Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - Printable Version+- Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net)
+-- Forum: Tendo City: Metropolitan District (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=4)
+--- Forum: Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=42)
+--- Thread:
Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever (/showthread.php?tid=7147)Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 15th September 2018
So I started playing GW1 again a few weeks ago, as I mentioned in the Games Finished thread after finally beating Nightfall for the first time, but I have continued to play the game since and yes, I still think that, as the title says, Guild Wars is one of the best and most addictive games ever. I'm going to write more about why soon, and will probably post it here, but I just wanted to start with this, because well, the game is still incredible!
+ The graphics hold up exceptionally well -- this is still an amazingly beautiful game, with some of the best art direction ever in games. The insane degree of improvement between that E3 2003 trailer and the game as it has existed since the open alpha I played during E3 2004 is incredibly impressive, and while there have been a few tweaks since, most recently in this years' patch which added infinite draw distance and helped to reignite my interest in the game, most of GW looks as it has since its release in 2004-2007, but looks way better than a whole lot of games many years newer. Sure, newer games put a lot more polygons on screen, but the art design and overall visual look is some of the best ever. The soundtrack's pretty great, too! The music is more on the atmospheric side, but when the music's just as great after a thousand hours as it was at the beginning you know they did something right.
+ While not as content-rich as World of Warcraft or EverQuest, due to sadly only getting new content for a few years (the least paid expansion was in 2007, and the last free content addon in early 2013), Guild Wars has a vast quantity of things to do. Between the four main campaigns, the intense challenge of Hard mode, the scores of quests all over the world, the time-limited events that rotate in and out every year, and PvP if you have the right group together or are playing at the right time, Guild Wars has many hundreds of hours of content; I've played like 960 hours since launch now, plus somewhere between 150 and 200 hours of alpha/beta before that, more than half of that on my main character, and there's still a huge amount of stuff left to do! It's sad that I've finished all four of the campaigns now, but with everything else the game has to offer I could play it for a lot more hours, doing new things most of the time.
+ Exploration is still incredibly fun! Between the scenery and the combat, this is a great game to explore in, one of the most addictive ever for me. Guild Wars' unique skill system, part MMO and part Magic the Gathering card game, is one of its highlights, and making builds of skills is always an interesting challenge. I started a few new characters recently, and the way the game scales up from easy to hard as you go through a campaign is just fantastic. Of course there's a huge time commitment, but they reward you for it at least.
The game isn't perfect, though. Of the complaints I have, these are the main ones.
- My main issue, probably, is with that time commitment. So, I've spent most of my time in this game with a Necromancer. That's great, but it'd be very cool to try high level play with the other classes, everywhere in the game! But you can't do that. To get to all the areas, use all the skills unlocked on my account, use all of the Heroes, and such, you need to do everything again with each new character, which is a prohibitive time commitment for almost anyone. I may have fun playing as other characters sometimes, but when I want to really play the game I have no choice, I've got to be playing as my main. It's kind of unfortunate that there is no real solution for this. The game does have one kind of max-level-from-the-start character, PvP-only characters, but as that suggests they are only usable in the Battle Isles PvP modes, which means the random arenas, guild battles, or the Hall of Heroes. You can't even play the other PvP modes, such as Fort Aspenwood or the Jade Quarry, with PvP characters; those are for regular characters who have gotten that far in Factions only. I can equip my Hero characters with a full set of skills, but you can never play as those characters in the regular game. Oh well.
- One of the other main issues is that after some number of hundreds of hours, the game does get repetitive. GW is a game that's all about running around and activating skills. If you boil it down, that's really all you do -- run around, listen to or read the story texts, and hit skill buttons in the right orders during combat, while selecting the correct enemies or allies to attack/heal. It's fantastic fun, but after a few years I started to get bored of the repetition and going back to playing it again reminds me of why. I still really love this game, but it IS true that like most of the better endlessly playable online games, it gets repetitive before you run out of new content to experience.
- On that note, finding human groups, if you desire that, will be challenging. While people are definitely still playing Guild Wars, since about 2007 finding human groups for random missions or quests has been hard. I disliked the Hero system at first because of how much it devalues player groups, and I still dislike it for that, but I also find it essential at the same time, because most areas don't have other people in them anyway so Heroes are essential! Henchmen often just won't do the job, you need the great control you have over Heroes. But even Heroes pale compared to a human team, which is the problem -- in the vast quantities of super-difficult postgame and Hard Mode content Guild Wars has, how are you supposed to have any chance at beating most of it solo or just with Heroes? Maybe with just the right builds you'd have a chance, but I never found those builds; AI allies in this game are no replacement for humans, but humans looking for random groups are few and far between, and again, have been for over a decade now. It's a problem that makes the Master difficulty and Hard mode stuff particularly really, really hard, because having to do everything with just Heroes can be nearly impossible at times. I'm sure there are good builds I could look up to make this easier, but I usually like to play this game just making builds up myself, instead of looking up good ones, so yeah, it's hard, much harder than it was in the earlier days when finding human groups was easy. Still though, even just solo with Heroes Guild Wars is still incredibly fun, so while this is definitely an issue, it's not a dealbreaker.
= Oh, and on the note of the story, GW's stories are ... fine. The first campaign, Prophecies, starts out with the most interesting plot piece of the whole game, the Searing. That part is compelling, and I still pretty much hate the Charr! But after that, and in Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North? GW's writing is alright. Some plotlines are amusing, and some here and there have some weight to them. It's mostly kind of forgettable though. I know writing stories for online RPGs is hard, since many players will entirely ignore it all, but I've always thought that GW has an alright to good story, but not a great one. There is no player choice at all, for example; all you can do is follow the story along, and never affect anything beyond the prewritten story. I do like that the game consistently does a good job of giving many of the enemy groups good, believable motivations and realistic character depth, though, that is a strength of GW. There are some straightforward crazy-evil villains, but many, such as the Charr, Shiro, the main enemy in Nightfall, and such, are interesting. From what I read about GW2 I think they've taken the story in some bad directions there, but just looking at this game it's solid. It's never amazing writing or something with a real message, though; this is no Planescape Torment certainly. So yeah, it's fine, better than what I've read about plenty of MMOs, and with one very interesting thing right at the beginning of the first game, but otherwise story is probably not the reason most people have played so much of this game.
So of the things I have listed in this thread, the faults are somewhat minor compared to the strengths, and the story issue is really a mixed-bag category and not a fault really. This game is incredible, one of my favorite gaming experiences ever, and it's fantastic that it's still so great! It's really impressive that the graphics have held up so well too...
Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 28th October 2018
So I was saying I'd write more about GW (even though nobody else here has ever cared), so here it is. This first post is a look back at E3 for Everyone, the first public test for Guild Wars in May 2004. I looked at a few posts I made about it here on TC, and also at some posts looking back on it that I wrote a few years late on other forums, while writing this, but most of it is new. Most of the screenshots are ones I posted back in '04, though, because I only took so many. Later articles in this series from after E3 for Everone will, however, be mostly new old screenshots, ones I mostly never posted online before.
How do you write about your favorite games? I've often found it harder to write about games I really love than anything else, which is part of why I've rarely said much about some of my favorites. Well, after going back to start playing this game again a few months ago after a new patch was released after many years, I got hooked on Guild Wars again and it made me decide to write some posts about it. I will be writing a longer summary of at least some of the reasons I love this game so much, but I decided to start with this, a screenshot-heavy look back at the early days of Guild Wars. It'll take a bit to get to the screenshots, but if you scroll down there will be a bunch of them. The screenshots in this post are all ones I have posted on several forums years ago, but that was before I had this site and I never posted them here, and as I started playing the game again recently, I decided to finally post them here too! While the screenshots are not new though, most of this text is; I didn't just re-use my old posts from 2004 and 2009, though I did go back to them and incorporated some parts of them here. This also will not be the last Guild Wars screenshots-and-text post I will write, I am planning more soon. I know that it might be better to start with something more like a review that explains how the game plays and such, but I want to start from the beginning, and the beginning is when I first played the game. Guild Wars' best days as a game with an active community are behind it, and that is an issue for new players, but I want to remember how great the game was, while also appreciating how amazing it still is, with this series of posts.
Now, most of the screenshots on this site aren't mine and are just there for illustrative purposes to show what the games in the text look like, but this is different: all of these screenshots are my own. They are the story here as much or more than the text is. This article has more text than later ones in the series will, but it still does have 30 screenshots of mine.
Introduction
Guild Wars, for anyone who does not know, is a cooperative online role-playing game, or CORPG by its own description. This is a game of skill, where planning and strategy matter more than anything. I think that CORPG is an accurate genre listing to put the game in, because it is somewhat unique. Mixing elements of massively multiplayer RPGs, collectible card battle games like Magic the Gathering, and single-player RPGs, while removing most grind and leveling requirements, Guild Wars is a unique mix which is nearly perfectly suited for what I want out of an online RPG. Guild Wars is a unique mixture which somehow fits perfectly together. It is a singularly exceptional experience and has a most-likely permanent place in my top 10 favorite PC games of all time. I will go into more detail about the gameplay soon, after the first small batch of screenshots. The concept here is to go through this test as I did back then though, while also talking about how much I still love this game today, so that will have to wait. With the first Guild Wars Arena.net made something amazing, and it's still one of the best and most fun games around. I played many hundreds of hours of this game between 2004 and 2007, probably nearly a thousand in that time in fact. It's surely high on list of games I have put the most time into. However, after '07 I slowly started playing the game less, as despite its greatness it does get repetitive over time. At the same time I was getting more and more interested in classic games, and the developers switched from working on GW to developing its sequel so new content updates slowed to a crawl. After playing probably 900 hours of this game by early 2007 I had only played 200-something more hours in the eleven years afterwards, until getting back into the game a few months ago that is. Unfortunately, Guild Wars' developer, Arena.net, hasn't made anything nearly as good since sadly, as its sequel Guild Wars 2 is a massive disappointment in my book -- in fact, despite being decent to good on its own I'd probably consider that game to be one of the most disappointing games ever made because of how much of a downgrade it is from its predecessor -- but see my First Impressions article on Guild Wars 2 I wrote years ago for more on that game, I think I covered it fairly well there.
So as I said above, my interest in going back to the first Guild Wars originated with a new patch for the first Guild Wars that some Arena.net developers released a few months ago, five or six years after all active development on the game had ceased. This patch did a few things. Most notably, it adds a new graphics option that allows you to enable full-detail models at all draw distances, removing all distance detail reduction that the game previously did. This makes the game look better. Sadly, at the same time, perhaps by accident, they broke all remaining Windows 9x compatibility, so I cannot play the game on my old Windows Millennium computer anymore, like I always could until before this summer's patch. KernelEx doesn't work anymore with GW... it's a real shame, oh well. You can launch the game, but can't log in anymore. Despite having much better machines, I like playing Guild Wars on that old computer sometimes because it is the first machine I played the game on, and it is the game I played this game on the most -- I didn't get a newer computer until early 2007, by which point I wasn't playing GW as much as I had for the couple of years before that. A lot of my best Guild Wars memories come from playing it on that WinMe machine which, as many of the screenshots below will show, does not exactly run the game at a good framerate. Heh.
So with that, I should get to the point, and talk about Guild Wars as I first played it in May 2004, mixed with comments about how different some elements of it are from what the game later became. As some background, I had been a big fan of Blizzard Entertainment, and their Warcraft and Starcraft real-time strategy games in particular. Meanwhile, online RPGs had been a huge thing for some time, and while I'd never been interested enough to want to try one, by '04 I did want to see if I'd like them. I really didn't like the idea of paying a monthly fee, however! I still wanted to pay once and then have the game from then on, as it'd always been. So, when I heard about Guild Wars, an RPG being made by some former Blizzard developers who had built Blizzard's Battle.net network infrastructure and had done some early work on the then not-yet-released game World of Warcraft, which would be an online RPG but would not have any monthly fees, I was very interested. Blizzard was also working on its own online RPG of course, World of Warcraft. I'm sure everyone reading this knows how that competition turned out, but I still like GW a lot more.
E3 for Everyone Begins
Because yes, as soon as I played GW for the first time I was hooked! In May 2004, a full year before the games' release, Arena.net did something special: for five days before and during E3 that year, they opened up a then-alpha version of Guild Wars to the public for free, allowing anyone who wanted to download the client and make an account to play the game for those five days as much as they wanted. Known as E3 for Everyone, it showed the game to be in a pretty impressively complete state given how far from release it was. originally E3 for Everyone was going to be a three-day test, for the three days of E3, but ANet decided to open the game two days early. I heard about this either late at night of day one or early in the morning of the second day, probably less than a day after it opened.
Arena.net's founders' background making Battle.net shows in the games' advanced-for-the-time network infrastructure. Guild Wars runs rock-solid; if it has ever had unintentional downtime I don't remember it. The game never needs to go down for maintenance, and all you had to do to start playing is to make an account on their website and then download and run a 76 kilobyte client. No installation is required, the game will download all necessary files from the internet as needed, either before you launched the game next or during loading screens while playing. The game knows which files have changed since you last logged in, and only downloads changed files. I would learn later that there is also a command to make the game download everything at once, but downloads during each zone transition were a normal thing for a long time and they work well. They showed off their network tech right from the start, as tens of thousands of people played during E3 for Everyone and the servers handled it with no issues. They even patched the game during the text, and all players needed to do was close the game, launch it again, and the update would immediately download no problem and you'd be back in in moments! Compare this to almost any MMO and this is pretty impressive stuff. In order to show this off, they actually added a boss and associated quest during the test who was not there before. I took a screenshot of this boss, Stank Reekfoul, below. They may have added a mission as well. I remember being pretty impressed that they could add content so easily, with no server downtime or anything. (https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Fansite_Friday/Stratics has some more info on the streaming tech circa E3 '04.)
In the game, if you hit the Print Screen key it saves a screenshot to a folder on your hard drive. If you hit Shift+Print Screen, it saves a max-graphics-settings screenshot with the on-screen interface off, for nicer shots. Yes, when you press this it'll flicker on higher detail graphics for an instant to take a nicer shot, if you don't have the settings set to max. Many PC games have a screenshot function, but I don't usually take a lot of screenshots of games... except for Guild Wars. I took a lot of screenshots of Guild Wars, dozens over the course of the first five-day test and hundreds more over the years since. I still regularly hit the Print Screen key while playing, when I see something interesting. And I'm glad I did, because that is what made the image part of this article possible!
Graphically, the game had come a long way in a short time; on Youtube you can find a trailer for GW from E3 2003, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyueTjyl80 With relatively basic-looking graphics and a much more cartoony, simple look, the game looks nothing at all like it would a year later. It looks like an okay game for 2003, but the 2004 version I first played is dramatically improved over what you see in that trailer. It is fortunate that Arena.net spent the effort to improve the visuals; Guild Wars still holds up well today in a way that I don't think that 2003 version would.
So, when I launched the game, I saw impressive graphics. The first thing you do is create a character. While this game is set in a fantasy world, you can only play as a human in this game. I'm fine with that, it works just fine. Arena.net tried to create a unique setting, so you won't just find the usual fantasy races here. A few do make appearances, such as Dwarves, Tengu, and more, but most are unique to this game. The sequel continues on with that trend, so it does that right at least. Right from how it starts in a medieval apocalypse, with your humans facing off against giant furry ... uh, wolf-men or however Charr should be described, Guild Wars' setting is interesting.
One thing to know though is that each of the games' classes has an entirely different visual look, so your class choice matters a lot as it determines how your character appears. In the first test all six classes were available, but had only one costume each. Character customization is limited. In E3 for Everyone, all you could do is choose between three hair styles, four faces, four skin colors, and a few hair colors. You couldn't change clothing yet, so everyone of each class and gender looked the same, until they got some Dyes to change color with at least. Later many, many costumes would be added, but Guild Wars does have pretty limited character customization; there are only maybe a dozen faces, hairstyles, and such available for each gender/class combo, and you can't fully redesign the face and such, only change your height. Oh well, it's enough for me. The base game's six classes are as follows: the front-line Warrior is first, and is a very popular class though I've never liked it. The other classes are all ranged: the Ranger who is an archer with combat pets you can send out, though E3 for Everyone didn't have fully implemented pets yet (they also were thinking about having a stealth component for archers, but most of it didn't end up getting implemented); the Necromancer, who has stat-down and health-drain skills, as well as summoning undead, though that wasn't implemented yet at this point; the Elementalist with battle magic -- fire, ice, and earth; the Mesmer, with stat-affecting magics and a lot of skills that require precise timing to use well; and the Monk, the essential healing class.
In E3 for Everyone, you chose both a primary and secondary class when creating a character. In addition to their unique looks, each primary class also has an exclusive ability that only characters of that primary class have. Your secondary class allows your character to use skills from that other class, but not the other classes' exclusive ability. For instance, the Necromancer gets mana back each time anyone dies nearby, but only when the character is a primary Necromancer. A secondary Necromancer can use any blood, curses, or death magic skills, though. In the release game you only choose a primary class at first, and pick a secondary later. You can also change your secondary at will eventually, but not your primary.
Quote:
The login screen, during E3 for Everyone, with my password and email partially blacked out. This screen would change in later tests, but this was how it first appeared.
![[Image: 5CV7rJXW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1e/3b/5CV7rJXW_o.jpg)
Quote:
The character select screen. I mostly played as the selected character in this first test. Those other two were just test characters I made, and did not keep; I do not remember what I named them.
![[Image: qWKWyEcM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ae/89/qWKWyEcM_o.jpg)
Quote:
Character creation, E3 for Everyone style. I took shots of all of the classes in the character creator, and it might be amusing to post them all sometime to show which costumes they had and such, but for now this shows what the interface, and female Necromancer outfit, looked like. At the time I thought that the female Necromancer was the second-coolest-looking class, after the Ranger.
![[Image: QRtsdPSW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/34/c6/QRtsdPSW_o.jpg)
Quote:
A loading screen. You saw these screens often. A red-toned version of this art piece is also the one on the small poster that came in the box with the retail release of Guild Wars. I have that poster on my wall now, right behind my computer. This also shows that network tech, as the game is downloading this 288-file chunk of game in this loading screen.
![[Image: WZlAoaGx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/23/f2/WZlAoaGx_o.jpg)
Basic Gameplay and Ingame Shots from E3 for Everyone
Guild Wars is a third-person online RPG. I'm no fan of third-person games in general, really, but this one I love. In the game you run around, using skills from a skill bar by clicking on them or pressing the 1-8 number keys on your keyboard to fight human or AI-controlled enemies. You can move in three different ways: with the arrow keys or WASD, you move directly; by clicking on a nearby point on the screen, your character will automatically run to that point; and if you press the R key, you will run forwards until you hit something and stop. All three are very useful at different times, so it's great they include them all. When you hold the right mouse button you can freely move the camera anywhere except into the ground, which can be helpful or amusing. The mouse wheel zooms in and out. Oh, and the Tab key switches between targets, which is convenient when you're otherwise mostly using the keyboard.
Characters have two meters to watch, health and mana. Health auto-recovers when not in battle, but during combat you will need healing skills to stay alive if you take damage. Mana always auto-regenerates, though usually slower than you're using it so you need to watch mana usage. Your main interaction with the world comes through your skillbar. Having a bar on the screen with images for abilities you can use is standard to online RPGs, but Guild Wars has a unique implementation of it. You can equip eight skills at a time, meant to represent skill rings, with eight skills for your eight non-thumb fingers. You are limited to eight skills at a time while playing, and can only change your skill build in towns, while it is locked while in combat zones. Again, this is a game of skill, with a high skill ceiling. When you die, as I have done often, it's your fault. Getting rid of grind is one of the best things about this game, no question! Yes, you can make a compelling online RPG that is fun for thousands of hours, AND doesn't have required grind and leveling, or great items that give players absolute advantages. Guild Wars shows that it is possible. This was clear across the board right from this first test, as the test locked players to level 15 throughout. I am someone who hates grind, so this games' design is the best I've ever seen in an online RPG.
