What is it?
Guild Wars is a massively single player* online rpg created by the wizards at Arena Net
I'm not reading all those words!
If you read nothing else, read this:
First, check your preconceptions at the door. This is not WoW. This is not any other MMO you've ever played. Approach it like you're playing a strange new RPG, keep an open mind and dive in.
Second, DO NOT START IN PROPHECIES. I strongly recommend beginning with Nightfall. Factions is acceptable. You can complete the newbie area in Factions or Nightfall and bail to another campaign if you so choose, as you will be level 20 by the time you finish with it.
With that said, I *do* recommend that you create your first new character in Prophecies and play the pre-searing 'tutorial' portion (you'll understand what I mean when you finish it). It serves as a nice, gentle introduction to the game, and the area is both completely beautiful, and totally inaccessible to all other characters.
Third, grab your heroes. There are a bunch of quickly and easily accessible heroes early in Nightfall, and several more that can be acquired immediately in Factions and Prophecies (when traveling there from another campaign).
Fourth, join a guild. I don't care what guild. Just join one. You need that background chatter, even if you aren't playing with them constantly. I recommend joining a forum guild from a forum you know, but failing that, just up and join whatever random guild you can find in-game. Be ruthless about this. If the guild sucks the least bit, LEAVE. You lose nothing, just join a new guild a day until you find one you like. You owe stupid guilds nothing, and there are plenty of cool guilds in the game.
Play, enjoy, have fun.
Ok so what's this post about then?
Given the interest in Guild Wars 2 floating around the internets right now, I figured it would be worth devoting some time to a post describing Guild Wars 1 for people who have never tried it (or tried it in the past, but never really got into it).
This is not a megapost on every aspect of the game, as there are a wealth of resources out there if you want a general overview of the game.
Instead, this is intended to be a proper introduction to the game - ie, stuff I wish I had known when I was trying to play it, or wish I had known when trying to get my friends to play it.
And the game?
Guild Wars is a huge (huge) online RPG. It has massive amounts of PvE content, and a very fully developed, fleshed out PvP experience.
The PvE content includes three major Campaign storylines: the original Guild Wars, known as Prophecies, the first standalone expansion, Factions, the second standalone expansion, Nightfall, and the final 'normal' expansion, Eye of the North.
In addition, there are hundreds of side-quests, regular daily and weekly quests, seasonal events, and dozens of in-game achievements to tackle.
Guild Wars does have "dungeons" of a sort, but don't think of them as any sort of analog to WoW instances. They are, like so much of Guild Wars, distinct from most other online rpgs out there.
Sell me on the game
Sure, here's some cool features about the game that I love:
Zero Inflation: I list this first because it's one of my very favorite parts of the game.
- The level cap is 20. It was 20 when the game started. It is still 20.
- A top end sword has a damage range of 15-22. It swings every 1.33 seconds. This is the same as every other top end sword in the game. The same holds true for every other weapon in the game.
- Top end armor has an armor value of 60, 70, or 80 depending on your profession.
- Health and Energy levels are carefully controlled. Every character has the same base Health and Energy at level 20 depending on their profession.
- Your attribute points cap at 200. You earn 170 points at level 20, and the remaining 30 are earned through a game-specific quest.
- You can equip 8, and only 8 skills.
Why is this so important and so awesome?
It means that PvP comes down to skill, build, and teamwork, equipment has no part in it.
It means there has been zero inflation of player power, so PvE content has been tuned throughout the entire game to an expected level of power. It is possible to activate 'Hard Mode' for any area or mission in the game, cranking up the enemies levels and toughness, meaning that you can fight through challenging foes no matter where you choose to explore, or what missions you choose to tackle.
It means that all skills for all professions have all been tuned around expected levels of Health, Energy, and equipment power.
Amazing tech team: This is an under the hood thing, but it's still damn nice. In all the years I've played Guild Wars, I can count on one hand the number of times I've had PC Gaming issues, weird bugs, or any other sort of problem.
On top of that, Guild Wars has badass streaming tech. You can download the client on a PC without the full game, and it'll simply download new areas as you enter them, on the fly. The same goes for other player models/textures/etc.
Patch day? Yeah, no. You can be playing the game and receive the message "A new build is available, please restart Guild Wars!". You restart Guild Wars, and that's it. Or you don't, if you choose not to. Whatever. Have fun!
