What is the point to the game, exactly?

I'm a new player, and I was just wondering what the point of the game.

I find that it's pretty strange that I am going on to level 20 very soon. I am level 17. It is very odd that level 20 is the cap.

I also hear that loot is easily capable too, so after you get like ~200k worth of stuff, you basically cap your character?

And it seems like there are so many areas and missions to explore... but if you cap everything 5% into the game, what is the point to doing them?

A lot of the quests and missions seem like slog fests. I'm not sure what is the point to killing so many enemies that yeild very little xp. I guess I do get some purple drops, and 1 gold, but I have no idea what the purpose is.

So, from those people that have played this game for a long time, what is the point? What are the goals? What is there to look forward to and enjoy?

what is the point to any game? your enjoyment. I find it more interesting that you joined over 4 years ago and your only lvl 17?? It doesnt seem like you have much interest in role playing games.

I played for a few hours, didn't get hooked, and then dropped it. I just started playing a few days ago again.

Originally, this was designed as a PvP game. You started doing some PvE (Prophecies = slow, teaching campaign) and after you had understood the basics of the game, you started doing PvP (so, max level and max equipment very quickly reached to be ready to do PvP with your PvE toon if you liked), following a progression from the easier to the hardest format (RA->TA->HA/GvG).

Then the focus of developers shifted (or was planned from the beginning? After all they originally said that they would have released a new campaign every 6 months or so..) from PvP to PvE (don't know why as it seems to me that designing new campaings, areas, monsters and quests is far more expensive than maintaining some AT's, ladders and regular skill balances, and this is a ftp game, so they always had budget issues, idk..), with the introduction of titles, PvE skills (Factions), heroes and HM (Nightfall) and plenty of elite areas worth of farming.

So, basically, now you can choose what your point is. In PvP the point is playing for the enjoyment and the satisfaction of it (ever played some sport irl? that's it). In PvE, you are right that there isn't any high level cap, better weapons and armors as you proceed further into the game, etc. but all these things have been merely replaced by titles and shiny weapons/armors. There's no difference between grinding for the next level of a title and grinding for the next level of your character, really.

I'll have to echo the poster above me: what's the point to any game? To have fun. More specifically, in the case of GW, it's to actually get good at the game so you can do the more difficult challenges, get the shinier loot, explore the more dangerous dungeons with unique encounters, etc. Your skillbar, weapons, and armor will look pretty darn close to that of a 5 year veteran after just a few months (less, if you play regularly), but you can be sure that you won't get "good" at the game for much, much longer after that. It's very obvious to anyone who's played the game for a long time when you're playing with a newbie, even if they have maxed everything.

If you need a treadmill (read: a grindy MMO) to get "hooked" on a game, you might want to check your priorities. Or, not, whatever. You just won't find a required grind here, so if you need your *ding* fix to get high, you should just go back to whatever MMO you came from. Or you can try to get good at the game, and then you can start title grinding. Titles are pretty much the longest term goals that the game has; it takes years for most players to get to the max rank KoaBD title.

By the by, don't bother grinding mobs. The storyline missions and quests give you way more XP. The game was pretty much expressly designed so you never had to grind mobs; the only exception to that, ever, is if you're a new player in Nightfall and you don't take bounties, because you're going to run into a wall where you need to grind Sunspear points (all of...like 50 kills at max) to continue.

To kill time

If only I had the same sentiment about games being done when reached the level cap; I would've been able to play a lot more games.

Your problem is you are expecting Guild Wars to be the same as every other RPG game or MMO which are all based on the DnD focus of raising levels and finding uber rewards to out do others. Guild Wars is based on a Magic: The Gathering concept, where obtaining skills and creating uber builds is the game's focus.

Guild Wars also has a good storyline running through all three campaigns and climaxing in EotN. Prophecies was designed to be long and slow to give the new player time to develop his/her knowledge of skill usage and combat against mobs with varied builds. And your overall goal is to finish each campaign.