One other thing unique to the game is that Guild Wars does not have your usual consumable potions for healing, it has skills. This is a game about skills and skill, not grinding and who has the best pile of limited-use items, and I love it for it! Getting rid of consumable items, apart from a variety of silly festival items and boosters they would eventually add, was a fantastic idea which helps make this game great, and I have often wished more games would copy it. Coming up with a good build, or collection of eight skills, is an awesome part of the game as well. Right from this first test the game had a lot of skills available for use, so it was apparent right from the start that finding good combinations of skills would be key, as indeed it is. This is a game with a deep strategic layer in a way you do not always see in the online RPG space, and it has balanced, challenging, skill-based single and multiplayer gameplay as well. Again, it's an exceptionally well thought through cross between MMO and Magic the Gathering.
The way the skill-purchase system worked in E3 for Everyone was different from the released game, though. You start out with a set of starter skills, but could get more by getting skill points through experience, getting skill gems for your class as loot from beating bosses, then using the skill gem at a skill crafter or rare crafter to make a skill ring of that skill. You then could learn the skill from the ring. This system would be refined over time until by release all you need to do is use skill points to buy skills from traders or take elite skills from bosses after killing them with a specific skill that allows you to do that, but I like the ring concept because it explains why there are eight skills. Simplifying skill buying is fine, but the ring concept is important. In E3 for Everyone you could even try out a 9th skill temporarily, though that option would be removed afterwards.
One of the great things about Guild Wars is that the game design forces the players to work as a TEAM. You have to work together to get anywhere. The games' level design encourages this, as you are often moving along clear paths with regular fights against monsters along the way, but so does the way that the classes rely on each other. Warriors go in the front and other classes behind, essentially, with Monks being protected if possible since they are always the first to be targeted. Only characters with very specific builds can go on their own past the very easiest content in this game, and I have always loved it for that. Sure, the enemies don't have the best AI of all time, but it's decent enough to make the game fun, and that's what counts. They attack when you hit a certain range and use skills well. You can see what skills enemies are using, too, which is awesome and very helpful.
Now, while Guild Wars does not have potions in the usual sense, you do have an inventory. Enemies in Guild Wars drop materials that make sense for that kind of monster to hold, such as hides, carvings, weapons, and such. The game auto-distributes drops, so each player or AI character in your party gets an equal share of money and item drops. You will only see your own item drops, not anyone else's. It's a good system. You can then choose to either keep those items, filling up your inventory quickly but netting you some money if you sell unnecessary ones to a shopkeeper or other player through chat, or you can use Salvage Kits to break those items down into component materials. Those materials are the ones you'll need to buy armor and such with, and are more convenient to store than piles of different monster drops are. You do need to keep buying Salvage Kits, though. They need to get money from you somehow. In E3 for Everyone the basic inventory and item-drop system was in place, though changes would be made to how the crafting and crafters work in the betas and release; see the Crafter screenshot below for more.
So, no grind for experience? No grind for potions? No artificial mechanics restricting exploration such as limited mana and, again, potions? And yet, at the same time, a game with a high skill ceiling and significant challenge if you want it? It's amazing, but all true! Guild Wars is an online RPG specifically designed to not require inordinate grind, and to be fun and competitive for all players. Skill and playtime are both rewarded, but it's nowhere near as unbalanced as many games. Awesome stuff.
The game has three main aspects -- towns, player versus enemy exploration areas or missions, and player versus player areas. Now, the game is not an MMO, because the main world is not "massively multiplayer" -- gameplay areas are all instanced, while you will see other players in towns. First, towns are the only place you will encounter random other players. Everyone is not together, though; once a certain location reaches a certain number of players it splits to multiple "districts", or divisions of the server. You can switch between districts at will with an on-screen menu if space is available, to meet with someone, but this helps keep the server and graphical load down while letting as many people go into towns as want to enter. The rest of the time, though, the game is instanced, with your party on its own server fragment. This means you will only see your party in missions, which is fine with me because it allows a more player-responsive world. In an MMO, because everyone is in one world, everything has to reappear constantly, so that other players can interact with the enemies, do the quests, and such. However, in Guild Wars, while you are in a play zone it keeps its state for as long as you are in the zone. This means that enemies you kill in Guild Wars stay dead for as long as you are in the zone, which is awesome and plays a huge role in the game! Guild Wars' Player vs. Enemies (PvE) game is built around this, in fact. When you kill enemies, they die. When you die in an exploration zone, you get a 15% death penalty, which reduces your health and mana, and respawn at the closest resurrection shrine. Your DP (Death Penalty) maxes out at 60%, which is a quite harsh penalty that makes progress difficult. In a story mission you still get death penalty if you die, but the party won't auto-resurrect, so you only come back if someone in the party stays alive and resurrects you. If your whole party dies in a mission you are sent back to the mission starting area and will have to try again, so they have even higher stakes. Missions also have cutscenes that tell the story, though it is entirely linear -- you can't make any choices in Guild Wars, unfortunately. In Prophecies, missions and exploration zones are entirely separate. The later chapters would blend this by allowing you to freely enter mission areas as exploration zones, but that isn't possible in Prophecies. Several years later they would even add a Hard Mode, with an option which keeps track of if you kill every single enemy in a zone. I haven't done that as it is quite difficult, but I do really love the semi-permanent nature of killing enemies in this game.
Zones in Guild Wars are large, but you do not have totally free movement. Instead, you can only go through free areas. You can't jump off cliffs, swim in the water, or such, and there are invisible walls in some areas blocking things off. Usually the game uses visible 'walls', such as water, cliffs, or such, but corners of paths to go up a cliff face, the edges of beaches, and such often have invisible walls. Zones, either in exploration areas or missions, are widely varied in design. Some are mazelike nests of corridors, while others are simple loops or consist of large open spaces. I absolutely love Guild Wars' level design, myself. The restrictions on movement don't bother me, because figuring out how to explore areas is part of the fun! And it's a lot of fun. One of my favorite things in this game has always been exploring a new zone, and figuring out its paths and secrets along the way. Even if side paths lead nowhere, I need to explore all of them... and that was as true here as it has been ever since in this amazing game.
The game has great in-game mapping as well. There is a nice on-screen map in the corner, and in the released game you can also open a second map which shows what exactly you have explored, with a line showing your path through the zone. This version did not have that yet, but even in this first alpha, in addition to the minimap there was a full-screen map showing the whole map available to explore, with areas you have explored shown in detail. I didn't take any screenshots of it unfortunately, so anyone interested will have to find a picture of that online. Still, mapping is important to me in this kind of game, so the exploration, mapping, and that enemies stay dead while you are in a zone are all very important parts of why I like this game.
The full Guild Wars game, later re-titled to Guild Wars: Prophecies, has seven major areas you travel through, or eight depending on how you count. The E3 for Everyone alpha has one, Post-Searing Ascalon. All Prophecies characters start in Ascalon, the games' only medieval-European-style country, but it has been destroyed in an apocalypse. This first test does not show how the country was destroyed though, that would come later to us in the general public. It's a unique setting for a fantasy RPG though. This first test had a whole lot of post-Searing Ascalon available to explore and fight monsters in, allowing for a lot of hours of play. There were a bunch of missions too, organized pieces of the story telling of the aftermath of this apocalypse and what your characters do from this early point in the game. And for PvP play, the test had an arena where you could fight other random teams of four, and the Tombs of Drascir, a chosen-teams PvPbattle mode that was the precursor to the Hall of Heroes. I either never reached that place on the map or got there but didn't take any screenshots of it, though, because I have no screenshots of the Tombs of Drascir outpost or mode, unfortunately. I did play the (random) Arena some, but didn't take many screenshots of it. One of the arena is below though. It played like 4v4 Guild Wars random arenas always have, just on a map that would not be in the final game.
For this first test, I almost exclusively played as a Ranger that I named Falconess Ysaye. Now, Guild Wars requires all character names to be made up of at least two words separated by a space, and it does not have an automatic name generator; you need to come up with names yourself. All names must be unique of course, so you can't use a name anyone else has taken for their character. Of this character name, the first part references my usual online handle name but changed for the characters' gender, and the latter is a character name from a book I had read recently at the time. I chose a ranger because the class sounded cool, and in a game like this you need to choose a character and focus on them, so playing as one character seemed like a good idea. I still do still have a character of this name, though they would not end up being my post-release main. Still, rangers are great! I should note though, in this alpha each character class and gender combination had only one outfit, which is why everyone looks the same. You could change colors, but not design. This would change later of course.
After creating a character, you went into a tutorial area which taught you the basic controls and such, before sending you to the city. I didn't take screenshots of this, unfortunately, but there are a few in the later 2004 betas, as versions of this tutorial were in the game for a while. After finishing it you were sent to Khylo to begin the the main game, as seen below. First though, because apart from the four screenhots I took out of order to put earlier in this first article (for narrative purposes) I prefer to put things in order, exploration. Then next, shots from the town and in co-op missions.
Solo Play in Explorable Areas[B]
Quote:
This explorable zone is The Ascalon Wilds, the E3 version's name for the area outside of the main town Khylo. The E3 for Everyone version of this zone was removed between this alpha and the next public test and was replaced with Old Ascalon and the town with Ascalon City. Those are the versions of these zones you can play today, but I remember this much boxier version of the zone well.
![[Image: y5TKDx68_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/85/cc/y5TKDx68_o.jpg)
Quote:
The original Wilds zone fits with the visual look of most of the rest of destroyed Ascalon better, perhaps, than the redone release version of Old Ascalon does, which makes sense considering that the Ascalon missions and the unchanged zones were present in this test, while the redone areas were added later.
![[Image: 9kQciHKr_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b5/ef/9kQciHKr_o.jpg)
Quote:
Character and scenery
![[Image: fo2R9D7m_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/af/ed/fo2R9D7m_o.jpg)
Quote:
Looking up at the still-burning sky...
![[Image: vte6ysGe_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c5/3c/vte6ysGe_o.jpg)
Quote:
This is a pretty nice shot, with the sun and cool sky and ruins...
![[Image: 1DJcfz15_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/7d/25/1DJcfz15_o.jpg)
Quote:
There are a lot of parts of Ascalon that look like this still.
![[Image: 3Bx5DMuJ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0d/38/3Bx5DMuJ_o.jpg)
Quote:
This is one of my favorite Guild Wars screenshots, it shows the environment and really cool sky well. Also note the framerate and triangles counter in the upper right, it's often amusing to see what numbers that system got. It rarely hit 30.
![[Image: aVLuUssl_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/16/42/aVLuUssl_o.jpg)
Quote:
Casting Firestorm on some gargoyles. My character is a Ranger-Elementalist, so I had Firestorm.
![[Image: vHZ8CYtM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/26/db/vHZ8CYtM_o.jpg)
Quote:
I believe on Gargoyle just died...
![[Image: DtwlZMbB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4b/a7/DtwlZMbB_o.jpg)
Quote:
Stone Elementals were in this version of the zone too. I remember enemies chased you an absurdly long way in this test; once I ran along the whole length of the Great Northern Wall trying to escape some enemies, only to eventually be caught.
![[Image: IMH3T1wq_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a9/d7/IMH3T1wq_o.jpg)
Quote:
Shooting an Elemental at close range by a barren hillside. Also, one thing any Guild Wars player should notice is that the minimap here doesn't seem to have a circle around your character showing the range at which enemies will attack you. It's a really useful feature they added later on. The U-key map with its where-you've-gone tracker also was not in the game yet.
![[Image: rwy6GgwR_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c0/3b/rwy6GgwR_o.jpg)
Quote:
The old version of the Ascalon Wilds (Old Ascalon) really was much more canyonlike than the release one. Most of the E3 for Everyone version of Ascalon is in the release game, but not the main town or first zone. I'd love to be able to explore this version of Old Ascalon again...
![[Image: Et5XdoAr_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/15/c3/Et5XdoAr_o.jpg)
Quote:
Dead Gargoyle, live Guard Captain. Note how both of our legs sink into the ground; either that's sand there, or the collision here isn't quite right. Heh.
![[Image: r0G826pl_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ab/ce/r0G826pl_o.jpg)
Quote:
Looking at the entrance to Khylo, the main town in Ascalon at this point in development. The hazy thing in that doorway is a portal which will transport you to the city. It would be renamed Ascalon City before release apparently because they thought Khylo sounded too much like Cairo. As with the Ascalon Wilds/Old Ascalon, the town was entirely redesigned before release; in E3 for Everyone it was very fortlike, with tall stone walls all around and crafters standing on platforms.
![[Image: u2IajKih_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/38/0b/u2IajKih_o.jpg)
[B]The Town, Cooperative Missions, and Arena
Quote:
Khylo. Sometimes the textures would mess up, as you see here on my character. As you can see when this happened the framerate got much worse even with not much going on on screen. Also, I like these bits of old chatlog... even though people knew their characters would not be kept to the next test, trading went on right to the end! Also, yes, the game did not have any built-in trading interface, so you just had to use the chat to advertise that stuff. There weren't materials traders yet either, I don't believe, so all trading had to be through chat.
![[Image: H5PNGcFb_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ca/ff/H5PNGcFb_o.jpg)
Quote:
Part of Khylo. 18 active districts... Guild Wars was popular right from the start! Remember, each district holds a certain number of players, so the more districts, the more people in that town.
![[Image: SebdQHU0_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/96/58/SebdQHU0_o.jpg)
Quote:
This is the Crafter, where you could combine collections of monster-drop items for weapons and such. Having a single Crafter in town would later be replaced with people scattered around the world to trade items with, but at this point it was done at one centralized location. (Between this shot and the next one, I took 3 main menu and character-list shots and 34 shots in the character creator, of which I posted one earlier. Yes, there are that many.)
![[Image: TgLfH2Iq_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d3/17/TgLfH2Iq_o.jpg)
Quote:
Guild Wars did not have AI companions yet at this point, or even Ranger pets or Necromancer undead summons, so in E3 for Everyone you had to go alone or with other human players when in exploration areas or missions. The explorable areas in this test could be attempted alone, but this game is designed to be played in a group, so in missions playing with other people was absolutely essential! This is a player group I was in a mission with.
![[Image: Ec0Dd8pk_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/79/d8/Ec0Dd8pk_o.jpg)
Quote:
Another angle, taken just after that last shot, of the mission lobby, before we set out.
![[Image: 0xW48Bpv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/09/41/0xW48Bpv_o.jpg)
Quote:
The mission started. Before moving forward though, I took screenshots of the left-side interface, starting with the Hero panel. Here you view your stats and can choose which skill lines to put points into and thus improve the function of. At this point the menu interface was on panes you opened on the sides of the screen, instead of the movable windows they later went with. These four were on the left, and graphical options and such are on the right. I don't have a picture of the right-side options menu from this test, but I have the left ones here. As I go through the betas the changes to the interface are interesting to follow. I really like the detailed artwork around the minimap and skill bar in the E3 version here, they look great! Also, again, there was a level 15 cap during this test. You could get experience for skill points to get skills with, but that's it. It was a good introduction into how unimportant levels are in the game.
![[Image: 3dtGiy8h_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/97/d6/3dtGiy8h_o.jpg)
Quote:
The simple single inventory screen of this version is in some ways easier to manage than the multiple-pane one of the release game. The crystals seen in my inventory were used to get skills with at this point; this system would be removed later, along with the skill rings, but it's cool to see them here. You can find more information about how buying skills worked in this test on the official Guild Wars Wiki's E3 for Everyone page (link at end of article).
![[Image: Hpw2mPxz_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a8/55/Hpw2mPxz_o.jpg)
Quote:
Most skill icons have not changed, but the skill selection screen sure did. That healing signet skill would also eventually be replaced with class-specific healing skills, but the resurrection signet is still in the game as are those Ranger skills.
![[Image: besJVWGM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8d/fa/besJVWGM_o.jpg)
Quote:
Some more of the skill descriptions, circa E3 for Everyone. I'm sure some have changed since then...
![[Image: tAUAwu7W_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b6/0d/tAUAwu7W_o.jpg)
Quote:
The questlog. All three of these quests are E3 for Everyone-exclusive quests, which do not exist in other versions of the game as is; the top was renamed, the other two removed entirely, along with the skill gem system. But as that top quest shows, yes, this is all taken in one of my many failed attempts at Stormcaller, later renamed to Nolani Academy , the fourth mission in Ascalon. This mission was HARD then, in a way it hasn't been since launch.
![[Image: ogAywm0b_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/02/79/ogAywm0b_o.jpg)
Quote:
We're running along, during the mission. No, the graphics are definitely not set to max... not on that computers' GeForce2 graphics card. The card does not support the games' post-processing effects option either, and I believe I have anti-aliasing off for performance reasons. The game looked a lot better even then on more powerful machines..
![[Image: zP9H3aBC_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c1/af/zP9H3aBC_o.jpg)
Quote:
The Stormcaller/Nolani Academy mission lobby. It looks the same now, with fewer people most of the time of course. I apparently tried, and failed, this mission at least ten times during E3 for Everyone.
![[Image: Ux7OgnyU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c4/49/Ux7OgnyU_o.jpg)
Quote:
And here's the (Ascalon) Arena lobby. I found a purple dye in the last hours of the alpha, so I used it on the pants part to see what it looked like.
![[Image: UBCkSUJS_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/67/66/UBCkSUJS_o.jpg)
Quote:
Now loading...
![[Image: ciQPT8cO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8c/94/ciQPT8cO_o.jpg)
Quote:Not seen in these screenshots, but also present in E3 for Everyone, were a couple of test areas showing later parts of the game. You could explore some jungle and snow zones, though they had no enemies in them, and compete in a multiplayer 8 v 8 mode in Fort Koga, a defense-versus-offense PvP map that was pretty interesting. Fort Koga made a lot more sense as an 8v8 competitive mission than it does as a 4v4 random arena location as it is in the release game! 8v8 Fort Koga was removed before release but did return in the next public test, where I did take screenshots of it, so see my next post for that.
Waiting for the doors to open to fight our opponents in the arena... but this is the last ingame screenshot I took in this test, so who knows how we did. This version of the Ascalon Arena had a different map from the release version. I have a shot of combat in this version of the arena in the January set I will post later. That "/bug" command would be removed when the game released, but was used, and useful, up until then. I should comment on the tiny tabards. These cover characters on front and back, to mark which team you are on in player versus player multiplayer, and while serviceable are kind of silly looking. They were unpopular enough that Arena.net would later replace them with the guild capes that will be seen in later tests. I think the capes are a nice improvement over these.
![[Image: p2gNnPgh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e5/4a/p2gNnPgh_o.jpg)
Conclusion
And with that, E3 for Everyone ended. I had played several dozen hours over the four days of the test, far more than I initially expected. If there was a time-played command I did not take note of it yet, so I do not know how much time I played this beta, but it was quite a bit given the four-day time limit. The next test would be almost six months later, in late October. At that point monthly beta tests would begin, with one each month from October until the game released in May 2005. I played in all of them, and will post screenshots from those in subsequent posts in this series. I have never been hooked to a pre-release game like I was with Guild Wars! Over the course of the year from E3 for Everyone to launch, despite the very limited number of days the public could play the game I played a good 150-200 hours of this game, and thought about it a lot in the month between each test. From the graphics to the music to the gameplay, this game is amazing in ways nothing else has matched, and that all began with E3 for Everyone.
Again, I will continue this with screenshots from those beta tests, then some from the released game as well later on. As a fan of this game I find it really interesting to look back at the games' evolution before its release, so I'm really happy to have all these old screenshots; the game was different in a lot of ways, as I reference here but not in full detail. To sum it up, some of the most significant differences between this first public version of the game and later ones include the skill-ring system with those crystals and actual skill rings, that temporary 9th skill slot, the different-looking interface and menus, Khylo and the Ascalon Wilds, areas I'd love to explore again someday, and the absence of AI henchmen companions. You can find descriptions of these things online, but finding screenshots of each alpha or beta test, clearly marked, is trickier.
