Everyone here and beyond has thier opinions, I know, but I believe this is the best MMORPG on the market. I have had a little experience with Everyone here and beyond has thier opinions, I know, but I believe this is the best MMORPG on the market. I have had a little experience with Ever Quest, and a WHOLE lot of experience with World of Warcraft. Guild Wars should continue to be better with updates, fixes, balances, and expansions, just like every other persitent online game. Guild Wars sets itself apart in a few good respects: -The updating is painless. No need to download huge patches. It patches small parts of the game as you load different areas. Very nice. Nothing worse than jumping on to play a little of your game to realize that you have to spend the next 30 - 60 mins downloading and patching before you can jump on and play like in WOW. -The gameplay is fun and tailored more toward skill. You do have to spend some time leveling up your character if you want the best of the best, but it is the same in ANY MMO out there, it's the whole point of giving you something to keep doing and goals to achieve. One of my favorite things is the rewards for completing quests. You actually get skills for completing quests. This to me helps get rid of the desire to "grind" for levels. As in WOW, it is actually quicker to just "farm" or "grind" in a specific area for experience to level than to do the quests. All you get from the quests in WOW is weapons , armor, or items that are most likely (%90 of the time) worse than what you already have. Also with GW it is nice not knowing when or where you will actually be getting your next skill from. I know that sounds wierd, but in WOW you get "new" skills ("new" is usualy just upgrades for the skills you already have, you will have %60 of all the skills you will ever learn by lvl 20, %80 by lvl 30, and %95 by lvl 40) every "even" level. And it could take a good 3 hrs to get to the next level, if all you do is grind. So you play for about 6 hrs killing the same thing over and over again to get small upgrades. And you keep doing it cause you know you have to to get that new item, armor, skill, etc. With GW since you don't have that whole level crunching to get what you want thing, you are enticed to explore the world. -And the world is nicely detailed. It could use a little more fleshing out, but over all it is nice. It really is no different than any other MMORPG. The land is vast with small pockets of towns, and is sparsely populated with NPCs. The same with WOW. But what is nice with GW is that once you get to a main town/outpost, you can teleport thier instantly. In WOW you might spend 20 mins just flying/running to get to where you need to be, and that is only once you hit lvl 40 and buy a mount (wich is no small feat or small amount of cash). With WOW before you are lvl 40 you could easily spend 30 - 60 mins. Depending on whether or not you have gotten the right "Flight Paths" to get to where you need to be. -The Quest sytem is nice in GW. It's easy to understand, and you get a friggin green arrow that tells you where you should be going next, what instance to go into, and where on the map you need to be. In WOW, good luck, you will probably be looking it up in an Online Database, or asking around. Wich is not such a big deal, but you will be amazed at how much more time is spent actually playing instead of runing around looking for stuff, and how more efficient you can plan your questing adventures. A few mins spent in GW you can see how many quests are in a certain area and plan to do those so that you can kill more birds with one stone. Thank you for that Anet. -Once you get to the lvl Cap and have gotten all your skills (there are "elite" skills which you can only get by learning them from enemies) you can do the PvP portions of the game, wich are fast paced and action packed. I've read a lot of things about how hard it is to compete in PvP because you can't find a good group of people to play with. Well it's the same in ANY online game RPG or FPS or RTS. It takes some time to find good people to play with, but once you do it can be a lot of fun. At least in GW you have the options to join a PvP game by yourself, or with a group you're with, or do guild vs guild. And the system matches you up with like experienced/leveled/Rank people. You can kind of do the same thing in WOW, with the battle grounds addition (wich was just added about mid year 2005), but the long que waits (about 20 - 45mins depending on server population) might be kind of tedious for you. Especially if your lvl 60 with not a whole lot to do otherwise. And with GW if you don't want to do the questing part of the game you don't have to. You can imediatley create a PvP only character. Your PvP only character will not have all the perks of a character that got to lvl 20 by questing, but you can still have a lot of fun, you just won't be the best of the best. At least you have the option. -As far as GW not being considered a MMO: GW in my opinion is more MMO than any other MMORPG. With WOW you pick a specific server to build your characters on. You can have many characters on several different servers, but if they are on different servers you can't play with people on other servers. Wich might not be a big deal, but if you find you like the people better on a certain server or want to play on the RPG servers or PvP servers, you have to be lucky enough for them to offer transfers from your server to those servers. Wich they don't seem to do until a specific server is being over populated. Where as with GW you are automatically logged on to a specific "district" and at your whim you can change districts. Even internationally. This way ANYONE that plays GW can hook up with ANYONE else that is on at the time. That to me is closer to "Massively Multiplayer" than the server specific variety of MMO's. -In relation to the whole MMO thing. Everything outside the main towns/outposts is instanced for every specific group. I love this. As in all MMORPG's there is a lot of quests that require you to spend time traveling in the unknown wilderness to get something, kill something, etc. Few things are more bothersome than going to do such a quest and finding several like powered individuals doing the exact same thing. I thought I was supposed to be unique, I thought my quest was uniqe. WOW fails misrabley here. You will