Guild Wars is one of those games that you can easily play for long stretches while losing track of the hours--suddenly it's dark out, or light out, as the case may be. However, in contrast to many other RPGs, there's very little about Guild Wars that inherently demands a lot of your time all at once. It was clearly designed from the ground up to allow you to play in brief spurts, for minutes or maybe for an hour at a time. The PvP battles are action-packed affairs along the lines of what you'd expect from a competitive shooter. The role-playing quests and cooperative missions are typically less than an hour long. Also, you never need to worry about saving your progress or logging out in a safe area, because you can quit whenever you want to, and you'll always restart in the nearest town with all your skills and experience intact. There are no severe or permanent penalties from getting killed--just a temporary hit to your maximum health and energy levels that goes away when you get back to town.

Guild Wars offers single-player, cooperative, and competitive experiences each in turn.

From a technical standpoint, the game is a marvel. It boots up and quits out instantly, downloads software updates quickly and automatically, and runs wonderfully in a window if you prefer (you do need to be connected to the Internet whenever you're playing, though). Unlike in other online RPGs, logging in and quitting out is painless, and your character is also capable of instantly teleporting between all the cities and towns you've ever visited, at any time. These locations effectively serve as lobbies, and they're packed with players looking for other players to be their teammates. Or, if you can't find a good player team (or don't want to), the cities and towns let you fill out your team with computer-controlled henchmen.

For better or worse, these henchmen aren't as good as the real thing. Later on in the adventure, they'll be ill equipped to help you through some of Tyria's most dangerous environments. We also had them bug out on us on several occasions, either by getting stuck in the environment or flying off to who knows where. But the game generally makes it really easy to start and restart quests and missions, and finding willing players to work with is also fairly simple, which makes the occasional problems with the henchmen easy to dismiss. There's another issue that has to do with the game's cities and towns, which is that they can be overwhelming because they can be filled with so many players. There's no simple, obvious way to get into a group, short of clicking on the different people you see and then clicking a little plus icon that invites them to join you, so chat channels tend to be filled with requests from players looking for teammates. Also, there's no easy way to compare your pending quests with your teammates' pending quests short of just chatting about it, so it can be especially difficult to find a willing group to go questing out in the wilderness, versus taking on the cooperative missions that start out in town. And there's some slight but noticeable lag when you type chat messages. For a game with player community at its heart, Guild Wars seems somewhat devoid of amenities for enabling players to meet one another.

Furthermore, since Guild Wars makes it so easy to jump around the world, as well as to start up and exit out of the game in the first place, the player community doesn't exactly seem warm and friendly, on the whole. For example, if a quest or mission doesn't go well, random teammates are liable to quit without any warning, which can be frustrating to those left behind. As with just about any online game, the solution to this sort of issue is to play with friends instead of with strangers. To this end, Guild Wars actually has another leg up on most online RPGs, in that it lets you freely communicate with any other player in the gameworld, while most online RPGs limit you to communicating only with players on the same server, which contains its own instance of the gameworld.

Many of the cities in Guild Wars are absolutely packed with other players.

Guild Wars uses a different sort of technology. Towns and cities that have too many players in them are automatically split up into "districts," akin to separate chat lobbies, while missions and wilderness areas are always uniquely generated for the player team, so you'll never encounter random players or seas of already-killed monsters when you're out exploring the world. For the most part, that's great. But to an extent, it's actually a double-edged sword, since the fairly abstract manner in which the gameworld is set up diminishes some of the sense of immersion. It's difficult to fully appreciate the scale and the dangers of the world when you can freely and instantly teleport between the areas marked on your map. In other words, Tyria doesn't feel quite as cohesive as it could have, with the extremely brief but frequent loading screens between maps, and the fact that the towns and cities are all inundated with out-of-character banter. Additionally, the key story sequences are presented in full speech, which is nice, but most of the questing is conveyed through small text-based pop-up windows, which aren't very engrossing, especially not in the context of the game's otherwise-outstanding presentation. For that matter, the rewards for the game's dozens of different side quests often aren't even pertinent to your character. So the questing system can sometimes seem unfocused. It's mostly just there to give you more of a reason to explore the gameworld at your own pace--which, luckily, is enjoyable enough on its own.