GuildWars E3 Open Beta [Archive] - Everquest

Ladred

05-13-2004, 08:27 AM

Anyone else give this game a shot yesterday? From the little I played I found that it seems to be a decent game. A friend compared it to a diablo 2 knockoff, but I found it to be a bit more immersive than D2.

The graphics in the game were pretty good. Nicely painted landscapes and skydomes really added to the feel of the territory that you were exploring. When you enter the world in this demo, you are almost immediately attacked. Don't know if this was done on purpose, but it does pay off because it shows how easily it is to adjust to the controls. I was a warrior/monk, so all I really had to do was click on the creature attacking me and I attacked back. After slaying those cratures I had a look around my UI to get a feel for the layout.

On the UI you have eight action buttons across the bottom. For my character I had a healing signet in the first slot, this would heal me for a certain amount of damage but leave me very vulnerable. Second slot was my hammer bash, which acted as a stun attack and refreshed as you melee opponents instead of having a refresh timer. One thing to note with hammer smash, if you don't use it, the ability resets and you have to melee to get it back to the active state. The next three skills taking up the third, fourth and fifth slots were warrior skills called adrenaline skills similar to disciplines. One was called Frenzy, which would increase the speed your attacks but leave you vulnerable. Another was called Power Attack which would double the damage of the next attack if it lands. The third was a phrase, something like "For Great Justice". Which lasts for fifteen seconds and in that time the rest of your adrenaline based skills charge faster. I found out later that there are several "shouts" that warriors can use that are triggered by different situations. Like there is this one that you can use if one of your party members dies, something like "Vengeful Death", using the death to motivate you to fight harder. The next three slots were taken up by monk skills, which I found out is the healer class in the game. I get a resurrect ability, an ae heal, and a hot right at the start.

On top of the the hotbuttons there are two meters. One life meter and a meter for skill and spell use. Regen of these meters is quite fast if you are just standing around, and there are arrows that appear in the meters to show how fast you are regenerating. The blue meter is for both skill and spell usage. I found that it took a bit of time, being a warrior/monk, to adjust myself to a conservation level. I seemed to burn up the 'mana' juice pretty fast with adrenaline skills and healing spells. Once I found the balance though I was pretty unstoppable, save for getting ambushed by a swarm of mobs.

The rest of the UI is made up of a map in the lower right hand corner that shows a vague landscape layout. It also pinpoints NPCs, Mobs, and PCs denoting them with a unique color. Above that is a small tab sticking out of the screen that you can open up. This is your chat box. It has a few tabs in the window that opens up. One is a chat box, where you can chat out in the open like 'say' channel in EQ. I will add that you don't need to open this window to chat, but if you want to 'scroll' back up if you miss a message you have to open this window as the onscreen chat lines fade after a short period of time. There is also a guild tab for guild chat. A config tab to configurate the game and one more tab that I can't remember at the moment. On the exact opposite of the screen is another small scroll out tab thingy. This one holds your character sheet, inventory slots, skill list, and lore. Lore is actually where it keeps up with what quests you are on.

The gameplay system was interesting. I found my way into a town as soon as possible and started to look around and check out some merchant wares. There wasn't anything I could buy yet, but some of the weapons sure looked interesting. After I looked around, I zoned into an arena type area. A button popped up telling me how long until the next match. I clicked the join button, waited for the timer to tick down and was wisked off to an arena area with three other people. Another timer ticked down for the start of the match and the four of us piled through a door out into the open to look for our opponents. The pvp action was great. Even though being a warrior monk, I seemed to get the most attention, with a little communication I was able to get my party in one spot for my AE heal. We lost that fight, but I learned a lot about how to win the next ones. I found that a lot of the battles are range battles. Close up fighting will get you killed fast. So if you don't have a ranged weapon then you're pretty much screwed in pvp at level fifteen.

That is all for now, I'll probably play it for another hour tonight and talk about it somemore tomorrow. Would like to hear other players outtake on the game.