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I found Guild Wars to be a much more adult experience, but with a WoW twist. One of the first few fledgling steps into a genre that merges single player and massively multiplayer role-playing game characteristics. As for GuildWars, it’s got a high difficulty setting that really forces you to use wits and balance your skills, but there’s no really terrible punishment system other than weakening your stats temporarily until you’re forced to simply give up and try the mission over again because you’re so weak. For the graphics, they’ll be covered as we go. We’re also familiar with how good the game looks so I won’t embelish too much in that area. For the music, it was composed by the British academy award winner Jeremy Soule. It’s quite a bit of fun. Epic to say the least. Your bread and butter in this game is your skills. They can be spells, special attacks, or special actions that affect you or your enemy before, during, or after combat. An example: a ranger skill that helps you fire a shot with more than average damange, a necromancer skill that raises the dead to serve you, a elementalist skill that fires a fireball at the enemy…you get the idea. You can only use a certain number of skills, eight I believe, everytime you go out. To clarify, you only have eight skill slots, and you can only put those many skills in to “take with you” into the instance. To make matters even more delicate, early in the game you earn via a quest a “res” skill. Unless you specifically learn the resurrection spell, for most folks this is the only way to resurrect fallen allies. Even this skill can take up one of the eight slots, making selection more precarious. You get ability points every time you level up. I think the max level is 20, I can’t remember, but I’ll get to that later. You use these ability points to fine tune and micromanage your character’s latent abilities. Essentially, it works like this: lets say your became an elementalist, and you learned a lot of fire, water, earth, and air magic skills during your initial travels. You have to allocate points to areas that have jurisdiction over those forementioned skills to determine how good you are at each element. For instance, I have all sorts of various spells, but I put more of my ability points into “air” and “fire” magic. Thus, my skill-spells that fall under the sphere of those elements do more damange, or last longer, or are casted faster, depending on the conditions of the spell description. If you look at the description for spells, the number of damage the spell or attack does is usually green, which means it’s subject to change pending how many points you put into its respective sphere skillset. In case you haven’t noticed, what I’ve just described is the fulcrum of their argument that time played means nothing. And while for a RP character that’s an fib until you reach the apex of your journey at level 20, the PVP character is exactly that. You can have all the gear and loot in the world, but someone with half your shit can easily take you down if he knows how to micromanage his/her character better than you can. Not suprisingly, the Koreans are rather good at this. I’ll get to that last comment later. I find that all classes have a place. The Ranger has a pet, and it does a decent job with lots of crazy support skills like traps and the like. The warrior is the quintessential tank, and I think some warriors resent the fact that they cant do very much damage at first without a decent weapon. What they fail to appreciate is that not many other classes can effectively tank like they can. The monk is the healer that packs a hefty punch in a pinch. The Mesmer, my primary class, is an interesting character. The best frame of reference I can give is “illusionist meets Bard meets Rogue” for those of you who know your RPGs. I like it an awful lot. I’m currently a Mesmer/Elementalist. I suppose the closes approximation would be “Battle Mage”. I really, really, really unleash hell. Stupid damage, really. Of course, as that may tell you, you can dual class with no penalty other than you can’t have the primary skill of the secondary class. For me that’s no biggie, because the Mesmer’s primary ability is the ability to cast quickly, and I really like that. The adventures, while some complain are repetitive after a fashion, I find new and exciting around every curve. The enemies are well designed and produced. The environments are engaging and often interesting and challenging to navigate (maps are mostly useless in The Breach), and very fun. You don’t buy equipment (well, you do, but not always) in the conventional sense. You can usually get standard stuff, but if you want items that really help you out you need to craft them with the assistance of NPC crafters and material workers….for a fee. A hefty fee. A small player-run market usually runs in the major towns and cities since the NPCs charge such an outrageous fee, but honestly, if you’re out there doing quests like you should, money isn’t too big an issue. To give an example, a new peice of chest armor for my character requries four bolts of cloth and one peice of leather square. I got out adventuring and pick up some armor dropped from my enemy. I take out my “salvage kit” (which can be purchased from vendors and that have a limited number of uses) and salvage bolts of cloth from the material. Then, one of my enemies drops a hide of some kind. I take the hide to a material worker, and, for a fee, he tansforms it into a leather square. I go back with my materials to the original armor crafter, pay the crafting fee, hand him the material, and voila: new armor that looks boss. Don’t like the color? They’re a rather lively dye market that usually goes on in town as well. Oh, and loot outside works basically like “WoW meets Diablo”. It drops, its randomly assigned, you pick it up. If the item is magical or special in nature, it’s blue. You can identify it by using an “Identification Kit” which is also purchased from a merchant in town to identify the item. You’ll want to do this. Later on the items are actually useful, or at least valuable for a return profit. You can also use your salvage kit on most things to produce useful materials like iron igots, wood plants, etc. Every item makes something eventually, and is often worthwhile to sell or hold on to. The guild system is rather straightforward and operates almost exactly like WoW except instead of a talbard we get a really kickass, sharplooking cape. The capes cost some serious coin, so if a guild has capes on its members, you know they’re not some jackoff clan of a few misfits. Eventually, once enough money is raised and the game has progressed far enough, I think Guild Halls are still in the game, though I haven’t seen them. They’re tall, majestic structures with a long platform that seems to stretch out from the side of mountain into the open air. The horizon of the surrounding landscape rims around you, and the warm colors of dawn streak across the stone pavement and surrounding country side. The Guild Halls, if they are the same as in beta, are simply breathtaking. Ok, now here’s were I’m delving into speculation since most of this I got from my beta experience and what I’ve seen thus far. Once you level your character up high enough (or do PVP option) you join the ranks of adventurers that can travel the world and do cooperative missions (ONLY for RP) and/or venture into the Arena area and compete against other teams from other “realms” like Korea, Europe, and America. I really like how they did this. Apparently the arena operates like some kind of cross-server tether that links them together to fight. To give you an example, groups are formed either intentionally by players or randomly via AI once people show they desire to fight. They are grouped by those forementioned regions, and duke it out in the arena. The dominant faction garners the “favor of the gods” though I’m unsure of what that entails. The battles are usually short, sometimes long, but very intense. These are people who have fine tuned their skillsets and know how to tweak every skill and force every ability to operate as quickly and effectively as possible. It’s an amazing experience. I would have to describe it as the first successful RPG pvp I’ve ever been a part of. It puts WoW to shame, but then again, this is the base of what Guild Wars is. Eventually, if you win enough in whatever form the tournaments take (I’m currently unaware of the paticulars), your character will eventually be given the honor of residing if he or she chooses in the Hall of Heroes. It’s a special zone which can be entered or left at any time that shines and glows with an almost heavenly light and a specific musical score that seems to give the aura of an earthly elysium. I’ve seen conceptual shots and heard third party descriptions, but from what I’ve heard it sounds really amazingly cool. You have to really earn that. Some pictures:

My necromancer character in the midst of an early beta plot: click here An example of “crafted” armor as it appears as a set for the necromancer. This is an RP character. Crafting new and better armor is essential to surviving the later stages of the game: click here An example of high-end necromancer “crafted” gear as shown in PVP mode. click here My mesmer/elementalist outside the gates of a gathering zone in The Breach wastelands: click here A ray of light shines through the remainds of Old Ascalon: click here The ray of light up close: click here The mesmer showing off some newly crafted gear: click here An example of a guild cape. They have full motion when you walk, turn, and emote. Wonderfully rendered. Most items held offhand act similarly: click here

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