Guild Wars Review time
Guild Wars Review!
In all honesty, I really tried to like this game. This is a game Shawn rants and raves about all the time - how great the graphics are, how the gameplay is great, and how its free to play online. I went into this with very high expectations, I was excited to try something new. However... lets just say they were not exactly met.Don't take this the wrong way Shawn, you like the game and I get that, but this is how the experience went for me:
First off, when you begin the game you are given no introduction.. no sort of storyline to tell you what the hell is going on. You just appear in some 'market place' and have to figure out things on your own. My first immediate thought was, WOW, the graphics in this game are TERRIBLE! What was Shawn talking about! I came to find out later that they "turn down" the graphics there to reduce lag..or something.. but it's just not a great first impression for a new person to the game to experience.
Okay, with that all sorted out I had to figure out where to get quests from. In WoW it's very obvious - if you see a giant yellow exclimation mark over someones head, they want to talk to you about something. Their names are above their head so you can clearly see who you're talking to. In GW, I found it hard to pick out who was an NPC, and who was a regular player. I had to click on everyone until I found someone with a green circle around their feet.. i guess that's how you know they give out a quest, I don't know. Their names are also not as obvious.. they appear below their feet. There is also no icon when you mouse over them to show that you are able to chat with them.
I had great difficulty turning quests in for the same reason, no yellow question mark appeared over the persons head to show that I had to turn something in, and there was no marker on my map (no mini map by the way, just a giant awkward map you have to click and drag on to move it around on you screen) to show that I had to turn something in in that town.
The movement system is such a drastic change from WoW, EQ and even black and white.. that i found it really hard to move around and navigate. I would try to click on a character to select them, and if I clicked the ground by accident green arrows shot up from the ground and i moved to that position. Not what I had expected, but ok. There was a large awkward party box to the right of the screen, which took up a good chunk of my screen (is that really necessary?), and every place i visited was so dark i couldn't make out what I was looking at. When I did get to an interesting place, I was bombarded with what looked like little blue msn icons just floating around the room.. which is really confusing. If I wanted to know how many people were in a group, i would ask them, but having those things floating around is really distracting.
One last thing that absolutely drove me up the wall was the way we battled monsters. Every time someone attacked something, a message would pop up saying, "Shawn the pwn star attacks [insert monster here]". Picture having a group pf 8 people attacking stuff and you will understand what I am talking about here. What's the point of telling me something like that 17 times? What do they want, a cookie?
There were a few cool things, the dance moves were cool, I liked being able to click on a town to teleport there, and I enjoyed having the ability to choose my armor colors.. other than that, having played it for a few hrs.. I would not pick this game up.
In all honesty, I really tried to like this game. This is a game Shawn rants and raves about all the time - how great the graphics are, how the gameplay is great, and how its free to play online. I went into this with very high expectations, I was excited to try something new. However... lets just say they were not exactly met.Don't take this the wrong way Shawn, you like the game and I get that, but this is how the experience went for me:
First off, when you begin the game you are given no introduction.. no sort of storyline to tell you what the hell is going on. You just appear in some 'market place' and have to figure out things on your own. My first immediate thought was, WOW, the graphics in this game are TERRIBLE! What was Shawn talking about! I came to find out later that they "turn down" the graphics there to reduce lag..or something.. but it's just not a great first impression for a new person to the game to experience.
Okay, with that all sorted out I had to figure out where to get quests from. In WoW it's very obvious - if you see a giant yellow exclimation mark over someones head, they want to talk to you about something. Their names are above their head so you can clearly see who you're talking to. In GW, I found it hard to pick out who was an NPC, and who was a regular player. I had to click on everyone until I found someone with a green circle around their feet.. i guess that's how you know they give out a quest, I don't know. Their names are also not as obvious.. they appear below their feet. There is also no icon when you mouse over them to show that you are able to chat with them.
I had great difficulty turning quests in for the same reason, no yellow question mark appeared over the persons head to show that I had to turn something in, and there was no marker on my map (no mini map by the way, just a giant awkward map you have to click and drag on to move it around on you screen) to show that I had to turn something in in that town.
The movement system is such a drastic change from WoW, EQ and even black and white.. that i found it really hard to move around and navigate. I would try to click on a character to select them, and if I clicked the ground by accident green arrows shot up from the ground and i moved to that position. Not what I had expected, but ok. There was a large awkward party box to the right of the screen, which took up a good chunk of my screen (is that really necessary?), and every place i visited was so dark i couldn't make out what I was looking at. When I did get to an interesting place, I was bombarded with what looked like little blue msn icons just floating around the room.. which is really confusing. If I wanted to know how many people were in a group, i would ask them, but having those things floating around is really distracting.
One last thing that absolutely drove me up the wall was the way we battled monsters. Every time someone attacked something, a message would pop up saying, "Shawn the pwn star attacks [insert monster here]". Picture having a group pf 8 people attacking stuff and you will understand what I am talking about here. What's the point of telling me something like that 17 times? What do they want, a cookie?
There were a few cool things, the dance moves were cool, I liked being able to click on a town to teleport there, and I enjoyed having the ability to choose my armor colors.. other than that, having played it for a few hrs.. I would not pick this game up.