Many years ago I started playing MMOs, I started out playing a couple of pay to play MMOs with a friend. Soon afterwards I came across GuildWars. Unfortunately at that time I was still new to the whole MMO world and I let myself be influenced by other people's opinions. People were saying that you cannot have a good MMO without a subscription. Some were saying that GuildWars is not even a really MMO because it is all instanced. Basically I let others convince me that GuildWars was a cheap MMO with some serious limitations so when I checked out a few screenshots I got the impression that guild wars seemed to be a game mostly about PvP and just a little PvE content thrown. I am mostly a PvE person so I just moved on. BAD MISTAKE.
Some time later I was hearing about GuildWars on the news so I decided to give the demo a try, people were still talking about it so I said there must be something to this game. Unfortunately I had an unforeseen busy couple of weeks after I started my account and I really didn't play the demo much until my 14days expired. In the few hours I played the only thing I got was how desolate GuildWars seemed to be so and this just reinforced my bad impression. For the second time I moved on, Second Bad Mistake!
Time went by and now news on GuildWars 2 started coming out. I was reading about what Arenanet were planning for GuildWars 2 and some of the ideas were just amazing! I have played a lot of MMOs both Pay to Play and Free to Play. I have long since learned that the notion of any MMO that doesn't have a subscription is inherently inferior is completely wrong. Though there are many amazing MMOs out there and many are really enjoyable they all have a few immersion breaking compromises. Monsters re-spawning out of nowhere soon after being killed. Everyone getting the same quest over and over again, etc... And GuildWars 2 was promising a new breed of MMO that would actually go around these limitations. What they were proposing was simply put out of this world.
Now on one hand I had this news that was promising a close to perfect MMO with features never before heard of in any online game and on the other hand I had my bad impression of GuildWars, the two conflicted. In my mind it was either that GuildWars 2 was being overhypted or I was seriously wrong about GuildWars because there was no way a development team would go from a basic game like my bad impression of GuildWars stated to MMO perfection. What Arenanet was promising for GuildWars 2 was so amazing that I just could not risk it so I immediately ordered GuildWars to find out once and for all. Finally I had the one good Idea and what even more important I acted on it.
Simply put I had a bad impression of GuildWars on all counts. GuildWars was already an Amazing MMO with some really good ideas and for years I missed the longed for experience. What I thought were limitations were in fact good design Ideas. Yes most of GuildWars is instanced but that allows for some unique quests and while in the instance whatever dies stays dead (except players). GuildWars has a level cap of 20 but that's not because it lacks content, in fact it has a huge amount of content, but because GuildWars has an incredible balanced system.
With this blog I hope to explain what makes GuildWars an amazing MMO and how this will be taken to the next level in GuildWars 2. Hopefully if there is someone skeptic about this amazing game, they will come across this blog and s/he will see the richness of the story, game mechanics and the amazing variety GuildWars provides. Knowing all this there is not doubt Arenanet will deliver an amazing experience with their next installment in the GuildWars universe but until then GuildWars is still an amazing alternative.
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