Guild Wars First Impressions
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I have to say, though, that combat in Guild Wars is a lot more satisfying than in, well, pretty much every MMO I've played. (I know, it's not an MMO, but the play style is closer to one than to, say, Diablo). There really isn't anything radically different, save for the way mana works (which the game calls "energy"). It's a very small pool, but it regenerates very quickly, which brings in a whole different dynamic. Casters are also a lot beefier than what I'm used to--the necromancer I mentioned earlier can take three or four mobs of the same level, all at once, which just wouldn't be feasible with a WoW model, where the name of the game is kiting single enemies.
And a snip from GameSpy's article:
Guild Wars' unique method of streaming game data makes for a relatively painless installation process, but you do end up paying for this convenience a bit once you start playing. Before you're able to access any areas in the game world, you first have to download their data from ArenaNet's servers, and during busy periods, it can take fairly long. To give you some idea, when I installed the game onto my second machine, it took about 15 minutes to download the data for the game's starting area: the capital city of Ascalon. To contrast, that same transaction took only three minutes yesterday, during the comparatively population-light preview event. Luckily, loading subsequent areas took much less time after that initial hiccup; most took less than a minute, and no more than five minutes on the high-end. Not too bad, in the grand scheme of things, but the game would be well served if this process were to stabilize further, since part of what makes Guild Wars attractive is its novel method of streaming substantial amounts of game data.
