Guild Wars is a great play.....

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fairly easy to remember controls, adjustable camera angles, updates keep it interesting

Cons: Online play, fast connection necessary

The Bottom Line: 
Great graphics, every game different, variety of character classes, the variety of ways to play this game makes it fun for everyone.

Author's Review
I was browsing at best buy at the new games and spotted this on the shelf. From the pictures on the box the graphics looked pretty impressive and the fact of the free online play was also very attractive (I just hope it continues to be free online play and not a bait and switch). I used to be a Diablo II fanatic but there are just so many idiots on those servers these days and Blizzard has changed the game so much I abandoned all of my accounts out of sheer frustration.

What's in the box:
Nice full color book giving background and some other useful info.
Full color cheat card with game controls
Install cd's (2) with account number card inside the case

Setup:
Setup wasn't too hard, you must have your internet connection active during the setup because it's my impression that it is downloading files as the game is being installed. The first time I tried to install the game I had problems with the second disk, I tried again later and was able to get the game installed (I suspect server traffic was holding up the download it needed while it looked to me like the installer had frozen up). I like the fact that once you install the software you no longer need to have the disk in the drive to run it.

First login:
Start the program. Inside the case with the install cds you'll find a scratch off box with your account key in it. The type is small and some of the letters look very similar to other characters due to the font they used, so carefully type your account key into the box that pops up. You also have to setup your account and give them a bit of personal information.

Character setup:
Choices are warrior, necromancer, monk, mesmer (illusionist), elementalist (fire, lighting, water, earth magic), type characters. You start with one school but pretty quickly you'll be able to pick a secondary school. You can choose male or female for each character type (yeah! no more male or female only classes). You can adjust height and hair color and things like that about your character. Later you'll kill monsters that drop dyes so you can change the color of your clothing, armor, etc.

Starting the game:
You start the game inside a city, walk around and talk to everyone, especially the people that have the big green exclamation mark over their heads--this means they have something to say to you or a quest to offer you. Walk around and collect the first couple of quests and solve them for money and skill points. If you chose one of the spell casting types you'll get your first couple of spells pretty quickly.

online play:
I have a broadband connection (DSL) I find game play smooth and responsive, haven't yet run into any server lag although I take it that it isn't impossible to play this over dialup--but I'll bet it can be frustratingly slow. The graphics are just awesome, rolling hills, chirping birds, shadows, footprints, it's all there.

Controls:
They helpfully give you a cheat card with all the controls on it--you need it. This game is like a lot these days, keyboard for the inventory, quests, etc. and the mouse to change the camera view and movement. I like how they chose to implement the camera, you can adjust it easily (by holding down the right mouse button) to almost any angle you like. Movement is either by clicking the ground where you want to go or the arrow keys on the keyboard work too for those that are more used to games like unreal that use the arrow keys.

Game mechanics:
This is the type of game where you go around completing quests and killing things to raise your level. If you die you are resurrected at one of the healing shrines closest to where you died--and well out of danger. In the upper left of the screen you have a bar showing what level you are and it gives you an idea of how far you are from the next level. When you've got points to spend on improving skills you get a button below the level bar--click to assign your points--you can apparently only assign points when you level and later in the game you can move your points around freely to make your character more versatile in different areas. Most of the quests around the first city are pretty easy and you can complete them without too much trouble.

TRAVEL/MAPS: The M key brings up the full screen map, which only shows places that you've been to (a lot like Bethesda's Daggerfall and Morrowind games) and you can travel to cities quickly by clicking on them with the mouse (I haven't been attacked in transit yet so I don't know if that happens in this game). There is always a smaller map displayed in the upper right corner that doubles as a compass to show you which direction you are moving. The map is very useful, enemies are shown as red dots on the map and if you're working on a quest you usually have an indicator of where you need to go for the quest you're currently working on.

INVENTORY: You start out with a backpack, it has a decent number of slots but you won't be able to pickup everything. There are apparently more bags, etc. to be found later that give you a larger inventory. I'm not sure that this game cares about weight limits (compared to your strength) I haven't played enough yet to run into that if it does exist.

WEAPONS: You can setup four different shield/weapons sets F1-F4. It's kind of annoying that each set of weapons takes up an inventory slot, unlike some games I've played where equipped weapons do not take up inventory space.

