Guildwars

Funny you should start a topic on Guild Wars, I just bought it a few days ago. It looks fantastic, and the gameplay is very good.
It's free, which is a huge plus. Definitely worth the money, plus if you get a guild going (which I recommend) you can fight off against other guilds to become champions.

 

I've been playing it since it's launch but haven't joined a guild or played too much PVP so I can't really comment too much on that part.

The good:
There is no monthly fee to play the game.

Lots of skills to mix and match. Each profession has about 75 skills so a character with a main and sub profession will have around 150 to choose from if you unlock them all. Skills are earned as rewards for quests or bought from skill trainers or captured from enemies.

Level 20 limit. This can be a good or bad thing. I think it's good since it puts everybody on equal ground stat wise. They can also now concentrate on making the majority of content for level 20 players instead of spreading the content of 50 or 60 levels. It makes everything available to all of the players.

You can use henchmen for party members so if you want to play solo you can. This is what I've done through all of the missions and quests. The AI for them isn't the greatest which can be frustrating at times but they get the job done.

If you just want to participate in the PVP content you can create a level 20 player from the beginning. If you do that the player you make can only fight in PVP matches and can only use skills that you've unlocked in PVE mode unless you use one of their predifined templates.

All explorable areas are instanced. This is another that can be good and bad. Any time you leave a town the only players you will see are the people in your group. This eleminates people camping spots. The bad is that it limits the feel of being in a massive world with many other people that you get from other MMO's.

There is no grinding for experience. Simply doing the quests and missions will progress the story and you will level up accordingly so you never have to go spend hours mindlessly killing stuff.

The bad:
If you just want it for the PVE content you could be let down. There is quit a bit of area to explore but it doesn't seem like it's encouraged greatly. The majority of the focus is on the PVP.

A lot of the fights in PVE seem the same, there's some skill and strategy but not a lot. Playing against real people should eleminate that problem though.


Overall I've enjoyed it but need to start grouping with other people to fully experience it.

The main website I've been to is www.guildwarsguru.com they have some good guides and forums there.

 

I had played World of Warcraft for months before I got bored with it and quit. Playing Guild Wars after that was a big letdown. Guild Wars is not even 60% of the game that World of Warcraft was. I played Guild Wars for about 2 weeks and gave up on it - it just seemed too boring to me.

 

Looks pretty boring compared to WoW.

Dr of Dunk: did you ever hit 60? PVP Honor Syatem has made the game more fun, plus Battlegrouds are up on the test servers right now.

 

I was also a WoW player, and recently activated my account again due to the Honor system. I have to say, i was never a fan of ghe PvP aspect before, but now it is alot more fun to play now. You just go grouping with other people and PvP with each other, as well as the new quests and dungeons that are starting to show up. I thought I got bored, but all I needed was a break

 

Their is a lot of polish that is missing from GuildWars when compared to a game like WoW, if you go in expecting something of that scale you'll be dissapointed. It's a much simpler game.

 

No, I just got to 55 and it got boring. Then actually what I thought was the PVP system made it worse for me. People would just run around killing for no reason other than to up their "honor". An honor system with no dishonor is lame to me. I wasn't much of a PVP guy to begin with, so maybe that had something to do with it.

 

Having lots of fun playing this right now. Like getsmartnow says, the no monthly fees is awesome, and one thing i really like about it is the customization of characters. So far there are only 6 job professions (they may add more jobs with expansion packs), but you can have a secondary job profession for each character you have. IIRC, you can create 4 characters per account. Anyways, each profession has about 75 skills, so when you create a character, you can potenitally design your character based on about 150 skills to choose from (due to the 2 jobs professions). And for the most part right now, most of the jobs seem well balanced!

Edit: Wanted to add that in the beginning of Guild Wars, it might seem a little slow in regards to the PVE, but after you hit a certain point, it picks up alright and you'll be more pressed to stay alive. The PVE also provides some Arena areas which are kinda like wading pools for people to practice PVP action, kinda like playing a quick pick up Basketball game with people of your same relative level.

 

Battlegrounds is on the test server, and from what I hear, it is AWESOME. Just food for thought.

Besides the occasional Hillsbrad "zergathon" participation and a little Scarlet Monastery farming, I barely play WoW as well. (I've been practicing the art of the "1337 medic save" in Joint Ops lately.) But when Battlegrounds comes out, you KNOW I'll be back in WoW... until Battlegrounds becomes boring, and I stop playing again.

 

My problem is once I'm done with a game, that's it. I hardly ever return to playing it. There are a few exceptions, but they're rare. Well there's that and the fact I sold all my equipment and gave the gold to others in my guild before I quit the game.

I'm waiting for D&D Online to come out and see what that looks like. It won't be PVP based, but more PVE based to my knowledge, although I haven't read much about it.

 

Rangers get an skill that will allow them to charm animals. Once you charm an animal it stays with you until you trade it to an animal trader and will level up with you, if it dies you have a skill that will resurect it or it will resurect when you zone automatically. You have to keep the charm animal skill equiped to use your pet, if you remove it the pet goes away until you re-equip it.

Here's a discussion on charmable animals.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10019

 

I just bought GW about a week ago and impressed with the game.

I played Ultima Online when it first came out, and eventually stopped due to the massive amount of time it took to "build up". The monthly fees were not worth it unless you could play for hours at a time.

The first post is dead on that Guild Wars levels the playing field well.

If any of ya'll want to runn a mission, kill stuff or whatever, whisper to Tyrk Rewt.

 

GuildWars beta was terrible, if they haven’t added anything new to the game I wouldn't recommend purchasing it. World of Warcraft on the other hand is one of the most addicting games you will ever play. I wouldn't recommend purchasing this game either if you value your school work or your job

 

I have played it and it was relatively fun. Some aspects that annoyed me and made me quit eventually...

1) The fact that there is a limit on the amount of money your account can carry. Once I hit the limit, I had to convert my money into globs of ecto or somethin to keep piling. That bothered me.

2) Lot of scammers out there. Had to be careful on every trade I made.

3) If you wanted to do the missions with others on PVE, 95% of the time you would get stuck with totally clueless people who would ruin the mission. I had an easier time finishing all the missions on my own with henchmen.

4)Hated the feature where you could not carry more than 100 platinum at a time. Your trade would automaticlly get rejected if amount of platinum exceeded 100 p.

5) Twinkers all over. Easy game to reach max level of 20 if you had the money. Just pay your way to the forge and get the ultimate armor within 1 hour of your character creation.

6) Not a lot of variation on weapons. Very limited and restricted choices with differences being very minor.

In short the game is a just lite version of WoW or Everquest. Similar graphics but very casual and lite gameplay.

 

...or your significant other, unless you can convince her/him to play with you.

 

I agree with a lot of stuff you said. I tried playing Guild Wars for about a week after playing WoW for about 3 months. I just couldn't do it - to me it was a big step down in terms of gameplay and graphics. The equipment wasn't varied, the quests were pretty much FedEx quests with nothing other than hacking and slashing in between. Had I played Guild Wars first, it probably would've been better, but... eh.