The Gaming Den

While I don't miss the timesink that my old MUD hangout was, I do miss the social experience of my clan of friends. For that reason, I have been looking to get back into something similar, but a bit different (namely, less of a timesink).

My search brought me to Guild Wars. Something that immediately caught my attention was how, if you're doing PvP, you can just build a character with the gear you want straight away. This incredibly good mechanic almost made me buy the game right there (along with the fact that online play is apparently free?!). Then some sense prevailed, and I decided to come here first.

So I ask you, fellow Denners, what do you think about Guild Wars. How is it's grind factor? I'm guessing it's negligible, seeing as how outside PvE you don't really care about gear (at least that's how it was on my old MUD hangout) and inside you can get whatever gear you want. Is it enjoyable?

That's not quite accurate.

You can make two kinds of characters, RP and PvP. RP characters start at level 1, they can wander around the world, play in cooperative missions, gain experience, find treasure, and participate in PvP, if you want. PvP characters can only play PvP. They start at max level, and you can give them any basic equipment you want. They also have unlimited access to skills and equipment upgrades that you have unlocked on your account.

For example, anyone's PvP character can just grab a max-level sword. But if you've unlocked stuff on your account, then your PvP character can pick up a max-level sword that also has a couple of magical bonuses, like "+20% damage when your health is below 50%" or "deals fire damage instead of slashing damage." These aren't critical in the random arenas, but they do help; I'm not sure whether they're generally considered critical if you play organized PvP, though I've heard that some guilds won't accept anyone into their ranks unless they have everything unlocked (which I think is insane--you can only use a tiny fraction of unlocks at once, and there's a ridiculous amount of stuff to unlock).

Also, every character can equip 8 skills at a time (Guild Wars skills are what TGD would probably call "powers" or "spells"). When you first buy the game, your PvP characters have around 8 skills available. If you've unlocked everything, you've got thousands (well, only hundreds within a given class). You can still only equip 8 of them before walking into an arena, but you have a lot more build options.

There are 3 ways you can unlock stuff in Guild Wars:

1. When you play an RP character, every skill you acquire (via questing, training, etc.) is permanently unlocked on your account, and every magical weapon that you identify causes its enhancements to be unlocked so that you can add them to PvP weapons (if you buy a weapon that's already been identified, it doesn't unlock anything). You sometimes don't have a lot of choice over what you unlock, but you can unlock a lot of stuff incidentally in the course of "normal" play if you're interested in the quests and campaign.
2. Whenever you engage in PvP (with either character type), you get "faction" points per kill and per victory. These can be spent to unlock anything of your choice. The rate at which you acquire "faction" depends a lot on how well you do, but it's certainly possible to unlock a given skill or equipment upgrade for every 15-30 minutes of playing if you do fairly well, and you can even gain some faction by practicing against AI (but you're limited to 1000/day for fighting AI--that's enough to unlock one skill).
3. You can buy unlock packs with real money. This isn't microtransactions where they nickel and dime you for everything you do, they're huge packs that unlock "everything you can possibly get in this chapter, even if you haven't purchased the chapter itself," but it's still real money.

Compared to other MMOs, grinding is light. If you're playing an RP character, there's a bunch of missions (required, highly structured) and quests (mostly optional, minimal structure) that you can go on, and if you choose to do everything, getting through a campaign for the first time probably takes 40-50 hours, and at no point will you be forced to camp spawns or go on grinding runs or anything like that. If you ignore the quests and just do the missions, though, you may find yourself underleveled.


You're correct that they don't charge you for the act of playing the game. There's no subscription or anything; once you own the game, it's yours, free and clear, and you can play as much as you want whenever you want without paying the publisher a dime. However, the game is broken up into several "chapters" with different content. Each chapter costs around $50 and functions as a stand-alone game, but if you buy several of them on the same account, you can have a single character hop between them and do all the content. Some classes and many skills are unique to particular chapters, so you can't ever get them unless you own that chapter.

So if you want all the content, you're paying more to own the game than you'd pay for another MMO, which may cancel out the benefits of not paying a subscription. On the other hand, each chapter includes a full-length campaign and hundreds of original skills, so if you enjoy the campaigns, it really is like getting another game (that happens to use the same engine) for each chapter you buy, and maybe it's not more expensive than buying expansions for other MMOs. I'd recommend you just buy one chapter to start with and see how you like it, though.


In terms of gameplay, Guild Wars has a spectacular variety of interesting powers, and you can alter your build regularly (even if you're playing an RP character) to try lots of different things out. Every PC gets to choose two classes, and gets access to almost everything from both classes, so you can mix-and-match abilities.

The fights are fast-paced with a significant emphasis on counters, which means that you're rewarded both for carefully selecting your skills (and coordinating with your party) and for fast reactions. I'd personally prefer it if the game moved more slowly and gave more time to react, actually. Healing is of tremendous tactical importance, though every class has some capability to heal itself.