always be on the same quest as someone else, if not many people. You might even have to wait around while the enemy critter(s) respawn, or even fight with someone else over who gets to kill what, or just get ganked. This is not an epic experience to me. So what if I'm a powerfull "Hero" there are going to be thousands of the exact same type of hero out there with you. The "World" of Warcraft is populated more by "heroes" than normal peole. In GW it may be the case as well, but at least you don't have to see them all the time. -There is not a lot of emphisis on item collection for other than profit/sales. This I know a lot of people dislike, but in my opinion it adds to the gameplay. Instead an endless struggle to get a new axe with a +2 to strength instead of a +1, it doesn't really matter in GW. You will be just as effective, and they are there for the item needy person, but the game doesn't revolve around it. It's all WOW is about really, getting a better version of what you had before. -The skill system is really nice in GW. You only get to take 8 skills into battle. Wich can be frustrating at times, where you wish you would have taken another skill instead, but over all it forces you to be specific on what type of character you are playing. Wich is also nice because there are more than one use/roll for your character now. The duel class system is cool, you get to choose from two sets of skills, but only the first class you choose lets you alter thier main attribute, wich does make a difference in you character. And the abillity to change you attributes at will is very nice. Now you can only change skills/spells and attributes in main towns/outposts, but the frustation is minimal for the freedom to tailor your character so many ways. -The rank system for new items is nice to me. It gives the long term player something to shoot for. And it is no better or worse than WOW in my opinion, both are a pain for the casual gamer and a pain for the consitent gamer. It rewards time spent gaming. Same with WOW. -I really like the story of GW. It could be a little deeper, but it's nice. I also like you the land changes with the story. Right now there is only the two settings, or time periods, but at least I felt that I went a long with a change in time for the game. I also like how the main characters of the story are also interactive with most of the main quests. When you are called to help the prince with pushing back the enemy, he is there with you fighting along side. Also seen in many of the "side" quests with the everyday folk. Or when you complete a quest that called you to kill a Leader or find a group and lead them back, if you go back to the same spots later the people or leader are gone. Giving you a sense of actual accomplishment. Good luck in WOW to see any of this in WOW. Very few NPC characters actually physically come along with you, and if they do then that means someone else can't interact with them, and vise versa for you. Not one time in my whole WOW career did I ever see any piece of land change or NPC character good or bad change, wether or not I completed a specific quest 10 times. How epic is that. The biggest reason for this is because there isn't a whole lot to do than the same thing over and over again in WOW, that's why so many people have logged in so many hours in WOW. They took half a game, spread it out over twice as many levels as they should have, and charged people for it. Wich leads into my biggest rant. -GW is free to play online. They update it regularly, with new content as well as fixes. WOW charges you $13 - $15 per month to play (depending on whether you pay monthy or in 6 month blocks, both reacuring automatically), wether you play at all or all day everyday. And that's not the worst part. WOW was released before it was complete. So you payed $50 for half a game, I already said that I know, but one of the biggest reasons Blizzard said the cost was so high per month was because they would be updating it constantly for free. Well guess what, a year later they are finally to the point the game should have been when it was released. This is not an opinion. You can't honestly tell me that such big things like the PvP ranking/honor sytem was something they just came up with, or the battle grounds addition. These where things they had planned that just didn't get in to the release. And there is more updates comming. Now for some numbers. 5 million people have active accounts on WOW, most are paying accounts, some are trial accounts. Lets go back a bit and cut the number in have just to be conservative. Lets say 2 million people have been playing and only half of those were paying customers, and lets say they all payed in 6 month blocks at $13 a month. 1 million times $13 a month = 13 million dollars a MONTH, with equals 156 million dollars a year. If that isn't absurd to you then you have a bigger problem than what video game to play. There is no way that it cost that much to keep WOW servers running or fix bugs. And that number is not including the original profit from the sales of the game, (remember each paying active account also bought the game) or the profit from the merchandise they sell, and there is a whole lot of merchandise to buy and or being bought. So with all that cash they are just finishing a game and guess what, they are going to charge you another $20 - $50 to buy the expansion 1st quarter 2006. This is the main reason I quit WOW, I can not support such a greedy company for a product that is lower in quality than one that is of higher quality from a company that does just as much if not more for thier game. -On some less positive notes for GW: Jumping would be nice. I know it doesn't really do anything for you and would mess up the PvP arenas (they could disable it there) it is just nice to jump, small con in my opinion. A little more content on the RPG side of the game would be nice. More scripted quests with NPC's would be nice. Over all just small cons that could be or will be changed/fixed with updates and expansions. All in all this is a very good game and has shown it is impoving. It is the best MMORPG out there in my opinion, but that doesn't mean it will satisfy everyone out there. And another game is sure to come alone to take your time elsewhere. At least with GW when the time comes for that other game you will still have some cash in your pocket :)… Expand
