11 comments

This is a hard review for me to write. I love video games. I am an aspiring game designer. I understand how video games need every piece of the puzzle to fit together perfectly for the gamer to get the whole picture, the whole experience. That’s what makes perfect games so special and inexpressibly beautiful. You really have to play a perfect game to understand its beauty. That’s also what makes bad games so disappointing. They are so close, and take so much hard-work from so many people, only to miss the mark.

I am a huge mmo(massively-multiplayer online) fan and had heard nothing but good things about Guild Wars. Many of my “hard-core gamer” friends enthusiastically recommended the game to me. However, I was sorely disappointed. The game boasted beautiful landscapes and great graphics. But when I played it, I was disappointed. Yes, it was significantly better aesthetically than the free mmo’s out there, but this was a major title game. I was hoping for that Holy Grail, inexpressible experience of the perfect game. You could give it the excuse that it was over hyped and was objectively decent looking, but excuses shouldn’t satisfy a true gamer. It was spectacularly unspectacular. I had come to expect a certain level of quality in graphics and artistic design for the game, and I was brutally disappointed. All of the figures and objects were blocky and awkward. Instead of pulling me in and immersing me in the game, the visual effects (yes, even the world and level design) only furthered my realization that I was playing a poorly rendered fantasy game.

As far as the combat system and game play goes, these aspects of the game frustrated me too. Guild Wars employed all the common elements of your typical mmorpg. You got stat points and skill points and equipment. You learned collected more skills, you completed quests, you grinded, different character classes excelled at different things, and you killed different monsters with different techniques depending who was good at what in your party. You even had to manage the red bar and blue bar (some sort of health and magic point displays). Even the experience bar was green. Don’t get me wrong, the game was not bad. The key though is that the game was not good. I did not live through the spectacular experience of the perfect game that I had hoped (and paid) for. A game title as popular and as hyped as that should be good. For the kind of cash you’ll have to shell out to play the full game between all the expansions (I bought all three) and additions that compliment one another, you expect way more than what's delivered. All in all, it was extremely repetitive and monotonous, especially in player-versus-environment. The player-versus-player served to add to the mix a little bit. However, humans quickly figure out what combinations of skills and players work well against other combinations of skills and players. After a little while, you start to realize your replaying the exact same battles over and over. The game should have had something to set it apart, make it unique, and make it unforgettable. Instead, I found it unforgivable. The little surprises that it was lacking left me felt wholly unsatisfied. In fact, I have never played such a cliché game.

Even the level design was standard. You had your desert area, your snow area, your plains area, and your swamp and forest area. Even the architecture featured a little bit from every continent. Perhaps that is what the designers were going for; Perhaps they wanted to take all the elements that have come to be common among the genre and incorporate them and wrap them up into an all-inclusive game. For me, that only served to make an all-inclusively common game. There was nothing special about it.

To me, the one good thing about it was the community of game players. I thoroughly enjoyed my dealings with all I encountered in the web community, in-game as well as out. There a great amount of interaction between players through fan sites as well as the game. Everyone was genuinely genial and helpful. Unfortunately, this saddened me to see such a huge and thriving community so involved in such a mediocre, standard game.

To me, this fact only serves to demonstrate the fact that the mmo community needs and deserves a truly perfect game (which I’m sure they would gladly compensate the developer for as well).

In conclusion, Guild Wars is a decently mediocre game which I would not recommend to anyone unless they must play an, at best, decently mediocre mmorpg at any cost. If I had to do it all over again, I would have looked elsewhere for my Holy Grail of games.