Party size varies depending on the area but usually ranges from 4 to 8. Towns are gathering places where you can interact with other players, shop, and form parties; all the adventuring areas are instances, so you won't run into any players not in your party while you're actually out fighting or questing. There are AI-controlled "henchmen" you can add to your party if you can't (or don't want to) find real players to play with--they are by no means brilliant, but they usually manage to avoid doing anything dramatically stupid, and I did most of my quests (but not missions) will all-henchmen parties.

There are penalties for dying, but only until you leave the adventuring area; you don't lose experience points or have your equipment break or anything like that, so you can never make "negative progress" when you play.


I could play with you at some point if you want, though I haven't played regularly in a while and I'm not in a guild.

The Guild Wars trilogy on Amazon contains Guild Wars, Factions, and Nightfall. What all am I missing if I decide to spring for that?

Uh...that's all the complete chapters. You'd presumably be missing Eye of the North (which is a follow-on to Prophecies, the first chapter), and I think there's a bonus mission pack or some such that you can buy, but that's an impressive package. I didn't know they were bundling them like that.

I may need to point that out to some other people I know...

By the way, it looks like there's currently a free trial if you're interested. I don't know what the details are.

I'd ditch it. The only reason there isn't more cheating in the game is because it's tough to then monetize it, just as tough as for the owners of the game.

I have no wish to PvP, but I similarly have no wish to solo play in instances. WoW's world is too static for me, theirs isn't really more compelling.

That said, my WoW account is also lapsed; they've got stuff on the Player Test Realm I have no wish to see; they've 'solved' several problems of my class by giving 'what we want' which is, in no case, going to fix the trouble that was had except in a very minor and 'don't care' sort of way.

-Crissa

.... play Ragnarok Online on a private server.

seriously.

lemme check to see if the one that I used to play on is still active; it was pretty awesome to play on a free for all pvp RO server with my battle priest/undead and demon Exorcist. Mostly b/c Exorcist priests can rake in mad money and xp.

Wizards as well, and they can kill everything, but a wiz needs a healing clip or potions, while the priest can seriously tank most monsters in the game with their heals that have a tiny cool-down, and take up negigable mana, while healing for a non-trivial amount of hp.

JE wrote:lemme check to see if the one that I used to play on is still active; it was pretty awesome to play on a free for all pvp RO server with my battle priest/undead and demon Exorcist. Mostly b/c Exorcist priests can rake in mad money and xp.

That's the thing. I don't want to have to rake in money or XP. I just want to get in, maybe explore the world in a short level-up process and that's the only grinding I really want to do.

Play Fallout 3 in god mode then.

Slap on some addons, hack your level and skills and stats, and you're good to roll.

I'm doing that and enjoying it.

The funny thing is that I've gotten to the point where I only need god mode to haul around the piles of useless stuff that I'm now "collecting." Ruined books of various types and sizes have non-trivial weight, and I wanna catch 'em all.

I'm actually doing all of my fighting in normal mode instead of VATS; I'm not running out of ammo for the guns that I use, but I'm buying all the ammo and reload boxes (an addon item that refunds up to a certain amount of ammo of a certain type when activated) that I find b/c it's what I would normally do.

Nightfall has very little grind compared to most other games out there.

Getting maxed items and armor is pretty damn easy too.

The only things you really have to grind to get are rare skins that look cooler. If your ok with decent looking (they usually are at least decent), gear, then it's pretty damn easy to get maxed stuff.

I personally have had a lot of fun with guildwars. The ease of rebuilding a character is very nice, and the stories are at least decent. In Nightfall they give you heroes, which are henchmen who you can modify (making it even easier to play without other people if that's your thing).

I've beaten 2 of the 4 campaigns. How much grind there is depends entirely on what game your playing. Prophecies has a long main game and takes a while to get to the end.

Factions levels you to max almost immediately, but it takes a bit to finish the game still. I haven't beaten this one.

Nightfall also levels you to max almost immediately, and takes a bit to finish as well, but from impressions the campaign seems to be a bit longer with a bit less grind.

Haven't gotten through Eye of the North, but you have to be max level for it anyway so there seems to be little grind.

Some of the best parts about guildwars is that despite not being graphically impressive everything is conceptually awesome. There is a sea of jade, a volcano, a forest of petrified trees, some odd chaos place, and so forth. It's neat to sometimes just realize how awesome the places your exploring are.

Guildwars is also possibly one of the best balanced games I've ever seen. It's seriously kicks FFXI (another game where you could choose a main and a sub class) straight in the nuts. The fact that you don't actually improve in anything but looks from grinding makes it that much better.

I don't quite understand the different campaigns. Do you make a new character for each one, or the same character? If it's the former, can you then use the new skills you get in PvP with any character?

Thanks for all the information, btw.

You then use the new skills you get in PvP with any character?

For any PVP character anyway.

You make a character for a campaign, which determines where they start at. At a certain point (pretty soon), you can switch to other campaigns.

Yah, new skills are ok for pvp with any character.

Edit: PvE still have to buy skills, if that's what your asking, but any pvp can use them