2006 - What are you looking forward to?

[Crandaeolon]

Crandeleon - what's the attraction of Guild Wars?

PvP. GW is being balanced with (high-level) PvP in mind, and it has succeeded rather well in that area. The PvE side admittedly fares poorly when compared to traditional RPGs; it is rather slow-paced and should progress faster from area to area, and mix up monsters a bit more. There is a good variety of critters overall, they're just spread out over a large world. The latter areas can be very challenging and interesting though, but it takes time to get there.

Loot diversity is somewhat low because the original intention is to keep the playing field as level as possible. GW is not an item-based game, and probably won't be in future chapters either, though I suspect a lot of cosmetic additions and some additional variety in stats will be introduced to items and armour.

The main hook of GW is its well-balanced and demanding, sometimes fiercely competitive, PvP. The amount of skill, teamwork, communication and planning required is immense, and there's a lot of room for growth. Mindless button-smashing it is not. I'd like to ask anyone claiming something like that to get a guild into top 20 or hold the Hall of Heroes for, say, a dozen consecutive rounds.

Part of the attraction is also the direction that the game is taking. GW devs are listening to the community for wishes and monitoring the current metagame of the tournament and guild versus guild matches. There are frequent updates and sometimes very aggressive rebalancing of skills and game mechanics; the game is now very different from the release version. Factions promises to integrate PvE and PvP in new ways, add new features to the Guilds aspect of the game (such as guild alliances) and of course spice up the metagame with two interesting new classes.

Last weekend was a sneak peek into the new classes, but also introduced lots of new features to the original game, such as a PvE practice/tutorial system for PvP. Suffice to say that I've swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. If they can do even half of what they've promised, Factions will be light-years ahead of competition. (PvP, that is. PvE will probably still be ho-hum. )