Guild Wars. Part Three


The catacombs is the first ‘dungeon crawler’ I experienced in Guild Wars. There were about eight quests in it, and the areas were obviously given more thought from a visual point of view. During the game, you have the pick a second profession, and I ran around with the necromancer trainer before she dropped me off at a small side passage where I had to reanimate corpses and send them into deadly traps before killing a nightmare at the bottom of the passage.



For a reward, I got a grim cesta that I’m still using at level 8. Leveling is very slow in this game, as the max level is 20.

What this area lacked was two things 1) A boss, and 2) a story.

I ran around and killed everything I could find. The quest map – as opposed to the travel map – shows the area you’re in, any NPCs of interest, and places a bright green star where the next quest object is. Very useful for navigating a twisting lair of evil.

The only climax was finding the corpse of the moa bird in a large shrine area covered with candles and symbols on the wall. When I stepped in, a few shadowy things spawned and attacked me. That was it though. No interesting treasure, no powerful creature to beat, and no clue as to who killed the bird or why they needed it when there are tons of other critters running around they could have sacrificed.

I logged off for the night, and the next day start doing the rest of the ‘secondary profession’ quests for the XP they bring before picking my secondary.

While in town, I decide to interact with another human being. This is harder than you’d think as chat is constantly being spammed with WTS/WTB notices. I also encountered some interesting graphical errors. The white boxes below are other players.



I eventually begin a conversation with an actual human being (who writes in correct English and everything!) and learn that the ‘50g for GM’ requests aren’t people asking for a Game Master, but a Gate Monkey. There’s a gate to the north of here you need another player to open for you, and people will pay you 50g to open it for them. She offers to do so for me – for free – and I accept, it turns out I have a quest there. I had written it off, actually, but figured if someone wanted to party with me, I wouldn’t say no.

After opening the gate, we find ourselves again in a dangerous area full of Charr (have no idea what these are, other than ugly and evil). We finish the quest, and then go Charr hunting, which means her attacking them and Maya using spells to heal and protect her.

Yes, I am becoming a support character. It’s not that bad.

When we finish with the last group, she doesn’t suggest we slip into the nearby pond, but she does explain a large number of things about the game that were not in the manual and of which I was clueless about. She also tells me to pick elementalist as my secondary profession.

I do so, and start The Path of Glory.

Yes, this is the experience I was hoping for. The Charr break through the wall and attack the heartland. The area is destroyed, the NPCs I’ve interacted with die, and I’m teleported two years later into the ruined husk of the city I started out in. Unholy magics have overtaken the area. Neat!

But that means Devona is dead! My poor, virginal monk will be devastated when she finds out.

I open up a storage bin, grab a henchman (She’s a monk and her title is ‘healer henchman.’ Do you have to rub it in guys?), and run off to meet the ambassador from Krynn or Kreia or something. At his camp, I find the Elementalist that taught me my powers. Good to know someone survived. Then again, she was far south near Wizard’s Folly when the Charr attacked, so that makes sense.

She tells Maya that she can teach the monk no more, which is odd as Maya knows all of four elementalist spells. The Ambassador and I have a chat, at which point Maya comments that he doesn’t look like he’s from around here. I like that they include actual conversations in the game, but I’d like to think my PC is smart enough to grasp that an ambassador from a foreign kingdom *isn’t* from around here.

I check the ruins of the village where Devona once patrolled, and only find a monk who wants to teach me spells. My henchman proves useful as the monsters constantly run by Maya to attack her. She then flees like the cloth-wearing coward she is, and she’s very quick. As the monsters try to chase them down, Maya damages them with her spells.



While I’ve complained about the game, I’m enjoying myself. I don’t know if I should continue on with Maya or try one of the other campaigns. I’m interested in playing an assassin, or possibly a dervish. Then again, I read that the other campaigns had spoilers for Prophesies, and I don’t want that.

