Guild Wars
 

so, i've been seeing a lot of screenshots concerning a MMORPG called Guild Wars that you only pay for the game itself.. no monthly fees.

the screenshots look awesome.

any opinions?

Linky?

www.guildwars.com


It has potential. The developers are former blizzard employees so I wouldn't count it out. It might develop a strong following somewhat like Mythic. We'll have to wait until late next year to find out though.

a free MMORPG?

http://www.guildwars.com/gallery/scr...ges/gw004.html

Preeetty..... :D

Looks like it could be good, but along with never born I must say "free"!?

Looks more like you buy the game. After buying it you can play it online without paying monthly fees.

The game looks really good. Can't wait to see some more screenshots on it.

I understand they recently changed the name to ArenaNet. Still cheesy-sounding, but the game looks cool.

yeppers, free! buy the game, no monthly shit like evercrack!

-bounce-

i want it NOW. the graphics look purdy :D

http://www.guildwars.com/preview/default.html

There will be a "World Preview Event" starting on October 29th, click the link and you can download the installer, which lets you go ahead and download all the files for the game. You won't be able to play now, but you will be able to starting on October 29th, when it starts and registration opens.

Here's the system requirements:

System Specs:

Required System Specs:

* Windows XP/2000/ME/98
* 800 MHz Pentium III or equivalent
* 256 MB RAM
* ATI Radeon 8500 or GeForce 3 or 4 MX with 32MB of video memory
* 500 MB hard drive space
* Internet connection
* DirectX 8.0

Recommended System Specs:

* Windows XP/2000/ME/98
* Pentium III 1GHz or equivalent
* 512 MB RAM
* ATI Radeon 9000 or GeForce 4 Ti Series with 64MB of video memory
* 500 MB free hard drive space
* Internet connection

It's definitely work checking out during that preview period for any of you who haven't had the chance to play it before. I played it during the 3-4 day E3 preview event. It was incredible. No waiting or travelling to see your friends, just a simple click and you are teleported right into battle. The missions are fun, and it's extremely easy to form groups. Definitely excited to play this 2nd preview, to see how far they have come since E3.

Ill see you all on during the event unless im busy with bieng under someones skirt

Cheezy name or not,

That speaks for itself, lol. As far as the game goes I'll see you guys in the WPE, heh.

looks pretty cool. Definetly a plus that its by key members of blizzard and that you dont have to pay monthly for it. i think i will have to check thsi game out.

The game really looks good to me. I have a buddy though who played a beta version of it I think and he said it sucks horribly. Being free is nice but I finally caved in and got Final Fantasy XI this past summer and I can say it's worth every monthly fee and more. The game is magical. If anyone knows differently of Guild Wars though I'd be interested since I don't have any first hand experience with it.

The World Preview Event has started 1 day early, meaning you can sign up now. Go to the GuildWars webpage, download the installer, run the game, create an account, create a character, then it will start to download the rest of the files, then you're free to play. You might want to hurry up, just in case registration is limited.

I also played the previous preview event, and I thought it was pretty poor. I suppose that's just a matter of taste.

OMG does this suck. It's like a MMO version of Diablo. no depth to it, craptastic graphics, lots of lag, and you have to download new files everytime you change areas? Playing it with friends at the moment, but this game needs some serious reworking.

after playing for 30 minutes, man this game blows. sorry guildwars, but you aren't any fun. back to WoW :)

The reason for the files being downloading everytime you change zones is because the file you downloaded to install was only 62kb. Instead of making you download the entire game, you only have to download the files you're going to use.

I agree though, this game sucks. It's a little better then it was during the E3 for Everyone event, but it still blows honkey. I can't stand the whole "massive amounts of instancing" bullshit. Everything but the towns and some areas before dungeons are instanced. That is just dumb. So much for a cool persistant world. This shouldn't even be called an MMORPG, because if it is, then Diablo II is. You said it well Irishsean when you called it a Diablo II MMO. It IS Diablo II, except you can mate classes, and the chat rooms are 3d!