Ten different professions: Ranging from the recognizable Warrior to the entirely unique Ritualist and the stylish Dervish, there is something for everyone.
Hundreds and hundreds of skills: Every profession has dozens of skills, there are over a thousand skills in total in the game. Just how many? Click this link: WARNING LOTS OF IMAGES!
Multiclassing: You can take _any_ profession as your secondary class, giving you full access to all of its skills. Don't think of this like DnD multiclassing, it is effortless and simple to use. In essence, multiclassing opens up the ability to splash another class to gain access to a few key skills that complement your favored build.
PvP Characters: You can create a character as PvE or PvP. PvP characters are limited to playing PvP only, but they begin at max level, can be instantly outfitted with a full set of basic gear, and full upgrades can be easily and quickly earned by playing PvP.
Incredible ease of play:
- Instant travel, anywhere in the world, at any time.
- Instant free respeccing.
- Save and load skill and attribute configurations in any town or outpost. Download or share builds with a simple text code.
- Extremely rapid leveling. You will hit max level in a few hours once experienced, a few days as a newbie.
- Effortless gearing. Max stat gear can be acquired with minimal difficulty.
- Heroes. AI companions that can be equipped and fully customized. You can fill your entire party with Heroes and complete 95% of the PvE with them if you choose to do so.
- Universal storage. All of your characters can access your 'bank' in any major outpost, so you can freely swap or mule items as needed.
An Amazing World: The world of Tyria has been created from whole cloth by Arena Net. There are no orcs, you don't kill rats in a mine as your first quests. The world is populated by a great number strange and unique creatures, as well as riffs on mythological creatures from different real-world cultures.
The major conflicts in Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North are all against unusual and interesting foes, and they take you across the length and breadth of the world, from idyllic grasslands and forests to blasted wastelands, snowy mountains, steamy jungles, coastal shores, arid deserts, and many, many more.
You also explore some truly stunning and unique environments, including an entire ocean turned to Jade, and even other planes of existence.
Unbelievable art direction: Anet has won a lot of awards for their art team, and for good reason. Their concept artists are some of the best in the business, and their production team has done an incredible job of converting some of their best work into locations that you can explore in the game.
Ok that sounds kind of neat, but...
Yes I know, if all gear is the same, where's the rpg fun?
First, for weapons and armor, players hunt not for items with better stats, but rather, for items that look cooler. There are hundreds and hundreds of weapons and sets of armor that can be mixed and matched and dyed to create your own particularly pimp looking character.
Second, as far as customization goes:
- Every single weapon and piece of armor in the game can be modded.
- For most pieces, this means a prefix, a suffix, and a base mod.
- Your character can wear five pieces of armor, and a two handed weapon or two one handed items.
- You can swap instantly between weapon sets.
Third, your 200 attribute points can be divided up (and changed) however and whenever you want. Each profession has several primary skill lines, and a unique skill line that is exclusive to your primary class (ie, while every class can be used as a secondary, your primary class determines which unique primary skill line you have access to). You can focus on two skills, spread to three easily, or even dabble in four at a time.
Finally, remember all those dozens and hundreds of skills? You can only equip 8 at a time, and you can have any profession you want as a secondary, soooooo. Go hog wild experimenting.
Oh, and don't forget - if you're doing the wholo 'solo' rpg with 7 heroes? Every one of your heroes has the same equipment you do, the same attribute points, the same skills, and the same ability to take a second profession. So multiply all that customization, item acquisition and item modification by 8 (or more, really, there are north of 25 in-game heroes to acquire).
Oh uh... and you can actually use your _own_ characters as Heroes if you want. Yeah.
Ok ok, but surely there are *some* bad parts
Indeed, that there are.
In terms of PvE:
First off, Guild Wars had a major, major focus on PvP (hence the name), and that was one of the initial reasons behind the whole zero inflation thing. Which is cool - but it also meant that their overall PvE experience early on was rather... lackluster.
That is much less true today than it was then, but a lot of areas of the game are less appealing from a pure PvE challenge standpoint than say, WoW dungeons. GW does have 'dungeons' and it does have 'raids', but they have nowhere near the depth or variety that WoW dungeons do.
On balance though, normal world exploration and mob bashing are no more or less interesting than any other mmo, and configuring your character (and/or your party of heroes) and experimenting with builds to tackle different areas of the game is quite fun.
