Don't be swayed by the neigh-sayers.
On the subject of Character Depth. This is probably one of the most unique games in respect to character creation. I don't mean appearance-wise... I mean build-wise. In most online rp and mmorp games a "build" is a specific style of play using a certain profession or class. The trouble with most games is that there are only a few "builds" per profession to pick from, and each build can pretty much only be played one way, with skills already chosen, items already picked for endgame. Anyone who has played any games from the Diablo franchise knows exactly what i mean... but anyone familiar with mmo's should have a good idea. It definately gets old running around knowing that the character you spent so much time building is exactly the same as every other character of that class. With guild wars you don't have that issue. One reason being the secondary profession. This makes for "hybrid" builds, which means that you can take your character and fully adapt him/her 100% to your prefered games style.. You don't have to adapt your game play to the character, as with many other games.
One of the biggest selling points of this game in my opinion is that is is fee-less. But no one is pointing out WHY that is important. Sure we are cheap, we don't like shelling out an aditional 20 bucks or more a month to play a game that we already spent possibly hundreds on to buy the game and its expansion packs. In the past, we got over that. We bit the bullet and paid the fees because that was the only way a game could be kept "alive". Servers cost money to keep running. Developers have to be paid, etc etc etc. In the past, this was the case. Welcome to the future. There are even now MMORPG's from the past that are being offered free to play (Anarchy online, which sports both fee-less play and free client download.) Also, there are countless free MMO's coming from the asian community. Knight Online, Planeshift, and Silk Road to name a few. We now live in an age where the once-huge costs of game upkeep no longer apply. There is NO NEED for monthly fees. If anything, yearly fees might work. People think "you are just greedy and don't want to shell out the fee to play so you make stupid arguments for which you have no basis." Actually, I don't have a "major credit card" to pay the fees, and in the time it would take for a snail mail payment to arrive half of my subscription month would be gone before the money order cleared. But now I DO have a prime example to support my argument that MMO's no longer require monthly payment. That example being, Guild Wars. In the old days game companies were hesitant to charge people a monthly fee to play a game. To the companies then it was ludacris to think that anyone would want to devote that kind of cash to a game. Now the game companies no longer need the fees, but they have grown so large and become quite greedy and as such are hesitant to give up that huge (and I mean HUGE) revenue. How huge? World of Warcraft has a monthly fee of $14.99 with 1.5 MILLION subscribers. That means that per month on average there is around $15 Million in revenue from subscribers alone. Thats alos 1.5 MILLION people who bought the game at approximately $50.00 a pop. Thats $50 Million in revenue, with an aditional $15 Million a month being made. Is all this money really necessary to keep the game servers up and to keep the game running smoothly with interesting and new content?
In the future of online gaming I see many more games like guild wars being released. Even if they are not accepted as full-fledged MMO's they are just as engrossing and just as amazingly interesting. I say bravo to Guild Wars, bravo to a resounding success. Now if we can work on a similarly-styled science fiction (ohhh star wars please?) game. That would be the cat's pajamas.