Here are a few resources for GW E3 for Everyone information I found:
This site has a nice interactive map of the E3 for Everyone game, with clickable links showing the descriptions of the various towns and such: http://jerrith.org/gw/default.htm
The Guild Wars Wiki has an E3 for Everyone page, though it's just text and doesn't have screenshots: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/E3_for_Everyone#E3_for_Everyone_2004
On Youtube there are a couple of videos I found of E3 for Everyone Guild Wars gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi-LoDLfl8I&t=4s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta40sVo6t8w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsL-aMeCQkw
Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - Dark Jaguar - 29th October 2018
To me it's more of a "meh", nothing about the gameplay or the level design particularly grabs me. For the sort of game it is, I'm sure it's fine, but this isn't a genre I've ever particularly liked. I'll stick with Zelda.
Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 31st October 2018
Zelda? Guild Wars isn't much like Zelda... sure, both are third parson games with exploration and a fantasy setting, but that's about where the comparisons end. Zelda is much more of an action series, while Guild Wars is more of a strategy game.
As for 'the sort of game it is', GW has MMO elements, but it's not an MMO, it's a very unique mixture unlike anything else. That's a big part of why people still play it, I'm sure -- if you want to play Guild Wars, as I still often do, you have to play Guild Wars, nothing else is like it. The skill system particularly stands out of course, but there are other things too -- the mixed instanced and open design of the world is something other games have done, but none quite like GW's; the way the PvP and PvE elements work is unique, with such a strong PvP component that actually tries to be balanced and not about grind, but player skill; etc, it's all original and unique stuff unlike other games. The map layouts are reasonably original too, and I definitely very much disagree about level design, I think GW's level designs are great! The deep skill-based combat and great graphics are a part of it, but I love exploring the world itself too. It's easily one of the best games ever made.
Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 9th November 2018
Here's the second post/screenshot set in this series.
Continuing on, though, the second public test of Guild Wars came six months after the first one. In late October, Arena.net opened the game to the public again with the World Preview Event. This would be followed by six monthly Beta Weekend Events. I participated in all seven of these beta tests between October 2004 and April 2005. After that, the games' release followed in May. Anyone who preordered, as I did, could play for the first two days without buying the game, so I did that. I will start, however, with the remaining tests from 2004. This time, my post is going to be much more screenshot-focused than before; I've explained the basics of the game, so the pictures are the main focus now. Unlike the E3 for Everyone pics, which are all ones I'd posted online years ago, some of these screenshots are ones that I have never posted online before.
So yeah, image warning! That last post had 20 screenshots, but this has over 60. It's probably more than I should put in a single post, but for now I will do that anyway.
October 2004: World Preview Event
In this second test, Arena.net showed off a new area, the jungles of Kryta. Ascalon wasn't available this time, it'd return later. Kryta is a lush area, very different from the dead wastes of sadly destroyed Ascalon, and it looks great even on the dated computer I was playing the game on. Sadly the performance monitor is not on screen this time, but framerates were at best what I saw in the first test, and often were worse. The game is the same it was before, with the same classes, but the areas you could explore and the interface were new. For the most part, this interface is significantly improved over the one from E3 for Everyone, and is much closer to what you see in the released game, though there are still noteworthy things that would change, including more changes to the interface and skill system. Both of those things improved here, but were not in their final forms yet.
The changes to the skill system were significant. Skill gems were removed and are gone. Now, you could just buy regular skills from a skill vendor for a skill point. Elite skills have been added, additionally. You can only have one of these powerful skills in your skillbar at a time, and they aren't freely purchaseable; instead you need to buy a capture signet skill, then defeat a boss that has the elite you want and use the capture signet to turn that cap sig into the elite of choice. These systems are how you can get skills to this day. Another noteworthy change is the removal of those temporary 9th skills. This beta added in another semi-temporary way of getting skills that was also eventually removed, however: more like the skill gems of before, skill charms were added in this October beta. I don't remember the skill charm system well, as I think I mostly used permanent skills and not these more temporary ones, but skill charms were items that allowed any character to use a specific listed skill, temporarily. Yes, you could use any skill from any class. Skill rings stayed in the game, as they would drop from enemies and could be used, with a skill point, to make a skill charm into a permanent skill if it's for your primary or secondary class. You still could get temporary skills from the skill charms, though, in a way that you have not been able to ever since their removal during beta. They eventually decided that being able to temporarily get skills and trade skills to other characters wasn't a good idea, which makes sense, but being able to try something out without having to spend as much on it is a nice idea. There's an explanation with some reasoning on why skill charms were removed in this interview here; it's about changes to how PvP-only characters, a type of character that can only play player-versus-player matches and not the main player-versus-enemy AI game, get skills, essentially. Anyway, that removal happened in March, so skill charms were in the October through February betas.
Crafting has also changed, to a system much more like it is in release -- instead of a single Crafter for everything, small traders are scattered around the exploration zones who will give you weapons, rare crafting materials, or such in trade for certain types of monster drop items. You can also get weapons from monster drops directly or quest rewards, of course, so I've always found the traders not too useful. They're still in the game, though. More usefully, armor crafters in certain towns will make armor pieces. You can only get armor by buying it there in trade for lots of money and certain required materials. The later in the game you get the more armor costs, so save up. This version of GW didn't have much of a preview of what armor pieces looked like, so I had no idea what I was getting really when I made an armor piece during this test. Even now it's often better to look up images of Guild Wars armor online before buying, to be sure it's one you want. Fortunately the official Guild Wars wiki has a full database.
As for the new location, Kryta and the Maguuma Jungle both were introduced in this test. Some edges of the North Shiverpeaks and Crystal Desert could be visited, but not those areas in full. Even Krytan and the Maguuma Jungle were not finished yet; while the six missions present in this build of the game were complete, the explorable areas were not, and would not be for months. Explorable areas in Kryta often had few monsters, and some had little or no plants around like they do in the final game, in some areas you could walk right through trees and other should-be-impassable objects because collision was not fully implemented yet, and such. It was a pre-release beta and you could tell. The graphics issues where things sometimes broke still occurred as well, at least for me. I think those problems got less common with release, though. There were also few to no quests outside of the main mission track available in many areas, unlike later; they hadn't made a lot of them yet. So you could explore the world, and some areas felt done, but not all. There was more than enough to do for a four-day test, though! All of these issues continued on through the December test, so they apply to this whole post's worth of images. In the January test they started adding in more quests, so that will be for the next post.
Finally, ANet wiped all characters before this test, so you had to recreate your characters, though their names were saved. There would not be another wipe until later in the betas, so I was using the same characters through the three beta events in this post. For purposes of the time-played command, though, because you had to recreate characters time spent in E3 for Everyone could not be viewed anymore, if that command existed then; I don't know that it did. Time played was all erased once the game released, so the only records I have of how much time I spent in the betas, for sure, are in a couple of screenshots I have of time-played counters. One of those is in one of the last images in this long article.
![[Image: vWGLRLpH_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/89/e0/vWGLRLpH_o.jpg)
This shot is from one of the Kryta missions. Krytan missions are for six players, up from the four in Ascalon. Also noteworthy, I've reorganized my skillbar so that heal and rez are on the right end, as I've kept it ever since.
![[Image: 7tvwefL8_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/49/26/7tvwefL8_o.jpg)
This loading screen looks about the same as ever.
![[Image: W1zwexDd_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/14/4c/W1zwexDd_o.jpg)
Yes, once again I mostly played as my Ranger-Elementalist character this test, though I did try out several others for a while. On another note though, at this point I still found navigating missions difficult sometimes. The later addition of a second minimap with a dotline showing your path through the stage was a huge improvement on that regard, but before that sometimes figuring out where to go in a mission was frustrating. Guild Wars missions are not entirely open, but they are open or mazelike enough to sometimes confuse if you don't know where to go.
![[Image: Gm9DO7aX_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/39/30/Gm9DO7aX_o.jpg)
Henchmen, aka 'henchies', have been added to the game! These AI-controlled allies are essential partners for the solo adventurer, or for a party who doesn't have enough people to fill out a full group. More customizable Heroes would be added several years later, but Henchmen are a big improvement over the nothing the first test had. Guild Wars is a team game, built for team play by groups of players, and it's fantastic for it, but options for solo gamers are important and Henchmen and, later, Heroes give you those options.
![[Image: wpwRrhgS_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/09/82/wpwRrhgS_o.jpg)
A part of Lion's Arch, the main town of this beta and, indeed, Guild Wars: Prophecies as a whole. I took a bunch of shots in town but won't post all of them, though there will be more.
![[Image: to6fbmqm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/38/2f/to6fbmqm_o.jpg)
These strange buildings are out in the wilderness... but sadly you cannot get much closer than this. Still, they look cool! I know I keep saying it, but Guild Wars' art design is some of the best ever.
![[Image: u5wQmOe7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/73/45/u5wQmOe7_o.jpg)
The world map of Guild Wars, pre-Eye of the North. The icons show areas I'd gotten to that you could visit in this test. They include five of the six available missions in Kryta and the Maguuma Jungle (silver), a random arena (red, on island), Lion's Arch (gold), and Tombs of the Primeval Kings, a multiplayer arena area for pre-chosen teams (red, in the desert). More on that last one later in this post.
![[Image: GtoX3F9I_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/09/e1/GtoX3F9I_o.jpg)
This is the October '04 version of the inventory screen. It's still a single panel, it just looks nicer now. I do like the paperdoll of the final game, but this single panel was so much easier to organize... oh well. This is in a crowded Lion's Arch zone; see the chatbox behind the dye vendor screen.
![[Image: UdIgXSee_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5a/7a/UdIgXSee_o.jpg)
Again, the camera in Guild Wars is fully user-controllable. Hold the right mouse button and you can move it anywhere except into the ground, which is amusing at times.
![[Image: KcEeAbVZ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d3/2b/KcEeAbVZ_o.jpg)
Pets have been added in this update for Rangers, and this is mine, a Moa Bird. My ranger still has one of these; why change from the best? The shot is taken in the 8v8 Fort Koga random arena. More shots from that are later in this post.
![[Image: 5e9ol0Q8_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c1/bb/5e9ol0Q8_o.jpg)
A nice looking jungle lake. When not in missions I mostly explore with just my character and Henchmen/heroes, since the non-linear nature of exploring the overworld makes it hard to play with other humans; people aren't necessarily going to the same places. There were occasions where I'd get in a group for some specific quest, but most exploration is done like this, with just you and AI. If you have other people you know to play with that could be different of course, it'd be easier to agree on places to go or quests to do with people you can talk to and play with regularly. I should note though that when in a party the game automatically gives each party member a share of the drops, so the more party members the have the less stuff you get. Sure, it's kind of too bad that AIs take a share, but overall this is good because it means no fights with other players over loot! Unless you're pretty good at the game you'll probably usually need a party though.
![[Image: Kd8xx1ao_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/76/b2/Kd8xx1ao_o.jpg)
An overlook. I've probably taken hundreds of Guild Wars screenshots of things that I think look cool at the moment...
![[Image: AppGuRyI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b8/eb/AppGuRyI_o.jpg)
Some (non-interactive) houses in Kryta.
![[Image: ODvID61j_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/32/65/ODvID61j_o.jpg)
Here the ground has glitched out and disappeared. Heh... the game was very stable, but not entirely bug-free.
![[Image: RfDNj784_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/da/32/RfDNj784_o.jpg)
As I said in the first post in this series, when the textures went all white like this the framerate absolutely tanked.
![[Image: p5A96NJN_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/73/7e/p5A96NJN_o.jpg)
This crafter sells armor pieces. Give them the objects listed, they give you that armor. This is still how you can buy armor in the game today, with interface changes of course.
![[Image: CZEVRKs7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ca/72/CZEVRKs7_o.jpg)
Old chat is always neat to see. That person saying that there's no point in getting items because they're just going to be deleted soon is probably right, but why not do so anyway? The game's fun!
![[Image: qwkWx3Rh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/14/1b/qwkWx3Rh_o.jpg)
Tomb of the Primeval Kings, the team-based multiplayer mode, is the predecessor to the Hall of Heroes of the game today. It worked a lot like that, except it was based out of the Tombs outpost and there weren't constant updates in global chat about the latest team to win, if I remember right. Tombs was cool, because the game was pre-release and less serious even someone never in a big guild like me could play it and have fun!
Here's how Tombs worked. You started by making a team of eight players in the Tombs lobby area. Then you enter and fight monsters in a 'hold off the enemy' scenario for several minutes until several other participating teams are lined up and ready. Then, the mission starts. It is a random choice between several game types, including straight 1v1 team battles to the death, giant 4-team, 32-player melees with a resurrection station that will return your party to life if it all dies and the NPC priest is alive (with a NPC warrior ally to guard them), and another game mode I never ran in to, a capture the flag variant or something. If you lose, you go back to the start zone. If you win however you get another fight -- against another winning team and in a new arena. The team I played this mode with didn't win the one time we got there so I don't know what happened next. In this mode you do get more rewards -- Fame. A win in the first round (not counting the PvE 'hold them off' part) got you 1 Fame point and a win in the second (victor's championship) two. Overall, in this beta I got a whole 4 points. Heh. Yeah, I didn't play it too much... it was fun, but I wanted to focus more on stuff that got me rewards I could use for crafting with limited time. Guild Wars is an exceptional PvP multiplayer game, but I like the versus-AI experience better overall. At least I got a few points, though; this would not be possible for me in the final released game...
As for screenshots of it, I do have a couple from in a Tombs mission in the December image set below, but they're not too thrilling.
![[Image: Curgj9wA_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4a/b6/Curgj9wA_o.jpg)
Here you see one of my dozens of screenshots from the character creation page. I once again took screenshots of all the classes in both genders here, but one should be fine to show the new, nicer interface. The actual options are the same, though.
![[Image: uaE67YJl_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/82/03/uaE67YJl_o.jpg)
And here we return to Fort Koga 8v8 Random Arena, and those silly little tabards. You only got experience and nothing else for winning, but it was fun anyway.
![[Image: UdN34xkD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/89/30/UdN34xkD_o.jpg)
... Yeah, removing these in favor of capes was a very good idea. This map as an 8v8 really was pretty cool, though. The full Fort Koga map was only available in these early alpha and betas; parts of the map were blocked off later when it got cut to a 4v4 Random Arena stage.
Lastly for the October WPE's part of the article, I did not make this image, but this is a fanmade map of the Guild Wars world, circa the WPE, made by people on the IGN Guild Wars forum that I read and posted on at the time. I would participate in adding a little bit to the map later on as more zones got added to the game; more on that in the next post.
Quote:
Comparing this map to Kryta and the Maguuma Jungle in the final game it's pretty interesting to see how many pieces they would later add to these parts of the game...
![[Image: 3tWo3Vy8_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e0/55/3tWo3Vy8_o.jpg)
In this three-day test I once again piled in the hours. I was in college, but all these tests were over weekends so I had time. As these shots show I mostly played as my ranger again, but I did create a few other characters, most notably my necromancer Talindra Darkbane. Unfortunately the only screenshots I took of playing as her are no good, so screenshots of the character will have to wait until the November test post. By the end of this test, though, I thought that I really wanted to play a lot more as the Necromancer, and that is exactly what I did in November. Given that the time commitment to each character is significant changing characters is a pretty big deal in this game changing characters is hard and means you'll be replaying many hours of content you did already with somebody else, but sometimes it is worth it.
Other than that though, it was just awesome to play this game again, after six months. No matter how long it is between play sessions Guild Wars is always amazing. Running around, using your skills judiciously, fighting monsters, collecting items, using those items to get stuff with, it's a fantastic gameplay loop that the game pulls off to near-perfection.
Oh, and the tech held. Hundreds of thousands of people played during the four-day October WPE, and the servers held up great.
November Beta Weekend Event
About a week after the October Halloween weekend event, Arena.net held the first monthly Beta Weekend Event, or BWE. These six monthly tests were semi-open, in that they eventually did require access keys to play in, but those keys were not too hard to get. At first, such as in November here, just about anyone could still play. They also held contests to give out keys over the months. Or, you could pre-order the game, and get access to all of the BWEs with that preorder purchase. I got keys from various sources for the first few BWEs, but eventually pre-ordered, and never regretted that $5 for a second; I got dozens of hours of fun for that money.
Only a week had passed since the last test, but things changed in Guild Wars. As you will see the interface is the same, but with this test came the return of Ascalon! It had been more than six months since we'd last seen it, but the dead ruins of Ascalon returned in November, and I was glad to see them. With that returned the Ascalon tutorial stage for new characters that I mentioned in the E3 article. You could keep your characters from October, there was no wipe in between these two tests, so I didn't need new characters, but I did mix things up by switching from mostly playing as my Ranger, to mostly playing as my aforementioned new Necromancer character Talindra Darkbane. This character name I made up myself. The first name was the result of me thinking about making up names that started with "tal" and that was what I thought up. I ended up liking it quite a bit, it's a name I've used for characters in other games too. I like to make character names in games that are fitting to the gameworld, and aren't just the kinds of silly names anyone reading this has surely seen a lot of in these screenshots. However, this last name... well, it's kind of an over-reaction; like, she's a necromancer but not evil because I don't want to play evil characters, so, Darkbane it is! Heh. It's not great but it works I guess. Guild Wars necromancers aren't evil anyway, so the distinction's kind of pointless, but it means something to me. Oh, and no, I won't have character-name-origin-stories for many other characters; I just had to for this one because of how it is the one I've played as the most by far.
![[Image: FCkNcIpO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b4/12/FCkNcIpO_o.jpg)
So with that said, here's my first usable shot of Talindra, though given how broken the graphics are here that's a borderline statement at best... this does show that Ascalon tutorial stage, though -- Guardsman Jax was a character in the tutorial zone these early tests used. Yes, the same guy was in Kryta for the October test, then went back to Ascalon a week later. Long trip...
![[Image: vzFU2SpD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c7/cf/vzFU2SpD_o.jpg)
The Great Northern Wall in all its ruined glory. Here we see Old Ascalon as it has looked since, as the E3 '04 version has been entirely replaced with this one.
![[Image: 5A0UGLkB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/de/9a/5A0UGLkB_o.jpg)
A battle against a Charr. I still hate Charr, no matter how much Guild Wars 2 tries to get you to think about them as not evil...
![[Image: g4nHGi6t_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/78/17/g4nHGi6t_o.jpg)
The Great Northern Wall mission. I really miss being able to play Guild Wars missions with random groups, it was something I really, really loved in this game...
![[Image: 4gbTxL2P_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1f/70/4gbTxL2P_o.jpg)
Progressing in that mission. It looks the same now.
![[Image: banAt9BM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2a/2c/banAt9BM_o.jpg)
Trebuchets are cool!
![[Image: OKLwncn6_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/99/24/OKLwncn6_o.jpg)
This loading screen image could use some work, but I think it's still the same.
![[Image: qckm9XoB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ed/47/qckm9XoB_o.jpg)
Fighting Gargoyles again!
![[Image: VsZkPhyU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/13/e0/VsZkPhyU_o.jpg)
Is it the edge of the world? Seems so...
![[Image: PBg64Rqi_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/05/95/PBg64Rqi_o.jpg)
I played as the Ranger for a while in this test too. Most of the snow part of the game was not playable yet in this beta, but a few bits of it could be accessed, such as this one.
![[Image: i6dEWqO8_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f4/c0/i6dEWqO8_o.jpg)
Is this a cold pond or a hot spring?
![[Image: MazD8aJY_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a4/00/MazD8aJY_o.jpg)
Ice caves in Guild Wars look really cool.
![[Image: NbHjDdlJ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3e/bd/NbHjDdlJ_o.jpg)
The arena lobby.
![[Image: NhAa9jhI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f5/b7/NhAa9jhI_o.jpg)
World map, Kryta characters edition. See, in this test you could either play level 15 characters in Kryta, or create a new level 1 character in Ascalon, but not connect the two. So the Ranger is in Kryta, the Necromancer Ascalon.
![[Image: U7maNjJ8_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3e/e5/U7maNjJ8_o.jpg)
And on that note here's the Ascalon-characters map, as far as I'd gotten in the missions up to this point.
![[Image: Fc1mRhiT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e6/5f/Fc1mRhiT_o.jpg)
Got a new armor piece!