The difference between a level 20 character with minimal skills (e.g. the quest ones through Prophecies) and a level 20 character with lots of skills available (esp. elite skills) is incredible. We're not talking 2-3x more effective, but 5-10x more effective, especially if you balance the skills with other members of your party.

Note though that some of the skills you get given through quests are staples that you will continue to use throughout your GW career. It's the way you combine them with other skills you have available that make all the difference.

BTW, once you hit level 20, experience is still important - you continue to gain the oh-so-important skill points (once you have 400 or so it's not such an issue). And of course, experience cancels out death penalty while adventuring.

1. the story is the point of the game, not the leveling.
2. once your max level XP matters very little
3. its not about randomly killing enemies
4.the rarer, the more it sells for and the better upgrades it will have.
you sound like your coming from game where you just need to level up, but GW goes beyond that
5. the early missions will be boring because its likely you're still in a tutorial area, advance further into the story adn you'll enjoy it more
you can't cap that muchif you've only completed 5% of the game. to develop your char you should max your level, get max armour, get elite skill you want, get ascended then complete the story. even tehn you wont have done it all.
getting 200k is pretty hard considering what you ahve to buy, and once you have everything you need there are rare weapons, elite armour, skills and minipets to buy, its not like you'll ever have enough money (considering some items are 1000k+)

The fun stuff in guild wars happens after lvl 20. But don't worry, gw2 will allow you 80 levels. As for guild wars, there is plenty to do for newer players. Some of the high-end pve areas you will want to experience are Underworld, Fissure of Woe, Domain of Anguish (Nightfall only), Urgoz Warren (Factions only), The Deep (Factions only) and the various dungeons in Eye of the North.

Once you've finished a campaign on one character, you can play in Hard Mode on any character in that campaign. The game becomes significantly more interesting at that point.

As for capping wealth, you can hold up to 100k on an individual and 1 mil in your storage. Once you approach that limit, you can stash coins on other characters on your account, and you can purchase stackable things such as: globs of ectoplasm, obsidian shards, zaishen keys, lockpicks, armbraces of truth, black dyes, and consets to lower your coin levels. The most common currency replacement in the game is ectoplasms.

Since you can have 250 ectoplasms in a single stack, and each ecto is worth 6.5-7k, you can see that "capping" your wealth is never going to happen for almost all players. If you think you are going to fill your storage with ectos, note that armbraces are worth around 20 ecto each, and you can have 250 armbraces in a stack.

We will be playing on holographic consoles before you ever "cap" your wealth in guild wars.

Guild Wars is a game like others, but like others every game has it's unique quirks. Guild Wars is a fun game, and like a game you play it for enjoyment, adventure, exploration, character progression, story line...etc...etc...

If you don't like it or don't see the point to playing Guild Wars (or any gam you feel this way about) by all means, don't play it, you don't have to. Find a game or something else that you enjoy AND feel is worthwhile and not pointless.

I never said I hate the game and I most certainly didn't mean to imply there wasn't a point to the game. My question was genuine.

I am having trouble seeing why the world is so massive if the goals of the game is largely focused on pvp, not so much on loot and leveling. Because then the massive areas don't seem like much point then.

Perhaps the missions seem dull because nobody is around to do them, so I take henchmen into every single one of them.

The game is not like other MMOs. The point isn't just to get to max level. The sooner you leave your expectations at the door and come into it with an open mind, the better.

The massive areas are MENT to be played on max lvl, as the whole game is balanced for lvl 20 (which surely has to do with pvp). I consider everthing below lvl 20 as some kind of extended tutorial.

