Guild Wars - An MMORPG, or not an MMORPG?
 Guild
Wars is one of a recent crop of third generation online
role-playing games, and it comes with an impressive pedigree:
ArenaNet is a new company, but it's full of old Blizzard
developers. Rather confusingly, for a game that consists
of making up a character, then joining a whole bunch of
other characters on a server and killing stuff, ArenaNet
keep insisting it's NOT an MMORPG. So, what's new, what's
different, and is it a good thing?
First off, the differences between Guild Wars and a more
traditional on-line RPG like EverQuest or World of Warcraft
are more than cosmetic. Guild Wars is more like getting
a bunch of friends together on a LAN and playing a multi-player
questing game.
 Guild
Wars is almost entirely instanced. Once you have your party
together, you go off on your chosen quest. From that point
on, you have no contact with other players outside of your
party until the quest is finished. While you lose the sense
of user scale of other games, the trade-offs are impressive.
For a start, the game assesses your party, works out what
you know, what you've seen, who you've killed, and frames
the quest accordingly. Also, because the world is yours,
you can affect it all you like. Burn down the forest, blow
up the bridge, it doesn't matter. You're the only ones who
are going to need it. So, like Starcraft, what you do in
one quest affects what happens in the next one. You get
a sense of saga, instead of the usual repetitive Fed-ex
quests of other games. Instancing everything eliminates
many of the annoyances of other MMORPGs: kill-stealing,
spawn-camping, and loot stealing are simply impossible.
Guild Wars also almost completely eliminates levelling.
Characters top out at level 20, and you'll get there with
a few hours of playing. So where's the interest if you're
not getting more powerful as you play? Well, you'll still
continue to learn and acquire new skills and spells. But
no matter how many you have, you can only have eight 'active'
at any time. Strategy is in selecting the right skills to
have on hand, and blending them intelligently with the rest
of your party. Getting more just gives you a wider variety
to choose from. And rather like trading card games such
as Magic the Gathering, every spell or skill has a complementary
one that works well against it: there's no killer punch
or cast of doom no matter how long you've been playing.
ArenaNet say they're trying to reward player skill rather
than character skill, and one of the effects of this is
that you simply don't have to put in hundreds of hours just
to be competitive. Accordingly, there's no monthly fee to
play GW, just the cost of the game and its expansions, planned
to come out every six months.
 While
there are 25 story-based missions in the first 'chapter'
of Guild Wars, it's really geared towards PvP play. There
are three, team-based, modes of PvP combat: a quick arena-type
battle, a 'king of the hill' challenge where teams try to
hold territory against all comers, and 'capture the flag'
style guild-based combat. Worlds and guilds who top the
tournament ladders have access to special game content,
for as long as they hold that top position.
Combat in GW is a lot more twitch-based and involving than
normal RPG combat. It's real-time, you can dodge attacks
if you're fast enough, and when making or taking hits, the
game takes into account things like where you're standing
in relation to your opponent - they're not going to be able
to shoot you in the foot from below.
Character generation is quite typical of an MMORPG, though,
and with more limited choices than some games. There are
eight classes, but only one race (and the standard two sexes),
and limited choices of appearance. Graphics and sound are
pretty standard for this kind of game. Not shabby at all,
but nothing startling.
So yes, Guild Wars IS different. Whether that's a good
thing or not is pretty much a matter of taste. If you like
level-grinding, or you're not into interactive combat, you
probably won't like it. Otherwise, it's well worth a look.
Overall Rating: 9.2/10
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