![[Image: eGAeoKud_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/78/ac/eGAeoKud_o.jpg)
And here's more of the set. Here we see the new Ascalon City, which is the one in the release game. My first reaction was that it isn't as cool looking as Khylo was... which it probably isn't. It has some nice aspects to it though.
![[Image: 8HZDkHSt_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/04/51/8HZDkHSt_o.jpg)
The character select screen. As with the release game, you had four slots available. The third character is an Elementalist I didn't play a lot of and would later recreate with a different name.
![[Image: gA3zm3yS_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bb/42/gA3zm3yS_o.jpg)
I wanted to play Nolani Academy (nee Stormcaller) again? Really? Well, okay...
December 2004 Beta Weekend Event
While mostly a continuation of November, December did add one thing: you now could access much more of the North Shiverpeaks and their beautiful snowy landscape. I love snow and winter, and it's particularly great looking in Guild Wars.
Additionally, Arena.net added the function where if you hold Shift down when pressing Print Screen it takes a higher-detail and sometimes higher-resolution screenshot with the interface momentarily turned off. So, some of these shots show that nice new feature off. Some of the shots I took without Shift+Printscreen show the performance monitor again, to see what kinds of framerates I was getting.
![[Image: zX1GJV4R_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/53/94/zX1GJV4R_o.jpg)
For comparison here's the game as it looked by default.
![[Image: FVjJ6hQw_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ae/49/FVjJ6hQw_o.jpg)
And here it is with Shift+Printscreen. Beyond the disabled interface the graphics are similar, but there is a clear improvement here.
![[Image: gfUUQcqB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/02/21/gfUUQcqB_o.jpg)
When the ground broke in a mission in a human group, there's not much I could do but try to go on regardless; you don't want to bail on other people just because the graphics are a mess!
![[Image: jq6iBmVY_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/91/fe/jq6iBmVY_o.jpg)
More from that mission with the glitchy ground, this time with Shift+Printscreen.
![[Image: yJ3UQEZL_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/72/16/yJ3UQEZL_o.jpg)
The snow areas are some of the best looking in this game...
![[Image: mAFdg9O3_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3e/e1/mAFdg9O3_o.jpg)
Fighting monsters. The cast of Guild Wars enemies is so interesting, they did a great job making unique foes that are not just fantasy-standards.
![[Image: ySYf1RQ9_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/70/d7/ySYf1RQ9_o.jpg)
Outpost in the jungle.
![[Image: 7G0hEPJK_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3f/07/7G0hEPJK_o.jpg)
Tombs mission outpost. That sun behind the pillar looks pretty cool.
![[Image: eEGAgxqH_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e5/b2/eEGAgxqH_o.jpg)
Tombs was hard... this waterfall is kind of nice though.
![[Image: iiyfjRS8_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/59/50/iiyfjRS8_o.jpg)
Resurrection shrine priest and ghostly hero in Tombs.
![[Image: HqF4rvnz_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/93/b4/HqF4rvnz_o.jpg)
Entering battle, Tombs.
![[Image: hJz4uZvY_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c4/58/hJz4uZvY_o.jpg)
And here's the last from this Tombs set. I don't think we did great.
![[Image: MOvXpmto_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ae/84/MOvXpmto_o.jpg)
The Shiverpeaks, as Talindra. The falling-snow effect looks so nice...
![[Image: UGpD2T6L_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/83/9e/UGpD2T6L_o.jpg)
A nice action shot.
![[Image: Z1f0DfvQ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4b/2d/Z1f0DfvQ_o.jpg)
This one's probably one of my favorites I've taken, as far as action shots with the Shift+Printscreen combo go. The enemy Dwarf on their Dolyaak is rearing up as we strike back...
![[Image: I9VBiwJX_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/17/d7/I9VBiwJX_o.jpg)
An entrance to a mine that you unfortunately can't enter; Guild Wars: Prophecies is an almost entirely above-ground game, dungeons wouldn't really be added in numbers until Eye of the North. Still, it looks good.
![[Image: oakgV605_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1f/2a/oakgV605_o.jpg)
Another snowy vista, this time from a mission.
![[Image: aha43PQb_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/42/83/aha43PQb_o.jpg)
I believe this is in Ascalon City. Those giant paintings are pretty cool looking.
![[Image: JVOrGCx7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a7/bd/JVOrGCx7_o.jpg)
At the end of some of the betas, including this one, they had a fun closing event in Lion's Arch. For December, they alternated between burning people and summoning the great zombie dragon Rotscale. Lots of Rotscales, in fact. Too many Rotscales and people burning for my poor old computer to handle well.
![[Image: GJcTjjwz_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/62/47/GJcTjjwz_o.jpg)
One Rotscale. Since this was a town, there was no way to fight back... but they sure could attack us!
![[Image: JHugCipV_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cf/23/JHugCipV_o.jpg)
Fortunately people got resurrected after dying, but it still was a little annoying... though mostly fun. I like that they did these closing events, people who weren't there missed out! Yes, and I do say that despite seeing that the frames-per-second here on my PC dropped to 2 fps when I took this shot.
![[Image: w2k5DXtY_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/03/16/w2k5DXtY_o.jpg)
The green-name people are developers watching/participating in the fun.
![[Image: 8SGoa298_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ee/57/8SGoa298_o.jpg)
More Rotscales!
![[Image: WOXyIWjK_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/dd/70/WOXyIWjK_o.jpg)
During the closing event, after people mentioned them I decided to take a screenshot of my deaths and time-played counters. It says that over the 38 days since the last account reset before the October BWE that opened this post, I had played 47 hours with this character, Falconess Ysaye the Ranger, and had died 212 times as that character. That's 47 hours played, in only one of my two main characters, in eight actual gameplay days, since the October test was 4 days and November and December two days each. Considering I was in college that semester I played this a lot while each test was active. I do have a time-played screenshot for Talindra from a later beta, but not a definite total for how much I played the game pre-release. At release the counters were reset.
![[Image: 3hWkQ29x_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/53/c9/3hWkQ29x_o.jpg)
Trying to survive this was a doomed effort...
![[Image: W5RWkAj4_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c6/5d/W5RWkAj4_o.jpg)
We tried, though. It must have ended soon after this one, because this is my last shot from December.
Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 18th November 2018
Yes, it's a third part in this ongoing series. I've only ever posted a handful of these screenshots on the internet before, so almost all of them are new. Well, it's been long enough, so here they are. The core of Guild Wars was in great shape, but as it got closer to release Arena.net worked on the interface and balance, as they also slowly showed some more areas of the game. Readers will see some of all that here, as well as a bunch of shots of the entertaining end-of-beta event from January.
January
With the beginning of 2005 came the fourth Guild Wars BWE, or Beta Weekend Event, in early January. While the game was mostly the same, a few things happened this month in Guild Wars. ANet continued to work on the game as it got close to release, and teh interface took a jump towards its final form this month. I'll get to that, but going along with it there was a full character reset, so I had to recreate all of my characters again, trying to make them look like they should from screenshots pretty much. Character names were reserved for your account, but hours played, items, and such all were reset. Well, it's a beta, so you expect things like that.
The big change this time is further refinement to the interface. The old tabbed side window has been removed in favor of movable windows, with separate panels you can open for each one of the tabs on the lefthand menu. Oddly the righthand tab, for your graphics settings and such, is still here in this test, but the chatbox, map, and all of those left-side menus have been revamped. See the shots below for details. This version of the game was closer to the look of the final game, but it isn't quite there yet-- there's still a full-map button attached to the minimap, for example, and you can't just drag buttons onto the screen yet.
Additionally, you seem to be able to take characters to any available area this time, so the previous divide between Ascalon and Kryta characters has been removed. So, I took my Necromancer to Kryta, of course!
![[Image: WUT9Vg8u_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/42/a3/WUT9Vg8u_o.jpg)
This is a simple shot, but I like it anyway. In the upper right you see a hint of this updates' big change...
![[Image: tGgZvxn1_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/70/18/tGgZvxn1_o.jpg)
Lion's Arch. The Party Members panel has been redone.
![[Image: 4sU5SpCs_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/31/9f/4sU5SpCs_o.jpg)
Denravi looks pretty cool...
![[Image: 8B6GdBaM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/99/2e/8B6GdBaM_o.jpg)
Guild Wars does have a first-person camera option if you zoom in all the way. I rarely use it because it isn't very useful most of the time, but as unexciting as it is here's a first-person shot to show what it looks like.
![[Image: YBc1mOVC_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/75/99/YBc1mOVC_o.jpg)
The Maguuma Jungle has some pretty big plants in it... though the foliage isn't nearly as dense as it would be in a real jungle, everything's all spaced out so you can fight unobstructed. I've always thought Kryta and the Maguuma Jungle don't look realistic because of that, but oh well, they look great anyway.
![[Image: LFmdColB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/51/b2/LFmdColB_o.jpg)
Remember to set your skills, says this new tooltip!
![[Image: uE6fAW0f_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ca/a3/uE6fAW0f_o.jpg)
And here is the look of the new inventory system, with a paperdoll of your character showing currently equipped items, and separate panes for different bags you're carrying. The visual look would be improved on, but this concept is what went into the final game. By release you wouldn't start with all those bags either, only the main Backpack. This is as much inventory space as any character can have, still, to this day, but this was before the Xun'lai Chest account storage space system, so in beta if you wanted more storage there wasn't much you could do.
![[Image: WsPGeuql_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/67/99/WsPGeuql_o.jpg)
And here's the new on-screen map you can view during play. It shows your location and your path through the current zone, which is pretty awesome. When playing now I have a scaled-down version of this map open almost all of the time.
![[Image: pG0FT7of_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/97/9b/pG0FT7of_o.jpg)
The questlog. Functionally it's the same, it's just now a separate window.
![[Image: mwyuK1uS_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/20/ab/mwyuK1uS_o.jpg)
And the same goes for the new Skills window. It's still just a list, click and drag skills to your bar at the bottom of the screen to equip them.
![[Image: nONET6yc_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/84/79/nONET6yc_o.jpg)
Yes, the ground textures still sometimes broke like this. I don't know what caused this bug, but it doesn't happen on newer computers or anymore, thankfully.
![[Image: vAtn8RzS_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/fa/f7/vAtn8RzS_o.jpg)
I promised this in a previous post in this series, but here it is, the not-in-retail Ascalon Arena! This arena is the random arena of the original E3 for Everyone, and it also appeared in the November, December, and, obviously, January tests as you can see here. It's a simple V-shaped map, pretty much. It would be removed before release and replaced with the Ascalon Arena map of the release game, which has a lake in the center. I'm not sure which is better, but I do like this one, it's simple and you get straight to the action.
![[Image: fRaTLC6M_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3f/d9/fRaTLC6M_o.jpg)
The rest of the shots from this beta are a whole bunch of pictures from the end-of-beta event. This time they randomly made everyone do various emotes, and also grew and shrank the sizes of the players, which was pretty cool and isn't something you'll ever see happen in the regular game. Here, everyone's praying.
![[Image: uVPVPZPI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/13/6e/uVPVPZPI_o.jpg)
Chat from the closing event.
![[Image: NlJA7Lkw_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/21/6f/NlJA7Lkw_o.jpg)
And now everyone is tiny! I can understand why this isn't in the regular game, it'd be hard to click on people this small and wouldn't be fair for balance purposes, but it's cool that the engine can do it.
![[Image: VFSf3SwA_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3f/c9/VFSf3SwA_o.jpg)
And now back to normal size I believe.
![[Image: Ki744IeW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6c/66/Ki744IeW_o.jpg)
Everyone's tiny again.
![[Image: InrdGTjh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/df/fa/InrdGTjh_o.jpg)
Yup, more miniature people.
![[Image: h0jfSlLu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f2/aa/h0jfSlLu_o.jpg)
And now, suddenly people have started to get really large! I'm still tiny, as are some others, so I'm an ant surrounded by giants, or something like that...
![[Image: lLx9Xpg2_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/95/3d/lLx9Xpg2_o.jpg)
Can't even see myself anymore, with the giant naked people on screen... (Underwear is class-specific, as with the rest of the costumes, and cannot be changed or recolored. Each class and gender combo has one look everyone has.)
![[Image: Vq1Zf716_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/02/00/Vq1Zf716_o.jpg)
Yeah, I'm still small. Now everyone's praying again.
![[Image: 2r9MY7D6_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/75/36/2r9MY7D6_o.jpg)
Finally I grew in size! That's nice. Talindra's a short character so it's probably nice to be bigger sometimes...
![[Image: 98NfEha3_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d3/b7/98NfEha3_o.jpg)
And now some people have shrunk, but not me. This was a pretty silly event to experience, people who didn't play the betas missed out. :) I took a lot of shots of it because of how amusing it all was.
![[Image: JrmC6l1K_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9a/fe/JrmC6l1K_o.jpg)
Two-day beta over! Come back next month...
February
February brought two big changes to Guild Wars. First, they continued simplifying the look of the on-screen interface. This month, they simplified it a bit too much, presumably because the final interface wasn't quite ready yet so we got this very basic look in the interim. So for February, the remaining visual details around the map in the lower righthand corner have been removed, though there is still a map icon next to the minimap. The look of the skillbar and weapon-select icons have also been simplified to a very basic state, as all visual flourishes on them are gone. It's fortunat that they didn't stick with this look, because it lacks the visual flourish I expect from Guild Wars. The final interface look would add some of those details back in, but the visually complex skillbar and map of the original E3 build of the game were gone for good. That's kind of too bad, I liked the look of that ornate interface... ah well. This does free up a little screen space, anyway.
The other new thing this month is the addition of pre-Searing. My first introduction to Guild Wars was, of course, Seared Ascalon, as it was in the E3 2004 open alpha. That blasted, nearly lifeless wasteland is a memorable place! We players knew that something had happened to the country, but not what. But now, in February, a few months before release, Arena.net was finally able to reveal Ascalon as it looked before its destruction. Before the Searing, Ascalon was a beautiful country, of green fields and very European architecture. What happened to it is pretty sad... which is why, to this day, there is a thriving pre-Searing player community. Once you leave pre-Searing in the final game you can never go back, so some choose to never leave with a character. This reveal was pretty interesting, and as a result I took a lot of screenshots. Comparing some of these sights to the ruins of the main game is kind of sad...
First though, for this beta you could recreate a character in pre-Searing, but just like in the released game you can't travel back and forth between pre-Searing and the rest of the game. So, a (probably newly recreated) Ranger is in pre-Searing here, while my Necromancer stayed in the main gameworld. I mostly played pre-Searing, but not exclusively, as the shots will show.
![[Image: tsjs7ofV_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/99/5e/tsjs7ofV_o.jpg)
Here is pre-Searing Ascalon. Gwen here is a young girl who follows you around in pre-Searing Ascalon. She'd become a much more important character several years later...
![[Image: yxHpOWiv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c2/19/yxHpOWiv_o.jpg)
Pre-Searing is a really nice looking area, with green fields and nice architecture.
![[Image: xbc9JrYf_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/57/c0/xbc9JrYf_o.jpg)
Verdant landscapes abound.
![[Image: udsOozer_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e8/3f/udsOozer_o.jpg)
Ascalon City, viewed from outside. Pre-Searing is a much slower and easier start to the game than we had before! This area really eases you into the game, starting with only a few skills and very easy enemies. I do have one issue with pre-Saring, though: with it added, seared Ascalon lost much of its challenge, unfortunately. It's just not the same with so much time to learn and level up before getting there. At least the eventual addition of Hard mode helped some there...
![[Image: PJkfFY27_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/30/fd/PJkfFY27_o.jpg)
This nice village certainly is nothing like the E3 for Everyone version of Ascalon I first saw, either in life or in level design.
![[Image: fQdcWx1j_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f4/51/fQdcWx1j_o.jpg)
Yeah, they really want you to feel bad for what you know is going to happen next...
![[Image: 3kPFDNJ7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3c/49/3kPFDNJ7_o.jpg)
The pre-Saring enemies may be weak, but there are some.
![[Image: utXYc7gE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/29/db/utXYc7gE_o.jpg)
Up to four skills now. Pre-Searing may be very easy, but it is a pretty good tutorial space for new players.
![[Image: VXrmsg7J_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d6/3a/VXrmsg7J_o.jpg)
Some NPCs, such as this one, can also be found in seared Ascalon... but others are MIA.
![[Image: PD1LYr9C_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/25/67/PD1LYr9C_o.jpg)
There is a little bit of snowy landscape in pre-Searing.
![[Image: mURicP6B_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/fc/66/mURicP6B_o.jpg)
One side of a statue of Lyssa, one of the six gods of Guild Wars' world. Lyssa is the twin god of Mesmers.
![[Image: puTnZBtO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ee/54/puTnZBtO_o.jpg)
And here is the other side.
![[Image: 1JZ50USW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0d/21/1JZ50USW_o.jpg)
Here I am standing in an oddly shallow lake by a water mill. Guild Wars doesn't let you do things such as jump or swim, so either you can walk through something in a map or you can't go there at all. As a result most water is impassable, but some areas are shallow enough that you can wade through them, such as this lake here.
![[Image: 3lo3NUly_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/02/1f/3lo3NUly_o.jpg)
Nice shot of this statue in Sardelac Sanitarium.
![[Image: LG0dfgIj_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/de/2f/LG0dfgIj_o.jpg)
Yes, the floor isn't solid here.
![[Image: fovML9dF_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/98/41/fovML9dF_o.jpg)
Foggy hills...
![[Image: x8Jqk6XV_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ab/ea/x8Jqk6XV_o.jpg)
That sky sure isn't looking quite as nice now is it...
![[Image: nzVK7khc_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/97/ff/nzVK7khc_o.jpg)
This is a cutscene near the end of pre-Searing.
![[Image: 37PybADO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/dc/a8/37PybADO_o.jpg)
Yes, a storm is coming. Or worse. Finishing Pre-Searing would have to wait, though, you couldn't have a character actually finish it and leave in this beta.
![[Image: xxWIKBSd_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3e/7e/xxWIKBSd_o.jpg)
Cutscene over, I return to blue-skies Ascalon. I celebrated finishing it for a bit before I went back to my characters in the main world.
![[Image: jL3Cl5gL_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a4/fc/jL3Cl5gL_o.jpg)
First, though, I explored the dungeon in pre-Searing some, the Catacombs. Inaccessible in seared Ascalon, the Catacombs are a large and pretty cool network of caves, and in one of them you find this giant stained-glass window painting of the death god Grenth. No, he's not evil, just unforgiving.
![[Image: o8Q8a7sE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/74/e8/o8Q8a7sE_o.jpg)
And here I am exploring the Catacombs with another human player. Pre-Searing has a maximum party size of two, with no Henchmen available, so you're either alone with your pet if you have one, or with one other human. I mostly played it solo, but did party up for this a bit tougher bit.
![[Image: eVZOhKx2_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/05/59/eVZOhKx2_o.jpg)
An ominous part of the Catacomb indeed... this can't be good.
![[Image: 4sP2AX1A_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/00/cc/4sP2AX1A_o.jpg)
With the Catacombs explored I returned to the main gameworld, and my Necromancer character. I had to go to Ascalon first of course to see the contrast. After the Searing all plant life is dead.
![[Image: 5GwijxVn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4b/6d/5GwijxVn_o.jpg)
Here I'm exploring the far reaches of the Maguuma Jungle.
![[Image: uTmpV4FU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/7b/42/uTmpV4FU_o.jpg)
I posted some on the now sadly long-gone IGN Guild Wars forum during the betas, and at one point decided to help out with a giant map of the overworld people there were putting together. I posted an earlier version of the map in the previous post, but new areas had been added to the game this time, including Reed Bog and The Falls and this outpost at Ventari's Refuge, and I decided to map out the small zone Reed Bog. My small contribution was to fully explore this zone south of Ventari's Refuge. Here's the entrance point on the map.
