Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Guild Wars: Trilogy Re-Review
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
In our latest review, MMORPG.com's Mobin Koohestani puts the Guild Wars trilogy, the game that put ArenaNet on the map, through its paces.
After six years, three expansions, and a long-awaited successor, the Guild Wars Trilogy has become one of the most prominent MMO games in the market, taking an unusual spin on some familiar, critical concepts. The game has attracted millions of gamers globally due to one of its features: no monthly fee. Trust me, I’m well aware of the fact there are countless Korean F2P MMORPGs out there, but where is the content? So, if you haven’t really ever taken the time to delve into Guild Wars because you figured there’s no way a solid MMORPG can exist without a monthly fee, you have met your match.
Read more of Mobin Koohestani's Guild Wars: Trilogy Re-Review.
Comments
My first great MMO love... Well besides Runescape, but I don't count that one. It's a great game that deserves a near-perfect sequel.
Something about the GW trilogy is off. I say this because while I enjoyed the music, graphics, skill set depth and size of the game, I find myself suddenly not logging in for many months at a time. It just doesn't pull me or call me. Part of it I think has to do with the combat and the other part is how blasted hard it gets to solo the storyline past level 20, even with the right henchman setup. FOR ME.
That and the instancing completely ruins the immersion for me. So glad GW2 is getting away from that and making the combat more fluid and reactionary.
I give it a 6.5.
Somone on other post say Guild Wars its a GIFT and i strongly agree with that.
About cons and population go on American districts i dont think population its low
Currently playing: Elder Scrolls Online
MMORPG experiences:EQ2, AoC(pre f2p), Lotro,GW1,DDO, Aion,WoW( stop with wotlk),Allods, GW2
Eu,War, Secret World
Waiting On: WoD Sometime Maybe: Elder Scrolls MMO, Might and Magic
Great game, always has been. End game is greared more towards PvP then anything else imo, but if you enjoy the dungeons and PvE grind of end game, it has that too. One of the best games I have ever played...off and on now for 6 years.
If you started from Prophecies or Factions and you're not sure what you're doing, you can find the game EXTREMELY tedious but if you start from Nightfall, you'll find that the game is just a lot more fun and well paced. The reason is Nightfall has the Heroes (Note: Heroes are very different from Henchmen) and due the fact that you can control what skills they have and even micro-manage how they play, it becomes a more engaging experience.
If you've gotten to Lion's Arch in Prophecies or Kaineng City in Factions and you just happened to have the Nightfall Campaign, all you need to do is find the NPC that has the quest which will send you to Nightfall and all you need to do is complete the quest to get the heroes. If you also have the Eye of the North expansion, you can also get some new Heroes pretty quickly by just playing the first quest.
This is not a game.
Guild Wars 1 was -- and still is -- my all-time favorite online RPG.
(1) Great stories/writing
(2) Heroes/henchmen
(3) The level cap at 20: ingenious!
(4) The 8-slot skill bar with countless combinations: I love this (in contrast to WoW et al. with 85 skill bars cluttering up your screen)
(5) Gorgeous graphics, character models, and armors
(6) Accessibility of content to variably sized player groups (thanks to heroes/henchmen)
While I am looking forward to GW2, I really wish ArenaNet would continue making campaigns for GW1 -- or else design a similar type of game to GW1. No other multiplayer game I have ever played was as versatile and flexible for players playing solo, in pairs, in groups of three or four, etc.
Most other MMOs (I'm looking at you WoW, LotRO, AoC, etc., and even YOU, GW2) force you to LFG or LFM to meet the requisite number of players for a given dungeon. Geeze, how I do hate that.
What's bad about GW1?
(1) Too much instancing.
(2) The group size of 8 (used for most of the game) is too large, imo
(3) No z-axis
(4) No swimming, poor crafting, no AH
Even so, GW1 rocks. What a wonderful game.
I think it's important to mention the recent Guild Wars Beyond updates which are big content patches which bridge the story of GW1 and GW2 and help to keep GW1 fresh. Skill balances and bug fixes are also still being done although of course not as much since GW2 was announced. Not that Guild Wars is a buggy or unbalanced game however.
My first online game, it kept me happy nearly every day for well over four years, made some fantastic friends, for those reasons alone it holds a special place in my heart. Arenanet also come across as one of those companies you really, really want to work for, nice folks.
Another of the great things about the low level cap is the ability to customise your armour, all max level armour has the same stats, you can add and remove runes at will which gives you great scope for mixing and matching armour pieces to get a more unique look. Same is true of weapons, you wield what you wield because of the skin and the fact you like the way it looks.
Review didn't really touch on the secondary profession and attributes system, gives you massive amounts of ways to customise your game play style, if you're the kind of person that likes trying out different builds GW has millions of possible combinations. I love the skill system in GW, all that choice yet you can only ever equip 8 before leaving the hub, once equipped your stuck with it until the finish (unless its so bad you need to restart). Allows for some wild and wacky combinations and some strange builds - one of my favourites being the '1 hp BiP' Necro/Monk, one hit point of life and skills that sacrifice your life to provide energy to other players, beauty being that the game doesnt deal in percentages of less thn one so that sac of 20% of life ends up being 0, a manic battery for your team that needs to stay out of aggro and provide hex removal, still like playing that role in Urgoz runs.
Great game and a fair score.
My all time favourite by far.
One of the best and most underappreciated things about GW1 is that the servers NEVER go down. They've had one instance of scheduled downtime in the past 5 years, when they physically moved the servers to a new location. The weekly downtime other games have like on Tuesdays does not happen.
The game also just loads files if it needs to right before zoning. You never have to patch or wait more than a few seconds ever. I don't know if GW2 will be able to pull off the same thing, but if they can it will be yet another reason to love it.
