What went wrong?

Obviously, I was in the minority on this, but not alone. CalBear, our former EIC, and Tuan and Jason, who write for us occasionally, feel the same, and so do some other acquaintances. I can’t speak for them, of course, but I can say where things go wrong as far as my experiences are concerned, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was the only one.

At first, I thought that perhaps it was the rather bland storyline and uninspired voice acting that bugged me. That contributed, as did the utter lack of lip motion on characters (what is this, Daikatana?), but obviously such relatively minor issues are only irritants that build on the core dislikes. They’re not the game-breakers I eventually recognized.

The first major annoyance is the static, repetitive nature of the world. Though divided into instanced zones, there’s a very clear feeling of running across areas and encountering the same group of enemies over and over. Each zone has maybe 3-4 kinds of monsters which are further divided into very bland sub-varieties, like “the big one” and “the magic casting one”. The groups are almost always the same size and composition, so you know there’s never a challenge in killing them. No new strategies, no new tactics are necessary. There may be an occasional special encounter with a mini-boss or boss-style character, or running into the middle of monsters fighting each other, but that’s about it. Dying usually takes carelessness, lag, or AI.

Missions will have a bit more variety, but if you do it once, that’s it, nothing new is going to happen when you go back. Quests give players something to do when they’re running and running and running across the various zones, but they’re only the most basic types available, not bothering to conceal their “delivery boy/assassin” nature in the least.

As for the hundreds of skills… well … predictably enough, many of them are quite similar. That’s not to say that ArenaNet copied and pasted skills across the classes, but templates of the abilities are clearly visible. There’s a certain rule that’s being followed that is very good for the long-term viability of the game’s competitive community, but deathly boring to those expecting another Diablo: skill balance. Also, while games like Diablo with a limited scope can have some abilities that go beyond the MMO norm of heal/regen/revive/shield/damage/DoT/mez/buff, Guild Wars is more or less limited to that standard list, since it’s a multiplayer game first and foremost.

See, in the Diablos, it was OK for some skills to be absolutely balls-out overpowered, and some to end up being next-to-useless. Since most people only played each game for a bit, it didn’t matter if Corpse Explosion or Fire Wall were good, or an ability like Skeleton Mastery was totally useless. Yes, these imbalances could anger the players that focused on the wrong skills, but that also made it an incentive to get the right ones. Furthermore, Diablo and Diablo II could get patched, after the casual players left, to a point where balance was improved and the hardcore crazies could enjoy both games more.


In Guild Wars, most skills are relatively equal. Depending on what you’re trying to make your character and what the party composition us, the skill that was the be-all, end-all for your last character is going to be useless now. This means that there’s less personal incentive to play and experiment and try to min/max, but more team incentive to adjust. I’m willing to bet that most players are motivated more by personal incentives. We want to have the Uber Character, not The Healer With Some Bow Skills or the Warrior Who Can Mez.