I played the whole 3 days of Guild Wars... That was so cool! Kinda satisfyied my thirst for computer gaming for a while
It was kinda complicated at first but still, it was pretty simple to learn. The nicest thing about the game is the fact that they removed every "time-sinking" things. On the other hand, the fact that everything is more or less quick to reach takes out the charm of the RPG because it doesn't immerge you into your character and you give less importance to your actions, contrarly to EQ. BUT, in GW, you don't lose your items, and you don't lose experience, as far as I know (Levels were locked so I can't really tell). When you die, if you are in a solo mission, you respawn at a shrine somewhere more or less nearby with all your gears on. If you die in a mission quest, depending on which, you'll either have to wait until someone ressurects you or that the "priest" in competitive missions ressurects you (NPC). The only thing you lose from dying as far as I am aware of is healthyness: You have a -15% penatly (on your hitpoints, mana and something else..) every time you die and you can regain it (1 or 2% at a time) by killing creatures.
GW has a very unique gameplay and is a one of a kind MMORPG (as far as I am aware of) because the cooncept seems different from most MMORPGs. It's hard to explain... You would've needed to play to see it.
It's pretty fun that you can choose to solo, group VS monsters or group VS players. Lots of different kinds of competitions and quests. By the way, as far as I saw, all missions looked like "go kill somebody" or "protect this NPC" missions... But unlike Diablo or Diablo 2, there is much more interaction with NPCs: Sometimes you have a Prince to protect and he asks you to join him in freeing the northern wall from some evil creatures, some mulitplayer missions give you the chance to make a mage join you or a "Ghostly Hero" (NPCs...) in a competition.. Bla bla bla...
The loot management may look great but has some down sides too: The fact that loot is awarded by following a certain order of people makes so that sometimes a player will have the item that you were looking for and will try to trade it to you (which isn't cool). But at least it keeps ninjas from getting it all
Amazingly, on the first day of Alpha testing, there was already an economy going on... *laughs* Too funny... And people were fierce (is that the word?) traders... Which is kinda ridiculous in my opinion cuz they'd lose everything in the end after 3 days... hahaha
There seems to be some kind of guild magement or whatever... Which is cool... don't really know, it wasn't enabled in the demo.
In overall the E3 experience was very fun. My first fear is that the game was a bit repetitive but then again, it was just a very restricted demo... So there is much more to it that I could know of... But I still fear that it'd just be a bigger environment that you get bored of after you've seen it all 100 times. For exemple: There was a 4v4 (PvP style) competition in an arena in which you couldn't choose your team... I did like 10+ matches with crappy teams (because the mix of the 4 of us wasn,t great) and then finally I got a nice team, and we owned everyone (when we won, the game kept us teamed and made us confront a new team)... OWNED BIG TIME. We did 37 matches in a row and won them all. Matches lasted somewhere from 40 seconds (haha, that was funny) to 120 seconds (they were good). So after about 1 hour of doing these matchups, the 4 of my team were getting bored, and we continued for another hour and finally gave up cuz it was too repetitive. That happend on the 3rd and last day of the E3. And Honestly, if there'd have been more days to the E3, I would have never felt the need of going back to that arena because I was majorly sick of it. So I came to think that the same thing could happen with every part of GW because they are all follow the more or less repetitive scheme.
My point is: unlike EQ, there is a "goal" in the game... a path to follow, meaning less liberty and less expectations from it. So I'm thinking that maybe after you've "won the game" by finishing all missions (solo and cooperative) you cuold get bored pretty fast. But then again, it's not a very credible comment because nobody has tryied the full game yet.
It was my quick review of the GW testing... Considering that we've only seen a small part of it, I'd say it's a nice game cuz anyway there's no monthly fee so... You wouldn't have to pay to play; buy it once, play whenever you like, leave and come back. Oh... and I love the fact that it covers the PvP and the PvM and the Soloing angles, and splits them. That way when you go in one or the other area, you know that everybody is there looking for the same thing (towards other players I mean).[/img]