![[Image: vlam0DRo_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1d/bb/vlam0DRo_o.jpg)
I added this line in Paint to show where the separation point between the two zones is for that map I talked about. The only version of the map I have with my part on it is a post-release map of GW's whole gameworld as of May '05, though, so I'll hold off on posting it until I get to that point. It'll only be a few more of these posts before I get there.
![[Image: Xw5COSOP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/26/d4/Xw5COSOP_o.jpg)
In order to fully explore a zone you need to run along the whole zone boundary, bumping into the sides to be sure you've explored every possible shred of the edges of the map. It's kind of tedious, which is why I've never tried to get 100% of the map explored, but someone has to do it to put together complete overworld maps...
![[Image: mcG4t5c0_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/70/b3/mcG4t5c0_o.jpg)
And here we see how far I got in The Falls, the large zone past the smaller one I was mostly focused on mapping. There is more of it past this point, but I wouldn't see it for many years; you never have to go there, it's an optional area.
![[Image: gxbUUAKc_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2e/e7/gxbUUAKc_o.jpg)
Gathering a party in Tombs. I don't know how it went, I didn't take any shots this time in the Tombs battle itself.
![[Image: Dw9Jez3C_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/35/d7/Dw9Jez3C_o.jpg)
This sure does look different from the vistas of Ascalon images above...
![[Image: azmWGKZW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/97/b7/azmWGKZW_o.jpg)
Here near the end of the beta, I tried out the Elementalist class again for a bit. I'd remade and renamed my Elementalist since a few months before, with a new name kind of themed after Talindra's but fitting for an Elementalist. I wouldn't end up sticking with this name either, after release. I did finally make a new character with this name this year, however (and yes, the name was available!), though it's a Mesmer in pre-Searing at the moment. I'm not sure, I might keep the character there... Oh, and yes, it's always great to see old chat.
![[Image: goQ5FkhK_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/34/c0/goQ5FkhK_o.jpg)
Now this sure is some impressively broken ground! The objects are repeating as I move the camera, essentially, in the messed up part of the display.
![[Image: fqMuFHr8_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/7b/80/fqMuFHr8_o.jpg)
I hope starting the mission fixed the issue... a zone transition often would do so.
![[Image: TG7PxbiU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a4/c8/TG7PxbiU_o.jpg)
The beta is winding down, so the antics in Lion's Arch were winding up.
![[Image: 7FDqqMUp_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8a/0c/7FDqqMUp_o.jpg)
I'm not sure whether there was an event this month from the devs, though, all I've got are these two shots which don't hint at one.
![[Image: ASBz2fjM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/85/af/ASBz2fjM_o.jpg)
I checked pre-Searing again before the beta's end. I see someone in chat complaining about WoW... and I agree, I never have liked that game much...
![[Image: 2sF5aOk1_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bb/88/2sF5aOk1_o.jpg)
And here's the last shot I have from this beta. To close it out I seem to be playing this mission again, with henchies this time instead of other players. The interface and menus continue looking more and more like they have since release, but still aren't quite there.
Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 26th November 2018
It's time for more "new" Guild Wars screenshots! I really like that I'm finally posting all these online, anyway, so this series definitely will continue. If it gets enough parts I might add another top-bar page for the GW screenshot links, instead of having a whole category in the table of contents... we'll see. On that note, this time I decided to cover only one event, because I've got over 60 screenshots and that's about as many as I want in one post. For whatever reason, I took a bit over 80 screenshots of this BWE, the most I took of any of the betas not counting all of those character creation screen shots I did in the first two tests. And now, I decided to post about 3/4ths of those; from the past updates, I posted most of the E3 for Everyone shots, but lower percentages of the October to February ones; some just weren't worth posting. The same is true here, but even if in some ways they've gotten less interesting, as the most different things versus the game you can still play today slowly are being removed in favor of the Guild Wars we know and love, as of this update release is still a few months away, and the game is still very much unfinished. So, on to the March 2005 Beta Weekend Event!
March 2005 Beta Weekend Event
As Guild Wars got closer to release, more and more of the final game came into place. As such, this second-to-last beta mostly refined the game as it was, instead of adding major new content. The main new addition was a newly improved PvP-only character type and guild halls, forts that guilds can buy to fight in during guild-versus-guild battles, or hang out in anytime if you want. Along with that guild versus guild battles were also added, though I've never done that since I never have been in a guild large and interested enough in that to do PvP together. Other than that, many more quests were added to the PvE game. The character creation interface was alsorevamped, though I don't show that here. A listing of the changes is in this article here: http://gw1101.gtm.guildwars.com/events/press/interviews/fansite-friday-bwe5.php The rest of the interface is exactly the same as it was in February, though, so the final interface isn't here yet; that will have to wait for April. Yes, the interface wasn't finalized until just before launch.
Other than adding guild halls, probably the thing this beta was best known for was its closing event. Probably the most famous of the Guild Wars beta closing events, this one sounds like it was pretty fun... but sadly, for whatever reason I have no shots of it, and instead spent the closing part of the beta in the random arenas. I had fun there, though, so oh well. I will say some more about this event at the end anyway though, with some links to others who did experience it. I do have a bunch of screenshots of the April final closing event, though, so look forward to that!
One thing I do have a bunch of screenshots of this time is scenery, including a lot of large paintings and other interesting sights in Ascalon. These things can still be seen in the game today and they'd look better now, but I decided to post lots of these screenshots anyway because the amazing graphics have always been one of the many things I love about this game, and what better way to show that than by taking screenshots of that and sharing them?
![[Image: fQ8Y6g90_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c1/60/fQ8Y6g90_o.jpg)
On screen here, my character and some available henchies. Henchies are helpful but no replacement for human players. For PvE exploration, though, they're usually fine.
![[Image: QivyqnuO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f7/a1/QivyqnuO_o.jpg)
I'm not sure where I took this screenshot, and it's kind of frustrating me now. It looks like pre-Searing Ascalong architecture, but it can't be that, so where IS this? Is it somewhere in Kryta, even though it looks Ascalonian? Bah...
![[Image: hcK12whZ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c5/61/hcK12whZ_o.jpg)
And now, back to Lion's Arch. This sure isn't too interesting of a shot, though... what was I thinking here, that it's kind of interesting because it's one of the few places in the original GW campaign where you are actually under a roof?
![[Image: OrE8W3zL_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/80/aa/OrE8W3zL_o.jpg)
If this is Lion's Arch, it sure is empty...
![[Image: id2iB7Wx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5a/64/id2iB7Wx_o.jpg)
Even in low res and with anti-aliasing off GW scenery still looks pretty good, I think. But on a modern PC with everything maxed and the new graphics option on, it looks really great! This is just an arch, but it still looks pretty cool...
![[Image: DvBMriWW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d9/17/DvBMriWW_o.jpg)
And now for a couple shots of the main addition this time, guild hall islands. This is the first one they finished, the Warrior's Isle. Buying one for your guild cost a bunch of money, but you could visit them to check them out, as I'm doing here.
![[Image: r9TCtTPe_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/95/2b/r9TCtTPe_o.jpg)
More of the Warrior's Isle. The Asian architecture here presaged the art design direction of Factions and the Battle Isles.
![[Image: yWC6lEOU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ae/5a/yWC6lEOU_o.jpg)
And now, back to (Seared) Ascalon. Such a nice place...
![[Image: tHAmnNut_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/df/37/tHAmnNut_o.jpg)
Destroyed houses like this sure weren't in the original E3 for Everyone version of the Old Ascalon area!
![[Image: 6HzL1eKF_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2e/3a/6HzL1eKF_o.jpg)
Little bits of dying grass are about as much life as you'll ever see in seared Ascalon. No wonder so many of the survivors left...
![[Image: MxnbzYFg_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6f/8a/MxnbzYFg_o.jpg)
This was flat before the Searing!
![[Image: w6jKuX4X_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5c/8c/w6jKuX4X_o.jpg)
Giant crystals like this have erupted all over Ascalon because of the Searing. They're nice looking but are a sign of the destruction that happened...
![[Image: LvhF8xA5_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a0/d6/LvhF8xA5_o.jpg)
Necromancer Munne survived the Searing, though.
![[Image: tpa1L80F_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f4/43/tpa1L80F_o.jpg)
Running through Ascalon...
![[Image: wcuIGN5Y_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/23/1d/wcuIGN5Y_o.jpg)
But now, back to Kryta, and this particularly not-great looking loading screen. I get that it's a straight, way zoomed out overhead view, but the end result looks very pixelated and kind of bad.
![[Image: q0yWOlzg_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0c/bd/q0yWOlzg_o.jpg)
Yes, anti-aliasing sure does make these character models look a lot better. This is the Kryta random arena lobby area.
![[Image: LAJW3JhM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/69/c0/LAJW3JhM_o.jpg)
And here I am in battle. Random arena matches are back to 4-v-4, which is probably the right number; the experiment with 6-v-6 random arena battles from some months earlier was not popular.
![[Image: io2YBoFJ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/59/da/io2YBoFJ_o.jpg)
We lost, apparently after several wins. Too bad, but it was fun while it lasted though.
![[Image: GYLX9ZQD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1b/43/GYLX9ZQD_o.jpg)
This mission at the end of the Kryta part of the game is skill kind of hard. It's easier with other humans like you see here of course, but it's not easy.
![[Image: q6041Pbq_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/83/a6/q6041Pbq_o.jpg)
Before someones' spell hits the enemies...
![[Image: PVnMSkYh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5d/13/PVnMSkYh_o.jpg)
During the flashy explosion...
![[Image: daT4zVld_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0c/3d/daT4zVld_o.jpg)
And here are the results, they died.
![[Image: EiAS84ko_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8c/67/EiAS84ko_o.jpg)
Swamps in Guild Wars are bad news, you take health degeneration all of the time while standing in them. So being at the edge, like here, and luring enemies to you is a good idea.
![[Image: 6MgJmdWM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/da/4b/6MgJmdWM_o.jpg)
And now, back to exploring with henchies. This whole scene is the kind of thing most improved by anti-aliasing, but look at that framerate! It's pretty bad without it as you see here, on the 32MB GeForce 2 card that computer has in it. Regardless, foliage in GW is well drawn.
![[Image: ocPGi1Zn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/42/90/ocPGi1Zn_o.jpg)
There's a lot of running through environments like this in GW, so this is a pretty nostalgic shot.
![[Image: VykWvPTC_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/26/32/VykWvPTC_o.jpg)
At this point I decided to try my Elementalist again for a while... though the crazy textures in this area are more notable. That has to be broken! That's kind of a cool error, though...
![[Image: 33E4y7oe_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/84/57/33E4y7oe_o.jpg)
And here I'm playing one of the early Ascalon missions, with humans because it was easy to do that during beta.
![[Image: ADtVptA2_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3c/d1/ADtVptA2_o.jpg)
When you think about it, it's kind of crazy how oversized things like scorpions are in Guild Wars' world. A real scorpion as big as those devourers would be terrifying to say the least!
![[Image: Yd4EGkOx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/af/6b/Yd4EGkOx_o.jpg)
Maybe Firestorm will help this clump of enemies out... ... Yeah, I like Firestorm, when fighting people who don't move out of the way that is. Heh.
![[Image: FaqeBGi6_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5e/7d/FaqeBGi6_o.jpg)
On the mission out of Ascalon. Again, most of the Shiverpeaks were inaccessible during beta, so this was one of our few tastes of that beautiful area. Also... yes indeed, Prince Rurik, there are greater dangers ahead...
![[Image: g4Dzr6hR_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ff/8b/g4Dzr6hR_o.jpg)
And now, a bunch of shots of the giant paintings in Ascalon City. Here is Balthazar, god of war and the Warrior class. He doesn't look too happy here...
![[Image: HsC3uFto_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2c/e8/HsC3uFto_o.jpg)
Melandru, goddesss of nature and the Ranger class. Green is my favorite color, so I like the color here the best of these.
![[Image: iCtBgt7J_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c2/6e/iCtBgt7J_o.jpg)
Dwayna, goddess of healing and the Monk class.
![[Image: fnmpdEnf_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/20/90/fnmpdEnf_o.jpg)
Grenth, god of death. Despite his looks Grenth is not evil. though. Severe, but not evil. I like that GW does not go for the videogame-standard "the death god is evil" plotline.
![[Image: y3vBxF8Y_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ff/3c/y3vBxF8Y_o.jpg)
A dragon, or perhaps wyvern since dragons are in quite short supply in this game, if there even are any.
![[Image: UifjXJRN_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/14/dd/UifjXJRN_o.jpg)
Here's another one of those giant crystals...
![[Image: 5iDb1z8g_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/25/09/5iDb1z8g_o.jpg)
And here we get a close-up of just how scary Devourers would be in person! I've bought one new piece of armor and probably will be fine against weak foes like this, but they look scary at least.
![[Image: XPDMfErA_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/fb/79/XPDMfErA_o.jpg)
Using a regular attack, prsumablye because mana ran out, or because I was moving the camera for this shot instead of hitting the skill buttons... it was worth it, though, because this looks nice.
![[Image: 4R8LQVaO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/72/6c/4R8LQVaO_o.jpg)
I win, but my henchie monk was not so lucky. I still had a resurrection signet though, so that problem can be solved.
![[Image: W6nqq383_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/da/2a/W6nqq383_o.jpg)
And indeed, just as promised, Ascalon has a lot more quests now! There definitely weren't anywhere near as many quests in the game before. More content is good, and Arena.net did a good job of packing the game with things to do.
![[Image: FUbEOkLP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/eb/3d/FUbEOkLP_o.jpg)
This angled area is kind of unnerving somehow...
![[Image: q3XQdhsv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a4/d9/q3XQdhsv_o.jpg)
And here's another one of those giant paintings of Balthazar.
![[Image: S5b8HaA3_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/85/6d/S5b8HaA3_o.jpg)
Tired of the Elementalist, I went back to my favorite, Talindra the Necromancer. Here I am in the Tombs lobby, looking for a group and at the players' antics, such as the people dancing in the background here.
![[Image: htsBVnYB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/70/a4/htsBVnYB_o.jpg)
He's fine, just upside-down. Heh.
![[Image: EZYD5H3R_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/56/4c/EZYD5H3R_o.jpg)
Tombs, like the Hall of Heroes that followed it, is a very nice looking but somewhat intimidating place, since victory is so hard to come by...
![[Image: X2oSxcWr_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5d/c4/X2oSxcWr_o.jpg)
That doesn't seem to have gone well, so it's back to the lobby.
![[Image: zfg1mIxn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e0/db/zfg1mIxn_o.jpg)
Yes, in beta you really could find randomly assembled groups for Tombs. This would definitely not continue on into retail, better players stuck more to their guilds once the game was out. Finding random groups for missions and stuff was easy enough for several years, but for high-end PvP areas like Tombs? That quickly became much harder, and I stopped trying after not too long. You need good team coordination to win much in structured PvP areas like this, you see, and that's hard to do with a mostly-random group.
![[Image: Qul8tvvn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9c/45/Qul8tvvn_o.jpg)
Guild Wars even has voiced cinematics now! It really is coming together. The first player in the group acts as the speaker in cutscenes, with two voice tracks, for male or female. If all human players hit the 'skip cutscene' button it'll skip it, but it does require all to hit skip for it to be skipped. I often liked watching the cutscenes, even when I'd seen them multiple times before. Sometimes I did skip, though. Not this time, though.
![[Image: EGL2AeVc_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e6/96/EGL2AeVc_o.jpg)
This beta is heading towards a conclusion, but some people are still trying to sell stuff in town.
![[Image: qY1O9xWu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e4/de/qY1O9xWu_o.jpg)
Yes, that's right: capes are in the game, and I got one! Back in the earlier betas Guild Wars had little tabards instead of these capes, but they were removed because people didn't like them, and Arena.net came back with these. I had to save up for mine so I only got it here, but here it is, a guild cape with, of course, the closest recreation I could of a Black Falcon Lego shield logo on it. It's a great cape and is very similar to the one I have now. GW's capes look great.
![[Image: LbwS7dUz_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c4/51/LbwS7dUz_o.jpg)
Yes, having a cape really adds to your characters. Meanwhile, chat's zipping along.
![[Image: cDpBRmol_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/84/3e/cDpBRmol_o.jpg)
But instead of sticking around for the full ending event, I decided to go to the random arena instead. I'm not sure if I saw any of that infamous event, honestly, but if I did I didn't take screenshots of it.
![[Image: 0cdPhUgs_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/22/42/0cdPhUgs_o.jpg)
Random arena battles in GW are something I have always loved. It's a perfect balance of strategy and fun, as you don't need to be as serious as you would in the higher-end PvP areas and many skill builds work, but it still is very much a skill-based mode where better builds will work better. And looking at my build here, I was clearly heading in the direction I've gone in ever since, towards a strong focus on the Blood skill line, with Dark Pact and Life Syphon as some of my key skills.
![[Image: 1aUqUoJZ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a9/a1/1aUqUoJZ_o.jpg)
I hope you're not doing that WHILE also playing in this PvP match... heh.
![[Image: mVnohysi_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ae/a1/mVnohysi_o.jpg)
We won this round, but the end of the beta is fast approaching...
![[Image: bjmiD53O_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d3/ca/bjmiD53O_o.jpg)
That's for sure, me, I definitely like the regen skills the most! Regen and degen are some of my favorite things in Guild Wars, as far as skills go. On the other hand though, we lost... oh well. It was a lot of fun while it lasted.
![[Image: 7NayskSi_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8f/0f/7NayskSi_o.jpg)
That is, I probably meant that even if somehow our one remaining player lived, this beta is over...
![[Image: rwFMICUU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f5/39/rwFMICUU_o.jpg)
Yup. I don't think it got out of this loading screen, we were just forced back to the login.
So what did I presumably miss out on while I was in the arena? Well, the closing event in the March beta here involved a lot of Gwens spawning everywhere and burning people with fire while saying all kinds of amusingly creepy things. Specifically, we're talking about child Gwen here, from pre-Searing. Gwen, the character in the main game, wouldn't appear until several addons in; in Prophecises there were a few hints that she might have survived, but no proof. Anyway, she was very much in this beta, killing people.
The GW Wiki has a list of all the things the many Gwens that spawned said during this event: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Gwen ("Beta Weekend Event" category).
A couple of Youtube videos also capture it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Sx90HIcB0&t=23s - This video was trying to be a bunch of Necromancers dancing their very Thriller-styled dance set to the song, before Gwen interrupted...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1kW7pNFW-k (warning: language) - The Gwens spawn about two minutes into this video.
Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 4th December 2018
This time I cover a very important period in Guild Wars' history: the release of the game! First, though, came the final beta test in April 2005. Then in May, the game released. I'll cover both the April BWE and the first two days of release in this post. I will explain in the "Preorder Release" (first two days) section below why it's that period of time in specific. I was going to put these in two separate posts, but I decided to merge them together. That means this has the most images of any posts in this series, about 80. I know that's a lot, sorry about that.
Beta Weekend Event, April 2005
In April 2005, Guild Wars finally had its last Beta Weekend Event. There was only one month to go before release, and the game was in great shape! Indeed, apart from the amount of the game we couldn't play -- excepting previously available areas the Shiverpeaks and Crystal Desert were still mostly unavailable, along with most of the Fire Islands -- Guild Wars was almost in release form in this test. Most notably, the final interface is finally here! Yes, after almost a year, the look of Guild Wars' interface that any GW player knows finally comes into appearance. The look of the minimap and skillbar, the menus, customizable interface where you can drag any interface element to any point on the screen, all of it's been totally redone since the previous beta, and it would not be changed again, apart from some additions that Nightfall made for Hero and Henchmen control; note how those buttons below the minimap aren't there yet, and won't be until late 2006. Until then you could not control Henchmen or tell them to stay at a point, and Heroes did not exist. This put much more of a focus on player groups, which I loved. The addition o Heroes and being able to give your AI party members more direct movement controls is fantastic for solo Guild Wars, but it helped destroy something I really loved about the game, finding random human groups for missions. I'm very glad I played GW before Heroes were added. Sure, when playing the game now you're grateful for them because finding human groups would be difficult regardless, but Heroes have both positives and negatives. But anyway, that's getting well ahead of things.
