Hail, A question of your fine game sir ...

My name is Holywar and i'm an overlord for a halo2 Clan known as the Dark Legion. As a clan we are looking to diversify and start playing some other games, and this game came up as an option .. well i have read the press releases, and while it looks good, i'm not sure i want to basicly order 12 people to buy a $50+ game based soley on the input of people whos intrest is in selling vidio games, so i would like to ask the good gentlemen here, the actual players, the most critical of audiances, what is the positive things and the negative things that i can expect from the game?

Here is what i gathered

1. Its made by people who used to work on my favorite blizzard games, vetrans of the industry who pioneered alot of things in development. A plus point in my book.

2. Its more competitive (hence the guild war motife) which is pretty cool.

3. It avoids alot of the most annoying failings of everquest, World of Warcraft, and every other bit of Massivly online gayness .... so it looks better to me, but still i'm leary.

You will have to excuse me i'm a bit long winded. Any information directly pertaining to why Guild wars is Great, or why it is terrible would be helpful. Thank you.

HolyWar

Dark Legion Commander

Well you should pre-order the game and try it on the next BWE in April by yourself before you listen to anybody in Forums or Press-Releases, people got different tastes but I by myself (played one BWE) love the game! Don't get blinded by the "low" LvL 20 cap or any comparings between GW and other MMORPGs, GW is just unique! Maybe if you wanna go out with a party and meet other people that may loot-steal or killsteal you and keep you away from questitems etc then GW isn't the rigth game for you guys! Every Party got a seperated quest-map to avoid stuff like I mentioned before! Many people may see it as a disadvantage but still you'll be able to meet many *and I mean many* people in town!! GW is not a typical power-level MMORPG where LvL matters everything! This game requires skill (thats why its a lvl 20 cap too AND because you'll still be able to switch between games and won't have to notice that your buddies are 40 lvls infront of you!). I think if your clan comes from Halo2 it's just the right game to switch to and it's worth its money! First of all it got no monthly fee like you may know already and the PvP and graphics are just beautiful! If I don't get something wrong....Halo2 is a tactic-shooter right? Well Guildwars requires tactic like I said and it got the best PvP avaible in any MMORPGs including different mods like capture the flag and Hall of Heroes, only "disadvantage" may be that you'll need to be in a guild to have the full PvP features! I hope i could help you with my low experiences and I'm looking forward to see you and your clan on GW...it's worth the money trust me!

EDIT: I probably mist many informations but I don't think I'll be the only poster....btw did I mention the perfect class-balance??

EDIT2: May not be important for some people but GW got a awesome service!! I mailed them around 3 times now and they always responded to me with a clear answer within 15mins - 2 hours max!!

There are many positive things about Guild Wars....in my opinion far too many to just list them randomly. Perhaps you could be a bit more specific in what you are looking for? Specific questions that may have came to you while reading the press releases that cannot be answered by the FAQs page?

Do not neglet the search function either....I know that sometimes it is difficult to know if you are asking the right question but I have often found the answers without having to ask the question using it.

thats pretty through. Though you should make that more readable. Yeah , halo is a tactical shooter. Halo2 is and will remain our main focus, but we are interested in trying something diffrent. About guilds, the guild idea is real cool but is it an exclusive thing, or can i get 8 buddies together, start my own guild (I'm thinking The Dark LEgion ,mhahahahaha) and then quest for gold, and buy our own guild hall in the game?

As for Nerotics question about the search function, i been reading the forums for the past few hours, i just wanted to chat with the natives in real time. Your forums are REALLY busy .. its hard to keep up. MAybe someone could suggest to the mod that they divide them up a bit. You have enough traffic for 20 forums or more that could be very specific, and keep random people like me from wondering.

I like what i see so far. I like it alot. I wonder what anyone else has to add?

I agree spend $5 and pre order the game to play in the next BWE. Then you will be able to make the decision for yourself.

Well, this is a GW fansite so you're not exactly talking to an impartial and fair audience here. We're definitely of the opinion that GW is better than most other games you'd care to name.

What you can expect from GW, though, is something that's not very much like WoW or EQ or an MMO. GW isn't an MMO. It appeals to a lot of people who play MMOs because it does do away with a lot of their problems. It's completely instanced, there's no kill-stealing or spawn camping. It's mission based, there's no endless searching for a group for your quest. It doesn't have a monthly fee, instead supposedly optional expansion packs will be released periodically to fund the game, but it will always be "free" to play. And it has a low-level cap and several other featurs that mean that powerleveling and grinding are not the roads to power or success. A higher level is important, better equipment gives you an edge, but those are relatively easy to come by and they're only a slight advantage rather than critical necessities.