Right now, I am soloing all the content without problem, but I worry that later on I'll need to join groups, and I hate the idea of being someone's healbot.
Labels: , | edit post
7 Responses

  1. Um. Hey Nick. Thanks for commenting.


  2. Scheherazade Says:

    So I leave a long, well-thought out post and don't get a response, but some guy who winks at you does? =(

    Anyway, like I said before, if you want a good story, you're looking in the wrong place. The plot is right out of a bad fantasy novel. But if you're enjoying the game regardless, that's great. =P

    Oh, and don't worry, Devona isn't dead. In fact, she'll soon be another personality-free henchman. =)

    By the way, the biggest upside to being a monk is probably that you won't need to drag Alesia along everywhere you go. Oh how I hated Alesia.


  3. Mordaedil Says:

    No time like today to make a Lesbian Stripper Ninja in the game, I'd guess. Considering you can in a tiny bit customize your colors, you can even look like your avatar on the mainpage.

    Notably, I didn't play Guild Wars for very long, but I made some of the same observations you made. It's very obviously very well adjusted to give you the impression of making a change, as you said, but somehow they don't bother. They don't even seem to want to tell a story because they are too set in their old ways.

    Things like this is what's been done time and time again, same in Dungeons and Dragons Online. But, this is sort of the model that Star Wars: The Old Republic will follow, except since it is Bioware behind the wheel, change will happen.

    They might infact be the first ones to really bring story to the world of MMORPG's, which seems to somehow be poison if I believe the message boards over there to be right.

    Glad I don't.


  4. Greetings and salutations Scheherazade. Sorry I didn't reply to you previously.

    I don’t need a ‘good’ story, but a 'good enough' story. It's an MMO, so I'm not expecting the heights of fantasy literature.

    Ack! Spoilers! Though I did suspect Devona would return.

    I’m having fun pretending that my henchmen have personalities. I like the idea of henchmen, and have found them fairly useful. Yes, even Aliesa. I did most of the map with her, as the enemies tend to target her, which means she runs around while I kill them from afar. I did all of the area outside the Breach with her, and on the other side of the Breach, I’ve used the mage and fighter henchmen plus her.

    As I said, I don’t like healing. I want others to do so. Why do you hate her?

    @ Mordaedil:
    I’m not assuming BioWare will be able to make a great MMORPG. I know they can make an RPG I like, but I’ve never seen them change the world in response to the PCs actions in their single-player games. I recall in KotOR, you could cleanse a den of kashicks (the mantas things), kill the queen, and crack open the eggs (which bizarrely gave you dark side points, even though you’d just slaughtered all the adults and gotten no points), but whenever you returned, the outside area was full of the kashicks.


  5. Mordaedil Says:

    Good point, I guess KotOR wasn't very good with the consequence thingie, but I'm not sure if they intended it to be that way anyway.

    I recall in Neverwinter Nights, in the Beggar's Nest, if you either kill Gulnan or destroy her shrine, all the undead will be instantly destroyed, except undead Gulnan didn't raise herself.

    That was an interesting touch.


  6. Scheherazade Says:

    Yay, I got a response. I feel so special. =)

    Sorry about the "spoiler". I briefly wondered if I should say it or not, but since the game pretty much assumes you know she's alive the whole time, I figured it wasn't like I was revealing anything. =P

    I hated Alesia because, well, she's an idiot. She gets herself killed constantly and frequently isn't very good at her job. I know it's not her fault, but she can be pretty frustrating to deal with. Then again, maybe they've changed her AI or something since I've played. Or maybe the time since I've played has tainted my memories. =P

    And I agree with your criticism of BioWare not allowing your choices to have much effect on the world, although there were a few cases in which they did in KotOR. I recall that if you take the Dark Side path to finishing Manaan, the price of medpacs and such will go up for the rest of the game. Such instances were probably rarer than they should have been, though.

    I'm hoping that Mass Effect 2 will be better in this regard, since it's hard to imagine how some of your choices in the first game could manage to avoid affecting this one, the most obvious case being the big decisions at the end.