Guild Wars Weekend Preview Event

Guild Wars seems to be more complete now. If you choose to start at level 1, you begin in the tutorial stage, make your way to Ascalon City, do the Charr invasion missions, progress to the Ascalonian refugee missions, then the Kyrtian missions. That's about as far as I got. Story wise, it's quite interesting. If only they put in voice acting into the cinematics.

Guilds... I joined a guild. Quite fun. Although it's not too fun facing a party of level 20 players when your party is around level 10. There IS a difference between characters of different levels. I know I said before that there wasn't much, but there is. All classes gain 20 HP per level and 5 skill points per level. So you can imagine getting into a duel with a level 20 warrior who has maxed out their swordsmanship whilst you are a sword n00b. Not very pretty.

However, you can also create pre-made PvP characters which are level 20 (the max) with selected skills and items. Being PvP characters, they are restricted to these zones, and cannot take part in any story related stuff- which is quite a lot.

The interface has changed a fair bit. There's also more customization options for the characters. They also have commands, like in WoW, such as /dance. Rock on necros!

Doing the missions with your guild members is quite fun as they are less of a stranger to you in comparison to the other random players you can party up with. It would be even more fun to play with friends in the same timezone (for convinience), but SOMEONE couldn't be stuffed double clicking on gw.exe. Searching for an elusive N64 and a L permit was less of an effort apparently.

In the short amount of time I played WoW at a friend's place, Guild Wars shapes up quite nicely. The first several missions for WoW as orcs involved killing a set number of enemies- Prove your strength and kill this, a group of thingies threatens us so kill them, etc. I prefer the GW missions. However, make sure you have enough time set aside to complete the mission as sometimes it can be quite tedious to get past a certain point and then realise you have to quit and do something "more important".

To the MMORPGers out there, get Guild Wars when it comes out. You just have to goto the shops and buy the game. No monthly fees. My guess is that you need a cd key to play, so don't bother trying to scab the game off me or someone else, or download from BT.