In Guildwars, every player is/should be able to play the game under the same conditions, no matter how many time they invest. For that reason you can generate lvl20 chars for pvp and pve chars reach lvl 20 rather early. (and yes anet broke that principle with pve title skills)

Sure, it takes some time to get the perfect weapons (especially in pve and when you cant afford buying weapon mods or runes), but skillbar > equipment. A good skillbar profits from good equipment of course, but you cant compensate a poor skillbar/playstyle with great equipment. When your char has reached lvl20 YOU have to become better, not the character.

And yes, it is frustating that you hardly find people for missions. But the harder the missions are, the more likely is it that someone looks for human teammates. Zaishen Missions/Bounties and outposts for high end areas are well visited. Try to find a guild. (Writing "new player looks for guild" in kamadan should do the job)

I guess my point is... if the areas are all meant for max level... then why are the areas so big? What is the point to doing all of the missions, doing all the quests, and investigating in every nook and cranny of the world?

Yeah, I'm learning that skill bars > equipment. I'm trying out different skills. I guess getting some elite skills would help add some focus/variety, and perhaps that's the only reason I can come up with to suggest why the world exists... to hunt down bosses to capture their skills.

You see, I only mention it because perhaps a much smaller world could have existed to achieve the same game ends? In Wow, a world like that makes sense when you consider the mechanics of the game. I actually think it's smaller possibly, yet it's more jam-packed.

I don't mention WoW because I think it's better. I am just saying that it serves its purpose when it comes to the game's design. I am not sure what the world's purpose is in guild wars.

Unfortunately, I don't have nightfall. Just prophecies and factions. I joined a guild today, and it seems active, but I dunno what they do or what the point of it is. I see a big empty guild hall.

Mostly the point of pve is grinding titles and farming rare loot.

The immediate goal is to complete the storyline. Prophecies and Factions have separate storylines, progressed by completing missions and primary quests. Secondary quests allow you to discover more lore.

After that, there's PvP and titles.

Becoming more powerful just isn't a goal in itself.

Yeah, that's a strange thing for a game to me. Rarely do you see a game, where as you progress, the reward is just to see more content that is basically similar to the content before it. I think there has to be some drive or incentive for doing it.

In PvP, I can understand the competitive factor. Being ranked higher than others is actually a reward in of itself.

But for PvE, I don't think seeing new content is enough. Perhaps unlocking some new skills is a bit of incentive, but how often do you change your bar? There aren't that many skills after all in retrospect, especially if you're just playing through one of the campaigns for the first time.

And titles? I guess it's similar to that competitive factor, but I don't see it in this case. It's not like it's a battle of how well my mind works compared to someone else's. Not like chess, or playing a match in starcraft 2.

I like to think about game design a lot. I'm just having a hard time understanding the design behind this PvE world.

The original idea was to progress through the storyline and unlock Elite skills that could be used in endgame PVP. It was different from most MMORPGs in that there wasn't much endgame PVE to do early on.

It's funny, what other games did you play before? From what I know only EVE differs in the execution of PVE. Even Wow forces you to progress through PVE for more PVE. There are only so many ways to do a raid instance, you go through trash pulls and then boss and then rinse and repeat.

I suppose the only thing I'd have loved for GW was DAOC's rvr system.

Well, in WoW, there was at least a driving persuit to get gold, sell items on the AH, etc. to eventually get a mount, and then a flying mount, and so on.

When it comes to raids, the dungeons had some great loot, and getting that special item for your character was a pretty nice incentive.

Sure, it's rinse-and-repeat, but it's a pretty good formula and it's tried and true.

Take a look at a lot of single player games. Final fantasy has lots of ways to develop characters, lots of gear and spells to unlock. But once you've done it all... is there really a driving incentive to actually beat the game? Not really. There's actually not much reword for doing it, other than saying, "Yep, I beat it."

I find the enjoyment happens because of the journey, not so much to do with the end.

I see two solutions. One, you make the world smaller and more focused to the strengths of the game. That'd actually make it better.

Two, you have pvp armor vs. pve armor. Make the pvp armor work the way it already does, but scale the pve armor with the challenges/missions to be done in pve.