I shit on you Guild Wars and hope you find a way to make this game not suck massive amounts of cock and balls, because bitches are for fucking.

Only played for a little while, but I think I'll already delete this. Very disappointing.

Hmm, I've played a few hours and seem to enjoy it. It is fairly strange that there are no people around, but it makes it seem more realistic. Don't think you'd often find a couple hundred or more adventurers in the same place. I'm gonna go play some more, heh.

You people seem to call it just another Diablo like it was a bad thing. Not that I liked D2 much, but thousands of other people did, and played it for years.

Meh, everyone's complaining about the lack of people.

"Rather than labeling Guild Wars an MMORPG, we prefer to call it a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game)." That'd explain a lot...

They also intentionally made it less hardcore and more arcade style to differ from the other MMORPGs out there.

You just have to read a bit to see what they were trying to accomplish instead of saying it sucks because it's not the type of game you expected. It'd be interesting to here some logical explanations of why it "sucks", heh.

However it would be nice to wander around a bit on your own, find a party and join up with them...

Alright, unlike the rest of you I simply love it.

First off since when you go on a mission only YOUR party is there, you dont' have people stealing your kills left and right and it also makes you choose your party wisely.. as again if you get screwed.. no one can kill steal and subsequently save your life. Also you dont' have to worry that much about people hoarding monsters and then run past you... that shit is just annoying, but now if it happens its merely a team member that should no longer be a part of your party.

The graphics? First off you're playing a ROLE PLAYING GAME. Graphics are not everything, and futher more they're not too shabby if you have a good gfx card.. At least thats what it would lead me to believe as they look fine to me.

Others have complained about no one being on. I have NO clue where you get that from. They have towns in the form of Districts. So essentially there is only one server for purposes of where characters can play on, but they're like servers in terms of holding people. This means everyone can play with everyone no matter what district they gained their levels in. Oh yeah, back to the "no people" part. There are many districts that are FULL.. I don't know how many fill a district but I know I've run into at least 80-100 people on every district I've been on. It doesn't look empty by any means but very full and flourishing.

Co-Op.. thats only when you're doing the Co-Op missions. Its a huge storyline there. For those of you that say no plot.. you haven't looked at the Co-Op missions. Each one has been taking no less than an hour to complete, and thats with a full party. There are other areas where you can just wander the entire lands with a party, but its not used as much as the Co-Op area during this event because the space is a lot smaller when you have all these Co-Op stories to go through.

Also you can't forget about the namesake.. Guild WARS. The PvP is simply awesome. I'm a guy who usually doesn't get into PvP, but it was very well done in this game. I've spent countless hours just doing PvP. Besides every MMO person I've ever met said that for the game to be good its gotta have PvP. I've never seen a lot of storyline in PvP, yet thats all the majority of MMO's like to do. Guild Wars has that, and excells in it. There's a tournyment PvP where you can have a Party of 8 and you'll be fighting 3 other parties of 8. I've been there before and it was intense.

I'd go back to it right now, but its 8 am and I should have gone to bed a lot sooner. ;)

I'm glad someone else likes it. The PvP system is simply amazing, Was playing the 8vs8 in the Arena yesterday, got wiped out every match. Ranger gets increasingly harder to use with that many people. It was a lot easier with 4vs4, where I didn't have to worry about getting rushed by warriors.

The districts thing is pretty cool, makes areas populated, but now with too many people. It wouldn't be too hard to find people either, message them and tell them to meet in a certain area and district.

I was exploring in some of the explorable areas yesterday and found it pretty cool as little quests would pop up and give you something to do as well.

Now finding a good party where everyone doesn't rush and get everyone else killed is a little harder to do, but it's not so bad since you don't lose any experience when you die. I think you do lose money when you die though...

