Guild Wars is one of most interesting and innovative games on the horizon. It is certainly a game that's not easy to describe; in summary, it's a fantasy-themed, action, online role-playing game. However, don't let the convoluted description throw you off, because the thing to keep in mind with Guild Wars is that it's being developed by three former members of Blizzard, the studio responsible for some of the biggest PC games ever, including Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft. We had a chance to see Guild Wars last year when we were invited to check the game out early in development. A full year has passed since then, and ArenaNet recently paid us a visit to show us the progress it has made.

There are six professions in the game, including the elementalist.

Guild Wars is being designed as a competitive online role-playing game--one where you'll battle other players in addition to a wide variety of menacing monsters. Most importantly, it's also being designed so that the best players will not necessarily be the ones who spend the most time playing it. To achieve this, the game relies on a skill-based system that's reminiscent of the card game Magic: The Gathering. You can collect and earn a wide variety of powerful skills and abilities, but when it comes time to fight, you'll be allowed to select only eight of them to take into battle. Each skill has a cost and a benefit, so you must anticipate which formula will be most effective against the competition. But this way, even a relatively new player will have a chance against seasoned veterans, because it's less about what level your character is and more about the skills you select and how they match up with the opponent's skills.

There are more than 400 different skills in the game, and they cover a wide range of abilities to pad out the six professions in the game. When we saw the game last year, ArenaNet had only announced the warrior, ranger, and necromancer professions. The three new professions are the elementalist (a specialist in elemental magic), mesmer (a master of what is called denial magic), and monk (an expert in healing and resurrection). Each profession has its own set of skills. For example, the ranger is an archer, so a lot of ranger skills involve bow and arrows, like Pin Down, which temporarily pins a target to the ground. The mesmer specializes in countering enemy spells. One mesmer skill is backfire, which for 10 seconds causes the targets to receive 22+ points of damage if they try to cast a spell.

You'll run around the world in a third-person view, and you'll be able to rotate the camera all around your character. The game uses the familiar WASD interface, but the game is simple enough that you can play it entirely by using just the mouse. The left mouse button is used to interact with objects, talk with non-player characters, attack hostile creatures and players, and pick up loot afterward. In other words, it feels very much like a 3D version of Diablo, which isn't too surprising considering the pedigree of the people involved.

The lighting and spell effects are impressive.

The character-creation system is as flexible as those found in other online role-playing games; you designate a gender, a profession, and a secondary profession (at higher levels, your character can effectively dual-class), with the first two determining your general appearance. You can then select a variety of attributes, including hairstyle and color, face, and skin color. A slider will let you adjust the height of your character. And once you're playing, you can pick up distinctive armor, equipment, and weapons that will affect your appearance. There are also dyes in the game, and you can actually mix and match your own color schemes to paint your clothes and armor. Thus, player guilds can color coordinate, and if they choose to they can even keep the formula for their color scheme a secret, as well as make gathering the required dyes an initiation quest.

ArenaNet built its own proprietary graphics engine for the game, written by cofounder and programmer Mike O'Brien, who previously worked on Warcraft III and World of Warcraft. The environments are lush and detailed, and there are excellent lighting effects, including a soft glow that permeates the entire game. We were shown some of the monsters, including shambling zombies and a menacing and huge bone dragon, all of which looked impressive. But the really impressive thing about the graphics engine--and the game itself--is that it's all streaming from the Internet.