Guild Wars: Nightfall World Preview Event.

[BirgittePovar]

Originally Posted by Weritech

I dunno about that...

I was playing WoW Beta and GW Beta during the same period on the same low-end system in 2004. Given simular circumstances (considering the number of different textures and whatnot), there's no comparison.

Ask yourself why the creators of the incredibly brilliant or beautiful single/small multiplayer games have never made an MMO with this level of graphics.

Do you REALLY think it's because the people creating MMO engines are complete incompetents or all bad graphic designers?

I don't know why people tend to have this idea that media like this is easily transitioned from one style of project to another.

Guild Wars looks beautiful, but the texture count is very very small. Enemy NPCs generally all look exactly the same. PC Textures are generally all the same too, with different color shading being the primary characteristic.

Even with this, you'll get lag in towns when enough people force themselves into a certain town.

[Malvesti]

I played GW for a week or so. The thing that irritated me was how identical everybody was. It seemed that at L20 there was 1 tier of armor, and once you had it, the only difference between people was which color combo you picked. Of course, the differentiation comes a lot in the skill selection. But armor and weapons just seemed too generic to hold my attention. Am I wrong?

[Abalieno]

Guild Wars is the very only mmorpg beside WoW to have a client well engineered.

[Itzena]

I don't know - the EVE client is pretty solid.
(The server hardware, OTOH....)

[Saban]

I bought guild wars in february, played it on and off, never got past level 8. then i started it up again a couple days ago and cant stop playing, level 14 now, doing prophecies missions. Hoping to get level 20 and maybe do some pee vee pee.

[Clericnon2boxed]

Originally Posted by Malvesti

I played GW for a week or so. The thing that irritated me was how identical everybody was. It seemed that at L20 there was 1 tier of armor, and once you had it, the only difference between people was which color combo you picked. Of course, the differentiation comes a lot in the skill selection. But armor and weapons just seemed too generic to hold my attention. Am I wrong?

somewhat, ever tried the pvp character creator ? can make quite some different looking characters there, each class got different amor sets with different looks (just compare gladiator amor vs knight vs some other)

in the pvE area there is an expensive set, and with the new expansion another one I guess for each class, I never understood how people enjoyed the PvE loot/tradeskill part in GW its so pointless (min/max wise).

[masteen]

I played a while back. I only bought the expansion Factions, which turned out to really fucking gimp me in PvP. Almost all the premade PvP builds rely on skills from Prophecies that I cannot use.

They finally wised up and are now offering a full Proph skill unlock for PvP only for like $10 less than the box.

The PvE is cute at first, but really, really sucks the donkey nuts once you hit max level and are trying to capture elite skills.

[Abalieno]

Originally Posted by Itzena

I don't know - the EVE client is pretty solid.

Performance is BAD for a game that moves only an handful of polygons and a background.

In windowed mode it lags, you cannot resize/maximize the window.

The chat window freezes the client for every line of text appearing.

No dynamic loading (every times the game needs to load something, the client hangs up).

Flickering textures on many, many space stations due to Z-buffer problems.

And a million of other glitches.

[Zaniel]

The best thing about GW is its patching system. It's continual, on the fly, comes in tiny packets and takes almost no time at all. They run major patches regularly and you pretty much never notice it. They don't even bother to patch zones until you next zone into them and all that means is an extra 5 seconds zoning.

I also dunno how they run their servers but after the first few weeks teething issues the servers have come down maybe twice in my memory and one of those times was physically packing up shop and moving data centres and they were only down like 12 hours or something.

GW proves all those "Oh noes we need to have daily/weekly/hourly game down-time for database cleanup and server maintenance" is bullshit.

[BirgittePovar]

It's not bullshit.

Yet again you have no perspective on Scope.

Diablo 2 servers didn't require any downtime for maintenance either.

Do you think those people just forgot how to design server architecture with WoW?

No, silly, they aren't the same Scope. And don't even go into the server problems WoW has, this is unrelated to this point whatsoever.

Google doesn't require downtime for maintenance either. Does that prove that Fires of Heaven message board shouldn't? After all, they are both web pages.

[leane]

GW uses instancing, that means zones are not server dependent, take a bunch of servers down to cleanup and leave the rest to take on the extra load. D2 could do that too since zones/map/instance did not have to stay up 24/7

WoW and Eve however are different in that since everybody can access certain areas those areas have to be always up and running which means the only way to take them down is to shut them down.

[spentmotiff]

If someone was to start with the original campaign, would you able to progress through it without a group of people playing with you? Like I stated earlier, I was thinking about giving it a whirl but didn't want to end up endless LFG due to joining with a group of friends...

Are there people still running the original campaign at all?

[Samflam]

The henchman can get you through the entire game if you didn't feel like LFG.
Edit: Well at least until the later missions... it gets pretty fast paced later on.

[Saban]

Yea i've pretty much soloed every mission up to 7 so far, gonna try it tonight.

[leane]

I've heard of people doing ALL the missions with hechies but thats a lot of work, they are very handy if you want a secondary healer or to fill in for empty slots without waiting a while... Classes overlap a fair bit though so usually you can grab almost anybody.