And I'm afraid that's where I have to leave it. You see, I've been playing on a demo account, and my time is nearly up. Though to be fair I think I've been through most of the starter area quests.
So aside from my rambling incoherency over the past umpteen chapters, what is the game actually like?
Well, as MMOs go it is one. It seems to do all the standard sort of things MMOs do, only it does them slightly differently. Game wise the obvious being the instanced nature of the world. The only common areas are the towns. This is a little odd, but in a good way. Aside from the obvious advantage of not having random arseholes hassling you and camping the one thing you need to kill it also means that quests actually get done. So for example when you go out and kill the evil beast it actually stays dead. This is great as it helps to avoid the general feeling of futility that usually permeates your every action in these things.
Is does make getting screen caps for a series of articles a bit annoying, since you can't go always go back a second time for the shots you want.
Gameplay wise it seems like it might quite interesting when you really get into it. The dual class thing is intriguing, but the real oddity is the stats and powers, such as they are. Basically you get a number of skill groups to distribute points into which improve the related skills. But you can redistribute these any time you're in a town. You learn the powers from going out and finding the appropriate trainers, but you only have 8 slots in your bar. So you get the challenge of building your character in a way to best suit whatever it is you're doing. And it nicely avoids the clutter of having twenty bars stacked up with abilities, which is also nice. Another weird thing is the lack of potions. Your health and mana naturally restore over time, which is nice as it does avoid the whole trudging 16 miles back to town because your health is to low and getting picked of by some random weenie thing. Travel is also surprisingly unpainful, as you can always teleport back to any town area you've already visited. This is a tremendous help, and doesn't even clutter your inventory up with scrolls of town portal.
Story wise there probably is one, but I honestly wasn't paying that much attention. The fact that a story might actually be able to advance somewhere is rather intriguing though. The subquests are all diverting enough, though some are obviously a little less silly than others. The game does get bonus points for it's seeming lack of "kill 12 boars" missions. Interestingly there ARE NPCs dotted around who want arbitrary amounts of the random crap that monsters seem to drop, but they don't give out tedious grindy quests to that effect. They'll just trade you X walrus spleens or whatever for whatever items they have on offer. How useful these items are is of course varied and debatable.
I can't really comment on the multiplayer aspects because, like most of not all games, I don't know anyone else who plays. It's probably quite fun if you like that sort of thing. There were at least a few quests which required more than one person though.
I do have to say that I was quite impressed with the game overall, and the demo seemed pretty well set up. Sure there are limits (like you can't drop items), but the time limit seems reasonable to get to the end of the starter area and give you a good taste of the game. The real question I suppose is would I actually buy it?
This is of course where things get really interesting. Because you CAN buy Guild Wars. No fees, no bullshit, no feeling like you have to spend all your time logged in to get your monies worth. Just buy the game and then play it as much as you like. If you like it then maybe buy an expansion. Truly a revolutionary approach, and one I wish more (I.E. any) games would take. The best part of course being that I looked on amazon and found it for £7. THAT'S value for fucking money. Hell, you can get a full set of all the expansions for about £18. All I can say here is "suck it, warcraft".
I guess if I had to sum up the feeling I got from Guild Wars it would be like someone tried to make a MMO which doesn't suck. That this should be a rare and original concept is fairly depressing, but most stuff seems content just to try and be warcraft. The fact that you can be a Necromancer and have a small girl follow you around is just icing on the cake. All in all a good time I'd say.
Now if you'' excuse me I'm gonna go finish up my last 45 minutes of demo time. And then maybe go shopping.
No comments:
Post a Comment