Guild Wars Reviewish Thingy.

Janie

Full Member
It arrived yesterday and I played it a fair bit last night.

After installing (easy - even for me), you enter your address and create a account - no credit/debit cards details required, just a valid email address needed.

Firstly a quick overview of the game.

There are 6 professions in the game Ranger, Warrior, Mesmer, Elementalist, Monk & Necromancer. The game requires you to pick a primary profession and a secondary profession. Each profession has 4 or 5 schools of skills for example Elementalist has : fire magic, water magic, earth magic & air magic.
When you start leveling your character up you can put attribute points into these schools - the more points you have in a school the more powerful the spells from that school will be, also with more points in a school you get access to high level spells of that school. With a level 20 character (the max level) you can max out 3 of your schools (generally 2 from your primary profession and one from you secondary). So there is alot of room of difference between the players....2 elementalist/necromancers may have completely different spells.
Another thing to note is you can only have access to 8 of your spells/skills in an instance or PvP arena, you choose which 8 before entering - again this should be quite a tachical choice if your in a guild you want skills which are going to help each other, also some spells (the more powerful) are on cooldown timers, require alot of mana have a casting bar so picking a balanced set of skills is important - no point picking 8 really powerful spells then running out of mana after casting 2 of them and waiting around for mana to regen. Some spells also combine with others (appartiently).

My Experience :

After logging in for the first time your presented with the choice of RP (roleplaying) or PvP (player vs player). The PvP gives you a predesigned level 20 (which is the max level) character to play, all you can do with this character is fight in the arena's in teams of 4 v 4. I'll come to the RP later as I decided i'd check the PvP first.
The PvP character design gives you the choice of 10 or 12 pre designed templates - primary and secondary professions chosen and the 8 spells selected, you can't change anything (yet*) so pick the one that appeals to you most and name it.

Once you done that you load up outside the arena, there are loads of people milling about (other players) and the general chat soon fills up with 'what do I do', 'help', 'how do i change my spells' and 'noob'. The only real option is to click the 'start mission' button, this throw you into a random team with 3 other players who hit that button near the same time as you, you load into the arena and there is about 20 seconds before the fight starts, at the other side of the arena are the oppositions team and it's basically kill the other team before they kill you - as your in a completely random team, you only get the 20 seconds to discuss tactics - and noone does that it's normally just 4 * 'hi' then some tactical genious says 'stay together' then it starts, - these fights last about 3 - 5 minutes and are quite fun despict having no tactics and everyone runs about randomly! I played about with a few of the templates and they do play completely differently - on the downside they are very unbalanced - for example one is based around raising golems from deadbodies, practically useless in this situation as you have no combat or defensive options you'll often be the first person to die (the idea is to wait for someone else to die then make a golem from there body). It was also noted that the warrior/monk template was by far the best. So all in all this quick play PvP was fun but very throw away.

The meat of the game comes from the RP side - here you create a character from the ground up they are level 1 and you pick the primary profession (you pick up the secondary profession early on) and then enter the game world, this is then simular to Wow run about collecting quests, a few venders to buy and sell to however the big difference is the missions/quests are all instances - meaning as soon as you leave the start town your on your own out there, unless your part of a party then your teammates will share the instances with you - I've only been in the first instance (basically the landscape surrounding the town) and it is alot less linear than the WOW ones, there are quests to pick up in there, lots of directions to take and if you leave it, it remains how you left it when you re-enter it - this first one is basically a training area i think, you learn more spells/skills choice a secondary profession etc etc. I got to level 4 and still had plenty to do in this area (although i'd got to the point where i could move on a progress the story).
Obviously in the RP your character can travel to arena's and fight in PvP stuff (in the instructions it says you can do this from level 3 onwards, and you do gain xp for these arena kills/victorys) join a guild and then fight with the guild in PvP fights (you can have upto 4 teams of 8 in the guild battles *from instructions*) there is also capture the idol, king of the hill and a few other arena battle game types other than the standard kill or be killed.

Things I liked :

The whole tachical choices of spell selection, with each class having 85 skills/spells the choices available are massive - much more about individually than Wow characters.

The RP looked like it would be good, getting a character to level 20 is supposed to only take about 20 hours - then you throw them into the PvP arena's.

The whole concept of the guild could work nicely working out tactics and stuff then trying to execute them ;)

Things I disliked :

The graphics are horrid, completely lacking any charm whatsoever.

I wasn't over keen on the autocombat - you select a target and you do your default attack on it, if you do a skill or spell you'll do that on it instead - however what i didn't like was after selecting the target you'll hunt them down automatically, you'll move automatically into range and start firing, if they run off, you chase them, this is fine if your the aggressor, but if your the target it's a nightmare as you simply can't lose them. If a warrior gets on a mage or monk they have to Benny Hill around hoping someone else will spot them and help out......This is only a problem on PvP of course.

Can't comment on the sound/music as my PC makes no sound!

Any Questions? :p
 
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Althorn

Full Member
Sounds about right, my box turned up this morning, so didn't have much chance to play apart from find out about the freaky get click on a mob and you chase it down and beat it's head in all from one click :)
 

Janie

Full Member
Something that may come in useful - you buy indenifying kits (25 uses) for the vendors for 100 coins. Took me ages to work that out and was running around with a inventory full of unidenified items :)
 
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