Guild Wars etc

I had the opportunity to get a copy of Guild Wars for $10 after TG over at Best Buy. I did NOT go to their Midnight Madness sale (you know, where you have to go over there at midnight to get in line for the 4 am opening).

(This year I went to Office Depot, arriving at 5.30 for the 6am opening, 25 people ahead of me, where I was able to get a 24" LCD monitor, 1900x1200, for $280--oh is that nice. One bad pixel, stuck on green.)

After Office Depot, I went to BB to see how things looked, and saw that they had GW for $10, but the checkout line was at least 200 people long, so I went home. Later in the afternoon I went back and bought it. The installer was reasonably fast, but of course the first thing it wanted to do was 600 MB of updates. Hope my ISP doesn't object to these massive downloads...in under a week I've already had two more software updates downloaded, too. (This is just the original game, GOTY edition, but no expansions.)

So what's GW like? Well, it doesn't have a monthly charge, which works for me. Entropia didn't either, but it did have a business model aimed at making money for the developers, and the game was nearly opaque. GW doesn't have a business model like that at all--you buy the game, you play until ArenaNet/NCSoft shuts it all down in a few years (which you know they will at some point).

GW is Dungeon Siege 2 as MMO, only not as well done. Like Oblivion, the "Economy" isn't very interesting...not much you can spend money on that is worth spending money on. You battle monsters, they drop loot, you can't carry much so you have to leave things on the ground as you travel, because you can't run back to town and sell--that results in the monsters all being respawned. At least with DS2, you could run back and sell, and most of the monsters would not have respawned. In DS 1 there was no respawning at all, so it was easy to run back to sell, and there were probably things worth buying.

There's the "Crafting" opportunities, but they aren't that interesting, although that was how I got better armor-rating clothes.

DS 2 had better visuals overall, and better looking characters (although not equivalently customizable, but really, how valuable is that?) and gear.

That said, GW is pretty dang nice at 1900x1200. And it does run, unlike a couple of other recent games (FEAR and Bioshock). You don't get a larger field of view (what I would have liked), but you get a lot of extra space to push subwindows (like inventory, tasks) off into.

I've been playing for a few days, and am at level 10. You can get to level 7 by yourself, without much trouble (I did get killed and resurrected a couple of times). GW gives you a little more camera control than DS 1 or 2, but that doesn't amount to much other than being able to look uphill. Sometimes I found myself with the camera aimed somewhere and I couldn't see what was going on at all.

GW has a lot more going on in terms of tasks/quests you can do, but they all have the flaw of "Mr X asks you to do Y, and it's far away, and when you're done you have to go back to Mr X to get the reward" -- which can get tiresome. You can do a partial "fast travel" in GW, but Morrowind had the best deal there. Not all places can be fast-traveled to, and if you have to go the Location A twice, you will have to whack the same monsters each time. Well, that's ok if you are getting more XP each time, but eventually that stops, you are level-wise too far above creature Z but you still have to kill it. The 10th or 15th time you have to whack the same bunch of monsters is is REALLY old.

It's a lot less clear about your weapon damage and armor rating than DS 1|2. I really don't know what I have.

One interesting thing: in the opening "campaign" (i.e., "pre-searing"), the opponents are fairly stupid and work alone. "Post-searing", the opponents work together, and seem to be grouped in small squads, and if there's a cluster of sorts, when one is attacked the others all run over to help. Your 'bot henchmen are fairly weak, tho, I seem to always get Level 3 teammates, altho my "pet" is close behind me. (OK, this seems location specific, if I select teammates in Piken Square, they are level 6, but in Ascalon City they are level 3; you get to Yak's Bend and they are level 8, so presumably that continues to rise further through the game--but those levels are not sufficient to get you through the game).

Possibly the worst aspect of the game: if you get wiped out a couple of times, you have to go back to town to get a recharge, because your max health has been reduced, then you have to go back through all the same areas you already went through, kill the same monsters again, etc. If you have to do this a couple of times, you get sloppy and in too big a hurry and get wiped out again. My tolerance for this "do it all over again" routine is not too high.

And also weird: I seem to have found myself repeating a couple of missions. No idea why. I'm not objecting to the XP, but I'm beyond where the kills get my anything...I'd have thought that once done, formal missions could not be repeated. It turns out that most have "secondary missions" for 1000 XP, but you can't always go back to do them. You can if you restart the mission and had not received the secondary mission before; I was successful at that once, and not successful another time (turned out I had received the mission, and the NPC who gave it was gone the 2nd time). And you really have to be careful about picking up something a mission target might drop. Twice I've had to go back and redo a mission because I forgot to grab the item.


Visually there are some problems: The worst, I think, is that there are clipping issues. You can run right through other people or monsters, which means that you can't really play this in first-person view, because you might standing at the same ground x/y as the monster--or at least close enough for it to not be visible, then you don't know what you are swinging your sword at. And then you can't see your weapon either, so you don't really know where you're aiming. This would be relatively easily solved by having all characters have the equivalent stand-off distance as inanimate objects force on you to go around. It's really hard to select a target to hit when you are inside its 3D model and can't see it.

When you are on ground where the elevation varies a lot (or on a big monitor), you can all too easily see how the texture images for the rectangular segments get stretched. It'd be nice if they were more jpeg-ish, where they could scale better. Or to have more detailed textures for use on bigger monitors. Kinda like the port of Quake 1 into the Quake 2 engine, where the textures got doubled in resolution. Or you need to show a lot wider field of view.


and of course the bots run on Artificial Stupidity, just like everywhere else. Dungeon Siege did that better too--they'd do what I told them to do with less tendency to run into fights.



(only slightly related: Google for "Artificial Stupidity" -- some of the results are pretty funny)