A late review? Maybe. But worth a read!
No, no, that four years is just gone, and now it's time to give Guild Wars a casual look and its due as a subject of critique.
The funny part of playing Guild Wars is that I keep feeling the need to upgrade my armor, find a new weapon every two hours of gameplay, or spend money crafting useless items in order to grind a crafting skill slowly uphill like a boulder up the side of a mountain in order to make a single shoe for an auction house. In actuality, these popular and addictive mechanics are absent from the Guild Wars MMO, which in a way is refreshing and in a way quite disturbing. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that while playing this game I often yearned for a change of armor sets, and quite honestly got a little drunk off of happiness the moment I upgraded my armor to the top tier 3/4th the way to the level cap. It's just a simple reminder that I am totally and seriously institutionalized to the main stream normal that now runs only with a comparison to WoW. I've looked into help groups about this, I really have.
WoW withdrawal symptoms aside…
I can see the appeal of Guild Wars for a lot of different reasons. The game focuses on players using any skill at any time or making any build for their character that they desire. Players can also mix skills of their primary class with a secondary class and match them in any way they see fit. You want a warrior-monk? Done. You want an elementalist-mesmer? Done. You want a stripper with a PHD? Done.
The possibilities are quite limitless, as you may have guessed from my implication, and can be changed at any time in any town or outpost. In a lot of ways, this beats skill trees that you climb, climb, climb, and have to pay to redo because you're having regrets that you spent 160 hours of your life making a priest that wears plate.
If I had to name the first mind-numbing fault in this game, it would be the piles and piles of useless gear and trinkets that were constantly thrown at me for completing quests. As I turned in one quest on the outskirts of the broken city of Ascalon, my 6'2" warrior-mesmer chick was offered an off-hand scroll for the monk healing skills that I didn't have. This lead me to once again admire and miss Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, a game that deemed unnecessary gear to be total nonsense and only awarded items and gear that were useful to your class each time, every time, no nonsense. Of course, all of the useless gear that I received as part of these trash quests was just broken down into materials that I later used for better armor, and that just begs the question of why the game couldn't simply reward me with materials instead of trash in the first place.
The second mind-dulling fault I find with Guild Wars is the backtracking. The world is pretty darn big, in the Guild Wars sense, and having to run to find someone on the top of a mountain only to run with them, at a slightly slower speed, down the same mountain really becomes a long and tiresome process. What better way to kill the momentum of excitement in a game than to have a player hack and slash their way through hordes of enemies that have no respawn and then walk back with some captured soldiers through empty fields of wasteland.
Perhaps the third most noticeable fault of the game is the trash quests that go along with the trash loot. I think just about every MMO these days suffers from this epidemic: the quests don't matter. Don't bother reading the text. Don't bother even looking at the description. Just see how much experience you're about to get, head out, kill something, and come back for your reward. I find this kind of sad honestly because I know there was someone somewhere in the game's development that put a lot of time and effort in all that dialog text, and even more people to plan the quest and program it… and no one takes the time to read a damn thing.
The best you can say about the quest system, outside of the main mission line, is that people run into town, spend as little time there as possible, dog-pile quests, and run off to finish them in an hour or so before moving on. Doesn't it make more sense to design towns, outposts, and cities for more lasting appeal? Shouldn't every town have a mini-game to play, an attraction to experience, or some sort of compelling reason to WANT to be in that town? Just a thought.
All the same, I do have to credit Guild Wars for creating a narrative in the MMO and attempting to keep the RPG at the end of the acronym it associates itself with. The in-game cinematics that are triggered when advancing the main plot, although now a bit awkwardly old and therefore hilarious, are actually a welcome sight. Instead of just watching the main boss of a dungeon simply fall on its face, a little dialog from some companion characters follows in an attempt to build a plotline. This not only helps the player feel like they have some significance to the plot and the world, but it also shows that there is more value to playing missions than just looting a corpse and teleporting back to town.
I'm also equally happy that this game runs very smoothly and solidly on my laptop, which is not a gaming machine at all. The graphics are quite beautiful for a game that is now six years old, and the animations are pretty slick and fun to watch.
Honestly, I don't have to tell you much more about this game because chances are that you've already played it six years ago and either love it or hate it by now, and so it's really just on me to get with the program and form my own opinion.
I like it. I like it enough that I will see my character through to completion but then possibly drop it like a bad habit afterwards. Yet I have to admit that this game, being as good as it is for as many reasons as it has, truly gets me excited for Guild Wars 2, as it is most certainly a steppingstone to greatness that might actually take WoW down.