Saturday, March 25, 2006

Now Playing: Guild Wars

It's called boredom. Not boredom with Guild Wars, but boredom with other games I'm playing. Battlefield 2 is great, but it seems every month I have fewer friends to play with. EVE Online is great and I love it! However, I don't have the time to get anything out of it currently. I am paying for my account, but that’s just to ensure I am training skills.

So I reinstalled Guild Wars a couple of days ago. I spent about two hours starting up my new Monk/Mesmer, named "Column I". I seem to be shifting towards using the name Column as my avatar names more and more in MMORPGs. I already have a level 17 Warrior/Necromancer named "Heartless Foe" in Guild Wars.

With "Column I" I've been focusing on completing every quest available in the tutorial area of pre-searing Ascalon. This is something I never did with my original characters so it is a treat to discover some of the missed items.

So far I haven't noticed any dramatic changes. The same clunky movement is in game and is still my biggest gripe. I am just a stickler for fluid and graceful movement which is something I don't see Guild Wars ever having. It's just very jerky and flat out warpy sometimes. This doesn't ruin the game experience, but when you pick the game up after a few months off it takes a bit to get used to again.

The biggest changes revolve around the graphics, but this is nothing Arena Net did. It is my new computer. I can run the game at MAX settings at a widescreen resolution. The game is much better looking and the extra screen space changes the UI a lot. I can put loads of things off to the side and still have a 17" screen area in the center clear of everything except my hotkeys and group window. This adds a lot to games and I can't ever imagine gaming without a widescreen monitor ever again!

I also got about 45 minutes to fire up the Guild Wars : Factions preview that was occurring this weekend. I started with a pre-made level 20 PvP character nicknamed a "Shadow blade". The shadow blade is a Warrior/Assassin combo with the Assassin being one of the new classes available in the upcoming GW:Factions expansion.

Sadly though, I didn't make it far into the Factions content. I did the first few quests that teach you about the various arena battle types; annihilation, priest annihilation, obelisks, etc. Then I got stuck on the "Defeat 5 enemy teams" part before having to log.

Hopefully I will get more time to experience the Factions event before it closes down. I suspect I will buy factions because of the territorial PvP concept and the fact there is no monthly fee. I like Guild Wars enough to play it for a week straight every few months, but not enough to be in a competitive guild for GW.

Update: 15 Nov, 2009 - Edited spelling, applied label, and removed broken images.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:02 AM

    you can keep going on the "defeat 5 enemy teams" thing without the faction preview event btw.

    a couple months ago during the first factoin preview, they let you into the battle isles and that changed stuff around and the pvp aspect seems to be seperating from PvE.

    making any pvp cahracter takes you to the battle isles and lets you participate in the first leraning tutorial of pvp. you can also get there through Lion's Arch with a pve character by boat (look ath your map for help)

    hope this helps clear stuff up

    ReplyDelete
  2. I realize that now... been away from GW too long :P

    ReplyDelete

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