At the same time it appeals to people, like me, who'd never touch a traditional MMO with a ten-foot pole (I've tried them and just never found one I liked despite having lots of friends who are hooked.). There's an emphasis on PvP and competitive play. And GW's emphasis on skill and planning rather than time spent playing means that competition takes place on a much more level playing field. GW is extremely action oriented and fast-paced. There's always another mission, another quest, another round, only minutes, if that away. And while a good match or mission can last for an hour or longer the individual battles within last matters of seconds. Seconds filled with quick and important decisions. Not quite on the level of a twitch-based FPS but enough so that everyone is in constant action, constant motion, and there's seldom a dull moment. There's also the strategic aspect of putting together those skills and statistics and weapons and things. Characters in GW are limited in what they can use and carry into each mission, not in what they can possess overall. Characters can be torn down and built back up between maps, changing skills, changing attributes, from an overwhelming variety of choices, so they're extremely flexible. Yet in a mission they're limited to only being able to use eight skills, so there's a lot of fun and enjoyment to be found from trying and finding the "right" eight skills to use.

Nothing's perfect, though. GW is, at times, a game headed in a lot of different directions. It wants to please a lot of different audiences and sometimes it suffers. Compared to an MMO there's not a lot of content. There aren't massive worlds to while away hours and months of leveling away unless there's a lot we haven't seen yet (There's some things the public doesn't know about, true, but not all that much) so there's a concern over whether there'll be enough things to do before the next expansion comes out. The level cap is low, which puts some people off, as some people actually *like* grinding until they're uber. But GW isn't a game about grinding, it's about getting to the "endgame" as quickly as possible while still including some idea of character progression. There's a question over whether people who don't like PvP will have anything to do once they've done all the missions and reached lv20. For that matter, some people don't want to level at all and want to get right to PvP. There's options for them, so-called PvP characters which start out a max level with a decent range of equipment and can only access PvP areas. But there's currently no way of making sure they have the skills and equipment they need outside of playing PvE. Some people view any PvE time as "grind" and don't like it, they want to just PvP as if GW was a Fanstasy FPS, which it's not. It's an RPG at heart so you'll grow and advance a character, you'll just do it a lot more rapidly than in other games. Everything is instanced so there's a concern over how the community is going to work out. There's no server where all your friends play, there's no chance to head into town and see the same characters over and over again, everything separated, players can warp from place to place and zone to zone with a few clicks, so that sense of being part of a persistant, ever-changing world that's important to some players is, by and large, absent.

And, of course, there's all sorts of minor issues like imbalances and bus and poorly or unimplemented features or things that would be nice to have but aren't in and might not make it by release. Just as there's all sorts of minor pluses like the excellent graphics, the storyline, the overall sense of design and gameplay that's distinct yet oddly right (I don't know how to put it. A Warrior in GW is unlike any other sort of melee character I've had the pleasure of playing. Not in a bad way, it's just a nice way of looking at such a character that no one's hit on before. Yet it's not so unfamiliar that I'm lost. And I can say the same thing about every other profession, too. It just...hangs together really nicely.).

Overall, I would describe the game as the spiritual successor not to, say, Warcraft or WoW the way it should have been done, but instead to the natural evolution of a game like Diablo 2. It's moved online, it's become much more group-oriented and co-operative since it's primarily a multi-player game with a nice ittle single player options rather than the other way around. And PvP play is integrated from the get-go and everything is rigorously and ruthlessly balanced to make sure that nothing gets too out of hand - sure, you'll hear a lot of bitching and moaning but it's about the details, it's about whether this skill or that skill needs a tweak rather than "omg Rangers are so awful, why play one?", the underlying core is as solid as any other I've seen, especially given how complex a game this is. But it's an online action-RPG or the next, best step along the road of whatever that means. If you're looking for an MMO, I'd look elsewhere. If you're looking for somethign you can pick up and excel at the first time you sit down, like an FPS, I'd look elsewhere. If you're looking for a "live-action" RTS, where it's all about knowing the right stuff to do and having the twitch to execute, I'd look elsewhere. Guild Wars is pretty unique, in terms of what else is out there, and it can certainly satisfy a lot of what those types of games can give you, but not all.

If you want to find out more, I'd look around the fansites. There's a lot of information available not just here, but elsewhere (Just like an opinion on the game, I built this fansite, I'm, of course, going to say it's the best but it's what suits your needs that matters and I don't know that.) that's not available in press releases or on the official site. Head to our main page, look through some articles and guides, go over the skill lists, stroll through our forums, and do much the same at other sites. Then, I'd plunk down for a pre-order before the next BWE, which is this upcoming April the...19th, I believe, an try the game out - you'll get a pass for you and a pass for a friend, so you don't have to start out alone and can have another guildy alongside you, too, for the cost of one pre-order. If you don't like it, take your pre-order back and get a refund. If you do, then you can buy the game and keep playing when it's released a few weeks later and your $5~$10 preorder is a deposit on the final retail price.

Well you have just succeeded in asking a very biased audience but we will do the best we can.