SPELLS: If you're a spell caster you start out with 8 boxes at the bottom center of your screen that are numbered, you cast by hitting the corresponding number on the keyboard. Some spells can't be cast one after the other, they have a timer(cast delay) on them and you have to wait a few seconds before casting that spell again. I haven't had a problem, yet, with monster attacks interrupting a cast, perhaps because they're low level monsters this doesn't happen yet---all spells seem to always go off no matter how many times I get hit during the cast.

HEALTH/SPELL POINTS BAR: Your red health indicator and blue spell points indicator are in the center bottom of the screen over the boxes with your spells in them. Health and spell points regenerate pretty fast on their own but there are also spells that heal or regenerate health faster or leach health from your enemies.

IN GAME COMMUNICATION: There is the ability to add friends to a list so you can always talk to them, the game will tell you if they're online. Each character in the game has a unique name so there are no worries about talking to the wrong person. Bubbles with text can pop up above your head or you can privately chat if you know the character's name.

COMBAT: Combat is real time, not turn based. In the first few areas monsters pretty much ignore you unless you attack them first. New players should learn the art of taking 'em on one at a time and not disturbing whole groups at once so you don't get ganged up on. Combat is initiated by clicking on the monster, if you're a spell caster press the button for the spell you want to cast. The game automatically keeps attacking till the monster dies, then you have to click on a new target. Having the camera angles on the right mouse button makes it pretty easy to keep track of your targets. The game has melee (swords, staffs, axes, etc.) weapons and ranged weapons (i.e. bows is all I've seen so far). The health bar and level of the monster you are attacking appears on the screen so you know when spells are or are not working and how much health the monster has left. With some spells you also get what looks like a rune pop up above the monster's head.

BOOTY: I love the way monster drops are handled in this game. When goodies drop the game assigns them to the person that killed the monster and only that person can pick it up--no more jerks hanging off to the side and grabbing everything dropped from your kills. If you're in a party situation it apparently has some kind of logic for deciding who gets what items if you all helped. I'm not sure what happens if you don't pick up something assigned to your character, I would hope that after awhile it becomes open for anybody that wants to pick it up. Scattered around the scenery are barrels that contain goodies if opened up.

Most drops are in white text, rarely you'll see something drop that is in blue text--the blue text items are better and you have to go to town to buy an identify kit (25 uses each) to identify the item. This is a little bit annoying because the kits are expensive based on what money you're getting at first and the identified item often isn't worth the cost of identifying it. There are also drops of what appears to be components for crafting items--I haven't dealt with any of this yet and don't know how it works but there is a tool kit you can buy in town that lets you take bits off dead monsters for later use in whatever this is for (I admit it, no time to read the book).

MONEY: I'm only level four but most of what I'm getting from kills and from items I'm selling is not much. i.e. stuff is expensive vs. the little bit of gold you are getting from kills and quests.

PVP: Apparently there is the ability to play against other humans--I haven't tried this. There are also "guilds" that apparently go against one another in an "arena." This part of the game doesn't hold that much appeal for me but it might later when the character is of a much higher level and killing monsters starts to get boring because it's too easy.

LEAVING THE GAME: Unlike some online games, if you exit the game you always come back to the first city the next time you login.

Stability:
I'm running windows xp professional on my system. The game runs well but sometimes it doesn't like it if I minimize the window and it has crashed on me a couple of times when doing that, as long as you don't task switch out of the program it runs continuously for hours with no problems. I'm running this game on an AMD 3000+ cpu with 1 gig of ram onboard and a GEForce 5200 based video card.

Overall what I think:
The game has an easy to remember set of controls, I hate any game that has too many keystrokes to get anything done. While all character classes have similar looking characters (ie. the faces and bodies are all the same) in the game it's easy to customize by using dyes to change the colors of clothing etc. I find the game play smooth over a broadband connection and combat pretty easy. It's also very helpful to always be able to see where the bad guys are on the map in the upper right corner.

I've only played a spell caster/illusionist up to 4th level but she's fairly capable of taking care of the quests and monsters in the area around the first two cities you find--i.e. I think they've done a fair job of balancing the difficulty versus the character when first starting out. I would not like the game so much if it was too darn hard for a newbie character. Monsters don't seem to respawn immediately within the same game session but if you exit and go back to the same area you will see monsters in the area again. I prefer games that are different every session and this one certainly seems to fit that bill. In many areas you always see the same type of monster and often you'll get the same multiples of slightly higher level monster that attack in groups but each combat can come out differently, i.e. they don't always toss spells at you or attack in exactly the same way.

