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Guild Wars Factions : Review
Posted Sep 21, 2006 by Jon Wood
Today, MMORPG.com is pleased to bring you a review of the first sequel to the very popular MMORPG Guild Wars, Guild Wars Factions. MMORPG.com writer Cari Davidson took the time to look at the game and brings you her opinions.
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If you’re not already familiar with Guild Wars, go read up on it. It’s a fantastic game well worth its price, if only for the art, music, and single-player experience. Of course, you’ll get so much more – cooperative and competitive missions, a story that is easy to get into, and maybe you’ll even make some new online friends. Guild Wars Factions, the first of presumably many sequels, takes that same recipe for success and expands on it by adding new classes and an entirely new storyline. This time, the story takes place on Cantha, a far away continent with an Asian theme, and instead of a completely linear story, you will have to choose a side in an endless war between the Kurzicks and the Luxons, battling it out for control of land, power, and fame. |
You canr ead the whole article here.
Your review, which seems to come about half a year late, makes the game seem to be astounding, outstanding, and wonderful, but the rating is a 7.6 out of 10. Either your review or your rating is off. I tend to think it is the review, for not explaining the lower ratings better. "The game is worth the purchase price [$50] for the art alone... it really is a feast for the eyes," yet with this being such a redeeming factor your Graphics rating was only 8/10. I don't get it.
Also, "you can comment here" points to the web site's home page.
Trying to make sense of the ratings is becoming a bit frustrating. To read this review, it sounds so glowing I was expecting something close to perfect. A 7.6 seems quite low in comparison to what is actually written in the review. Compare to the World of Warcraft endgame rating of 7.9, despite a review that sounded quite critical when I read it. After reading both reviews it sure sounds like WOW's endgame should have earned a much lower rating than Guild Wars Factions. So what, if any meaning can we really attach to the ratings themselves?
Also, why such a low rating for role playing? I didn't see an explanation. Seems like a huge omission considering no other facet of the game was rated this low.
Guild Wars (and Guild Wars Factions) is a great game with a unique feel in the MMO space. It's very difficult to compare it to games like World of Warcraft (which is obviously the game everyone compares everything to these days). You can easily compare the graphics: Guild Wars is downright beautiful and blows WoW out of the water, even though WoW has great animation, which is its saving grace. Aside from that, the two games play entirely different, and comparing them in the same space is a little awkward. Would a car review compare a Harley Davidson to a Ferrari? Both are fun... both are beautiful... but they are quite different, so you can only sore each on its own merits.
Some of the things I lowered:
Graphics. The graphics are beautiful - but animation sometimes lacks in that the mouths don't move and some of the creatures slide along the ground instead of having a realistic walk cycle.
Value. It should conceivably get a 10 for having no monthly fees, but it's still $50, so it's not exactly free, which would be a 10.
Role-Playing. The story is good, so that side of story-telling in RPGs is taken care of, but there is very little actual player-to-player role-playing, so I dropped this one a bit as well.
If you read the review because you are thinking about playing it, I do highly recommend the Guild Wars series... I'd still suggest starting with the first one (Prophecies), though. The next one looks pretty sweet, by the way. I played the preview event over the weekend, and I love the new classes, and the music and environments ROCK!
Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. It very clearly explains your review and I very much appreciate it.
It also means I just HAVE to go out and try the game now!
...This is not a single player game, you cannnot review a game after a month or two. Especially since it has pvp & balance issues need to be found.
For the review 8/10 is a very high score, 9/10(!) for fun and 9/10(!) for value, 8/10 for graphics is also a good score; overall its very good scores, its the 7:s & a single 6 that bring down the average to 7,6 which is not bad at all. (Bad would be 6.5< total).
Right now people want 9/10 10/10 for a good game but thats hardly using the entire 1-10 range at all, imho 6.6-8.5 is a good game (with issues in the 6.5-7.0 range) while 9.0+ is an amazing game (in all aspects).
But I would like to see the roleplaying/support-category be remade since these are a all or nothing issue (either you use support or you dont or there is roleplaying or not). (Has any game ever gotten more than 5-7 for those two issues?)
Performance / Lag:
I have NEVER encountered a game that is as lag free and as good performing as Guild Wars compared to its graphics and effects. Even on mid to low end Systems GW runs smooth. If ever a game earned a 10 in performance it#s Guild Wars.
Customer Service:
I played games from a lot of Companies and only thing i can say is NCSoft / Arena Net offers GREAT customer support. I get confirmation eMails within hours and solutions within a day at max. I know Companies (Especiall Sony Online Entertainment) where you are screwed if you need support. So ranking Guild Wars a 7 in Support is not refelcting reality.
The weak spot on Guild Wars is the roleplaying component if you want to say so. Not much real roleplaying content here.
Over all i think the rating is too low and would see it somewhere in the high 8 scale, maybe even 9.
I would rather see this game removed from mmorpg.com entirely since it's hardly a multiplayer game. And no, I'm not talking about instancing, although the excessive use of what is otherwise a handy technology probably contributes to community issues as well. I played Prophecies, and in my experience, that thing is really just a single player game. The community consists mostly of children, and while you could in theory do "cooperative" missions with a group, in practice the computer controlled henchmen play better than 95% of the community and are far less annoying; the game would actually be a lot better without any online elements since there's no real reason to interact anyway.
The storyline missions in Prophecies were relatively interesting but the duration of PvE content was only about one week; given that expansions often contain less content than the original game, I wonder how much new content is in this one. Another weak point besides community and length is weak character customisation - all characters look exactly the same and wear exactly the same clothing; has this been improved in any way? I'm not going to say anything about the PvP aspects though since I do not wish to participate in it at all. But that brings us to my final point: this game has NO PvE endgame whatsoever. 1-2 weeks and it's over; many real MMOs remain interesting for years.
Peice of junk game, how does it have these ratings!?