Friday, May 27, 2005
Guild Wars Verdict
It's good, not great.
A quick summary of the bad stuff (the good you can find in a lot of other places):
A quick summary of the bad stuff (the good you can find in a lot of other places):
- The loot is boring. It gets better after the first few levels, but it still hurts the game
- Skill acquisition isn't balanced. Ideally, you'd get skills in all categories at about the same pace. That way, you'd be able to play a different style all the way through the game. However, it seems that every class (not just 1 or 2) is given a bunch of useful skills in one category (e.g., fire magic for elementalists, healing for monks, blood magic for necros, etc.) and not many useful skills in other categories. As a result, everyone plays a fire elementalist for at least the first 10-15 levels (out of 20). Eventually, you round out your skill collection, but by then, you're so used to that one set of skills that there's no reason to change.
- Early-level PvP is dominated by "twinks". It is possible to use max damage weapons (the most powerful in the game) in the earliest arena (level 1-10). High level players simply find a weapon with low requirements and pass it on to their new low level character. New players are thus not only overmatched in playing skill, they are totally outclassed in equipment, too. There should have been a PvP arena at the beginning where new players aren't at such a disadvantage. There should be something that guides new players into PvP; as it is, they have to seek it out or stumble on it themselves. And it should not be so easy to equip the most powerful equipment in the game.
- The skill distribution problem mentioned earlier also hurts pre-20 PvP, because everyone uses the same builds.
- The warrior/wizard/healer/archer gameplay is tired. PvP consists of seeing whose healer dies the fastest. And good luck when you go up against a team of 8 healers.
- Calling targets for your teammates to attack is unnecessarily difficult, especially in PvP. In general, communication without a headset is primative compared to modern team-based games.
- Pathing sucks. Sometimes you'll try to use a "touch" skill that requires you to get next to someone. You'll start running automatically towards the person, but you'll often end up blocked by an obstacle that you should be able to run around easily, and the skill use will be halted with no visual feedback that you were interrupted.
- There's no collection of stats for PvP, beyond guild ranking stuff for end-game guild-only PvP. I'm sure plenty of people who play casually and do random PvP would love to have some sort of stats and recognition.
- The storyline is mediocre at best. There are plenty of cutscenes and such to advance it, but it is meandering and nonsensical at times.
