Guild Wars World Preview Reflections

For those that missed it, Guild Wars had something similar to an open beta this weekend, when they hosted a World Preview Event. Guild Wars is a MMORPG, but it's definitely not your traditional MMORPG. The folks from ArenaNet, the same ones that brought us multiplayer Diablo, are responsible for this gem.

Impressions from the weekend event:

• This game is Diablo II on steroids...which is a good thing
• The level grind found in most other MMORPGs has nearly vanished (more on this later)
• Limited character customization at the beginning, but opens up as you get more materials
• Finding and joining groups is very easy
• Ramp-up time before missions is 3-5 minutes, tops
• Classes, for the most part, are fairly balanced (more on this later)
• Game has a good, streamlined interface that is fairly small and easy to learn

Let me begin by saying the developers did this weekend event right. Anyone could download the client and play. As soon as you began, you were already at level 15 (out of a max 20) so you could immediately jump into some upper-level content. In guild wars, your character has a primary and a secondary class (of the six classes available). I chose elementalist as my primary, and warrior as my secondary. This turned out to be a very playable combo, lots of fun. In Guild Wars, nearly everything is instanced, which means there are multiple instances of every area. The main towns were instanced, with probably 100-200 players on each instance. Once you leave town for a mission, each mission 'lobby' is also instanced, with about 50 players or so per instance. (NOTE: traveling was done right as well, in that you can teleport right from the start to almost anywhere on the map with no hassle) From the instanced lobby, you join or start a group (usually 6 players), then enter the mission, which is then instanced just for your party. They almost have setup a waterfall effect of instances, which worked fairly well.

Missions were fun when you had a group that could hold their own. Having a variety of character classes on each mission is critical. Each mission had certain objectives, that all ran across a particular storyline. At the end of each mission, there are cinematics with dialogue that moves the story forward. This was kind of neat, in that your character would appear in the cut scenes, and sometimes even had some dialogue. After completing all the missions and reaching level 20, I headed over to the PvP areas.

PvP is where this game really stood out for me. PvP came in so many flavors. You could group with 8 people and do a two part mission, where the first part is PvE and the second part PvP. Or you could go to an arena, immediately jump into a mission, and get randomly assigned to a team for 8v8 matchups. If you're team won, your team stayed together and progressed to the next map to face a new opponent. If your team lost, you were all ported back to the mission lobby zone, where you could either enter the same mission, or head elsewhere. Guild combat, which I only got a small taste of, was very strange. It was 8v8 on large maps, but each guild had to defend/attack the other's castle, and each castle had NPC archers and footsoldiers protecting it. So not only were you fighting the other guild members, you're fighting high level NPCs as well. I only got a chance to play these battles a few times.

In terms of character creation, like I said, the elementalist/warrior I created faired well. But the PvP tank character seemed to be warrior/monk. These characters are self-sufficient recking machines. The monk class in general is extremely important, as they are the only class that can steadily heal and support teammates, and can also resurrect fallen teammates over and over and over again (yes, PvP usually ends up in each team losing/resing several people per match).

For a better description of what the developers were going for with this game, check out this interview. Gamespy also has a detailed page on character classes and other useful information if you're interested in Guild Wars. After this weekend, I'm convinced I need to go pre-order the game so I can get in on this coming weekend's event, as well as other beta events before the official release in early 2005.