Guild Wars for Windows

What You Get:  Guild Wars is a contemporary of smash hit massively-multiplayer on-line roleplaying game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, but in playstyle, Guild Wars actually plays like one of Blizzard's earlier products, Diablo.  Interestingly, Guild Wars is not "massively multiplayer" at all, since the world of Guild Wars is divided up into "instanced" zones: once you leave a town, you cannot interact with other players who are not in your party, so you must form your parties in town.

In practice, both Guild Wars and World of Warcraft play the same way: you create a character and "level" that character, gaining skills and equipment as you go.  Sometimes you adventure with other players, sometimes you go it alone.  But there are a number of differences between Guild Wars and World of Warcraft that can be seen as perks or flaws, depending on the kind of player you are.

1). Payments: to play World of Warcraft, you must both own the game and subscribe; this costs approcimately $15 a month.  Guild Wars is free to play once the game has been purchased, and even downloads quickly if purchased on-line.  That said, there are a number of attractive microtransactions available through the Guild Wars on-line store (features like more bank account slots for your character, or campaign-wide "skill unlocks").

2). Level Cap: in World of Warcraft, the level cap for characters is level 60 (70 or 80 in later expansion sets), and it can take weeks or months of sustained play to reach this cap (at which point, a completely different process begins: acquiring end-game gear for your character, if you wish).  In Guild Wars, the cap is level 20, and relatively easy to reach after a short play period.  The process of character development continues, though, as the player searches for "perfect" gear and more skills to acquire.

3). Character Classes: in World of Warcraft, players create a character of a given class and race; to sample another class, they must create a new character.  In Guild Wars, all characters are human, but their appearance is determined by their primary class (profession).  Only the character's primary profession is set in stone; each player must choose a secondary profession, the skills of which theoretically compliment their primary profession.  The secondary profession may be changed at a certain point in the game.

4). Transport: Players in World of Warcraft face hefty commute times as they ride or fly from point to point in the world, all in real time.  In Guild Wars, players can simply "warp" to and from any town your character has visited, making it very easy to get where you need to go quickly.

5). Skills: In World of Warcraft, specific skills increase in power as new versions of them are trained, and they are enhanced by "talents" and gear.  The sheer amount of skills available to a player at once can be overwhelming, and there are special mods and macros designed to let players access all of their abilities easily. 

The situation in Guild Wars is entirely different.  Once a player leaves town, they can only use EIGHT of the 300-plus skills available to their character; it is the specific selection of skills that determine a character's role and effectiveness.  For example, a Warrior-Necromancer might enter the field with only one Necromancer skill on their hotbar, but that one skill might make all the difference (and often does). 

Unlike World of Warcraft, in which each skill has a number of "ranks" that determine its power (a Rank 1 Fireball is less powerful than a Rank 2 fireball), Guild Wars is far less arbitrary: all of the many fire spells in the game are linked to a single "attribute," appropriately named Fire Magic.  As a player puts points into Fire Magic, all fire spells grow in power.  This applies to all skills in the game.  Players can power up or power down attributes like Fire Magic freely in town, but once they're in the field, their "build" is set in stone until they return to town.

This is where the game begins to resemble Magic: The Gathering.  Each "profession" has access to 150+ skills (each of which can be likened to the specific cards of a Magic deck), all of which have a niche, but only 8 of which can be employed at once.  The different "professions" in Guild Wars are like the different "decks" in Magic: The Gathering.  Warrior skill icons have a gold tint; Necromancer skill icons have a green tint.  Monk skill icons have a blue tint.  Elementalist skill icons have a red tint.  A player's effectiveness will depend largely on the skills they choose to field; a single skill can be the linchpin of a given build.  There is no combination of skills that works under every situation: each mission or zone will require careful consideration of the skills a player and his party members bring into play, particularly on Hard Mode.