Returning to Guild Wars as it was in April 2005, the added customization is great, but I have always missed that Map button that used to exist to the lower right of the minimap, so I added it back in by dragging a Map icon there from the menu on the lower left. You can add any of the lower-left menu buttons to the screen anywhere, but that's the only one I've ever put on screen. It doesn't look nearly as nice as those integrated map buttons from the previous betas, sadly, but it's better than nothing. I wish you could use the old map graphics with the integrated overworld map button. Also, readers will notice that while you can move all of the icons around, I don't do it; I've kept the whole GW interface in the same exact places it has been since I first played the game in May 2004, with the map in the lower right, skillbar in the bottom center, spell effects in the upper left, and such. I know many people move things around, but I don't like change without purpose and the interface as it was works great.
Besides the interface though, which is a big thing, there isn't too much to say about this beta. By looking at my screenshots, I clearly was just wandering around doing not a whole lot, and that is reflected below. Of the 49 screenshots here, about half are from the closing event and half are from before that, but I was just playing little bits as all three of my main characters and such, nothing too special. Everyone playing knew that a full server reset was coming after this beta, so trying to make progress in the game or get items felt pointless when it'd all be gone in a few days. If you read the chatlogs in these screenshots, there's less item trading and more discussion about the coming final server wipe, understandably. The previous wipe had, again, been between the December and January betas, so we'd had four weekend beta tests to build these characters up, quite a while in beta terms. I took a screenshot near the end showing how much time I'd played as Talindra during those four months, but sadly didn't do so for the other characters and again the account-wide time-played counter still was not in the game yet, so I don't know how much time I spent in Guild Wars pre-release overall. My best guess has always been 150 to 200 hours, and after going through all these screenshots again I still think that's probably about right. I'm sure there were people who played the betas more than me, but considering the limited number of days and that I was in college I played this game a whole lot pre-release. My memories of the GW betas are some of my favorites from gaming. So, on to the screenshots.
![[Image: aG3AaxGV_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b8/f2/aG3AaxGV_o.jpg)
Starting out, I took screenshots again of four loading screens. I'm not sure why, except that GW's concept art is outstanding, I've always loved it at least as much as the actual in-game models. Also... 1060 files remaining? That probably took a little while, though thankfully the files were small; GW is not a huge game.
![[Image: eg8WnJ8H_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/45/1a/eg8WnJ8H_o.jpg)
More fantastic concept art for this beautiful game.
![[Image: zgZ0Y9f7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f1/7d/zgZ0Y9f7_o.jpg)
And another one, of the desert this time. This has always been one of my favorites, I think...
![[Image: 8kowHYWo_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b2/fa/8kowHYWo_o.jpg)
While these screenshot-as-loading screen deals have always been the worst. The contrast between the amazing concept art and this stuff sure is stark.
![[Image: PETudSlX_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/80/ce/PETudSlX_o.jpg)
And now for some actual gameplay. First, a match from the random arena. At this point, for anyone who does not know, the Battle Isles did not exist; those would be added in 2006. Instead, each arena was a solo affair, tiered by the player levels allowed there. The top-level random arena was at Fort Koga, so that's the map you saw most of the time. After the introduction of the Battle Isles, a Random Arena with randomized play of a bunch of maps replaced this. The lower level arenas still do exist in the game, but upper-level ones like this are only in the rotation. It's a nice improvement, because just seeing one map all of the time did get boring.
![[Image: AoHhtfbi_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/88/a1/AoHhtfbi_o.jpg)
The Crag, on the Fire Islands? Was this new for this beta? I sure don't remember it before! That's a pretty cool inclusion.
![[Image: 9WoMC0KM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1f/2d/9WoMC0KM_o.jpg)
It doesn't look like it went well at all for us, though... But on another note, I find it interesting and kind of weird to see how often I'm changing costumes on Talindra here; I've had just one, the elite scarpattern armor, on ever since I bought it in late 2005, so seeing new clothes every couple of screenshots is kind of neat.
![[Image: sw1PB3MO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/70/61/sw1PB3MO_o.jpg)
And now some exploration in the edge of the Shiverpeaks with my ranger. The Moa Bird / Strider always has been my favorite pet by far. Indeed, I've almost never used anything else...
![[Image: 0Bge7spE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/88/7a/0Bge7spE_o.jpg)
This is a pretty cool looking building! GW's snowy trees look great, too. And yes, my Ranger here still has Firestorm. (It's a fine PvE skill, really!)
![[Image: 9kKljm8Y_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b2/c2/9kKljm8Y_o.jpg)
Ice caves look pretty awesome, though they are even better with post-processing reflections on...
![[Image: 6cNmufiU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ee/ed/6cNmufiU_o.jpg)
And here we see a team led by me in Tombs! this is right at the start of the match and is the only shot I have of the match so it probably didn't go great, but that's pretty cool. I don't think this has happened again since.
![[Image: 17DylTfZ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9b/d3/17DylTfZ_o.jpg)
I checked in with my Elementalist for a moment. ... I know I've said it already, but I love that cape design...
![[Image: SHcwTIcT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/40/d5/SHcwTIcT_o.jpg)
More fantastic loading screen art.
![[Image: MmFgmAam_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/13/7a/MmFgmAam_o.jpg)
So, as that last loading screen and the ice cave shot suggested, my ranger is in pre-Searing this test apparently. The reality of the ingame graphics can't match the art, of course, but it does look nice.
![[Image: Rmo29byl_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0c/f1/Rmo29byl_o.jpg)
I took screenshots here of all four characters, so as to make it easier to recreate them as close as possible in the release game; you kept your character names but not anything else, and had to make your characters again. I'll only post this first shot.
![[Image: JLdc7iOM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/63/a2/JLdc7iOM_o.jpg)
Ventari the Centaur's kind of cool looking, as are the mesas above the Maguuma Jungle. Guild Wars has such a great variety of environments...
![[Image: 4KzFC0Jx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9e/f7/4KzFC0Jx_o.jpg)
Here's a stained glass window of Grenth in the Ascalon Catacombs of pre-Searing. It's a particuarly impressive scene to run across.
![[Image: EmSnbZi1_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c6/0f/EmSnbZi1_o.jpg)
And here's a painting of a dragon in the Catacombs.
![[Image: vw2ot81k_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bf/dc/vw2ot81k_o.jpg)
The framing here, with the column of light extending into the gap between the two sides of the open roof, is impressive.
![[Image: xF753lhN_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f7/11/xF753lhN_o.jpg)
And here's another painting, this time in Seared Ascalon.
![[Image: zpRj61HD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/47/ff/zpRj61HD_o.jpg)
They didn't scrimp on detail; even relatively small things like this art of, what is it, dragon wings, on this long mural is done extremely well. It works from both artistic and world-design standpoints.
![[Image: awAtBGNm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b1/b5/awAtBGNm_o.jpg)
Yes, Arena.net sure likes its dwarves! Other traditional fantasy races are, again, not even in this game, but Dwarves are quite prominent. They may not be playable, but they do get things like this giant statue...
![[Image: 5xpIiWUK_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e9/6a/5xpIiWUK_o.jpg)
And here we see, again, the major places you could visit in the betas. This does not show outposts, you need to zoom in to view those, but it gives a good sense of what was revealed before release and what was held back.
![[Image: T4QjvMgy_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/de/ed/T4QjvMgy_o.jpg)
In the betas I often wanted to explore more of the snowy areas of Tyria, beyond areas like this at its start... well, not too long to wait now, only a month to go.
![[Image: dFAIGbDq_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/49/93/dFAIGbDq_o.jpg)
Now the Henchmen have actual names and unique looks, instead of their generic names and appearances before.
![[Image: I5r4ZlH2_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/7e/b2/I5r4ZlH2_o.jpg)
And now the actual gameplay shots are over, it's on to the closing event. First, some nice fireworks and old chat. Isn't it pleasant?
![[Image: dV87Tb5H_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d2/e9/dV87Tb5H_o.jpg)
Boom!
![[Image: 6xQaPWAy_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a0/fe/6xQaPWAy_o.jpg)
Aah...
![[Image: uqa4tYNq_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6d/ab/uqa4tYNq_o.jpg)
Ooh
![[Image: jZNWx2xn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5a/05/jZNWx2xn_o.jpg)
Whee!
![[Image: VhizXiv5_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ce/47/VhizXiv5_o.jpg)
What's going on here?
![[Image: rputxVRD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8b/ab/rputxVRD_o.jpg)
Game of the year (2005)? Yes, absolutely!
![[Image: yBTrbWWf_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a3/5b/yBTrbWWf_o.jpg)
I probably should have cut some of these fireworks shots, but I decided to post all of them to celebrate the end of the betas, even though most are nearly identical.
![[Image: xmTAd0Se_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/de/7b/xmTAd0Se_o.jpg)
Nothing this way.
![[Image: Ttm4el7R_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c3/e3/Ttm4el7R_o.jpg)
That's the way to look. I like reading all these chatlogs too.
![[Image: OtBdBtMh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cf/88/OtBdBtMh_o.jpg)
Everyone's dancing? I guess I could too then...
![[Image: ktnTk198_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/fd/4c/ktnTk198_o.jpg)
The Necromancers basically dance Thriller.
![[Image: mmdmLfB8_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/02/53/mmdmLfB8_o.jpg)
Dance and fireworks together! What a nice party.
![[Image: hhStkvHB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b6/40/hhStkvHB_o.jpg)
Wait... that doesn't look right! What is that thing in the background...
![[Image: ngIl3UPn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/93/31/ngIl3UPn_o.jpg)
Oh. Infernal Wyrms are here to kill us all. Of course... had to expect some kind of violent end to this! And yes, for the last test, it was Infernal Wyrms, lots of them. And again, we couldn't fight back...
![[Image: YDypo2ma_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2e/d2/YDypo2ma_o.jpg)
People are dying left and right, though many would be resurrected randomly after a while.
![[Image: Ahr6uGcB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0d/6b/Ahr6uGcB_o.jpg)
Time to check the material trader! Why not? It's not like anything is going on...
![[Image: yiiPEd8k_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/67/89/yiiPEd8k_o.jpg)
That was a close one, it almost got me.
![[Image: PvAOUOQg_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ce/0b/PvAOUOQg_o.jpg)
Yeah, the giant wyrms are quite large, and the way they unpredictably erupt out of the ground and damage anyone above them can be tough even when you CAN fight back.
![[Image: H2xSxAac_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a7/dc/H2xSxAac_o.jpg)
I decided to leave Lion's Arch and see if the Wyrms were anywhere else. Well, they were also in Ascalon City, that's for sure, as this shows! The page for the betas on the Guild Wars official wiki doesn't mention that they were in Ascalon City too, along with Lion's Arch and a few other places, but here is proof that they were.
![[Image: vXI1RR76_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/65/9c/vXI1RR76_o.jpg)
Safe... for a moment. But yeah, losing all progress and characters in a few minutes or so is going to hurt, I agree, chat...
![[Image: W6o6ocqx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6b/12/W6o6ocqx_o.jpg)
Gah, it got me, here in Ascalon City. I tried to escape... but with the betas ending, I took that shot I mentioned at the beginning of this article about how long I'd been playing as this character -- 61 hours as Talindra since the January beta. Not bad for effectively eight days of availability! And as the shots show I did play the other characters some here and there, too, so that's not the overall total for the 2005 betas.
![[Image: fXqEfZot_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/24/5f/fXqEfZot_o.jpg)
Goodbye, prerelease Guild Wars...
![[Image: QjOPtpVu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/39/e9/QjOPtpVu_o.jpg)
Oops, that's not good. Guild Wars almost never crashes! But sadly, to finish the last beta, the graphics crashed at the end. It's pretty neat that it let me take this screenshots remembering that, though!
And with that, the Guild Wars betas ended.
Preorder Access to the Final Game: May 2005, for two days
Once Guild Wars finally reached its release day in May, those of us who had preordered the game, as I had, were allowed to start playing a day before anyone else. Yes, the idea of giving early access to games to people who pay ahead is not new. It is more common these days, but it isn't new. The difference is, all you and to do here was pay $5 for a preorder copy of the game, which I had done at Gamestop some months earlier, and you'd get that access; you did not need to actually pick up your retail copy of the game to do so. Instead, anyone with a preorder could play for that zero day and then the first public day without needing to enter a key, but after that you'd need to pay.
Now, there probably was a way to digitally buy Guild Wars, but that wasn't something I could do at that point in 2005, I either had to or wanted to go to a store and get a boxed copy of the game. However, April and May were finals time at college and I had preordered at a store back at home, so I could not get to the store to pick up my preorder close to release. As a result, I played for the two days allowed without entering a retail key, then stopped for what ended up being a month or two before I finally got around to buying a retail copy of GW. I believe my preorder had expired by that point, so I had to pay full price. The $5 that preorder box cost me -- and yes, it was an actual boxed thing that I still have -- was well worth it for the scores of hours it got me, though! Screenshots from after I finally bought the game are for a future post, though; this is just for those two free days of access I got with my preorder/beta key.
While in the later betas I'd mostly been playing as my necromancer, I remade both the Ranger and Necromancer characters on day one and chose to start with the ranger, since that was the character I had first played a year earlier. So, here are a bunch of shots of playing pre-Searing again as my Ranger, followed by a couple of shots from Seared Ascalon. Losing access to all of the later parts of the game that I'd been playing so much for quite some time was kind of a shame, but it gave me something to work for.
![[Image: RiFbmY9T_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1f/17/RiFbmY9T_o.jpg)
Guild Wars is such a beautiful looking game, even today!
![[Image: adr6UPId_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3c/bf/adr6UPId_o.jpg)
What happens to the nice version of Ascalon here is really sad, though...
![[Image: M7ooEiSP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3a/6b/M7ooEiSP_o.jpg)
Very nice action shot here!
![[Image: GU4gfGhC_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/77/bd/GU4gfGhC_o.jpg)
This part of the Catacomb reminds me of some areas of Factions, really, more so than most of Prophecies...
![[Image: ZcI6GA7Q_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9a/c4/ZcI6GA7Q_o.jpg)
That's water there, not ground. Poison water.
![[Image: fCApTeji_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b7/7d/fCApTeji_o.jpg)
Despite that, I took this closer-up shot of a damaged mural.
![[Image: ecNc81hL_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/55/43/ecNc81hL_o.jpg)
You want to run through the poison quickly, so as to not die. Much unlike later parts of the game Pre-Searing is easy, but it is possible to die if you mess up, as always in this game.
![[Image: Q8vDgCAf_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ae/04/Q8vDgCAf_o.jpg)
Grenth's statue here emits waves of fog...
![[Image: zlTt8coq_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0b/82/zlTt8coq_o.jpg)
Out of the Catacombs, I return to idyllic Ashford village.
![[Image: wUTf7783_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/61/db/wUTf7783_o.jpg)
Aidan is one of the four heroes, and is one of the three on the poster that comes with Guild Wars. He's a ranger with a good design. (Why is Mhenlo absent from that poster, anyway? If I knew, I forget...)
![[Image: tY8Yq5sf_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ff/e4/tY8Yq5sf_o.jpg)
Ascalon City has people doing random stuff in it? Who'd expect otherwise from players in an online game...
![[Image: mlWRGo9S_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ba/61/mlWRGo9S_o.jpg)
Cynn is probably my favorite of the four heroes. Here she's just a normal person, but after the Searing she wants to burn the Charr with fire. That sounds like a good plan, most of the time... And yeah, she's also on the poster. Devona is the one in the center on that poster, but I don't have a shot of her here.
![[Image: VKs111R5_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f1/b2/VKs111R5_o.jpg)
The Ashford area is really nice, and it looks like the harvest is coming in nicely as well...
![[Image: Hw6A8nI7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cc/c1/Hw6A8nI7_o.jpg)
No, my Ranger doesn't still have Firestorm today, I swapped it out at some point for an all-Ranger (and res signet) skillbar. But I sure did keep it for a long time.
![[Image: Dr6T7I2g_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/dc/88/Dr6T7I2g_o.jpg)
It's that ominous cutscene again... I know what this means.
![[Image: MwKblcCZ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4e/23/MwKblcCZ_o.jpg)
More fields. The enemies in this area sure are easy.
![[Image: URYLB54x_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/af/04/URYLB54x_o.jpg)
Lyssa statue, again.
![[Image: TcI1Lfzx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3e/aa/TcI1Lfzx_o.jpg)
Here's the map of presearing. It looks like I've explored almost all of it now, so it's probably about time to move on to the main game... but I didn't take any screenshots of that. Instead...
![[Image: H00o45f9_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f8/49/H00o45f9_o.jpg)
Instead, yeah, my next screenshot is this. I think this is from Seared Ascalon? If it is pre-Searing, it'd be the only screenshot I have of Talindra in pre-Searing, oddly enough. I think this might be from after the Searing, though. For some reason I didn't take any screenshots of Talindra in pre-Searing other than maybe this one. I don't know why. I can understand that after playing through pre-Searing pretty thoroughly with one character and facing that two-day time limit I wanted to get through it as quickly as I could with my first character so I probably zipped through it with Talindra, though, and I had just taken a bunch of shots of pre-Searing, but still it's a little odd. Oh well.
![[Image: V0UAwzwc_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d9/fc/V0UAwzwc_o.jpg)
The Ascalon Arena has been remade and here is its release form, the new Ascalon Arena with a pool of water in between the sides instead of that V-angle of ground.
![[Image: CxwLUDs4_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0a/23/CxwLUDs4_o.jpg)
Bought some new armor.
![[Image: ljjihyUG_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9b/37/ljjihyUG_o.jpg)
Shift+Printscreen definitely momentarily increases graphical detail, you can see that again here.
![[Image: yikOwncL_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/87/bd/yikOwncL_o.jpg)
I know I said it before, but Devourers, like a lot of monsters in this game, are ridiculously huge compared to the size of real-world creatures. I don't ever want to see a scorpion larger than a horse!
![[Image: II7o0Vj1_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d6/e4/II7o0Vj1_o.jpg)
The Ascalon Arena lobby isn't as populated as it was in the betas where this was the only arena, but it was possible to find a match. This wouldn't last of course, since only low level characters can fight here.
![[Image: zXdh9jFm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d7/9c/zXdh9jFm_o.jpg)
And here's another shot from a random arena battle in the Ascalon Arena.
![[Image: fzCrQLPb_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/75/ea/fzCrQLPb_o.jpg)
And last, the sights of Seared Ascalon. And with that, the two-day preorder release access period (from early in April 27 to early in April 29, 2005) ended, and I would not be able to play Guild Wars again until I bought the game in early June. I treated it like one last BWE, just in the final game this time, pretty much.
To conclude, remember that fan-made map of the whole Guild Wars (Prophecies) world that I said I contributed to? Well, here is the final map, file last updated May 5, 2005, shortly after the game released.
![[Image: rkleEgHN_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/11/5e/rkleEgHN_o.jpg)
Yes, here is that final world map, compiled from maps made by all of the people listed on the bottom, myself (A Black Falcon) included. Yes, this is the full world; the Sorrow's Furnace area of the South Shiverpeaks would not be added until later in '05. Sorrow's Furnace was a free addition, which was pretty cool.
So that's it, that was the Guild Wars pre-release access period. I posted most of the screenshots I took during that period, and I hope that they help illustrate the many changes Guild Wars went through during its year in open testing. I kept playing the game after release, though, and I will make more posts filled with screenshots that I took of the final game. Don't worry though, I will get back to writing other articles on this site as well.
RE: Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 9th January 2019
Finally, here's the next part. Yes, I posted this on my site like a month ago, and part 7 was done a few weeks ago.
Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots, Part 6: June + July 2005, I Bought the Game
A bit over a month after the release of the game and those two days I spent playing the release version of Guild Wars with the access that my preorder got me, I finally bought Guild Wars. I bought a retail copy, though I never used the disc, I just entered that key into my beta install of the game. I believe that the pre-order had expired, so I had to pay the full $50, which I was fine with given how much playtime I got out of that $5.
