Guild Wars: A new Kind of MMORPG

By Jonathan Berohn

The hard core gaming set is always looking for something new. Whenever a new promising game comes out, gamers are usually willing to plunk down a few bucks to check it out.  Gamers are also very quick to separate the successful game from the pretender.  That's how games like Diablo II still boast huge followings 3 years after their release while other titles like Dungeon Siege quickly fade into obscurity.  The makers of Guild Wars are counting on landing their new game in the former camp, and they're doing everything they can to make sure that happens.

Cooperative Adventuring

On one level, Guild Wars is the standard adventure, find stuff, and improve your character kind of MMORPG. That's multi-man online role-playing game for those of you unfamiliar with the lingo. In short, that means you play via the Internet with hundreds of other gamers at the same time.  These are appealing when they work smoothly, prevent hacking and cheating, and offer interesting storylines that allow for replay ability.  Guild Wars not only promises this, but they're out to prove it.  They are offering open beta test events to anyone who wants to download the client software to give gamers a feel for the game and get them hooked.

Player Vs. Player

One of the best ways to ensure that gamers will want to keep playing is to let them kill each other.  Games like Unreal Tournament and CS thrive on this kind of game play.  Guild Wars, as the name suggests also offers strong PvP play.  Not only can individual players battle, but groups of players (the guilds) can also fight each other in cooperative battles.  If Guild Wars can pull this off, then the game certainly promises to garner quite a following.  Guild Wars is due out in early 2005, but you can get involved in the beta events right now.  You can also pre-purchase a Guild Wars package at many computer stores and get access to additional game resources.