If you get into a situation you can't handle I've escaped by opening the map and clicking on a city--all bad effects going on are canceled when you reach a city. I'm not sure this will always work as the game progresses but at least for the newbies like me this makes life easier. Overall I'd say the game was worth the money, I look forward to getting into other areas of the game when my character has gained some levels. At least at first for the magic user classes it seems that you only get those first few spells, I'm not sure what has to happen to get more or if there are even are more (or they just increase in strength as I level up). There are certainly a few web pages out there even though this is a really new game, I'll be adding to this as I get a chance to read some of that stuff and keep playing the game.

Update: Been playing this for a while now, ditched the first character I made--she went to war too soon. I made a ranger/monk character that has been quite fun. Early in the game before the scarring you can play alone or with the provided henchman--no problem, this is not so true later on in the game, after the scarring. You can do many of the quests around Ascalon using henchman but the farther you get away from the first city the harder the game gets and the smarter the foes get. After you leave Ascalon and head towards Kyrta the game is just too hard to play with just henchman anymore, you're forced to team up with others if you want to survive more than 30 seconds on a mission.

Just since I've been playing the company has made a couple of rather major changes to the game, they've reworked a couple of current things and added some major new areas to the game. One big change is that now when you come into a new city there is almost always a "mission" button offered in your party window for a major quest. Due to the design of the world there's a huge amount of room for them to add stuff thus keeping everyone interested--this is great. After you've reached level 13 or so you start finding blue, purple and gold objects that...when salvaged...leave items behind such as sword hilts, staff wrappings, bowstrings and bowgrips that can be used to upgrade other weapons. You can upgrade things more than once too....you don't loose your nice bow if you put a bad upgrade on it by accident--just add a different upgrade again later. Your chance of salvaging is apparently random and not tied to your level or anything so you don't always get goodies but most of the time you will get something that can be used to upgrade a weapon or a rune to add to armor. The thing that irks me is that a ranger I get stuff for other classes much more than I get stuff that I can use myself. I suppose this is one way they force you to trade with others.

The whole concept of salvage is a great one, you can salvage white items that have no powers of their own to create materials to be used to craft other stuff. Using expert salvage packs (expensive) you can salvage blue/purple/gold/green items that result in runes or upgrade pieces for weapons. Armor/weapons improve the farther you get into the game, the trick is to know what items to hang onto for use later in crafting better armor or weapons or for trading to collectors. You can't keep everything, you don't get that many inventory slots. There is some "storage" available via a Xunlai agent that exists in every town, this storage is shared amongst all characters on your account so it's an easy way to move stuff between characters but they really don't give you a whole lot of space to serve every character; you're still forced to pick and choose what you keep.

Armor: Like I said armor gets better as you progress in the game however, you can only wear the armor of your primary class, never the armor available to your secondary class. Runes work in the same way, you can only use runes for your primary class not your secondary class. As you can imagine because of this there are a lot of primary warrior class folks running around because they get the best armor. I am nearly level 20 now and playing well past Lion's gate, I'm finding that at least for the Ranger, there are better pieces of armor available from collectors than there is to be crafted. Sometimes the tough part of getting armor from a collector is finding all the collectors that have all the different pieces---which is the point I suppose. I could kick myself, I got rid of some monster parts that I need for one of the armor pieces and now I have to try to pick up more by killing those beasties again (and they don't drop that often--pooh).

This game just keeps getting better, a friend of mine formed a guild, we don't have a hall yet but that might happen in the future. Love the game, they've got me hooked.

GENERAL COMMENTS:
There are certain areas of the game that are often difficult to get out of, i.e. you can't find a party to finish the mission or get you out of the ding dang city. This would seem kinda poor design, no one should ever get caught deadend in an area because they can't do the missions to get out for lack of a party (henchman are just too dumb for missions after a certain point in the game). Some of the missions found in one city are better done from a farther on city to start and so you can never find anyone where you're supposed to start to do it because they've all gone to the father city to look for a mission group. There are "professional runners" that sell their skills to get you to a city you haven't been to before. This is cheating and the game designers have taken steps to make running harder (more monsters in the woods) but it still goes on and it's easy to be taken for your money by one of these folks (but there are honest ones too). Fortunately that is one advantage to belonging to a guild, you can generally call for help when you get stuck.

