Introduction
About a year ago, a challenge was made to the typical MMONG scene and its pay to play style. Games like Everquest and World of Warcraft lured players into playing games for a monthly fee to work at a game that never ends. Enter: Guild Wars, which features no monthly fee, a solid single player campaign, and a signficant PvP element.
Gameplay
To compare it to another game, I would say it best fits with Diablo. Characters are put into a massive 3d world to fight various hordes of monsters.
Players choose a profession and a secondary profession to do battle against these foul creatures, and are only give 8 ability slots to use in their fight. Because of this limited access to your skills, Guild Wars has constantly been compared to Magic: The Gathering, where a strategey element plays a huge role.
The game world itself can be divided into two areas: Towns/outposts and the rest of the world. In towns and outposts, players can team up with others to complete quests and kill things. Once they leave these shared areas, however, they are given their own unique copy of the world.
Sights and Sounds
Guild Wars has some pretty nice visual invironments. Terrain ranges all the way from war torn Ascalon, to deep jungles of Maguuma, and from the desert to the deep snow mountains. You journey all across this massive world and it looks good doing so.
What left to be desired, however is the character models' lack of animation. Mouths don't move, and actions in cutscenes stem more from their emotes (/dance, /cheer, etc) rather than anything out of the ordinary.
Stuff that sucks
The thing that has always bothered me about Guild Wars, which is something that people LOVE, is that it's not a defined RPG or a PvP game. If you ask a handful of people, you'll hear a difference in what they think it really is. To me, I wanted a roleplaying game in the same vein as Diablo, and it really satafied me there. But due to this mesh of PvP/RPG playing, there were limitations on the characters themselves. Everyone is capped at level 20, and there are no extrorindary "UBER ITEMS" or "LEET ARMOR" to make your guy invincible. Everything is conducted in a world of balance, which makes RPG mode a little less conventional.
Conclusion
Guild Wars is an excellent game. I had been running Xfire for about 8 months when I picked it up, and two months after owning Guild Wars is was my top game in hours played. It's an addictive little game that really did fill the void that diablo left me all those years ago. I'm hoping that in further Guild Wars releases, there will be more RPG oriented action and not as heavy of a concentration on PvP, but from what I can tell, it'll always been a balanced, double edged sword. There is no monthly fee, and the folks a Arena.Net constantly have "preview weekends" to allow your friends a shot at playing for a few days without actually buying the game. It was a good value for me, who refuses to pay any sort of monthly fee, and if you feel the same way, I'd suggest demoing it some time.
Guild Wars Website: http//www.guildwars.com
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