Guild Wars

[Navaros]

I played Guild Wars extensively for a long time.

Once you learn how to play and master all the missions there's not all that much to do in the PVE side of things.

The PVE presentation is not all that good, ie: the voice acting and cutscenes are almost univerally horrible across all 3 games. Most of the game is presented via NPCs standing in one spot whilst text blurbs float over their heads instead of voice acting, like in King's Quest 1 or something. The NPCs don't look that good. I literally have games from 1999 that have NPCs that look better than most of the Guild Wars' NPCs.

PVP is pretty deep but unless you intend to become a seriously hardcore player who devotes huge amounts of time to it, you will have little to no success. Making teams in PVP is a huge headache, often taking 1 - 3 hours of real time to assemble a competent team before you can even start playing. Then once the team loses 20 - 40 mins later, it disbands. And even if you become hardcore and win a lot, there are very little rewards for winning in PVP, which ulimately is why I lost interest in it. Also are very few PVP maps, and they just get copy and pasted into each new game (ie: no PVP content is created for new games, other than new classes and skills). And don't even think about trying PVP without hardcore third party voicechat programs like Ventrilo or Teamspeak running, because you will lose in the first round every single time if you do.

To add insult to injury, the devs are constantly nerfing the crap out of any good skills available in the game to appease bad PVP players' and their incessant complaining about skills they do not have the talent to beat. This means that if you like playing a certain class or using certain skills, chances are you will be extremely aggravated when the devs nerf it to smithereens against your will - which will inevitably happen.

After having played Oblivion a lot and recently loaded Guild Wars up again for a bit, I can say my eyes definitely have a very painful adjustment trying to readjust again to Guild Wars' vastly inferior graphics. I've seen games released in 2003 that have better graphics than Guild Wars, and in 2007 they are getting more and more noticeable to me. Although I've seen a lot of people ranting about how Guild Wars has "beautiful graphics", so perhaps my graphical standards are higher than yours may be. The graphics are the same in all 3 games.

When Guild Wars first came out I woulda gave it a 75%, but because of it's age and stagnating graphics, presentation, and gameplay (all 3 games are basically the same thing), at present time I'd give it 65%. On second thought, due to the devs' constant nerfing of everything that bad PVP players ask to be nerfed (which screws over PVE players too), I'm knocking the score down to 50%.