Every one of my characters except my healer monk had problems finding mission groups in certain areas. Certain parts of the game require 1 or more monks in a group or certain death will follow. Normally, foreigners don't mix in the american zones but that doesn't mean they can't. Just like in Diablo II it's kind of annoying to have someone that doesn't speak english on the team who apparently has no clue how to play and endangers the whole group with their stupidity. Once a mission starts you can't kick someone that is just standing by the gate while you do the mission and they get credit for doing nothing. You also cant kick someone that's an idiot and aggros monsters because they don't know how to play in that certain area. I think this needs to be fixed, the group leader should be able to kick players that aren't doing their jobs or can't/won't follow instructions so players aren't being caried by the group and rewarded for doing nothing. Some of the characters are a lot more work to play, like a good healer monk, than others. A reputation system might be a good thing for the company to implement so you can find out if someone is being called a cheat for ripping people off in trades or a newb because they can't follow instructions and run off and aggro the baddies all the time in missions.

one last update: You stop gaining attribute points after level 20, all you gain is a skill point each time you level. There are supposedly a couple of late game quests that give attribute points as a reward (this is an area they can play with if they want to--cool). After 20 you can't increase your attributes very much anymore so all you can do is get better equipment or gain "elite" skills that are captured from monsters or earned in special quests. Still love the game but it's now really hard, probably didn't build my ranger properly at first but at this point in the game you can move your skill points around freely with no penalties for changing them around. You can have four characters on each account, I've started a warrior so I can use this great gold vampiric hammer I found with the ranger...the warrior has a much easier time than the ranger so far, it was also great to have plenty of money available that the first character earned and put in the communal stash. The secondary mesmer class gives her some ability to heal herself and some other neat spells. There supposedly is a new world for this game coming out soon (February 2006?)that will also cost for the supplement, that's fine, game play is still free. I really haven't even begun to experience this game even after weeks of play...somebody really did this right...kudos again.

rumors of updates: There are supposedly plans for an additional class, the assasin. Due to the new class we're supposed to get an extra character slot. I hope they also increase the stash size. More on this as it happens.

More on updates: There will be two new character types, the assasin and the ritualist. The assasin has dual wield weapons and spells appropriate to the class, the ritualist uses "spirits" to heal and cause damage etc. The company had a weekend where you could sign up to play the two new classes in the player vs player arena, it was also apparently a debug session so they could work on debugging their code (so few companies do this anymore that alone is impressive). I like the new characters, the general consensus is the ritualist is overpowered but I'm sure they'll do more with balancing before the final release. The traffic in the game has really gone south, everyone is waiting for the game update before they get back into the game.

Update: the end of April 06 they came out with Factions the second installment of the game. You pay again for Factions but you get a whole game, two more character slots and two entirely new classes to play with. For those considering updating to windows 64bit the game runs perfectly so far (I just upgraded).

First big problems: Well I said I went to 64 bit days ago now suddenly I get bad screen corruption at times in guildwars, at first it was only in factions in the undercity quest, but now it's everywhere. NCsoft basically blew me off using the excuse that I'm running 64 bit. Personally I think this game has a hate going on with ATI video cards. I've found lots of posts from folks with ATI cards on forums (and gee guess what NCSoft they're all still running win 32!!!!). I really hate it when a company finds an excuse to ignore you right away without even looking into the issue. The game ran fine for three days straight, something they did the beginning of the week is causing the issue. ATI has hever had the best of reputations for driver quality, I'll be looking for some beta drivers and playing with settings because NCsoft apparently doesn't realize that Vista is due out next year and they're not gonna be able to blow off 64 bit os users for very much longer...at least not with the unsupported os excuse.

update: the ATI card apparently has a problem, does the same thing in a 32 bit system. The company has started beta pvp days for the next installment of guildwars Nightfall. Again there will be two new classes the Dervish and another. Not known at this time if there will be more character slots again like there was the last time. Not sure when Nightfall will be released but as I haven't even finished Factions yet.......It's nice to be able to go back and forth between the games easily and those that have both games have a few advantages in terms of spells that are available and the ability to get excellent armor fairly early in the game (as compared to prophecies). I think the story was better in factions, looking forward to what they will do with nightfall.