Guild Wars: Or Would You Care for Some MUDLite?

Less Content, More Filling? These are the questions I was forced to ask myself while playing Guild Wars. I'm no stranger to NCSoft's interesting take on RPGs, and in the past I have enjoyed titles such as the widely popular City of Heroes. Yet often there is just something missing in their releases.

First let's look at the good things. Guild Wars is an interesting approach to the MMPORPG genre in that it is not centered around a subscription model. Instead players are interconnected using the same type of infrastructure as battle.net (no surprise given the origins of the development team). This means we thankfully have a relatively lag free gaming experience with a good amount of consideration to streaming world data in an efficient manner. Environment design is good, though lacking any ability to jump sometimes feels inhibitive. Playing style is simplified as a result of the very easy to learn skills based combat system. Some of the quirks include the limit of 8 skills which you may only modified when in a safe zone (City or other non-combat area). These nice design features make the game very easy to jump into for a novice user. This would tend to bear out to the design teams idea of "the Counter-Strike of Role Playing". Unfortunately this is both a blessing and a curse.

A side-affect of the direction taken by the game designers is that content is somewhat sacrificed for ease of play. Rarely ever do you find yourself too out matched (unless you really are asking for it) and quests are by and large "hunt this, and come back for your reward". Granted this is nothing new to the MMPORPG genre as a whole, but the simplification of skills and enemy AI means this type of questing gets old fairly quick. A small party size of 4 (you and three others) is also a double-edged sword. Unlike some games (WoW, EQ) this smaller party size means that it is inherently easier to find a group, though it also means that your party is fairly limited in diversity. Healer, Magic User, Fighter, Ranger/Fighter seems to be the standard grouping. The Primary/Secondary skills sets mean that you can technically get 8 types of characters but I find that the secondary skills are really more beneficial during solo play. On that note, Solo-play is interesting since you actually get to use NPC styled Henchmen (NWN anybody)?

Don't get me wrong, Guild Wars is a good game and provides novice users a great way to ease into the MMPORPG world. For hardcore players though I would advise caution, some of the lack of depth may not be your thing. For a more detailed review you can check out http://www.vraxx.com