As such, the primary goal of the game is to acquire all the skills you need to play your character effectively.  This can take time, but the amount of time it takes depends on what you want to do with your character.  After all, a Necromancer is hardly going to be expected to charge into the front lines, so it is unnecessary to acquire skills for a Necromancer-Warrior that facilitate charging into the front lines.  By comparison, a Warrior-Necromancer IS expected to charge up front, so a wise player will choose to acquire only those skills that support this practice.

6). Gear: In World of Warcraft, gear is everything.  A max-level character with poor-quality gear will lose, every time, to a max-level character with excellent gear.  In Guild Wars, by contrast, your skill selection determines your performance; gear merely makes the experience slightly better.  For example, spellcasters who have acquired a "perfect" magic wand have (usually) more energy at their disposal and a roughly 28% chance to cut the casting time and cooldown time of a skill in half.  THAT'S IT.  A Warrior with a "perfect" weapon of their choice generally has a 20% chance to do slightly more damage on any given attack.  The rest of the time, it's one's skill selection that matters.

As such, the pursuit of gear is mainly a luxury, and secondary to acquiring the skills one needs for their character.

7). Convenience:  World of Warcraft requires a substantial commitment of time and energy.  For end-game gear acquisition, membership in a guild is almost mandatory, since a number of challenges can be completed only with the assistance of up to 39  other players, all of whom must do what they're supposed to do.  By contrast, Guild Wars allows players to go it alone for much of the game, even going so far as to provide AI-controlled henchmen or customizeable Heroes (Heroes are available only to accounts with Guild Wars Nightfall) to make the going easier for players who prefer to go solo.  In addition, playing Guild Wars can be easily divided into individual goals: find a town, capture a skill, complete a mission, etc.  The game even suggests you take a break if you play for more than two hours straight.

In addition to being able to "warp" between towns, Guild Wars offers a number of account-wide benefits that cut down on the daily grind.  Once a skill is acquired by one character, it is "unlocked" for the player's account, meaning any new character has easy access to it, so that specific-purpose fire spell you had to wait until the end of the game to acquire can be easily trained for another low-level character of the same profession.  Characters share the same bank storage account, so it is possible to find a good bow for your Ranger while playing as your Warrior, and put the bow in your storage account so that the Ranger may access it later.

Lastly, Guild Wars offers a number of time-saving microtransactions by which a player can pay real money for conveniences such as extra storage space in their bank account, extra character slots (one can only create four characters initially, although this increases automatically with the purchase of expansion sets), and even skill-unlocks for an entire campaign. 

Overall Impressions: When I played World of Warcraft, I invested myself in my character, and I treated my character as my personal representative in the virtual world of Azeroth.  I spent time and energy perfecting my character for this reason as much as a desire to advance through the game.

By contrast, due primarily to the fact that my character in Guild Wars actually has spoken lines of dialogue that are not of my choosing, I felt that I was WATCHING, rather than BEING, my Guild Wars character.  I was not invested, personally, in the character's development, except insofar as the character was a versatile platform for skills.  Combine this with the rather plain visual effects and animations, and you have a game that isn't particularly engrossing, except from a strategic perspective.

In addition, the game's interface could use some work: the audio prompts for party invites and chat messages are easily missed.  The ability to draw on the minimap is nice (and provides for some very creative insults, I might add), and the ability to skip the cut scenes is a godsend, since the spoken dialogue in the cut scenes is almost physically painful.  That being said, the tutorial dialogues tend to drag occasionally, and it would be nice to be able to skip them.

Gameplay Impressions: It bears repeating: Guild Wars is somewhat understated by comparison with the fully-realized world and larger-than-life characters of World of Warcraft.  The characters in Guild Wars are beautifully detailed but somewhat plain in terms of silhouette.  Similarly, the world itself, though gorgeously rendered, bears more resemblance to a richly detailed photograph than to an engrossing fantasy world to explore.

