned by running around the map and waiting for bugs to crawl out of the earth, or fighting groups of NPCs scattered around the outerworld areas. I never figured out a way to split up groups of mobs, so that you could take them on one at a time; multiple mobs on you at a time generally meant a quick death, even if they were a level or so below. I almost never had battles without additional mobs joining in, whether from wandering mobs or from bugs spontaneously crawling out of the ground to assist whatever mob I was fighting. There were always, always bugs crawling out of the ground to attack me. Running from an encounter was generally pointless, as that usually only made more bugs spawn from the ground, and since mobs had no limit to which they would chase you, ended up with me dying or finally making it to a city guard with four or five mobs in tow. Henchmen evened out the odds, and made the PvE encounters much, much more survivable.

Newbie combat was very simplistic and  seemed more like an endurance battle than anything else–the first side to run out of energy loses (and since energy regenerated very fast, a lot of battles lasted a long time). Downtime between battles was negligible, with most , if not all, of your energy and health having regenerated simply running to the next battle. Button mashing was limited to the eight abilities you had loaded on your hotbar, so pick and choose which abilities you will need carefully. You can only change your ability line-up in towns, so it was a major pain-in-the-ass to find that you had forgotten to load up a new ability before going out to quest. This feature I’m sure makes for interesting tactical choices later on in the game, but not being able to use all your abilities, or even the ability to change them outside of cities, was fairly annoying when just leveling in PvE. You unlock more abilities as you progress through the game via quests (and rarely, via merchants), which makes choosing a good ability lineup even more important. There were tons of abilities that I had yet to unlock while playing; I think that unlocking these abilities is one of the core ways to distinguish yourself from other characters in the game.

Dying was a bit of a pain, though it certainly isn’t the worst death penalty I’ve ever encountered in online games. When you die, you have to wait a little while (generally about 10 seconds) until you spawn at a graveyard, which were generally chosen based on being the farthest distance from where you died. Running back to where you died would of course spawn more random encounters. Not that you really needed to run back to your corpse, because all your items respawn with you, and you don’t need to recover anything from the corpse. There is the ability to resurrect in the game, but since most of the fights I got in consisted of me stomping the enemy, or the enemy stomping me (and my group), so there wasn’t much opportunity to resurrect other than at a graveyard. There was no equipment penalty for dying, and no experience loss.

Travelling in the game is brilliantly done: hands down, it is the best travel system I think I’ve ever encountered in an MMOG, or at least the most convenient. Like World of Warcraft, you have to travel to a location to unlock it (and suffer all the random bug encounters, and aggressive mobs on the way), but once a location is unlock, all you have to do in order to get to it is double-click on your map. Instant zone. Imagine if the griffons in World of Warcraft instantly zoned you to your destination, and you have it. No more waiting for ten minutes flying from location to location, or missing the boat and having to wait for ten minutes. The outerworld map was greyed out initially (as in fog-of-war), so getting to a location could be a pain, especially since the maps are very linear, and force you to stick to the paths.

Quests and encounters seemed very linear. Go to point A, kill mob A, go to point B, and kill mob B. The only interesting quest sequences were at the beginning of the game, when you transition from old Ascalon to modern-day apocalyptic Ascalon. Quests after that were standard MMOG fare of kill mob, gather items, take a message to someone important. Failing a mission wasn’t generally much more than a waste of time, since you could simply reacquire the mission from the initial quest giver—there didn’t seem to be much consequence for failure.

One of the major end-game focuses of Guild Wars is the group vs. group PvP, and guild vs. guild PvP. I didn’t get any character high enough to encounter this area of the game, but I was constantly spammed by ‘The favor of the gods’ messages when teams would win PvP battles. PvP is limited to group encounters, from smaller four-on-four encounters, to larger guild encounters—there was no one-on-one PvP that I saw, and all PvP happened in very controlled environments. The limitations of unlocking abilities, and choosing which to use in your hotbar, and physical limitations of the environment, I’m sure make for very interesting strategic and tactical decisions. Every guild spam that I saw (and the guild invites that I received) all mentioned voice chat via TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. I can see how these would be absolutely necessary to coordinate, based on the crappy chat interface.

As mentioned earlier, one of the initial choices you can make entering the game is choose between making a PvE character or a PvP only character. Making a PvP character seems like a fun choice, but straight out of the box it would be a dismal one. Creating a PvP-only character take about three times as long as creating a standard PvE character, because you have the added overhead of choosing your dual-professions, your equipment, and your ability lineup. Once you have created the PvP character, you are left with a moderately equipped character with the most gimp of abilities. Remember how I mentioned that you had to unlock abilities via quests? PvP character only have access to abilities that you have previously unlocked with your PvE characters—so creating a PvP character without playing the PvE portion of the game is practically worthless. And once you have a level 20 PvE character (which has the ability to PvP) with unlocked abilities, I don’t see the point of making a PvP-only character to do the same thing. I was very disappointed with the PvP-only character creation and ability limitation, but these limitations may turn out to be a good thing, because the game is fairly complex once you have multiple abilities to combo.

The game ran flawlessly in 1280×1024x32 on my computer. I had no noticeable video lag at any time, even with all the spectacular lighting and dynamic equipment effects. I encountered no game bugs, though a couple times I noticed patches downloading that fixed rare bugs.

Overall, once I was able to get around the completely foreign interface, the game was fairly enjoyable, but far from spectacular. The graphics and eye candy were very nice (though the dancing animations were crap). Gameplay seemed fairly linear and forced, but not much more so than any other MMOG. Until you unlock abilities, your combat dynamic will be very boring—as you unlock more abilities, you become able to make more tactical and strategic choices, and gameplay becomes more interesting.  High-level guild vs. guild PvP seems to be the goal of the game,  and I was disappointed that I could not get in and experience this via a PvP-only character, but upon reflection, I can understand some of the reasoning behind the limitations. Guild Wars doesn’t offer as much end-game PvE content as other MMOs out there, but for a game with no monthly fee, it is certainly an excellent alternative to the big players.