Imperfections in Guild Wars
I followed Guild Wars with great anticipation before its release, since it offers the key elements of MMORPG gameplay: forming groups on the spot to do a specific task, persistent game world etc. without many of the drawbacks- griefers such as killstealers, the lack of any actual plot besides what a 12-year old AOLer is 13375P3AKing, and (more than anything) the charge of up to £120 a year for the privilege of playing the game you have bought and paid for.
Now that I’ve been playing it for a couple of months, I still believe that it is the greatest PC RPG since Diablo II, but I am also more aware of some of the drawbacks that do not become immediately apparent when you first start the game (in the ‘n00b lands’ as they are called).
The main point is that the ‘instancing’ system basically turns Guild Wars into Diablo II’s multiplayer, except with the ‘towns’ turned into 3d chat rooms. Before the game’s release, this was billed as the ultimate weapon against various forms of griefer, but it just ends up being irritating, and exposes itself as being a cost-cutting exercise to reduce the load on NCSoft’s servers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but trying to disguise mutton as lamb is the issue here.
The updates are also poorly-notified. Whereas in Counter-Strike Source (another online game with compulsory updates) you at least get an ‘Update News’ page that appears telling you what the patch will do, suddenly finding that half your items are now called something else (seriously, ask anyone whose hasn’t had the game for more than a week or two what an Enchanted Lodestone is) means you have to spend about five or ten minutes just working out what is different. The game has the ability to do better- after a week or two the main menu started carrying warnings of doom to anyone who used skill calculators (saying they contained keyloggers, which is BS) conveniently just after NCSoft had said it didn’t fit with their vision of what the game should be like, so it would be nice to see this being put to productive use rather than leaving anyone who doesn’t have the time to spend 15 minutes trying to decipher the (horrendous) Guild Wars website in the dark about changes.
Another aspect of the game’s ‘model’ is the levelling system. OK, so they want to limit the benefit gained by playing the game constantly. Fair enough, the level limit (20) does that. But levelups just don’t provide any real benefit. I recently used the ‘attribute points’ from TWO levelups on my Elementalist character, and you know what it got me? My fire spell did 2 extra points of damage. With several ‘levels’ put into Energy Storage, I still only have 15 more energy points at level 13 than I did at level 0. By all means put an ‘upper limit’ on levelling, but don’t eliminate the rewards of doing it altogether.
The ‘death penalties’ (bizarre, even Diablo didn’t do this) are on the extreme side- if I die in combat, and my teammates immediately resurrect me, why should I have 15% less health and energy unless we trek all the way back to town? (yes, the much-vaunted instant ‘travelling’ to towns doesn’t work in a party… inspired)
In all, Guild Wars’ gameplay works fairly well, and it could be the RPG game so far this decade if NCSoft would stop screwing it up with stuff like this.