Guild Wars Revisited

So I've been messing around in Guild Wars again recently. I had started playing way back when the first chapter came out, and it served as my introduction to the world of MMORPGs. Eventually I "upgraded" to World of Warcraft and got sucked into that for about six months. I came out of that gasping for air and wondering where the heck the rest of my life had gone. I mean, it's not that I don't appreciate what Blizzard has done with the game. In fact, I think it's brilliant. It's just such a huge time sink, and even after all the months I had spent with it things were actually threatening to get worse. After I hit level 60 the only way to keep enjoying the game to the fullest extent would have been to get involved with huge, heavily coordinated raids and basically structure my entire life around playing the game. I actually did consider doing that for a little while, but eventually what little sense of personal responsibility I have won out and I pulled myself away from the whole thing permanently.

But anyway, this post isn't about WoW. It's about Guild Wars, and about why I'm enjoying my casual revisit to the game.

And I guess "casual" is the key here. See, Guild Wars is a game you can play like a game, rather than an extension of your life. Playing the entire game solo (with the exception of a handful of special, and entirely optional, areas) is a perfectly viable option, and quests are generally quick and not too terribly difficult. The instanced nature of the world (i.e. whenever you leave town the world is generated just for your party) also means that you never have to wait for someone else to clear out of an area before you can do a quest. Oh, and that reminds me: there is a distinct, and entirely welcome, lack of collection quests. No spending two hours killing yetis or bears or whatever trying to collect 20 whatever to give to whatever person for no good reason. On the contrary, every quest given to you in Guild Wars affects the world in some way, however large or small, and makes you actually feel like you're accomplishing something.

Ah yes, accomplishing something. Now, it could be argued that nothing you do in a video game really accomplishes anything in the grand scheme of things, but when operating within the confines of a game world we gamers like to feel like our efforts are meaningful to some extent. By this measure, Guild Wars is a more satisfying experience than WoW ever was. Being a game with a finite (and fairly interesting) story, Guild Wars is a game that you progress through, working ever closer to uncovering the answers to some pretty intriguing mysteries. And when the story is done, that's it. You can get involved in PvP, which is in many ways what Guild Wars is really all about, or you can hang it up and move on, feeling satisfied that you actually "completed" the game.

That sense of completion is something I never really got from WoW. But with Guild Wars, once you finish the story there are only a handful of things left to do beyond PvP (at least in Chapter 1, which is what I'm playing). You can run down to the Underworld or the Fissure of Woe (both max-level areas with great drops and armor), or you can explore Grenth's Footprint and Sorrow's Furnace, where you'll find some of the most difficult battles in Chapter 1 and the ultimate weapons for each character type.

And yeah, that's a lot of stuff right there, but all of it is entirely optional unless you want to make your character as powerful as possible. And even if you do want to get all the best gear out there, it's not that much of a pain. The most statistically powerful armor in the game can be purchased from an armorer in one of the game's final outposts. The ultimate weapon for each character is always dropped by a particular boss with a standard location. Even if you want to get completely decked out with the best equipment and see everything that Chapter 1 has to offer, it isn't going to take months and months of raids to do so.

Time is such an important factor, too. You spend so much time doing what amounts to nothing in WoW. My daily herb run, in which I would travel around the world to collect herbs to sell at the auction house, would take between one and two hours. And I did all that before I even started doing quests. And then there's travel time. I don't have a guess as to what percentage of your game time in WoW is spent just traveling, but it's a depressing amount. Staring at your character's back while she bobs up and down on the back of a giant bat for ten minutes is not compelling gameplay. Seriously.

By contrast, Guild Wars features virtually no travel time. Every time you're out in the field you're there to do a quest, and going out to do quests will often lead you to new outposts and cities. And here's the wonderful thing: once you've visited a new location you can teleport there instantaneously at any time. Yes. Just got a quest in one location that requires you to travel to the outpost you were at ten minutes ago? Teleport there! Sexy.

Is Guild Wars unequivocally better than World of Warcraft? Nope, but it's a different creature, and I'm only discovering now that it had already solved many of my personal problems with WoW before the game even came out.

So, uh, yeah. Tired of MMORPGS? Never liked them in the first place? You might still enjoy Guild Wars. Anyway, there's no subscription fee, so there's not much harm in picking the game up and giving it a try. And with Chapter 2 supposedly rocking pretty hard and Chapter 3 due out by the end of the year, there is a ton of content waiting for you if you find yourself interested.