Van Hemlock

Another day, another world. This time it’s Guild Wars, and the beleaguered and shattered land of Ascalon. You take on the role of determined freelance Hero, wandering the wilds and generally solving problems with the judicious application of brute force.

It’s a popular, and indeed, overused theme, but the execution here is very well done, and in terms of gameplay mechanics, Guild Wars brings a lot of novel and fresh ideas to the genre. Also, as previously mentioned, it has no monthly fee at all, despite being every bit as polished as World of Warcraft or Everquest II.

Three Good Things

• Lavish: The world of Guild Wars is a wonderfully detailed place, full of interesting nooks and crannies, great art and fantastic postcard moments, and the whole thing seems to fit together well. Lands, monsters, character models – the whole look and feel carries a kind of unity found in WoW, but lacking from EQ2, although Guild Wars has a much less ‘cartooney’ style. A suitably orchestral score by Jeremy Soule (Icewind Dale, Dungeon Siege, et al.) and surprisingly elegant cinematic-style cut-scenes during the course of play, sets the presentation off and makes a unified package that is very immersive, and probably one of the most stylish MMOs I’ve seen in recent years, at once detailed, and yet accessible.

• Dual-classing: Guild Wars offers a novel class system. There are only six classes, but everyone is required to pick two, making a possible thirty different hybrid combinations, and it looks like there is an awful lot of mileage to be had from experimenting in this hybrid choice; different class skills complement each other in different ways, e.g Warrior/Monk, Mesmer/Warrior, Elementalist/Ranger, etc, etc, so working through the thirty different types to find a combination you like could provide a huge amount of replay value. My first go is a Ranger/Necromancer – I always liked the Pagans from the Thief games; my kind of Druids - and it seems I’ve stumbled on a fantastic zerg combo, with the classic tamed animal pet leading the charge of temporary lifespan skeletons, while I hang back and rain AoE fire arrows on the melee. The brief dabbling with other hybrids I’ve tried shows every indication that many other powerful combos exist to be found too.

• Skills: While you gain a frankly bewildering array of skills (hotkeys), for both classes, in a surprisingly short amount of time, you can only take eight of them out adventuring with you at a time. You can only change these eight in a town, and this adds a Magic: The Gathering card game feel to character tuning and design, and again, finding a good set of eight complementary skills that can cover most eventualities looks to be an excellent avenue for tinkering. I’ve gone with a combination of pet and ranged skills, but the rate new skills show up, through class quests, this line up is sure to change often. The limited skill slots also have PvP implications, bringing a certain degree of balance to the whole affair.

Three Bad Things

• Apocalyptic: It’s not much of a spoiler by now to mention that Bad Things Happen to Ascalon pretty early on. The tutorial levels take place ‘Pre-Searing’, in a lovely land of golden fields, shady woods, picturesque hamlets and babbling brooks and streams. All very nice, and a quite uplifting place to spend three or four hours a night, beating on stuff. However, such tranquillity cannot last, and by about level 6 (which took me about four hours), the main story arc quests take you through a quite harrowing destruction of the world as you know it, and you emerge back into a wrecked land of dust, ash and ruins. What’s worse is that the hills and dried up river beds are clearly the same landscape you were skipping through previously, and all the quest NPCs you’d been helping beforehand are now all dead, scattered, mad or just very bitter. Certainly its novel – have the characters start their real lives actually in Mordor, but I’m sure it’ll get pretty harsh after a while. The world map shows distant lands that aren’t grey, but I do wonder how long it will be before my Ranger sees a blade of grass again, let alone a tree. One popular solution seems to be to keep at least one of your four characters in the pre-seared section of the game, and holiday there now and then.

• Fast: I’ve been playing at a fairly normal 'lightly-obsessed' rate, and I’m already level 10 out of 20, after about three sessions. Clearly this game has a very small treadmill, possibly even smaller than WoW. I guess the idea is that once you hit the top, and have tracked down all your class skills, the main event becomes team-based PvP – the eponymous Guild Wars in question. Still, there is a pretty huge world map to uncover, and thirty different hybrids with god knows how many skill combos to toy with, so while the game is short, it can probably be replayed many times. Ultimately though, you’re going to run out of stuff relatively soon.

• People: While pretty much all of Guild Wars is instanced for your party alone, the towns are shared, and as to be expected from a game that doesn’t need to see a credit card, full of more than the normal share of the young, and idiots, and most distressingly, both. There’s a lot of trash talk, gibberish, and trading spam, although the game has very little in the way of economy, and seems to be far more based on your choice and use of skills than uber gear. The main spam market seems to be in armour dyes, which tend to function in the same way US Dollars work in war torn third world countries whose own currency has become meaningless – hard currency. Everyone wants to look unique, and so don’t – it’s Ultima Online’s black dye tubs all over again. Fortunately, stepping through any town gate lands you out in your party’s own personal copy of the world, and for the really sociopathic, you can even go out alone, and take three AI henchmen along instead. There isn’t a real need to pick-up group at all in the early stages, although I’d imagine people do PvP better than the henchmen. Roleplayers are likely to be greatly let down by this game, however.

I like it a lot so far – it manages to be very casual, while at the same time is very involving, with a light-hearted grind, based almost exclusively around questing, and a storyline that clips along at a satisfying pace, and makes me feel like I matter. More advanced elements of PvP and Guild stuff remain to be seen, but even hermitey soloists like me can get a lot from this game, which skilfully combines the best elements of Dungeon Siege and Diablo II with those of World of Warcraft and Everquest II, and the fact that it’s free to play, is just a bonus – I’d happily pay $10 a month for what I’ve seen already...