Good Things:
-Level cap at 20. This means no leveling after level 20... Ever. This is a good thing because it eleminates completely grind in Guild Wars. It allows you to go from watching the intro cinimatic to killing crap to killing stuff that's high leveled. What else does it do? It keeps missions challenging while at the same time not restricting the amount of PvE content in the game. And if your guild is very competitive, probably the most important thing is that it keeps PvP extremely balanced. I'm guessing you wouldn't like to be beaten down by someone who is level 500 and then called a newb just because he played longer than you to get that truley insignicant number correct? Well the cap being at 20 avoids this. Do not mistake a low level cap for minimal content. I could spend a month exploring only the Beta content and never truley find everything.
-Most balanced game I have ever played. There are no "über" skills that own everything and there are definatly no better classes. Speeking of which, there are 6 classes of which you select a primary and secondary.
-Jump right into the action. In Guild Wars, you can make a PvP character from a template without ever setting foot in a mission and have at least a fairly good chance at being an asset to your team. There are (or were depending on how many they may have removed recently) 20 pre-made templates. One of the best thing is, there are no treadmills. If you buy a skill with one of your RPG characters, you unlock it for every PvP character (they start at level 20) you will ever have - even if you delete the guy who unlocked it. This allows you to go through the storyline a couple times and unlock every single skill and quite a few items so that you can have an instant competition character which you can grow and modify any time you like without having to do hardly anything!
-Awesome PvP. There are several different Gladiatorial Arenas spread across the map which put you together with 3 random teammates (teams of 4) and pit you against another random 4 teamates. There is the Tomb of Primieval Kings which will be a Worlds at War concept (not-random teams of 8 compete against each other in tournament style. Whoever holds the Hall of Heroes - the last tier which you stay at for as long as you are still winning - unlocks new content for their homeworld and so-on). And finally, there is Guild Versus Guild, what you've seen ranked on the ladder at the official site. This is 8vs8 and is full of tactical choices and lots of other stuff.
-Graphics. The Screenshots don't do the game justice.
-Developers that actually give a RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO about what you like and don't like. There have been many changes in Guild Wars due to popular demand.
-Challenging missions as well as Explorable Areas. There are missions in Guild Wars which will take you through the main road of the game. But if you don't feel like doing what Prince Rurik tells you to or going out to do a specific task, you can enter into Explorable Areas where you and your party can explore the landscape freely slaughtering whatever you want and finding hidden outposts. Can't pass a mission cause it was made insanely hard? Take the Explorable Area to go around it!
-Instanced missions. The missions, PvP battles, and explorable areas in Guild Wars are "instanced", which means that each seperate party, or group of parties battling against each other, gets their own special copy of the world. This means no people stealing your kills.. No people camping the spawn point of a monster... and especially important for PvEers, what happens in your instance, stays in your instance. If the game wasn't instanced, then A.Net wouldn't be able to burn down towns depending on whether or not you completed specific tasks and so on.
-Extensive list of skills and good combinations. There are about 75 skills for every profession... You get to select 2 of the 6 professions... Have fun trying to make a good skill build. hehe.
-Not heavily level-based. What? Did you say that my level 15 can wear that super-über armour as long as he got to the outpost that allowed him to craft it? Noooo... Isn't it annoying when you get to a point in the game using your skill and awesomeness only to find out you need to go back and level to 40 just to wear the next set of armour? No longer.
-No "armour-making attribute". You don't have to grind up attributes like "Armour Crafting" or "Weapon Smithing" just to be able to get good armour. All the weapons you'll ever need are found from monster drops or bought from other players and to craft armour, you just bring the not-so-rare materials to the crafter of your choice (the harder to get to the crafter, the better stuff he'll make).


Bad Things... uhhhhhhhhhhh... There really isn't anything bad about the game itself at this point. Some of the players are a bit... quiet... but other than that... i mean... the game is almost perfect by itself.

Its a fun game. Nuff said.

wow. i'm humbled by that long and through post. I'm convinced its worth a try, though i can't beta cause i am going on a buisness trip that weekend, and i am not paying 5 dollars an hour for hotel internet, but i'll have one of my buddies get on the beta list and give it a try.

Just anothing comment, i like the community here. Its very Laid back and easy going, and informative. I don't think i have seen a flame the whole time i been online. Good working keeping the kids away.

Well just another proof that the lvl 20 cap is something good....thers no HIGH-level players that feel special and flame noobs/low lvl characters...we're actually equals! (once we reach vll 20 ) But true....people don't talk much in certain districts *coughs* had to vists 4 districts to find a nice person who lead me to the gladiator arena....

If the entire community of Guild Wars was exactly like that of this forum, the game would be unbelievable even if it had worse graphics than pong! While there aren't a whole lot of ass-holes in guild wars (there are a few but everyone shuts them up quickly enough), there are a lot of overly quiet people... I kind of get annoyed while I'm questing and I'll ask if anyone's alive and don't get a response - although someone usually says "haven't slept since thursday" or something... Of course, you run into people from the forums a lot also (particularly at the Tombs which is my favorite arena because it is the most challenging and is world-wide. I like GvG a lot but sometimes not all my guild is on... which has dropped in rank significantly since we started screwing around going "it's the second-to-last beta... who cares.." (coughAllMonkBuildThatLastedForHourscough)

Alright, it is good, but recently some people who are of bad regard have come into play on the earlier levels.

Of course, SOME players are more equal than others . . . as demonstrated by a certain Level 1 flute-playing child, who managed to fry every Level 20 player in the game - - along with everyone else.

LOL...too bad I missed that