So, from this point on, for the most part this series gets less interesting from a historical perspective — Guild Wars was out, so you won’t be seeing as much of a chronicle of the visual and content changes the game underwent during development. I have many hundreds more screenshots of Guild Wars that I’ve taken over the years, though, so I want to keep posting these articles anyway. I hope something here is of interest.
Guild Wars: Prophecies Release, June-July 2005
Comparing the shots in this update from how the game is now, a couple of differences stand out. Most obviously, of course the Heroes and the party movement control buttons on the bottom of the minimap did not exist yet, as they would not until Nightfall released a year and a half later. Additionally, the Battle Islands also did not exist yet. The Random Arena did go through multiple maps, but there was no centralized Battle Islands hub for multiplayer areas, they were still scattered around the main map, with the Random Arena on that island south of Kryta, and the high-level tournament in Tomb of the Primeval Kings in the desert. A Team Arena did also exist, in the South Shiverpeaks, but I don’t believe that the Random Arena would send you there at this point. So, as you will see later in this update, you could just keep going in the random arena until you lost, pretty much.
So, I actually never played GW in May 2005; the release was at the end of April, then I bought the game in early June. The screenshots in this update from cover from early June 2005, the month I bought the game about five weeks after release, until July 11th. There are 52 screenshots in this article, so there are fewer than the last one. It ends at that date in specific because some time after that my computer had some issue or something, and the next 133 screenshots do not have accurate date codes in them. They’re all dated “July 20, 2006” which is most definitely not accurate. I went back to that computer to see if anything better was there, but sadly no, none of the screenshots are still there; the originals were probably lost in a partial hard drive failure that computer suffered several years back, though they probably also have that incorrect date on them so that wouldn’t be too useful anyway. From looking at those screenshots they clearly are from after this set ends until fall ’05, though. Anyway, as far as number of screenshots goes, the next two folders, which cover to spring ’06, are the largest; after mid ’06 I continued playing Guild Wars, but not as much as it had the first two years (from mid ’04 to mid ’06). That’s next update, though.
![[Image: 2vGNd4ge_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/42/98/2vGNd4ge_o.jpg)
At this point, both of my characters are in Seared Ascalon. That would soon change, however… well, for one of them.
![[Image: TfL5s4f5_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/63/f1/TfL5s4f5_o.jpg)
I’ve got some quests to do.
![[Image: UK659XMP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a2/f3/UK659XMP_o.jpg)
My skillbar still has a bunch of these skills in it…
![[Image: MlnpbVc6_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d3/8a/MlnpbVc6_o.jpg)
Winter is my favorite season in real life, and it looks amazing in Guild Wars too. I love the look of GW’s snow-laden trees!
![[Image: FKIPMOWb_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/63/98/FKIPMOWb_o.jpg)
These people look like trouble… and like they’re reusing that model a bit too much perhaps? Heh.
![[Image: FD2nFgFD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/64/39/FD2nFgFD_o.jpg)
The White Mantle are your friends… those Unseen Ones they worship totally aren’t suspicious at all!
![[Image: OWhMahCs_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f0/18/OWhMahCs_o.jpg)
Before the Xun’lai chests inventory space was a real problem.
![[Image: iw7f5S8r_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ab/ec/iw7f5S8r_o.jpg)
Looks like I’ve fully explored this zone!
![[Image: gYFkQYWx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/05/ac/gYFkQYWx_o.jpg)
Random Arena time! … Yes, I probably should switch to res signet for the arena, but I rarely did.
![[Image: NydwSwJo_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bc/25/NydwSwJo_o.jpg)
It can be fun to look at all the different costumes available in this game.
![[Image: ZmHqH3KF_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ac/6e/ZmHqH3KF_o.jpg)
I do have the Necromancer scar pattern armor, but not the Monk tattoo one.
![[Image: grJATmVM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d4/c3/grJATmVM_o.jpg)
I took several shots of my character here for some reason. … Yes though, that angle the tree takes a few feet off the ground is interesting…
![[Image: CuTluCvQ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/80/b2/CuTluCvQ_o.jpg)
And here is that same image without the image enhancement of Shift+Printscreen.
![[Image: b2aoof7J_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/60/ae/b2aoof7J_o.jpg)
Similar image, but I like the background better in this direction.
![[Image: BFJCZs8L_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/83/42/BFJCZs8L_o.jpg)
The Searing left some burning scars like this in Ascalon.
![[Image: X3THkdnO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c3/ba/X3THkdnO_o.jpg)
This is a pretty cool angle for the sun and lighting on this mural…
![[Image: kiULEnnM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1a/33/kiULEnnM_o.jpg)
Random arena I presume.
![[Image: fNIXv6jX_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bb/b7/fNIXv6jX_o.jpg)
Yeah, having a chest to put your rare crafting materials in was a big improvement. It’ll be quite a while after this until they add it to the game though.
![[Image: vYX6KChQ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/76/19/vYX6KChQ_o.jpg)
Not too much going on here, but GW environment art is great.
![[Image: oFt8eL4x_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a1/3d/oFt8eL4x_o.jpg)
And here is how material crafters look in the final game.
![[Image: Ius5FG82_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/39/ee/Ius5FG82_o.jpg)
And here I took shots of a couple of other female Necromancers with similar hair to mine. Not sure why really. GW's character customization is somewhat limited, but it is enough to make people look at least somewhat different.
![[Image: FEoRUxhH_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a2/2d/FEoRUxhH_o.jpg)
Here’s another.
![[Image: jwll6At1_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9f/1b/jwll6At1_o.jpg)
And a third, along with plenty of people in the background.
![[Image: CssNMM7o_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a0/0c/CssNMM7o_o.jpg)
Shortly after this I had to give up on my guild cape, because for a while I joined a guild with some people I knew in college and wasn’t the guild leader. It’ll return eventually though…
![[Image: snSQ4nbF_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d5/f0/snSQ4nbF_o.jpg)
Nice heroic shot! But yes, this shows how my Ranger’s still in Ascalon, while the Necromancer progresses through the game steadily. Yeah, I was playing as the latter character a lot more.
![[Image: zgullYku_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/40/21/zgullYku_o.jpg)
When you’ve got life regen stuff and there isn’t an ongoing match, it can be fun to stand in the lava and watch your health not go down much…
![[Image: KoC9o6aA_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4d/f4/KoC9o6aA_o.jpg)
I’ve reached the Crystal Desert! Cool. Looks like I died though… oh well.
![[Image: 2dwBLel2_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cd/9b/2dwBLel2_o.jpg)
And here’s an amusingly weird thing about Guild Wars: some things disappear when viewed through water. Guild Wars isn’t a game with an underwater component, but you can walk into the edges of seashores and such at some points. And when you do so, you notice two things: hair, for some reason, vanishes along with the top of your characters’ head, and the bikini clothing parts of Necromancer scar pattern armor also vanish. These parts of your character model disappear completely, and you can see the sea floor on the other side in this shot. It’s a little easier to show off the hair part with a character as short as Talindra is, taller ones can’t get deep enough in many places, but regardless, it’s weird that this is a thing, and it is still like this — you can do this in GW today and you’ll see the same silly disappearing body parts thing.
![[Image: UeObU3w7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1e/c6/UeObU3w7_o.jpg)
And here, you see that the above disappearing-hair-and-clothing thing only is visible when you’re looking through the water-surface texture. If you manage to get the camera underwater as I did here, though, you see that the character model is fully visible like normal. Yes, I’m underwater here, and that’s the water surface above me, but my hair is visible because of where the camera is. Guild Wars is amusingly weird sometimes… ? Oh, and yes, this is the first cape from one of those guilds with people from college. It’s alright but I like mine the most.
![[Image: g9QxW49U_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a1/0e/g9QxW49U_o.jpg)
19 straight wins! Very impressive, this is one of my better winning streaks I believe. I think that later on things were changed so before you reach 19 wins you get sent to the Team Arena lobby, instead of just continuing on in Random Arenas… but as you can see here before that point you could just keep going. Unless this is from the Team Arena? I don’t think so, though.
![[Image: AT1dFRGU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/09/37/AT1dFRGU_o.jpg)
… And yeah, with one of our team leaving that pretty much ended this awesome run, which is why we’re unhappy in the chat. Random new person (no screenshot after this one) wasn’t as good.
![[Image: mc12IYEh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f0/4b/mc12IYEh_o.jpg)
Yeah, I’m progressing through the game nicely with Talindra, farther in the desert now.
![[Image: 7lJYHOSC_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a6/36/7lJYHOSC_o.jpg)
This is a somewhat ominous looking cave shot, if you think of it as a picture and not just ‘party standing still in a mission’…
![[Image: pc38MNBB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f1/ae/pc38MNBB_o.jpg)
“A new build of Guild Wars is available. Please exit and run the program again.” appears when the game is patched. When this happens you can stay in the game, but can’t do much and eventually will be forced to log out and download the patch by running the game again. Fortunately this usually didn’t take long. It’s too bad we didn’t beat the mission before the patch dropped… oh well.
![[Image: mvUuumAP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5e/8c/mvUuumAP_o.jpg)
At this point I decided to make a third character. Yes, it was an Elementalist again, always my third class. As you can see though I redesigned my character from my beta Elementalists. I’d been reading some Drow D&D books at the time, so I chose the darkest skin tone and a character name I made in a Drow name creator online. Of course she’s human though, there are no elves in Guild Wars (or playable nonhumans).
![[Image: LUM3wx2L_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/38/50/LUM3wx2L_o.jpg)
Yup, still in Ascalon. My new character has already matched this ones’ level… though I would eventually finish Prophecies with this character and not the Elementalist (yet at least) so that would eventually change.
![[Image: Fo6eRB5I_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/95/63/Fo6eRB5I_o.jpg)
Somehow that ultra-light skin never burns. Videogames are nice in some ways…
![[Image: 3AYs5Vzu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/dd/8f/3AYs5Vzu_o.jpg)
Once again, we see the way the clothing textures simply aren’t there through water.
![[Image: v274JV8E_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a1/4c/v274JV8E_o.jpg)
Looks like we lost this one.
![[Image: mdkHuJVU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8d/85/mdkHuJVU_o.jpg)
Heh… here’s another silly glitch. This rock, at this point, still didn’t have the right collision on it, so you could stand inside this edge of the rock. This may have been fixed since then, I’m not sure.
![[Image: MqRAEAsp_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5d/34/MqRAEAsp_o.jpg)
Guild chat? I haven’t seen any of that in like ten years now…
![[Image: hartFz5a_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9c/36/hartFz5a_o.jpg)
The desert and snow can look kind of similar if you just look at the ground, but this is the desert.
![[Image: wcKiaX0E_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/04/a0/wcKiaX0E_o.jpg)
No, I’m not quite at the Fire Islands yet, this is the Random Arena map.
![[Image: YFByAeGI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d1/d3/YFByAeGI_o.jpg)
And now we’re in the snowy lands of the South Shiverpeaks. The ground definitely looks kind of similar.
![[Image: 6p6F0l1I_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ee/67/6p6F0l1I_o.jpg)
Light and statue
![[Image: erOSrByT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9a/57/erOSrByT_o.jpg)
And here it is from a different angle. Not quite as cool from this direction…
![[Image: HGIvwRpE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e1/01/HGIvwRpE_o.jpg)
I don’t think I currently have Pyromancer robes for either of my Elementalist characters… I should fix that problem, it has always been my favorite female Elementalist outfit… but yeah, that skillbar could use some work. I hope I don’t have many skills yet.
![[Image: 1iXaHqDy_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0c/ce/1iXaHqDy_o.jpg)
A decent loading screen.
![[Image: rgSwwv2A_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a2/19/rgSwwv2A_o.jpg)
And now I have, for real, reached the Fire Islands, the final area of the story, with my main. I’m probably close to a hundred hours in (since launch) with Talindra at this point, Prophecies took me at least a hundred hours to finish per character.
![[Image: 297dmpL6_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2a/27/297dmpL6_o.jpg)
The Fire Islands are an appropriate end point, being all lava and igneous rock.
![[Image: whMNqijx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/65/a7/whMNqijx_o.jpg)
First though, let’s go back to the Elementalist for a bit, in this low-level Arena.
![[Image: uMfQlU3V_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/59/fe/uMfQlU3V_o.jpg)
This is a pretty good map, it has some nice options.
Next time: More of release Guild Wars. After that, Sorrow’s Furnace and the first Halloween event.
RE: Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 20th January 2019
Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots, Part 7: July – early September 2005
For this update, I broke up the next screenshots folder into two parts and this is part one. The folder these screenshots was in got messed up years ago, as I mentioned previously, so none of the files have the original creation dates in them, but going by context these images are from July until just before Sorrow’s Furnace’s release on September 7; that’s about halfway through this folder so that’s where I broke it into two pieces.
This was a good time for me in Guild Wars. I was still playing a lot of the game that summer, as I was off from college and had plenty of free time, and I was still loving the game for sure. Screenshot-wise, though, most of these screenshots aren’t particularly interesting, I think. Hopefully enough of these are interesting to make reading through this update worthwhile. I am posting many of these despite that because I still very much want to post old Guild Wars screenshots online, and hopefully some images in this set are good. There are 48 screenshots this time, so it’s not too many. The next update will be a bit larger.
Guild Wars: Later Summer 2005
![[Image: PKsqIjbN_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/15/b6/PKsqIjbN_o.jpg)
Obsidian armor? I will never have this, sadly… though the Elementalist one here is definitely one of their coolest-looking outfits, it’s just so crazy expensive!
![[Image: 3xGtdVWi_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b3/09/3xGtdVWi_o.jpg)
Tombs used to be quite busy. And full of people dancing, too.
![[Image: 8Ww9EFwC_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5e/9c/8Ww9EFwC_o.jpg)
It may be a party outside though, but in Tombs it’s a bloodbath…
![[Image: ophbmcGB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0f/d4/ophbmcGB_o.jpg)
But hey, people doing silly stuff in games can be amusing to screenshot. Also, that door in the background has some great art design, as expected from this game!
![[Image: FoQBfeIF_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5c/9a/FoQBfeIF_o.jpg)
I think I tried to get into a party for Tombs here, but I don’t think anything came of it. Here’s some chatlog anyway.
![[Image: aouvpIfz_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2f/44/aouvpIfz_o.jpg)
I’m posting this otherwise very similar shot for the new chat.
![[Image: IWHxy1If_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/15/d1/IWHxy1If_o.jpg)
This is the mission outpost for Prophecies’ final mission, which I was gettinga party together for here. From this camera angle it looks like I’m knee-deep in the ground, but that is just a raised stone platform in the middle, so it’s not really like that. (Interestingly, you can move the camera down through that stone platform in the center of this area, which reveals that it’s on top of standard ground. It turns invisible once you get the camera down into it.)
![[Image: qy3VISaG_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e0/01/qy3VISaG_o.jpg)
Yeah, at this point a lot of people were reaching the end of the game. It was a crowded outpost indeed! Also, more Obsidian Shard armor, this time the Necromancer one.
![[Image: LeQYtNdz_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/20/d2/LeQYtNdz_o.jpg)
And here’s another person with the female Necromancer Obsidian Shard armor. Just to test, I tried taking this shot at the maximum resolution supported by the monitor I had at the time, 1600 x 1200. As you can see, the framerate got … a bit worse: it went from 11 fps a couple of shots ago, to four in this one. I did not keep the resolution here after this screenshot for that reason.
![[Image: 7fLTkEZz_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c8/68/7fLTkEZz_o.jpg)
This attempt at the final mission seems to be going poorly… most of us are dead, me included.
![[Image: ONj4ikI0_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9a/1e/ONj4ikI0_o.jpg)
This time the party I was in got to a cutscene, though! Awesome. Nah, I don’t think I’ll skip it… I rarely did that, whether or not I’d seen it before. Guild Wars’ cutscenes aren’t too long, and they’re mostly good.
![[Image: H4hwHR8G_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f2/35/H4hwHR8G_o.jpg)
Looking at the background here, winter is my favorite season, which is probably why the Shiverpeaks are probably my favorite environment in Guild Wars. This area looks pretty nice…
![[Image: fQGzeELp_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ab/0b/fQGzeELp_o.jpg)
This area’s plainer-looking, probably because of the absence of trees and falling snow, but it is still nice and white.
![[Image: 5ijOq6AW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/56/0d/5ijOq6AW_o.jpg)
I should get 15k Pyromancer armor sometime… but after all this time I still only have one 15k armor set, for my Necromancer.
![[Image: rytx9KMF_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c0/b2/rytx9KMF_o.jpg)
… If you pretend that this scene was real, I don’t know that I’d want to know what is going on here…
![[Image: 9iFXvQph_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/10/74/9iFXvQph_o.jpg)
The desert. It’s not that large an area of the game, before Nightfall greatly expanded on deserts in Guild Wars that is… but back when Tombs was there that little piece of it was a destination, anyway.
![[Image: 1sPv0RRV_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/99/f3/1sPv0RRV_o.jpg)
Watch out for unlicensed bots that steal your login data!
![[Image: ldfFa1zp_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0e/b0/ldfFa1zp_o.jpg)
And now, a couple of shots from in a Tombs match. I played Tombs post-release more often than I remember, it seems…
![[Image: OyJiD2rW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f4/d3/OyJiD2rW_o.jpg)
Some of the team. I’m facing the other way though…
![[Image: AdOuXd8q_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/90/e5/AdOuXd8q_o.jpg)
Looks like that match ended quickly, probably. We’re going to try again though!
![[Image: 8b4r6hvE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/38/6b/8b4r6hvE_o.jpg)
Now I’m off to the random arena instead. Maybe this is a first person shot or something? Because that looks like my monk character in the center, but I hadn’t created her quite yet so… yeah, I’m not sure.
![[Image: 3oSxIaCd_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e0/34/3oSxIaCd_o.jpg)
Dwayna.
![[Image: drsrcL1D_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ff/84/drsrcL1D_o.jpg)
We won some, but sadly lost eventually… too bad. I wish I had a shot showing how long the winstreak was.
![[Image: Hr28XgAw_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/76/70/Hr28XgAw_o.jpg)
See my message on the screen: this shot is probably taken under-water, but you can’t tell because when you get the camera underneath things such as water they disappear. So yeah, I’m totally on land here… yeah… It’s a neat trick of how the Guild Wars camera works.
![[Image: uxt0Ib2y_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/91/f6/uxt0Ib2y_o.jpg)
Standing in the fire of the fire islands arena between matches can be entertaining. Again though, who is this? It's some random character. Because…
![[Image: 5av114TH_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/82/b1/5av114TH_o.jpg)
Because here is my monk character, just created at level one. The name references two characters from Quest for Glory I, a favorite game of mine from the early ’90s. I don’t love playing monk and aren’t as good at it as I am at ranged combat classes, but I did eventually finish Prophecies with this character, which took over a hundred hours. After that I mostly stopped playing Monk though, and it’s hard to go back to, remembering how to heal teammates well and such takes practice.
![[Image: 8VlBVdY0_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/29/c7/8VlBVdY0_o.jpg)
I’m sure Sarah here will be fine this time…
![[Image: TM8jNLyR_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/51/b9/TM8jNLyR_o.jpg)
You’re being pretty confident there! Probably over-confident, really. I don’t know how well we did, but hopefully it was well… most of the year the Fissure of Woe costs quite a bit of money to get into, after all! It’s some of Guild Wars’ postgame content, and it’s hard. Challenging areas like this are, even more than the rest of this game, really designed to be played with an all-human player party. There are even harder areas in the game now, that are totally inaccessible to all but the best solo players, but the Fissure’s more than hard enough for me to not get far at all playing it these days with just Heroes and Henchmen. I love Guild Wars’ grouping focus, but it does mean that solo play can be inapproachably hard, and groups just aren’t around these days like they were in 2004-2005… ah well. It’s still an amazing game anyway, and thankfully some people are still playing.
![[Image: je5Snmpl_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/26/07/je5Snmpl_o.jpg)
Moving forward in the Fissure a bit. You go here to get Obsidian Shard drops, to make that cool Obsidian Shard armor if you can get a lot of them. Good luck with that, I only ever got a few…
![[Image: iMP1iOJC_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3a/51/iMP1iOJC_o.jpg)
That over apparently, here I’m back in the Shiverpeaks for a bit.
