GameTavern - Guild Wars Impressions

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Guild Wars Impressions

Well so far I've been playing Guild Wars for about 2 weeks, and all I can say right now is that I have NO IDEA where all the great reviews are coming from. Guild Wars has "generic" written all over it. Here are my impressions so far:

GOOD

Beautiful graphics. The look of Guild Wars is far more realistic than the stylized comic book look of WoW. While the overall design does not appear to be as well done as WoW, the detail in Guild Wars is outstanding.

Easy of Gameplay. Fighting in Guild Wars is not tricky in the least. Large icons for each of your 8 available spells are easily accessed and don't lend to missing key touches in the midst of battle.

Auto-run.

Ease of Travel. You can travel long distances by simply opening your map and clicking on any major non-instanced area of the game. No more waiting for the damn air-ships or trams.

BAD

Character options. There is only one race available, human, and the models are painfully generic and similar to one another. There are no facial hair options and most of the face options look alike and even the male faces look female/elvish.

Gameplay. The spells look lousy, your summoned creatures are essentially meat sheilds, the melee combat is uniform and uninspired, etc. If this were a stand alone RPG it would be completely disengaging. The fact that all of the combat is instanced makes the weak gameplay even more evident.

Questing. The quests are poorly spaced out and confusing. The green arrows that the game uses to direct you sometimes do not show and quests available at the same level can differ greatly in difficulty. There's nothing like being lvl 5, just finishing a quest against a few lvl. 4 enemies... and then walking into a quest filled with roughly 5,000 lvl. 8 bad guys. Meanwile your quest list gives you no indication what level you SHOULD be to attempt the quest.

I should add that I have not gone very deep into the game. I keep switching and starting new characters because I'm trying to find something that will keep my attention and give me a real reason to keep playing. I have heard that the beginning does suck and the game gets much better once you get deeper into the game, but I've also heard that "deeper" translates to 10's of hours. I have a problem devoting that much time to a game that has not shown me any reason to trust that it WILL improve. Never-the-less, I will persevere...

With that said, I have to believe that the great reviews that Guild Wars has gotten have more to do with its subscription fee, that being ZERO, than with the game itself. Maybe the game does become fantastic 30 hours in... but I want a game to give me a reason to play those 30 hours.

I'm going to give Guild Wars more time, though, and return in a couple weeks with my full review. This time I'm going to start a new character and stick with it for as long as possible.