guildwars posts

"Guild Wars is an old game." As the game approaches its fifth birthday and Guild Wars 2 continues production, that's a phrase you'll hear more and more. While it's true that the game has been around for a while now, age doesn't necessarily equal stale or boring. On the contrary, it means you've got an established game with an experienced development team behind it, and they've had time to work out all those bugs, kinks, and emergency patches that are so common in new games. Even better, you've got a strong player base that knows their way around.

The largest factor in what makes a game fun for you is your attitude and outlook, so let's take a look at some ways to keep from falling into the trap of assuming there's nothing left for you to do in Guild Wars.

Fans of Guild Wars have been waiting for well over two years for Guild Wars 2, ever since ArenaNet fired up the hype machine in a big way back in March of 2007. Anet announced Guild Wars 2 and Eye of the North at the same time, and anticipated that the beta for GW2 would arrive in the second half of 2008.

Since the announcement, the Guild Wars player base has become intimately familiar with various versions of the phrases "We haven't released that information" and "TBA", punctuated occasionally with new information.

While the bits of information given here and there add up to something relatively substantial, fans are still asking the big question: When? Obviously the planned 2008 beta didn't happen, and now fans will have to wait a bit longer.

CEO Jaeho Lee referred to GW2 and Blade and Soul in a recent conference call with investors: "I believe there will be certain public events in the year 2010... at least a closed beta test for those titles. Commercialisation will be expected, at this point, probably some time in the year 2011."

At least fans have plenty of time and motivation to finish filling their Hall of Monuments. Silence and delays aside, when Guild Wars 2 finally arrives, most fans trust ArenaNet to give them something well worth the wait.

In the header blurb to this column, I state that "Running Boot Camp or Parallels is not an option here." I stand by that still. I don't think that dual-booting or loading XP within a virtual desktop is the solution any of us want. Dual booting takes up valuable hard drive space that I could use to store large media files of consenting adults. Running Parallels throws another layer of processor overhead when I run XP within Parallels within OS X. Not to mention Parallels' DirectX support is poor. Note: I haven't tried VMWare's Fusion, which is the competitor to Parallels.

A week or so ago, our own Mike Schramm wrote up a little piece on TUAW about CrossOver Games. CrossOver Games lets you run some Windows games within an emulator. It's not a pure virtual environment like Parallels, so you don't have the overhead of running two OSs. When I read Mike's piece, my first thought was, "huh." My second thought was, "Huh, I wonder if there's a middle ground here somewhere." At the risk out sounding like I'm eating my own words, CrossOver might be enough of a compromise that doesn't involve buying a copy of Windows to game on a Mac.

If you're a fan of music at all, you probably already know who Sarah Brightman is. Her voice transcends all genres, ranging from pop, rock, musical theatre, core classical and world music. Her career has spanned three decades and her name has become synonymous with the new "pop opera" style.

Great, but what does any of this have to do with MMOs?

If you check out the cover of her recent album, and you're a Guild Wars player, you may notice some similarities. Symphony, the latest release from Sarah Brightman, features artwork done by ArenaNet Art Director Daniel Dociu. Both the album and her website spotlight Guild Wars concept art, as well as original art created specifically for Symphony.

As we reported last week, ArenaNet's Community Relations Manager, Gaile Gray will be switching roles at the company. So this weekend was her final farewell. She appeared in-game in Guild Wars to celebrate her last days with the players, as did the infamous Frog on his farewell tour as well. Every 3 hours, The Frog appeared in each district of Kamadan, Lion's Arch and Shing Jea Monastery, granting special party buffs for players who attended and performed certain emotes at his request. It was very reminiscent of the Mad King's appearances during the Halloween events, complete with that unique humor we can only find at these events. I'm sure the Sugar Hill Gang would be proud of The Frog's rendition of Rapper's Delight.

While this special buff was active, players would earn double the points for using party items towards their Party Animal title. This led to an overall heightened festive mood for the entire weekend with bottle rockets, sparklers and champagne poppers flooding our screens. We wish Gaile and The Frog all the best in the future.

Happy one week birthday to us! It's been a tremendous first week, and we've been honored to see such a great showing of support from the MMO community. You all are really making this a launch to remember, and we'd like to thank you for it by yet another crazy day filled with birthday presents -- for you!

Okay, enough mushy stuff from us. Today's Massive Giveaways feature that free-to-play sensation, Guild Wars! With many features folks have come to love (hooray henchmen) and the ability to group up with friends all without having to deal with subscriptions, this has become an extremely popular title. If you haven't had a chance to get your own copy (or complete your set of all of them) never fear! We have lots and lots of great Guild Wars prizes to give away today.

For this first hour, we're giving away a key for the combined set of all the Guild Wars games! This key includes Guild Wars, Guild Wars: Factions, Guild Wars: Nightfall and Guild Wars: Eye of the North. True, you will have to download the games from online when you register your keys (or perhaps snitch a copy of the installers from that friend of yours who has been pestering you to play) but for four fabulously fun games to play, what's a little download between friends?

As always, there's that 18 & up, must be a U.S. resident and all the other official rules business that you know so well by now. But for those eligible, what are you waiting for? You only have until 10:00 am Eastern on Saturday (11/10) to get your name in the hat, so get to commenting!