If anybody 's tired of this horrid world torn by wars, crazy dictators in white houses, if one is looking for an imaginary world to replace the surroundings, the upcoming title GUILD WARS (GW) looks very promising =)
Finally I was able to join the beta weekend event, a monthly occurrence designated to iron out the bugs from the game before it hits the shelves…
what's the most attractive about GW is the fact that despite being a FMMORPG (“F” stands for fantastic, the rest: look it up…) the game will NOT require monthly fees, like for example the cartoonish behemoth called World of Warcraft.
In GW, the graphics and sound track are simply astounding… The beginnings put a player in the lush and succulent meadows of a medieval-like castle-village-river-mountain area filled with magic and runaway hogs… The immersion is SO complete and realistic that my cat would start hissing in horror every time a wolf would howl in the background in the game =) The beauty of vertex and pixel shaders summing up to quite a load of video-post-processing make the visuals so beautiful that its almost sickening… At the same time my antiquated GEFORCE 5600 was handling everything without as much as one hiccup…
one can almost feel the scent of golden wheat ready for harvest in the air… a pleasant change from the radioactive meadows glowing under the moonlight or sunlight in the WoW…
The clever instancing of GW areas makes them beautifully un-crowded (unlike WoW, where dozens of players follow me, and wait for a monster I just killed to respawn so they could complete the same quest I just have. Not unheard of to see a monster I just killed respawn and attack me on my way back to town also…) The idea behind GW is to give you a quest AND a personalized map that you can choose to explore completely on your own, or with a select party of other online MMORPG junkies. The monsters you kill in a personalized area STAY DEAD… Party gatherings can be accomplished at the common areas which are sort of trading and crafting posts and entry/exit points into the personalized areas…
Altogether, even though the world is not as seamless as WoW, to indicate the transition from a common to personalized area, GW's world does not disappoint with story-line focus, scope, attention to detail and variety of lands, friends and foes. Plus, just when one least expects it, the world almost instantaneously changes into the total opposite of the beauty encountered before. The action mysteriously picks up, and the realism and immersion become even more addictive… The world one learned to explore for several character's levels, has to be learned and explored from the beginning as NO stone is left in place after the eruption of evil… BUAHAHAHHAHAA…
Unlike “hide and seek” that I just went to see in the theatre… GW will be brilliant upon its release to the public (before the end of April. )
Awaiting the next Beta event of GW in march, however I will have to continue fighting the horrendous UI of WoW, where the characters are too stupid to automatically turn when the enemy is behind them, or to queue up several spells, or to remember to continue shooting arrows into a target because after one initial targeting mouse click I might change my mind… Yes, let me emphasize that again: WoW is a cartoonish click fest, not without its charms, but not without a lot of cumbersome clunkiness either. GW rocks as it truly has the potential tor revolutionize the online gaming…
ah, did I mention the semi-scripted missions that robustly drive the plot forward ?
~shpakoo