In addition, gameplay can feel slightly clunky at times: somewhat slow reaction speeds and the inability to roam freely can lead to a sense of claustrophobia and restrictiveness.  Since most of the skills in the game have activation times, it's very difficult to fight on the move, which can lead to feeling rather like a sitting duck.

Lastly, there is a certain degree of grinding that goes on while playing Guild Wars.  The most efficient way to unlock skills is to create a character of the profession for which you want to unlock skills and then play through the Prophecies campaign to receive key skills as quest rewards.  The alternative is to fight other players for points that can be spent unlocking skills, or by raising money in the game to buy your skills outright.  Naturally, all three of these modes can be a bit of a drag if done over and over: the single-player campaign is long, riddled with bad dialogue, and occasionally frustrating, but the sheer variety of skills out there (and the amusing necessity of coming up with new combinations to meet challenges as you advance through the game) makes the experience more fun.

Nevertheless, Guild Wars has some astounding strengths.  Spells are usually accompanied by shining "sigils" or "seals" that appear over the character's head.  The first time I cast a Necromancer spell in Guild Wars, I got goosebumps from watching my character hover off the ground and contort with power as she seemingly breached the border between life and death, accompanied by a death's-head sigil flaring above her.  Other classes have different effects and casting animations, but the overall effect is the same: your characters are calling on their respective powers at your command.  The spell effects themselves, though understated, certainly aren't bad: you generally know what's happening to you and what's happening to the bad guys.

But perhaps the most important aspect of Guild Wars appears when you hit upon a skill selection that is very well suited for a given challenge.  After completing the Prophecies campaign (which wasn't particulary difficult to do by myself, except near the end, when I asked another player for help), I started doing it all over again, this time on Hard Mode.  Believe me when I say that Hard Mode is aptly named: monsters attack faster, hit harder, have lots of health, and they have access to skills that make groups of monsters very tough to deal with.  Every area in Hard Mode must be examined with a fine-toothed comb, the monsters analyzed and your skills chosen with care.  One mission in Hard Mode took me a dozen tries to complete, but once I hit upon the correct skill combination, the sense of exultation was complete: I had surmounted a challenge that required both strategy and analysis. It goes without saying that Hard Mode must either be done with Nightfall's customizeable computer-controlled Heroes or with other players who know what they're doing.

Which is not to say that there is just one way of doing things.  Someone came up with a Monk build that was almost unstoppable in most circumstances, despite having only 55 health (for reference, most characters have around 500-600 health at level 20). When it was first used, the 55-health Monk created legendary disturbances in the Guild Wars metagame.

Since Guild Wars offers no substantive penalties for dying (missions must be started over if the party dies, but dying in an explorable area merely gives you a slight penalty to Health and Energy that goes away upon entering a town), the trial-and-error nature of finding the right build can be challenging rather than frustrating, and the lack of a subscription cost allows players to take a breather and put the game down for a while, guilt-free.

Perhaps the most telling example of a situation in which a good skill selection is necessary is the fight for Ascension in the Prophecies campaign.  In order to change their secondary profession, characters created in the Prophecies campaign must Ascend, and to do so, they must fight a Doppleganger of themselves.  In this case, the Doppleganger does not mimic your character's appearance; s/he mimics your character's skill bar.  Any skill you bring to the encounter, the Doppleganger has as well!  If you bring a healing spell, and then an interrupt to make sure your Doppleganger can't heal himself, the Doppleganger will have access to the same skills... and since the Doppleganger is computer controlled, its reaction time is much faster than yours.  Yet each class has the tools necessary to outsmart their Doppleganger (I won't spoil the fun by telling you how), and figuring out how to do so is all the more rewarding because you are then permitted to change your secondary profession, so your Warrior-Necromancer can now be a Warrior-Monk or Warrior-Elementalist, too.

Hardware and Customization: Guild Wars is pretty easy on the hardware requirements, and there are a number of ways to customize it so that it runs well on a middle-of-the road PC.