The game world in Guild Wars is quite large and there are plenty of quests to keep you occupied for some time. The instanced zones are all good sized, with plenty of areas to explore. The game makes it easy to determine where you need to go to complete the next step of your currently active quest by placing an arrow on your compass rose to guide you. However, this arrow directs you to your quest location as the bird flies – navigating on the ground is another matter. The main problem with getting from one place to the next in the game is that there are plenty of artificial “glass walls” in place to keep your character from falling off of cliffs, tumbling down hillsides, and the like. While it may be useful to help prevent players from falling into an abyss, it also leads to a lot of artificial dead-ends – places that look like you should be able to make it safely past but can not. It can be frustrating at times to take what looks like the right path only to find that it comes to an end and you’ll need to double-back and look for a new route. If you’re trying to reach one of the common areas getting there is easy – you just need to click on the city name on your map and you’re transported there – but trying to reach a quest location can require a degree of trial and error.

Nothing like a romantic boat ride through a swamp.

There is another minor issue with the quest system in Guild Wars: the quest rewards are not necessarily geared towards your character class. Everyone can use the experience gain, but if a special item is part of the reward then you’ve basically got a one in six chance that it will be of any use to you.

Should you die while questing or otherwise, Guild Wars features the most forgiving penalty in online gaming. After death you are automatically resurrected at the nearest shrine with only the need to do a little backtracking to return to where you were. And since every area in the game has at least one of these shrines, you never have to backtrack all that far of a distance anyway. While you remain in the instanced area you will accumulate a penalty to your maximum health and power, but this penalty is erased when you leave the mission instance.  No need to spend hours erasing experience debt!  Guild Wars uses the same liberal policy when it comes time for you to quit. You can end the game anywhere and anytime that you’d like – there’s no need to camp and no penalty for bugging out of a quest early. Simply click on the close button and you’re back to the Windows desktop and the next time you play your character will be ready to go from the town nearest to the place where you left the game.

For all of the traditional questing and solo play opportunity it provides, Guild Wars is really designed to be a PvP game. You can spend a very long time exploring the game’s storyline and completing its quests, but you will eventually reach an end to the game. If you go this route you will find the game becomes increasingly harder to play solo and you’ll need to team up to complete most of the later quests. It is possible to team up with NPC henchmen on quests, but they are only of marginal use and never seem to be able to last long into a quest. Surprisingly the game does not provide much in the way of aid to players looking to group up. The process is a time-consuming one of walking through a town inviting players to join you and comparing quests on the single chat channel. Long before you reach the end game though you will reach the character level cap. The level cap is set at 20, and while at first this may seem to be quite low for an MMORPG remember that Guild Wars is about bringing the right set of skills to each situation rather than maxing out attributes.

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