GUILD WARS

GAME DETAILS :-

Developer : ArenaNet

Publisher : NCsoft

Engine : Not Revealed

Genre : Role-Playing

Release Date : April 26 , 2005

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS :-

Operating System : Windows 2000 / Windows XP

CPU : AMD Athlon XP 1800+ / Intel Pentium 3 Processor

Memory (RAM) : 256 MB

Graphics Hardware : DirectX 8.1 Compatible Video Card with Memory 32 MB

[NVIDIA : GeForce 4 Series
ATI : Radeon 9250 Series]

Hard Disk Space : 300 MB

GAME FEATURES :-

In Guild Wars, you play as a hero from Ascalon, your typical fantasy province that's fallen on hard times, thanks to relentless assaults from fearsome creatures called the charr. Ascalon seems huge and wondrous as you begin to explore it and its outskirts. But it turns out to be literally just a tiny portion of the richly detailed and shockingly gigantic world of Tyria, which you'll explore during the course of an adventure that's truly epic. Meanwhile, the other half of the game consists of competitive battles between teams of players, set in various types of arena events. It lets you navigate countless big, winding maps filled with enemies and treasure, and combat is frequent and fast. You can't climb or fall from ledges, so at times, the design of the maps feels pretty contrived. However, the generally linear layout mostly just helps to keep you focused. The game's interface is clean and intuitive, and offers a few neat perks like a minimap that you can scribble on to help you communicate with your team. You have free reign over the camera perspective, so you may choose to play from a first-person viewpoint all the way on out to a bird's-eye view. You can have exactly eight skills readied at a time, which correspond to the number keys on your keyboard. Which eight skills you bring to battle and which skills you discover during your adventure is really at the heart of what makes Guild Wars such a compelling experience. It's what levels the playing field in PvP and keeps the action manageable even when things get really intense. Each of the game's six character classes has 150 unique skills, and each one has its own little icon graphic, description, and purpose. For the most part, skills are not inherently better or worse than other skills--they're just different. Depending on how you've developed your character or your role in a player team, the skills will be better or worse for your circumstances. Many skills have obvious uses, while many are much more specific to certain types of situations. Some will serve you better when exploring the role-playing portion of the game, while others will be better suited to PvP battling against real opponents. The PvP battles are action-packed affairs along the lines of what you'd expect from a competitive shooter. The role-playing quests and cooperative missions are typically less than an hour long. Also, you never need to worry about saving your progress or logging out in a safe area, because you can quit whenever you want to, and you'll always restart in the nearest town with all your skills and experience intact. There are no severe or permanent penalties from getting killed--just a temporary hit to your maximum health and energy levels that goes away when you get back to town.

Guild Wars uses a different sort of technology. Towns and cities that have too many players in them are automatically split up into "districts," akin to separate chat lobbies, while missions and wilderness areas are always uniquely generated for the player team, so you'll never encounter random players or seas of already-killed monsters when you're out exploring the world. For the most part, that's great. But to an extent, it's actually a double-edged sword, since the fairly abstract manner in which the gameworld is set up diminishes some of the sense of immersion. Later, you'll be able to form groups of four, then six, and then more. Each time, it feels like a significant upgrade, requiring you to rethink your place in the team as well as your overall strategy. Eventually, teaming up with other players starts to feel like a necessity rather than a simple choice. Some of Guild Wars' final quests are both very open-ended and challenging. And they also serve as a primer for the sorts of PvP battles you could later proceed to engage in. The environments of Guild Wars may be the biggest attraction from a graphical standpoint. This is one beautifully detailed world, offering up larger-than-life versions of pretty much every type of environment you could think of, all rendered in a vivid, soft-focused look that gives the game a dreamlike quality that totally works. In spite of all this, Guild Wars runs great even on relatively modest systems, and even when tons of people are running around or duking it out. The game's few graphical rough edges, such as how characters seem to pop in piece by piece when you enter a new area, wouldn't even be worth mentioning if the superlative graphics didn't make them stick out a little. The game doesn't sound quite as impressive as it looks, but that's kind of an unfair way of putting it, since Guild Wars sounds great. A symphonic musical score by renowned composer Jeremy Soule helps imbue each of Tyria's distinct regions with its own personality, and while the music is of uniformly high quality, it can start to grow a bit repetitive as you explore within a given type of environment. The sounds of combat pack a good, solid punch, and different types of weapons and skills in turn make distinctive noises, which all tend to fit the action well. It's a very impressive game that's rewarding on many different levels and can be tremendously appealing for any number of reasons.

GAME REVIEW :-

9/10

Guild Wars Trailer :-