Over the past month, several friends and I have been having fun getting our feet wet in the world of MMORPGs by playing Guild Wars, which more accurately brands itself as a “CORPG” (”Co-operative” or “Competitive Online RPG”). I’ve never played any of the big MMORPGs before, not since my days of dabbling in MUDs and MOOs, primarily because of the monthly fees which I simply cannot afford on a student income. Guild Wars is unique however, in that it offers free online play after purchasing the game, available at EBGames for $50-$60. That fit into my budget, and the budgets of Mike, Gregg, Keezer, and several others who have all bought the game within the past few weeks.

As with most games of this genre, the most enjoyable element actually ends up being the social aspect, which is odd considering I’ve spent a large chunk of my playing time clad only in either underwear or pajama pants. It can be a lot of fun to have your digital avatar beat a digital representation of a hulking troll into so much dog meat. But it is infinitely more fun to have you digital avatar, alongside the digital avatars of several close friends, engage in this same beating. Nothing develops camaraderie like urgently banding together against a common foe - and if digital trolls don’t warrant urgent banding, then I don’t know what does.

Aside from having no monthly fees, another unique feature of Guild Wars is less obvious: its unusually low level cap. I’ve read that other such games (like World of Warcraft or EverQuest) set their maximum character levels at something much higher. In WoW for instance, your character can make it to level 60. In GW however, it is a paltry level 20 at which your character will peak. Overall, this makes for more interesting gameplay within the game, because there aren’t as marked differences between players who spend eight hours a day playing the game, and players who spend eight hours a week. Or so the claim goes, anyway - and I have to say, I haven’t found much reason to disagree so far. At any rate, hitting that plateau is something that players have to deal with much more early on in general, since it happens (relatively) soon.

Gregg, Mike and I are probably three of our guild’s more active members (yes, we have formed a guild, named “Stavromula Beta” if you must know) and two of us have made it to level twenty, and the other to level 19. So, y’know, we’re getting up there, and I think we’ve all had a bit of a mid-character crisis of sorts. We’ve been askings ourselves: is this it? Can there be any more to experience? Haven’t we seen it, done it, and killed/crushed/slashed/hexed/smote/blasted/shot it all? The answer, as we found out last night, was a resounding “no”.

We formed a party of six people consisting of the three of us, and three strangers. The three others ended up coming and going throughout the evening, so the three of us were really the only constants for a long period of time. We had decided to venture south from a town called Beacon’s Perch, through Lornar’s Pass, and way, way, way, waaaay down south, to the very bottom of the (cheesily named) Shiverpeak Mountains. But despite the corny name of the mountain range and the tranquil-sounding words like “Perch” and “Pass”, this area is well known in the game as one of the hardest stretches of terrain to make it through, regardless of your character’s level. Fighting your way through is not impossible, but utterly improbable, as even the first group of enemies is a match for most inexperienced parties, and things only get harder the farther you go. We decided instead on a “run like girlie girls” strategy, where we equipped as many skills and abilities as we could that allowed us to move faster while taking more damage from pursuing enemies, shedding all of our usual damage-dealing accessories.

So we ran, we died, we ran, we healed, we died, and we died some more. We made some great progress, had some awful setbacks, and returned to Beacon’s Perch on dozens of occasions to pick up a replacement member for someone who had given up half way through. And in the end, my map showed as explored at least two thirds of the route between Beacon’s Perch and the next southernmost city, which is a decent accomplishment for essentially our first stab at the run. However Mike commented around halfway through, and I think we all agreed, that it was ludicrously fun being pummeled like crazy by these huge, massively huge groups of huge, massively huge enemies that dealt huge, massively huge amounts of damage with each hit. Each run would inevitably degrade into everyone being killed except one or two fortunate players, who would then get cheered on by the fallen and yelled at when they started straying too far from the safer areas of the map. We died, we were resurrected, and we died, died, died again. But it was all great fun, and made for a very enjoyable evening.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 12th, 2006 at 3:37 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.