Anyways, this is a beta, so the final release is bound to be different. I'm seriously considering getting this game, not sure if it's worth it to get the Pre-Release though...

I'm enjoying it.

The only real problems I have with it is the messed up economics where you get hardly any gold and everything is real cheap, not to mention it's damn near impossible to buy new armour. But I'm guessing that's just something that's being worked on.

The Co-op missions are fun as hell. Although I'm up to the River province one where you have to get to a temple while avoiding the guards, one of my party members got spotted and we were all slaughtered.

Personally, I'd rather play 15 dollars a month for decent support and service. With no monthly fees, the game is just going to become a financial burden for the company.

I can't see it being much worse than the battle.net servers...

I have to agree with thriolith here. Guild Wars is going to run into some disatisifed customers because it's marketed as a "free MMORPG." This is simply not the case. Personally, I really enjoy the game, but it is NOT a MMORPG. I think of it as a better Diablo 2. Call it Diablo 2 1/2, or even 3. For all of you MMORPG fans out there looking for something new, go get World of Warcraft. For people who like or used to like Diablo 2, give this game a try. I think you'll like it.

i loved it. I will preorder it so that i can play on the weekends till it comes out because they are allowing people who preorder it to beta test on the weekends till it comes out. It has been a huge improvement to the e3 version i played. yay.

I could see it being fun if they were just gonna go the battle.net route with it. But they are planning on expansion packs every 2-3 months, and that is gonna get way expensive for a game just used to piss away time while a real games servers are down.

I'm pretty sure this game isn't your typical mmorpg.

I played this this weekend, and it seemed really interesting. I really like the idea of a staging area before missions that everyone did. I had no issues finding groups or people to play with. I'm not sure how long it would keep me interesting, but I'm thinking this might be something to look at.. anyone have any ideas if it will be a pay per month thing?

I'll answer my own question for those interested:

When will Guild Wars be released?


The beta begins in October. We will take as much time as necessary to balance and polish the game based on feedback received during the beta period, and anticipate that we will release Guild Wars by early 2005.
How much will Guild Wars cost?


Guild Wars will be priced at a comparable cost to other first tier PC games.
Will there be a monthly fee for Guild Wars?


No, there will not be a monthly subscription fee of any kind, anywhere in the world.

Bringing this thread back... my friend showed me the Beta test version of Guild Wars and damn, it's a pretty game. It's an MMO you don't have to pay monthly for (+props) and it's right at that $50 average game cost.

If you're in the Beta already, type in /dance ;)

GameStop release date is March 22...

Meh, I was in the first preview event and I wasn't impressed. Sure it had nice graphics and all, but the combat was just too slow for me.

Everyone thinks Guild Wars is so awesome because there's no monthly fee. What those people don't want to recognize is the fact that the expansions (some media say that there will be 2-4 per year) will be $20 or $30 each. There ya go...there's your monthly fee.

I played the beta and was supremely disgusted. The game felt incredibly awkward.

-Lasereth

Dude, you don't "have" to buy the expansions. You were supremely disgusted with what part of the game? what part felt incredibly awkward?

I can tell by some of your responses that you've been judging the game without really giving it a chance. And still, no one really wants to back up their beliefs on why it's a bad game.

Anyways, the game isn't marketed as a free MMORPG, that's just a plus.

If you can call it that.

Personally I wouldn't. It's more like a nextgen Diablo.

I've been looking into Guild Wars lately and am loving what I'm seeing. I've been on a three week hiatus from WoW and for the past week been trying to get back into the game... I can't, it feels too much of a chore.

I think I'm finally gonna put WoW down and pick this one up come April 28th, sure the no monthly fee tag is enticing but what draws me to the game is it's art direction, though not as good as WoW's it still harbors some fantastic visuals. And after watching the opening cinematic on gametrailers.com I got a bit pumped.

I know quite a few WoW vets who are turning their back on the game for GW, mainly because they've hit 60 for a while and found the game to get boring. Looking forward to GW!