Both approaches would work. One is more focused and probably does the strengths of the game more justice. The other would probably give a more enjoyable pve experience for a greater number of players.

i would say the point to guild wars is pvp with the option of pve.

Get lost. No, really. Get lost in the huge world If you want to focus on PvE and want to see why the world is so huge, explore the areas. Sooner or later, when you progress from Ascalon's ruins to the Shiverpeaks and further on, you will be amazed at the world and love the storyline. For now, keep doing the main missions and primary quests. They should take you through the world and youll see why it;s so huge: a considerable part of the map is used by missions. After that, you might want to explore the lore a bit more. Return to Ascalon, nolani and other areas, and explore the lore. Then continue the storyline in Factions and Nightfall and it will all come together.

In short for PvE:

1) go through storyline,
2) make obsidian armor,
3) Vanquish continent (aka kill all enemies),
4) show your achievements in Hall of Monuments.

Basically, up till lvl.20 is tutorial time

As for targets once you hit lvl.20.... first and most obvious target in PvE is to "complete" the game, meaning going through the storyline. There are several missions and main quests that take you through the storyline (yes indeed, there is a storyline behind what you experience in pve). Each mission, overall, increasing in difficulty and bringing variation in required strategy, challenging you to rethink what you are doing. More and more skills become available throughout the storyline enabling you to choose from a wider variation of skills, some skills you can (l)earn with side quests, others you can learn from skill trainers against a fee.

The world, especially in prophecies, is so vast so that you can wander off and go experience some other adventures if you don't feel like progressing through the main storyline. The great thing about prophecies is that you do not neccessarily need to go through the storyine in a linear fashion. But that also has the downside that you might skip part of the main story line without knowing and find yourself wondering why the heck the story made such a jump. That's probably why they later limited access to outposts in Factions and Nightfall depending on your proces in the main storyline. As you progress you gain access to higher level armor and weapons. Also later on you can change your secondary profession to have access to an even wider range of skills.

Once you have completed a chapter ("the storyline") then you have gear and titles to earn and some more difficult areas to beat. Now in GW max level armor and weapons can be gained quite early in the game. But here it is important to understand that "max" in GW means that it provides the maximum possible protection (for armor) or damage (for weapons). There are armors and weapons in GW that are much more expensive or rare than the "basic" max armor and weapons, but these do not give you more benefit over the basic variants. These are purely for the looks and give you an opportunity to show off how l33t you (think you) are. But that's only about the looks. Depending on your taste it could very well be that you find one of the basic armors much cooler than any of the "elite" armors.

In GW there too are "elite" areas, dungeons, etc. where special items may drop for you as end reward. These can be sold for high amounts in one of the cities (where Kamadan is the main trading city). Though GW does not have something like an AH, so you'd have to do the selling yourself ingame (or via an external site like this).

Well, when have you done all? When you reach max level? when you have maxed all titles? when you have got all the elite armors? Everyone has it's own definition of "all", nor does it say anything about if there is still anything left for you to do. I personally have not "done it all", I have not completed each and every quest yet and suck at pvp, yet I do have the title God Walking Among Mere Mortals (max level of the title indicating how many other titles you have maxed).

Depending on who you ask, some might say you only need the pvp arena's then . For PvE you'd only weaken the game by making it smaller cause there would be less room to "just wander around". Practically you'd turn it into a mission only game.... if that is what you want, then you're probably better of playing an FPS.... or some of the PvP formats, and forget about PvE.

Starter army is of a lower level than the armor later on, so in that regard it is already scaled. Later on you will not get even higher lvl.armor, but you'll have to solve it more creatively with your skill build.

Oh, and with regard to the question in your topic:
I don't think that there is an "exact" point to the game that is valid for each and everyone of us out there. One plays it for pvp, the other for doing "raids" together with others, another for the titles, another for exploring the GW world, etcetera, etcetera.....