Fighting the Guild Wars

For the past few weeks I've been playing Guild Wars a lot. If you don't know what it is, Guild Wars is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) with, at last count, about 2 million active players. But it's different from most MMORPGs out there, like World of Warcraft. For one thing, there are no monthly fees you pay in order to play the game: you buy the software and create your account and that's all the money you'll ever have to plunk down. It's not an entirely game-wide "persistent" world though: you can meet other players from around the world in places like cities and outposts, but once you leave those the game is an "instance" created just for you and your party of fellow players (if you want to play alone though you can hire "henchmen" from the cities to follow along and help you). It's also different from most MMORPGs in that there is a considerable amount of backstory and active plot that is at work in the game while you play. The biggest of those is the Searing: the first part of the game is played in an idyllic "fairy-tale" setting that lets you get used to gameplay. But once you choose to participate in a certain mission, an event called the Searing takes place and the kingdom you're in is turned into a desolate landscape. The story then picks up two years later and it's only then that the real game begins.

I first bought the original Guild Wars game - the one now referred to as the Prophecies campaign - almost two years ago: several of my friends had gotten into it and had recommended it. I played with it a bit, thought it was a lot of fun... and then some real-life stuff happened and I totally forgot about it. Since that time I've seen the two new "chapters" - Factions and Nightfall - hit stores, and a few times I wondered what I'd been missing by not fully exploring the original.

Then a few weeks ago I read about the upcoming expansion to Guild Wars called Eye of the North. Then next year will be Guild Wars 2, which is said to be a true MMORPG-style persistent world while keeping the traditional Guild Wars elements (including no monthly fees to play). Reading about them intrigued me enough to start playing the original Guild Wars again, this time creating a new character from scratch so that I could re-acclimate to the game. Real-life circumstances have also led me lately to make myself "relax" a bit more: the past few months I really have been going full-tilt nonstop. It's time to slow down just a bit...

Well, I'm glad that I gave Guild Wars another shot, because I'm enjoying it a lot more this time than I did when I first bought the game. It seems like a lot more people are playing it too, and it's always fun to hook-up with live players when it comes to tackling a mission. I'm probably going to play the original Guild Wars: Prophecies and then move on to Factions, which is the second chapter of the story (Prophecies and Factions and Nightfall are each stand-alone games, but if you have the others then they "interface" with each other so that you have a much larger world in which to run around in).

The original Guild Wars sells for about $25-30 bucks in most stores. Well worth picking up if you ever wanted to experience a MMORPG without having to worry about paying fifteen bucks a month and then feeling committed to play: with Guild Wars you play at your own pace. Maybe this game can be what we eventually use to wean hardcore World of Warcraft players off their addiction... :-)

Categories: games, guild wars, mmorpg