Official Guild Wars Thread

No_Style · Nov 8, 2004, 10:53 AM

This will be the official thread of GW. I know a lot of minor ones were created, but let's keep it all here.

Check out my long Guild Wars post if you want my impressions on this great game.

YAYitsAndrew · Nov 8, 2004, 11:21 AM

I thought the game was mundane. I did a few missions with my roommate and some friends and got bored. I tried playing a mo/me and a me/mo. At least around level 16 battles weren't difficult and required very little coordination. There is no good intuitive control system for healing/buffing your party. There's no attack queuing (like in city of heroes) and that would be nice.

Once you're done battling, the only thing left to do is to go into town and trade a bajillion crafting supplies to make armor that's as boring as the stuff you're wearing with higher numbers. I'd like to see more choices and armor/weapon paths. For a monk nothing ever changes, the numbers just raise. I want a high sp regeneration set that offers little protection or a high protection set that offers low sp regeneration.

There's no sense of roleplay (a common trend in today's mmo), nothing unique about the battling or leveling, and really no reason to get higher levels. This game is the definition of level grind. Even the massively multiplayer aspect of it could be argued since most of the time you're in an instanced dungeon with 5 other people. When you're in town, you're broken up into districts with maybe 50 other people. You have to constantly hop around to find trades and deals. This game parallels with phantasy star online very well. Sit in a central meeting place, join a party, grind grind grind, go back to the meeting place.

There's also only 5 classes which do cover everything (melee, ranged, hurty magic, helpy magic, stat magic) but I'd like more choice from within those 5 sets. Maybe I don't want to be a fighter, I want to be a barbarian.

The monthly fee of $0 dollars is on target with what is delivered to you.

No_Style · Nov 8, 2004, 11:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by YAYitsAndrew

At least around level 16 battles weren't difficult and required very little coordination. There is no good intuitive control system for healing/buffing your party. There's no attack queuing (like in city of heroes) and that would be nice.

Well the entertainment value of this game is a matter of a person's own opinion, but I'd like to point out a few things.

The control system is very nice. Buffing and healing can all be done with mouse clicks to the roster on the right of the screen and pressing the numbered skills. Attack queuing isn't apparent, but a glimpse of it is there. For my Warrior/Monk, I'm able to trigger signet, Sever Artery and 100 Swords all in succession and my character would do it all in succession.

Quote:

There's no sense of roleplay (a common trend in today's mmo), nothing unique about the battling or leveling, and really no reason to get higher levels. This game is the definition of level grind. Even the massively multiplayer aspect of it could be argued since most of the time you're in an instanced dungeon with 5 other people. When you're in town, you're broken up into districts with maybe 50 other people. You have to constantly hop around to find trades and deals. This game parallels with phantasy star online very well. Sit in a central meeting place, join a party, grind grind grind, go back to the meeting place.

Numerical leveling caps off at 20. Why? So that the new comer doesn't get intimidated by the fact that there's a level 95 Warrior/Monk out there. I gained 4 levels over the WPE, playing about 6 hours in total. Not bad considering the fact you can get XP from PvP. You can avoid a lot of district hopping by going to District 1 or 2 in any given town.

Quote:

There's also only 5 classes which do cover everything (melee, ranged, hurty magic, helpy magic, stat magic) but I'd like more choice from within those 5 sets. Maybe I don't want to be a fighter, I want to be a barbarian.

There are actually 6 classes. Warrior, Necromancer, Mesmer, Ranger, Monk, Elementalist. Although, I do agree more classes would be nice, I'm quite content as what is available. This isn't a MMORPG. ArenaNet already wants people to get that out of their minds.

Quote:

The monthly fee of $0 dollars is on target with what is delivered to you.

It's better to pay $0 to "level grind", don't you agree?

I know this isn't everybody's cup of tea. But, since I've met a former EQ junkie while playing this game who actually thinks it's better than EQ..it says a lot about the game and it's ability to entertain the "online RPG Gamer."

The core of GW is the PvP (Random Party vs Party OR Assembled Party vs Party). You can bash everything else about the game, but if haven't played the PvP, you haven't played GW.

P.S - It's nice to see another person's perspective of the game

YAYitsAndrew · Nov 8, 2004, 12:02 PM

The clicking is what really annoys me. When I'm playing a game I like to use the mouse solely for camera control; UI clicking takes a great deal of time compared to pressing a keyboard key. The UI doesn't show you if you've assigned a key to selecting player x (like it does for your weapon hotswitches) so you have to count each time. Plus the order is based on how you join. In FFXI you were always listed 6th in the list so you only had to remember 5 things and there was a visual helper. Clicking the person's character or a monster is even more annoying because it jumps around the screen and if you miss you start running to where you clicked. Turning this feature off introduces a bug that disallows you from picking up items (I hope this gets fixed).

I like that leveling caps so quickly, it converts the game to a more tournament style play.

PvP is what is limiting the number of classes. Balancing a large amount of classes over regular play and pvp play is a killer. I hope they do add in more classes because the power players are going to churn through all 6 and leave from boredom. Sub-classing only offers artificial replayability.

And EQ wasn't that great of a game, it was just the right thing at the right time; a lot like goldeneye was for n64, and halo for the xbox. None of them are exceptional games, but for one reason or another they were exactly what was missing at the time. I've played a lot of MMO's in the past couple years and in each of them I've met EQ junkies saying it's better than EQ.

P.S. - What's a good review if you can't contrast it to a poor review :P