v-s.net v0.6

Tuesday, 3:09 pm in Gaming

I’d always avoided picking up Guild Wars but after reading Newbitch’s column the other day – coupled with NWN2’s unplayable memory hogging – I decided to give it a shot.  The reason I’d always avoided it was more-or-less because all the material I’d read about it had always pushed it as a PvP based game, and my interest in PvP (beyond leeching rep in AV) is pretty much non-existent.  Most material was a bit waffly on the PvE content of the game.

So anyway I downloaded the client and installed it, and after a bit of annoyance at the character creation screen (warning: when downloading the client as opposed to buying it, only the minimum interface is downloaded at any one time.  Be prepared for lo-oo-ong loading screens in the first few transitions as the game actually downloads its level content), and then a bit more ooh-ing and aah-ing over the pretty graphics, I was finally thrown into the game itself.  It took me a while to figure it out – and for some reason I’d managed to miss this fact in any other official source – but GW is essentially an offline RPG, played online.  The various towns around the place are ‘online’ content – one can see all manner of other PCs running about – while all wilderness-type areas and any training/mission regions are essentially instanced/offline.  I believe it’s possible to add other player characters to your party in order to explore these areas (I think the maximum is three… or possibly five), and if you can’t find other players there are various NPC Heroes and Henchmen you can pick up in towns to help you out.  Heroes are essentially the same deal as NPC party members in, say, Neverwinter Nights 2-style games; they have an appearance and a basic class, but you’re responsible for their levelling, equipment and skills.  When out in the field they essentially do their own thing, but can be micro- and macro-managed.  They don’t, as far as I can tell, steal your items and gold.  Henchmen are different in that you can’t control their skills or inventories, and they seem to act more like actual players in that they take a cut of items.  I’m sure there’s some kind of XP spread in there too, but I haven’t figured out the specifics.

The levelling structure is more-or-less the same as WoW, in that the focus seems to (currently) be more on questing than grinding.  Overall, however, I find the game less generally intuitive; I don’t feel that I’m using my skills as effectively, aggro management on mobs is weird, I’m not sure which mobs I should be fighting for my level anyway, and I can’t tell in my quest log which quests are applicable for my level.  At the very worst I guess all this results in is trial-and-error and a couple of deaths (there is a cumulative death penalty, which cuts ‘power’ but if can be negated by returning to town), but there’s something about that which serves to make the game play seem a lot less intuitive.  The lack of ‘traditional’ stats – Strength, Dexterity, Stamina/Constitution, Intelligence and so on – also make the game’s theorycraft (theorywars?) a bit more obtuse.  Instead, stats are based on the schools of abilities a character gains as part of their classes; so if my Necromancer has 5 in Blood Magic, it makes her Blood Magic-based spells more effective.   I do, however, like the fact that once in town you can redistribute your earned stat points as you see fit, which more-or-less eliminates that whole nooby ‘oops’ factor.  There are also a couple of stats which seem oddly hidden by the game; unless I’m totally blind I just can’t find things like my overall AC or how many training points I’ve got left to spend.

The fact that there are only about 20 levels (I’ve heard it’s 25 but the highest I’ve yet to see is 20) is interesting, especially considering that I’m already level 6. So either progression is really fast or there’s one hell of a curve kicks in at some point.

The graphics are ooh--worthy but even then… I dunno.  I love the look of WoW because it has a very definite style to it; if you see a WoW screenshot you can instantly tell, absolutely positively, that it’s a WoW screenshot; there’s no chance of it coming from a different game.  Guild Wars is beautiful but it’s beautiful in a kind of generic, hyper-realistic way.  Armour and items are fairly limited but I really like the salvage system, which is kind of like crafting-lite (I’m not a great fan of crafting professions in MMORPGs since 9 times out of 10 they’re just timesinks); I like the way you can ‘strip off’ the special properties from armours and weapons and re-apply them to other items.

So all-in-all I’m enjoying GW (Luxxa Dela, level 6 Necromancer/Monk), mostly because it offers a lite, casual gaming experience that fills in time between now and the release of Burning Crusade next week.

In other news, I foolishly opened a wiki for the Nortcha Drif/Shoot the Messenger!/Et tu, Assiah? universe, mostly as a tie-in for the dream in furc that I will never get around to finishing.  Fun stuff.

• Tags » et tu assiah, furc, gaming, geeking, guild wars, nortcha drif, reviews
• Comments By » ~Arwym Starlight [h]
• Mood » creative