5/5 ★ – doghaus's review of Guild Wars.

I've recently started playing this again, 20-odd years after I first picked it up. I've never been particularly good at it, and I'm not a very sociable person so don't really get involved in the "guild" aspect of it, but there's something about it that keeps me coming back. Nostalgia's certainly a part of it, but I think the game design is pretty unique and it's got a lot more substance than other MMOs, which I inevitably pick up and get bored of. The skill and combat system provide real strategic depth: your skill bar is limited to 10 skills, but there are hundreds of skills to seek out and collect, so it has a deck-building element. All the enemies use skills from the same pool (apart from a few monster-specific skills), and unlike most MMOs provide a real challenge and force you to learn the skills of other professions. The game is actually composed of four separate campaigns, that can all be bought together in a package. Prophecies is the original and longest, set in a sprawling fantasy world with various biomes (forest, jungle, tundra etc). Factions is the second and has a Chinese theme and a focus on PVP. Nightfall - probably my favourite - has an African/Arabian theme and introduces "heroes," player controlled characters who assist you in battle. Eye of the North is intended as a bridge to Guild Wars 2, providing some high level end game content like dungeons and letting you earn rewards for GW2. The lore and storylines are pretty much nonsense, but although the graphics are old the art direction is top notch and later expansions like Eye of the North still look great. The worlds feel solid and worth exploring. It's a shame that the sequel killed off Guild Wars 1 - to my mind it's a far inferior game (I played it when it first came out, but as it's just like most other MMOs, I got bored pretty quickly). All the things that we thought we wanted in the first game - jumping, playable races, true multiplayer world zones - it turned out didn't improve it at all. Wooden Potatoes made an excellent video titled "The Death of Guild Wars" which explores what might have been. The new races created for Eye of the North/GW 2 are underwhelming (they are all slightly irritating). I would have preferred they developed existing races such as the Tengu, Heket, maybe centaurs. as they did with the Charr, the furry cat-cow enemies from Prophecies. Sadly it never had the player base to sustain a World of Warcraft Classic style revival, but it's got a small but dedicated community of players still playing it. I'll always keep coming back to it as long as the servers are up.