Second, Prophecies had one of the absolute worst introductory curves I've ever seen in a game. The intro area is beautiful, but the blasted wasteland you are dumped into soon after is a hellish contrast, and you have to _slog_ through hours and hours of exploration and missions, which were at the time, rather difficult. Today, they aren't as difficult, but it's still a huge slog to progress to 20 and the later areas of the game.
Ironically, Prophecies has the longest campaign, and taken as a whole, it is quite cool - but not as a new player, and not as an introduction to the game.
ANet realized this, and Factions launched you to 20 much more quickly, but it had a significantly shorter campaign.
Nightfall though, finally nailed it - quick and even progression to 20, a very expansive campaign, and the addition of Heroes to the game made the PvE experience tremendously smoother, and Heroes made tackling missions in Prophecies or Factions that were either difficult or extremely annoying without other players much easier.
Heroes.
Originally, you could only add 3 Heroes to your party, meaning that you needed 2 'real' players to max out a group (8 player max for regular areas, 2 players + 6 heroes). This was recently changed, so it is now possible to have a party of yourself and 7 heroes. This also opened up the majority of the game to be accessibly soloed.
Heroes were/are a double-edged addition to the game however. While they mean that you can treat Guild Wars as a huge single player rpg, they also mean that there's basically no need for players to group to tackle content.
As a new player, this can lead you to feel extremely isolated, especially because Guild Wars is _not_ a singular persistent world, every mission and explorable area is an instance, so if you don't go out of your way to join a guild or make friends, you can play for hours without interacting with anyone else - which isn't a problem if you're expecting it, but can be jarring if you're used to hi-lar-ious trade chat while jumping in place waiting for your 45 min dungeon queue to pop.
And I suppose if you just absolutely cannot live without increasing your damage output from 1k to 5k to 10k to 100k, Guild Wars probably isn't the game for you. (I'll tell you a secret though, there's no difference between 1k and 100k if the enemies have 10k or 1m health, shhhhhhh).
Finally, the one feature that the game does not have that genuinely sucks: No Auction House. Yes, this blows just as much as you might think.
There is a very active in-game market in Kamadan (the 'beginner' Nightfall city), and you can use forums/this tool to check prices, but it does quite suck.
http://argos-soft.net/GwEstimator/
There are in-game vendors for all common materials and armor upgrade parts, as well as max stat items and consumables, but more exotic items must be purchased from other players directly.
There's nothing you ever _need_ to buy from another player to do and see everything in the game, but there are times where it is convenient to acquire certain items from players, and that means ye-olde-everquest1-EC-tunnel-tradespam. Archaic and awful, sorry!
Alright, I got it. I'm interested. Now what?
First, you can buy the game directly from NCsoft, or grab it on steam.
Free Trial: http://www.guildwars.com/freetrial/
NCSoft Store: https://secure.ncsoft.com/cgi-bin/Store.pl?action=toggleCategory;category=4
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/29570/
These are all Trilogy packs, so you get the first three standalone games, but you need to purchase Eye of the North separately later. If you enjoy the game, you can always grab it later, you aren't missing anything without it (it is quite good, and worth buying once you're ready though!).
Ok but how do I play this thing?
The wikis for this game are exhaustively detailed, and have information on literally every aspect of play. Use them!
And of course, feel free to ask questions in this thread, there are plenty of veteran GW players on GAF.
The official wiki: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page
The unofficial wiki (note: Do NOT use the wikia wiki, it is not used by the community anymore): http://www.guildwiki.org/Main_Page
PvX wiki (again, do not use wikia): http://www.gwpvx.com/PvX_wiki
PvX is a wiki devoted solely to class builds. There are PvP, PvE, and Hero builds for everything in the game, from general all purpose builds to specific areas or challenges. If you're totally befuddled as to what to use, hit up PvX, grab a generic build for your class, and go to town. You can tinker and experiment freely, remember, free instant respecs!
Still to come:
PvP details - a few gaffers want to add some PvP love, I'll stick it in this post when it's ready.
Any other major questions people have.
Last Words
This is our place to talk about GW1, instead of the GW2 thread, so have at it.
Again, this is *far* from an exhaustive look at the game, Guild Wars is a huge game, but I know a lot of people tried it and were turned off for one reason or another, and it's very much worth the effort.
Give it an honest shot, and have fun!
