• Publisher: NCsoft
  • Release Date: Apr 26, 2005
  • Summary: Guild Wars takes the best elements of today's massively multiplayer online games and combines them with a new mission-based design that eliminates the tedium of those games. You can meet new friends in towns or outposts, form a party, and then go tackle a quest together. Your party always has its own unique copy of the quest map, so camping, kill-stealing, and long lines to complete quests are all things of the past. Within a quest you have unprecedented freedom and power to manipulate the world around you: your magic can build bridges and open up new pathways, or it can burn down forests and tear the ground asunder. You don't have to spend countless hours on a leveling treadmill to get to the interesting parts of the game, because combat is designed to be strategically interesting and challenging right from the beginning. You don't have to spend hours running around the world to prepare for a quest, because Guild Wars allows you to instantly travel to the beginning of any quest that you've previously unlocked. You'll never spend days playing only to discover that choices you made early on have left you with a permanently uncompetitive character, because the unique skill system in Guild Wars allows infinite experimentation but doesn't allow bad decisions to ruin a character. And you'll never meet new players only to discover that you can't play with them or compete against them because their characters are on a different server than yours; in Guild Wars, all characters live in one seamless world. [NCsoft] Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 52 out of 53
  2. Negative: 0 out of 53
  1. We were overwhelmed by the huge range of top-quality gameplay that's available here for $49.99 (USD) with no online fees.
  2. The look of Guild Wars is magnificent. [Aug 2005, p.84]
  3. At its best only when the structure is there to support it. Find eight people to play with regularly, and invest in voice communications to streamline tactical discussions, and Guild Wars offers an intelligent and demanding thrill - bringing the best of the skill and strategy of FPS deathmatches to the grandeur of a role-playing world. [Aug 2005, p.88]

See all 53 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 15 out of 121
  1. GeorgeS.
    8
    Guild Wars sports _the best_ fantasy PvP bar none. It takes a little bit of time to figure out your prefered playstyle or even how to play effective PvP but once you have got it the game just clicks. Tons of action and very little downtime. PvE can be taken at your own pace. Heck if you're feeling anti-social you can invite some decent NPC's to help you quest. The fetch quest PvE content is sometimes bland but the main storyline quests are very good. The music is good enough but the sound effects sometimes are wanting. *clang* doesn't always cut it these days. Graphics are very good and GW runs well on older computers. The interface is great. You can make your own to suit your needs in game with very little hassle. ArenaNet makes updates, patches etc, very painless and you hardly notice. The technology behind the game is quite awesome. There are some gripes. Targeting needs to be improved. And sometimes you can get tripped up on invisible geometry. No jumping sadly. If you enjoy PvP there is no reason you should not check Guild Wars out. Everything else is icing on a very sweet cake. Expand
    • 5 of 5 users said yes
  2. DemonicAngel
    6
    Before anything else is said, I must applaud NCSoft for putting together what seems to be an extremely robust and reliable online game (especially given the total lack of fees). The visuals, for a game with such relatively low system requirements, are utterly gorgeous. Sound is, well, fairly nondescript - the music is pleasant but unmemorable, and effects are fairly generic for the genre. Now, onto the game itself. Guild Wars has garnered widespread critical and public acclaim for its skill-based gameplay, instanced PvE areas and (most of all) the lack of monthly fees, and I kinda enjoyed the beta weekend, so I picked it up shortly after release. Since then, I've played it about 6 times in total - I reckon I can't have put in more than a few hours in total. But that's only because the game seems so directionless that it's difficult to feel any motivation to play. Admittedly I'm a solitary gamer and tend to have an unfairly biased view of MMORPGs, but NCSoft claims there is incentive for single player play. If there is, it certainly didn't rear its head within the crucial first two hours. The gameplay is reminiscent of Diablo - click on an enemy to start attacking it, and you'll slug it out until one of you is dead. Whilst you're attacking you can use your various skills by pressing the hotkeys - typically these will deal extra damage, heal your wounds, or work in combination to produce even more powerful effects. The profession and skill system undeniably adds a huge amount of depth, but the system is intricate enough to totally put off RPG virgins such as myself. The game seems built around a mission structure of sorts, where you talk to people to receive quests as is standard for RPGs. Thus far, most of the quests I've done (I haven't really touched on the main story arc at this point) have been "go here, kill these monsters/rescue this attractive young woman/recover this artifact, then come back to me and I'll give you this item/these items/this amount of experience". If this is the standard by which MMORPGs are judged, then it's a genre I do not ever want to go near again, ever. I'd say rent first, but this isn't an option, so instead I'd suggest playing at a friend's for at least a few hours before you make the decision. I wish I had, in retrospect, then I wouldn't have wasted my money. That's not to say Guild Wars is a bad game - it's clear that a great deal of work has gone into creating it. It just doesn't appeal to me in anything more than a very superficial way. (Besides which, people are scary.) Expand
    • 1 of 1 users said yes
  3. 1
    Terrible, maybe I went into the game expecting some fun PVP but its not, broken unbalanced classes. I played this game about 2 months ago. The feature of how your character auto follows your opponent (wow real skill) is incredibly annoying. The game is worse than SWTOR when it comes to being on "rails". I am excited for GW2 but if it is anything like GW1 I will not be purchasing. Expand
    • 1 of 3 users said yes

See all 121 User Reviews