That being said, I like GW1, I don't love it. There are things about it that I find clunky. All my concerns seem like they will be addressed in GW2 though. Still, for the amount of content you get in this game, no subscription, and just checking out a game that does do a lot of things differently, it's well worth the purchase price in my opinion. I'm still playing it from time to time.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
This is a great game to play, had a lot of fun with it. But now it isn't as fun (tho i have 2 accts and have run everything 50 times over no joke) It just doesn't seem fun as a solo player that I am now. I hope GW2 is different, even if it isn't it will still be a great game i'm guessing.
ive just recently returned to GW1, primarily for the HoM rewards, i will admit, as i plan on purchasing GW2.
i played it for a short time right when Factions came out. I started though in Prophecies and it is one of the few games that really offered a gorgeous environment and some of the twists in the storyline were great. i was actually taken off guard by the pre/post searing aspect of the game. something which could not, at that time, be accomplished w/o the instancing that GW1 so heavily relies upon.
when i came back a month ago i have to admit i was initially put off by the empty public spaces in Prophecies and the instancing. later when i finally got the other parts of the trilogy plus EotN, that changed. i began to actually enjoy the fact that i did not have to PUG, or belong to a guild, or spam channels LFG. instead i just followed the advice of others, started in Nightfall, ran to level 10, finished the entrance to EotN, picked up my heros very quickly in one quest and came back to Nightfall to finish up.
while i am not sure why, the whole henchmen-instanced spaces thing has really begun to grow on me. and while i am sure i will thoroughly enjoy GW2 i will miss both of those aspects of the game.
now pardon the WoW reference, but one can only hope that more companies will take advantage of the change in technology that allowed Blizzard in WotLK to change the open world as a character progressed through certain major storyline quests. this resolves the instancing to progress an individual's storyline while keeping an open world, of sorts.
as far as the classes go, the above accolades are absolutely spot on and i will leave it at that.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
Great game that aged better than many others imo
EVE is the only online game i played for more than 1 straight year, but GW comes right after it, and it's free
I bought GW 4 months ago and I LOVE IT. I play it everyday and most important thing, no monthly subscriptions. Lots of content in my opinion, and so far I only focus on my main character, gearing up my character's heroes and maxing up titles(if you know what I'm talking about). I pvp rarely tho, but mighyt get more involved from now on. I just mainly do the daily missions and help fellow guild/alliance mates.
Just showed this game to a friend and he thought it was recently released because the graphics were beautiful and it played smooth. lol
most value for money game i've ever bought
I remember how distressing it felt walking out into the world of post-Searing Ascalon the first time, having become entranced by the beauty of pre-Sear. Nothing else I've played has left such an indelible impression. It's easy to understand why some people *never* leave pre-Sear.
And stepping into The Crater for the first time? Whoa. I couldn't help but stop and just take it in for a while.
These are things I think of when recalling Guild Wars.
I actually stopped playing for a short while after leaving Pre-Searing, my beautiful beloved Ascalon had become that horrible charred landscape (forgive the pun). Once I returned I was on a mission though and that mission was vengeance!
I have never understoood what people liked about this game. I spent 50 bucks on it when it very first came out and didn't play it a week.
To this day I say it's the worst $49.99 I"ve EVER spent on a game.
I've tried it again a few times over the years and really, I think the game is just garbage.
The graphics "aren't" great and never were.
Gameplay mechanics are silly and the cross-classing makes no sense.
Boring quests.
blah blah... w/e just not my cup of tea I guess.
ok this sounds too good to be true and I read this word for word. 8.6 and basically F2p, but WoW is still owning this MMO market.
Color me skeptical, but is it really that good because I have had zero urge to play this game, but this review makes Guild Wars sound like a full fledged MMORPG.
I forget what interview I read where they said that didn't realize people were going to treat pre-searing ascalon as home and be upset when something happened to it. They made a point in Factions and Nightfall to quickly establish home and not take it away.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I just did the GW trial and what really ticked me off was the way you needed to run up a hill. The hard coded line you couldn't cross. Having played MMO's where jumping is a given I couldn't stand the game for very long. GW did not impress me in those first hours, even taking it's age into account. There are some nice looking classes in there and the trial limited me to the basic Prophecies campaign, but still...
GW2 with Z-axis should be more to my liking, not just for that, also for the DE system. The only thing that might turn me away from it is that if it scales too much with the area you're in. If the mob that almost killed you one on one at level one, can still almost kill you at level 50, then the part where the player is supposed to be feeling special may grow very thin fast.
I don't mind challenging gameplay, but if it feels like you're not growing, the game may lose appeal rather quickly.
Waiting for Guild Wars 2, and maybe SWTOR until that time...
It would be willing to go into discussion if you would use arguments that aren't 100% opinion.
It's not a mmorpg, it's an online cooperative rpg with some fantastic pvp elements as well. The world is heavily instanced, but you can interact with others in hubs as well as group with them to quest. If you think of it as a fantastic single player rpgs with multiplayer elements, it'll be easier to wrap your head around.
People use that when talking about Rift. He brings up good point. This article really confuses because 8.6 MMO i put on par with WoW quality and last I heard Guild Wars was not coming close.
I have never been remotely interested in this game until I read all that up there and eventhough they call it a CORPG it sounds like a MMORPG from the way they describe it.
We could go into discussion if he wants to come back and give examples, but *shrug* it's his opinion and he's entitled to it. He tried the game a couple times, didn't like it.
That being said, I would ask he keep an open mind about GW2. Great graphics (I think), different gameplay and doing away with cross classing. Also quests are completely replaced with an event system which is the next evolution past public quests to get people working together in a persistent world (no longer instanced). Still no monthly fee. Pretty much a totally different game, except for the lore, actually.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007