A Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game published by NCsoft and released in April of 2005. There is much that Guild Wars has in common with other MMORPGs such as Diablo II, World of Warcraft, Everquest, Asheron's Call, and all the rest. Like those games, it is set in a fantasy world in which one's character can perform quests, kill monsters, duel with other players, gain XP and levels, and acquire more and more powerful armour, weapons, and magic items. Characters choose classes -- which resemble the classes in pretty much every fantasy RPG and CRPG in the world -- and the appearance of the characters can be customized as well.

However, a number of things make Guild Wars unusual in the crowded MMORPG market.

• Guild Wars has no subscription fees. Once you buy the game, you can play it forever. NCsoft intends to make its profits by selling expansions for the game rather than by gouging its players month after month. They claim that the expansions will not give an unfair advantage to the people who spend the extra money; the expansions will simply add a wider range of options for player classes and races. Whether this is a workable model remains to be seen; I find it hard to imagine an expansion which would be worth getting if it doesn't give the player advantages of some sort. But perhaps, with some very clever design, variety can be added without messing up game balance.
• The artwork in Guild Wars is uniquely gorgeous. Where World of Warcraft opted for a cartoonish feel (one that was well-suited to the world), Guild Wars aimed for something more elegant. The mesmers are attired in Victorian eveningwear; the necromancers don goth regalia complete with fishnet gloves and thigh-high boots. Though many of today's MMORPGs have stunning landscapes and backdrops, this is the first I've seen where the characters are truly beautiful.
• Wilderness areas in GW are "instanced." That is to say, when a party leaves town to take part in a mission, a version of the world is created just for that party, and they will not meet anyone else as they explore and adventure. Towns serve as "lobbies" where people can gather, chat, and form adventuring parties.
  Some players find GW's instancing to be depressing and lonely. In World of Warcraft, the entire world is populated by everyone all the time, and one never knows whom one is going to meet when one is travelling. I happen to like the instancing, since I'm a misanthrope and generally have no interest in meeting random groups of players. NCsoft justified their decision to design the game this way by saying it eliminates irritating behaviours like spawn camping and kill stealing.
• NCsoft claims that "Success in Guild Wars is always the result of player skill, not time spent playing or the size of one's guild." Many players of MMORPGs are tired of being trounced by teenage nerds who spend seventeen hours a day playing out of their parents' basements and acquiring killer gear. Guild Wars aims to reward skill and talent rather than hours invested. I am very curious to see whether they will actually manage to meet this ideal; the game is still young, and teenage nerds are notoriously resourceful.
• The world is not divided into servers or shards, meaning that players do not need to make extraordinary efforts to find one another, as they do on Everquest or WoW. Any player anywhere on the planet can find her friends simply by meeting up in a town.
• Though there are only six classes for now (more are promised in future expansions), each character can choose a secondary class, allowing for some interesting combinations of skills. For various reasons a (e.g.) Warrior/Monk is different from a Monk/Warrior, and various Warrior/Monks are going to differ from each other thanks to their choice of skills.
• You can undo almost any choice you make in your character's development. If you don't like the way you've allotted your skill points, you can remove them and reassign them with only a minor XP penalty. This is dramatically different from games like Diablo II, where you are stuck forever and ever with the skills you picked in previous level gains. In Guild Wars, you can experiment with your character as much as you like within the basic bounds of her class.
• Your character stars in all the cutscenes! I've never seen a game do this before, and it's very fun to watch.

I like Guild Wars a lot, but the game does have some flaws.

• It is stingy about where it lets you move. While World of Warcraft allows the characters to jump, fly, ride mounts, and scale mountains, Guild Wars has set "paths" through the wilderness that you are forced to use. This can be frustrating for the character who is trying to find an item or an NPC, and it feels like a waste of so much fantastic landscape.
• A lot of people dislike the way that Guild Wars only allows characters to have eight abilities on their skill bar at any one time. (Skills can only be swapped out in towns: once you enter the wilderness, you must keep your chosen skills until you enter another town.) I think I see the logic of it: it is a way to reward creativity and clever gameplay rather than giving all the advantages to the person who has amassed hundreds of skills and who can unload them all in every encounter. Still, eight can be a suffocating number, and there's nothing more annoying than getting halfway through a mission and then discovering that every monster you meet is immune to the poison skill you wasted one of your slots equipping.
• The newbie zone, which is set in the city of Ascalon before the apocalyptic event known as the Searing, serves as a nice tutorial, and it allows people to learn how to play without suffering the penalties of failure that occur later in the game. However, the newbie zone only allows people to ally in groups of two, which is very frustrating. I play MMORPGs so that I can hang out with my friends, and if I'm introducing 2 friends to the game, I don't want to have to play with only one of them at a time.
• I really like the way this game deals with armour -- in theory. Rather than assuming that a slender 5'4" woman can slip into the greaves that were worn by the immense orc grawl she just slaughtered, the game insists that she salvage each piece of armour she finds and then use the leather, cloth, metal, or other raw materials to make armour to fit her. Unfortunately, in practice it means that all the armour for a given class looks more or less the same. Players can dye their armour various colours -- and dyes are one of the most desirable items in the game -- but more styles and more kinds of customization are needed so that characters can feel like real individuals.

Overall, I think that Guild Wars is a fine game. Its lack of a monthly fee and its attempt to reward intelligence and creativity rather than obsessiveness means that no-one has to feel compelled to play it for hours every day in order to get his "money's worth". The gameplay is fun, the quests are entertaining, and the world is simply huge. And finally, as I keep saying, Guild Wars is stunning to look at. I don't think there's any other game in which I've taken so many screenshots to show my friends.

http://www.guildwars.com