Guild Wars Review

Guild War's E3 for everyone is over now.

But I did get enough game time out of it. I played mostly as a Monk-Warrior.

Now, for those of you who don't know, the stats on my box are:
Athlon T-Bird 1.4Ghz
Soyo Dragon K7V Plus (VIA)
512MB PC1600 DDR RAM
128MB MSI nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 8x (Recognized by Windows XP as a Ti 4800, DX 8.1)
Directx 9.0b
2x Maxtor 40GB 7200RPM Hard Drives
[20Gb WinXP, 20Gb FAT32 Data, 20GB Gentoo Linux, 20GB FAT32 Data]
Unbranded 16X DVD Drive
12x4x8 LG CD-RW Drive (Previously external)
Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16-bit (ES1370, because I fried the onboard C-Media 5.1)
VIA Rhine II onboard Ethernet connected to SBC global's DSL service (around 160Kbps)


I had to drop to the second lowest graphical settings to keep the FPS in the range of 20-50, anything higher and the rate was under 20. Graphically, my machine did keep up.

The main problem I had was connectivity. I never dropped out of the game, but there were significant lags. PCs would load without their armor, or without the appropriate textures. You'd see all black characters for a few moments, then pow they'd be there fully. But overall, the game is visually aesthetic. It really is a beautiful thing if you can run with high graphic quality. Objects in the distance load and render slightly blurred, it's an amazing illusion of distance.

As for gameplay, I really enjoyed the game. For those of you who played Diablo, Diablo II, Darkstone, or Dungeon Siege, you'll feel right at home.

Really, that's about it for interface and the general tenure of gameplay, but let me break down their whole multiplayer concept.

First there are towns. Towns are really where MP comes into play. You can trade with NPCs and other characters in town, and be a part of all the chatting. You can learn new skills from trainers and skill gems. Each town is divided into districts, which pretty much is like different servers. So if your district is empty, you can just jump to a more crowded server.

Then there's the Arena. This is a pretty cool concept. Four on Four team RPG deathmatch. It's pretty difficult to get a good group though, people just don't now how to play yet.

Then there's a group mission area, where you get in a group and go out on a mission.

Plus, the tournament area, which I never tried, but I suppose it's like the Arena.

And then the lonely solo mission area. This is where you really get the goods and level up, but it's just like playing offline. No chat, and everyone plays this area on their own local copy pretty much. However, it still has to sync to the server for some reason.

Plus there's that pricing thing. They will charge you for the game, but you'll never pay monthly fees. Nice, eh? I'm sold on the idea. The Beta itself was about 96K, and all of the content was about 25Mb that was downloaded from the ArenaNet servers.

All in all, Guild Wars is amazing. But they need to develop some sort of filter for the chats because it gets really confusing trying to find who said what, and if they're even close to you. The maps are huge! Also, single player could just as well be played offline, so why not make that portion offline? Then you have gamers playing on their high-end laptops while their on the go then updating to the servers when they go to MP areas. However you'd have hackers messing with their characters. Solo is just too quite for a MMORPG. Arena mode is a great idea though.

Kudos Guild Wars.