I have now spent about a week playing Guild Wars and figured it was time to put some thoughts down on ‘paper’. I like the game, but it does have its quirks.

My time playing has been spent soloing and duoing supplementing the groups with henchmen, and all the time has been spent in PVE. The massive amounts of instancing tend to make me feel alone in the world and the key to fighting that feeling seems to be voice chat.
Quick hits on what I like:

• Models are nice.
• Even my wife thought the world was beautiful.
• I can dye my armor.
• There is a lot of the world, and my drive to explore is activated.
• There are some tactics involved in the combat.
• Large selection of skills.
• The ability to reconfigure my character for the evenings play.
• Multi word names.
• While heavily instanced, its all one world.
• Some of the missions have a nice dynamic feel.

Now even though I like the game does not mean I don’t see ways they could improve it. From what I have seen they seem to suffer from lack of polish (a trend lately).

• Double clicking on Merchants, will often times open their window and then
• purchase the first item on the list.
• Unable to invite to team unless in the same instance
• No location listing of guild/friends
• No level/class listing of guild/friends
• No way to customize chat colors
• Only 1 chat window
• No chat notification sounds. This is critical and I don’t understand why games developers have not caught on.
• Sound mix issues; combat sounds are on the same slider as footsteps. No way to hear footsteps with out going deaf in combat.
• Lack of mouse sensitivity control.
• No options to customize the camera control (it feels a bit loose to me)
• There should be a sell/buy back button to negate at least the last transaction at a vendor.
• No in game offline communication (email)
• The story drives forward in the co-op missions, but they did not really teach me this well.
• I don’t feel like there is much difference or variety in the equipment.
• Lack of communication from the developers. First few patches went out with out a word from them.
• No offical forums. I think every top game should have a place where their customers can communicate with each other and the devs.

Well that about sums up my feelings as of now about Guild Wars.

Star Wars Episode Three is right around the corner. Oh my are they going commercial tie-in crazy. Everywhere I turn I see Star Wars, and tha’ts ok ’cause I like Star Wars. I am trying not to get too excited, but it looks good.