![[Image: jWjkgzD5_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4d/f5/jWjkgzD5_o.jpg)
You get to the two GW1 high-level areas, the Balthazar-themed Fissure of Woe and the Grenth-themed Underworld, from the Temple of the Ages in the middle of Prophecies’ map. You can also get there from similar five-gods temple zones in Elona and Cantha, today. Even today you often see a decent number of people in the Temple of the Ages, particularly when an event is going on.
![[Image: mfcu2UnT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e8/cc/mfcu2UnT_o.jpg)
GW really should have had an auction house… but instead people who want a good return for their items have to do this, spam chat. They would add that search-list thing later on, but you still need to be logged in and listing it for it to appear there.
![[Image: PAQfmG39_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a7/ef/PAQfmG39_o.jpg)
More people in the Temple, mostly grouping for Fissure of Underworld runs.
![[Image: QYXoQBAW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e9/61/QYXoQBAW_o.jpg)
Returning to my monk, I’ve gotten a new costume and have progressed to Seared Ascalon. Nice. Monks were always popular,there was always way more demand for human monks in groups than there was supply! Finding groups is definitely easier if you’re a healer, the AI healers are decent but can’t match up to a player.
![[Image: 7s6E1Tdg_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/59/0f/7s6E1Tdg_o.jpg)
More of this mission. Yeah, I got very used to playing this game with an unstable framerate under 20 fps.
![[Image: Z5TYDjcr_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ea/f5/Z5TYDjcr_o.jpg)
Nice loading screen art. The Ascalon Arena is a low-level-only 4v4 random PvP arena, so today surely it’d be nearly impossible to find a match there. Things were different back in 2005, of course.
![[Image: 3uugrPV4_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4a/0d/3uugrPV4_o.jpg)
I believe this is a countdown for a mission, not the Arena.
![[Image: 6YBfn7ei_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0b/52/6YBfn7ei_o.jpg)
These timers are pretty annoying, though. Once you have a group, why make people wait so long all the time? If things could just start, you’d save so much time that you spend standing a round for countdown timers to start… I know some are needed to allow for people to load into matches and such, but it’d be nice if it would start once everyone’s in. Oh well.
![[Image: qH97ogbt_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1a/9f/qH97ogbt_o.jpg)
Nolani Academy… of course. It’s a much easier mission here than it was back in E3 for Everyone, but because of my first experience with it I still think of it as hard…
![[Image: gHeOt1vw_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0e/16/gHeOt1vw_o.jpg)
Running through (Seared) Ascalon, seeing some sights. Stuff like this destroyed building with giant mural is pretty cool as is the sky behind that.
![[Image: aBa61YUD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a5/19/aBa61YUD_o.jpg)
Guild Wars has nice water reflections, too. That makes even muddy water like this look kind of nice.
![[Image: yoZcpuiE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/58/18/yoZcpuiE_o.jpg)
Yeah, there’s definitely no life to be found here… apart from the monsters I’ll be killing and plenty of Charr, of course!
![[Image: M6vqZA96_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/49/10/M6vqZA96_o.jpg)
And now my monk is out of Ascalon and has reached the Shiverpeaks. As I’ve said before, the story arc in this game, from Ascalon through the mountains to Kryta and eventually to the Fire Islands, is very well done. It’s far from one of the great stories, but it is a good one which succeeded in making me care about the characters and world. I have not liked any of Arena.net’s stories anywhere near as much since, sadly, so maybe their success writing such a compelling story was a one-off thing… but still, this accomplishment is worth remembering.
![[Image: PKM4KYKT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/93/8f/PKM4KYKT_o.jpg)
This effort at getting through this area of the game sure wasn’t worth remembering though… but I took a screenshot anyway. Heh.
![[Image: JfUiGkne_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/70/cf/JfUiGkne_o.jpg)
And for the final screenshot before Sorrow’s Furnace, here is a shot of the map screen, zoomed in. Here you can see your path and you can see which parts of the maps have been revealed. It makes exploring most of a zone easy. Getting every single scrap of a zone mapped out is very hard, but getting close is easy enough, if you have the time. Guild Wars’ mapping system is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a game, and that is something that means a lot to me.
Next time: Guild Wars: Prophecies’ free content addition, Sorrow’s Furnace, releases, and the first annual Halloween festivities (?) commence. Here it is on my site. I'll make a forum version later of course.
RE: Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 3rd February 2019
It's time for the next update. In this post, 59 screenshots of Guild Wars, taken between the release of Sorrow's Furnace in early September, and the Halloween event of late October and early November. I took a bunch of pictures of the Halloween event, and that makes up the bulk of this update. It happens every year, but this was the first Guild Wars seasonal event, so it was pretty cool at the time. In the early years of the game seasonal events changed significantly from year to year, too, as they added more things each time. This first Halloween event is mostly just a visual change, with a redone Lion's Arch and visits from a certain crazy undead king. The minigames and such they added later were, I believe, not present yet.
Guild Wars: Fall 2005
![[Image: mwvkyQim_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0d/78/mwvkyQim_o.jpg)
This is a cutscene showing a flythrough of Grenth's Footprint, a new zone in the South Shiverpeaks Arena.net added in early September which contains the games' third 'dungeon', Sorrow's Furnace. Unlike the other two though, which require a significant payment in gold each time you want to attempt them, Sorrow's Furnace is freely accessible, if you can handle it. The Sorrow's Furnace addon was released in a free patch, which was pretty awesome, and came with new music and some very nice looking areas, such as this one.
![[Image: 3defaZBv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ce/c5/3defaZBv_o.jpg)
More of the flythough of the outsides of Sorrow’s Furnace.
![[Image: IbhVhbsw_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/12/90/IbhVhbsw_o.jpg)
Before you get to Sorrow's Furnace itself, you've got to travel through several zones, go to the new outpost in Grenth's Footprint, and gather a party there for the trek to the dungeon. Here I am heading towards that outpost, exploring the map towards the green mark on the minimap which shows where you need to go for the currently selected quest. Clearly there was a quest to get to this outpost, and I'm following it. This part is doable with henchmen.
![[Image: QSSigzSO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c0/94/QSSigzSO_o.jpg)
And here I am, in the outpost! Made it.
![[Image: yvdVg5qm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c8/50/yvdVg5qm_o.jpg)
I'll get back to Sorrow's Furnace attempts later -- it's a tough dungeon even with a human group, and I attempted it a bunch of times -- but now for something different: the first Halloween event, or "Mad King's Day" as Guild Wars calls it! It was late October, and to celebrate the holiday ANet did a big event with lots of custom graphics and NPC dialog lines, and some new gameplay content as well, though that would be added to greatly in later years. The event was focused on Lion's Arch, though the Tomb of the Primeval Kings and Droknar's Forge also had a few changes, and the altered moon was visible everywhere you could see it. The official wiki has a page on this event here: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Halloween_2005 I've got a bunch of screenshots of various elements of the festivities, starting with this, some transformed Krytan civilians in Lion's Arch. First though... why so much focus on Halloween? I guess they were trying for something that isn't just one nation's national holiday and this qualifies, so everyone playing the game can enjoy it, but Halloween is also something that I believe is more popular in the US than other places, so it's not a universal thing. It's a fun day when you're a kid, getting candy, but I don't like horror stuff and haven't done anything special on halloween in a long time, so I don't care about this stuff as much as some. Still, seeing the seasonal events in GW is always quite entertaining, and this was the first one so it was something of a big deal.
![[Image: GzA9Dfy2_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/48/23/GzA9Dfy2_o.jpg)
These people, or NPCs rather, have been tied up in spiderwebs.
![[Image: q2PZM18e_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/39/08/q2PZM18e_o.jpg)
Despite the spiderwebs though, the traders are open for business...
![[Image: xUk7doRb_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9a/64/xUk7doRb_o.jpg)
Just your average everyday demon and animal ... who is probably just some poor randomly transformed citizen.
![[Image: WSAYZaGo_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3f/04/WSAYZaGo_o.jpg)
Nope, this horseman is one of the special event NPCs, only here during Halloween. For this first seasonal event, ANet added some special items to the game, namely the four shown in the picture: Witch's Brew, Squash Serum, Ghost-In-A-Box, and Absinthe. You could get them several ways, but this trader sold them for drops. These party items each do some entertaining thing, such as making your character 'drunk' (this messes with the screen for a bit), setting off a visual effect, and such. Over the years ANet would add many more seasonal party events like these. I've got lots of them in my storage box, it's fun to keep them. But yes, other than the new visuals and the special visit on Halloween day, these items were the only other content addition; festival minigames would not be introduced to Guild Wars until 2006.
![[Image: TOUKca4M_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2a/64/TOUKca4M_o.jpg)
The sky looks different from usual as well, during Halloween, but there are many more changes as well...
![[Image: ZjVuiiXY_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3c/dc/ZjVuiiXY_o.jpg)
But first, just another undead trader offering those four new amusement items in trade. Collect those emblems, you can't buy them for cash!
![[Image: ZOStHWUN_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bb/d2/ZOStHWUN_o.jpg)
Here's a bigger change, there's a big cauldron in the middle of town, with magic emitting out of the top of it! The ground's not changed though, I'm pretty sure; the textures are just broken as they sometimes did on that computer.
![[Image: JFsbY8Fu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3e/3d/JFsbY8Fu_o.jpg)
And here's the moon, now with a slightly creepy face on it. It's a nice touch which adds to the atmosphere.
![[Image: A9EygEWG_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/88/cb/A9EygEWG_o.jpg)
Another view of the moon, cauldron, and sheet-white ground.
![[Image: Tgr2HGKt_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9a/51/Tgr2HGKt_o.jpg)
In this area, a circle of stuff is marked out on the ground... huh.
![[Image: NN8VQQHz_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/fa/df/NN8VQQHz_o.jpg)
This circle doesn't have much of a function yet, but it will.
![[Image: IekS90Ur_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/07/78/IekS90Ur_o.jpg)
Turning into a Moa for a week or two might not be much fun, they're surely not as smart as people...
![[Image: Oac2N05Z_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/96/26/Oac2N05Z_o.jpg)
Candy corn guards appear during Halloween. They look pretty silly... though while candy corn is an iconic Halloween candy, it's not that good tasting. So yeah, these guys are probably safe. :p
![[Image: aJloUjvk_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9a/77/aJloUjvk_o.jpg)
With ghosts in the sky the 'creepy' atmosphere shows. Note the giant candle on that rock, as well.
![[Image: umAGoPGh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/27/5f/umAGoPGh_o.jpg)
This one's a nice shot! And yes, that's not a rock, but a skull. And there's another demon skull on the now-black sails of the ship at the port. As I said I'm not a big Halloween fan, but the work they put in to redoing the city with a stereotypically creepy-Halloween theme is impressive.
![[Image: tryAYCdE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4f/04/tryAYCdE_o.jpg)
While focused on Lion's Arch, here in the Shiverpeaks we see that other areas have some changed graphics as well, here including that skull banner as well as the usual ghosts flying around.
![[Image: dkBqYMen_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/46/fc/dkBqYMen_o.jpg)
Returning to Lion's Arch, the sea looks sick... though it might be in better shape than that ship in the distance.
![[Image: rdRMJmhj_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/40/18/rdRMJmhj_o.jpg)
At specified times on Halloween day itself, the main event occurred: the Mad King's visit itself. This entertaining, but maliciously crazy, pumpkin-headed spirit tries to escape his prison once a year. On that day he visits Lion's Arch and torments the masses, which would be awful in reality but is a fun event in a videogame.
![[Image: 6MknkL7U_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0f/3f/6MknkL7U_o.jpg)
A closer view. The crowd looks larger here than in the previous shot that shows how we're all clustered around him... heh. The Mad King's got a good design. He's both kind of silly and kind of creepy.
![[Image: h7sW5dof_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/71/d6/h7sW5dof_o.jpg)
During his visits, Mad King Thorn goes through several phases. Some of the time, he gives commands to the whole group to take some action, and then rewards people who did it and punishes those who did not. Other times, such as here, he chooses one person, and tells them to play a game with him. I believe the game works like rock-paper-scissors, presuming that you participate by replying.
![[Image: VwNbQmoB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6e/3e/VwNbQmoB_o.jpg)
Leaving already? This isn't his first visit, as the chat points out, though; again, Mad King Thorne would visit every few hours through Halloween day. The Mad King's Day events would expand over the years, as minigames and quests got added to this base, but his visit still is the centerpiece of the Halloween event. One other thing that got added to over the years was the Mad King's backstory, though; he's not just selfish and randomly cruel, but quite evil at times. This comes across much more in the Halloween event quests added in later years than it does in his visit itself.
![[Image: lYAB3rmy_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0e/76/lYAB3rmy_o.jpg)
The ship's sails have a pretty cool look here, all black with a skull and crossbones... imposing, but nicely done.
![[Image: RhESrp64_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8c/47/RhESrp64_o.jpg)
Other than the visuals it's the same as usual though. But between the water, sails, and sky, the visuals are quite different.
![[Image: ug1gBr86_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d5/0b/ug1gBr86_o.jpg)
And here he is again! Yes, I made sure to experience Mad King Thorne's visit several times. It went the same each time, with different targets of course.
![[Image: R2N8xhyZ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e6/12/R2N8xhyZ_o.jpg)
Yes, he's quite self-centered.
![[Image: v2nc57Qg_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/74/c7/v2nc57Qg_o.jpg)
Just comparing his text line in chat to the lines over his head, he sure does go back and forth between giving people gifts and wanting to kill them, doesn't he. But that's what makes the event interesting, of course.
![[Image: D3b2GKLE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ca/72/D3b2GKLE_o.jpg)
It's a pretty amusing thing to experience, the first few times for sure.
![[Image: bBixlxQD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1a/61/bBixlxQD_o.jpg)
Yeah, this shot's nearly identical to the last one. I left it in anyway... but uh, yes, you could get pumpkin-head festival hat, like that person at bottom has. Festival hats were introduced here in Halloween 2005, and as introduced here were zero-armor hats that you could wear instead of your usual head armor. Given their lacking defense they were meant to be worn in town for fun, and not in battle, but you can put insignias on them. In 2009 the festival hat system would change, as a new festival hat and costume feature was added that adds festival hats and paid DLC costumes as skins that you can have appear instead of your regular, and equipped, armor, allowing for the wearing of festival hats in battle in a way that they weren't before. That was an improvement, but the original system wasn't too bad, the festival hats worked reasonably well as things to just show off but not use in serious gameplay. You got a pumpkin crown for being there during one of the Mad King's visits, so yes, I got it too, though I didn't take any screenshots wearing it. I still have at least one of the original ones, the one for my monk seen in most of these screenshots. And yes, it is the original armor-slot version; the festival hat maker can make copies, but those go in the festival-hats slot instead and are purely cosmetic. There was a new exclusive festival hat for each Halloween from '05 to '11, and until 2012 the only way to get each one was to have been there for that one event. Since 2012 it is possible for anyone to get them as Halloween quest rewards, though. Being able to get all the festival hats you missed is kind of nice, but it does remove their cachet. Oh well. At least the handful of head armor-slot festival hats I have are not replicable in the game today.
![[Image: F3Lejrpm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d0/bd/F3Lejrpm_o.jpg)
He's picking a new target... I mean participant... for his game! Who will it be this time?
![[Image: 2CNBU02i_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/50/be/2CNBU02i_o.jpg)
Ooh, he picked me! Yes, I'm playing as my monk here, as should be obvious from the character panel that's been open for like five screenshots now, and I got chosen. Yay? I didn't take any shots of how it went, but again the game is essentially rock-paper-scissors.
![[Image: n3XUYnQD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/36/ac/n3XUYnQD_o.jpg)
In this phase of the event, he's telling everyone to do the things (emotes) he says... or else.
![[Image: oQ8xExp9_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8a/cd/oQ8xExp9_o.jpg)
Sounds like you're having a fun week too...
![[Image: hvOaQ4jU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a2/6d/hvOaQ4jU_o.jpg)
With Halloween day over though, I went back to Sorrow's Furnace. Here's a shot from one attempt. It looks hot in the distance there, to say the least... and our chances look grim, with two people quitting on the group. Sorrow's Furnace is a tough dungeon and you need to be very good to beat it...
![[Image: I7gn4Uap_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e3/44/I7gn4Uap_o.jpg)
Just putting a slight reddish hue over the screen does a nice job of making the area look hot. Sorrow's Furnace is a literal furnace though, with fire and a Forgeman, so that makes sense. They did a great job with the visuals in Sorrow's Furnace.
![[Image: lP3EFtHx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d0/c8/lP3EFtHx_o.jpg)
And here's another example of that. This bridge didn't need to look this great, but it does!
![[Image: Pk07WaVX_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ef/6b/Pk07WaVX_o.jpg)
The art design here, both for the environment and this cutscene, have always impressed me. It still looks fantastic, from an artistic front at least.
![[Image: XRpgCBS1_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3c/92/XRpgCBS1_o.jpg)
And this shot might look even better. All of the mining equipment hanging from the ceiling may not really come into play in the game, but it definitely adds to the atmosphere.
![[Image: kadR0m9d_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a6/ce/kadR0m9d_o.jpg)
Around that rock, you get an even better view of this abandoned mine, and the great design work that went in to this area.
![[Image: eB6igAok_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d3/9c/eB6igAok_o.jpg)
Halloween is over, but the event isn't quite yet, so the moon still has that grin on it, visible everywhere in Tyria.
![[Image: iY6peclT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3e/9e/iY6peclT_o.jpg)
I went back to the city to look around again before everything returned to normal.
![[Image: rgKvCk83_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e9/d7/rgKvCk83_o.jpg)
The Lionguard might want to check out that ship, could be pirates...
![[Image: 5h4SDfjA_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b1/ca/5h4SDfjA_o.jpg)
The area looks better when you can actually see the ground textures. Heh.
![[Image: crgH6Z2N_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4c/29/crgH6Z2N_o.jpg)
And now, the Random Arena, as my ranger. I've clearly been playing Ranger, because I'm up to level 16. I'd been playing Monk too, but the Elementalist was being left behind...
![[Image: GZGTLrcW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/79/85/GZGTLrcW_o.jpg)
I hope we did well!
![[Image: hstitWpS_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/fc/66/hstitWpS_o.jpg)
Some of my stuff and guild people, circa October '05. Note how there is a vault box in the game... with one whole storage panel. The vault box is available to all characters on your account, once you get past pre-Searing that is. One panel isn't much space! Still, through this you could store some resources, and share items between your characters.
![[Image: Q0YencG7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/7f/ea/Q0YencG7_o.jpg)
This was about as far as I got into the zone The Wilds for many years -- to this guy partway into it which you need to visit for a quest. The rest of this large zone is entirely optional, and I didn't actually explore it all until last year... but it's worth doing, because The Falls themselves are really impressive! Dark Oak here, though, has an unpleasant vision for us to go back with.
![[Image: sFBV9x4k_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ef/7e/sFBV9x4k_o.jpg)
A mission outpost in the Maguuma Jungle. GW loved putting key NPCs on pedestals like this. It looks a little silly, but does make them easy to find. The one here is the person to talk to to enter this mission.
![[Image: I4B7EXeG_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/90/e7/I4B7EXeG_o.jpg)
If you want to do well in Tombs, even in '05, you probably wanted an organized group which used some external voice chat service like Teamspeak or Ventrilo to coordinate, but in-game, text-chat-only groups did still exist. Here I'm trying at that yet again.
![[Image: 2XkaZpSf_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/52/12/2XkaZpSf_o.jpg)
And here we go, into the Hall of Heroes...
![[Image: OomGKK4t_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/00/e1/OomGKK4t_o.jpg)
... Looks like that went great. Let's try something else instead.
![[Image: 5KuH6Rmn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/23/ff/5KuH6Rmn_o.jpg)
Yes, you spend a lot of time in this game running around. It's fortunate that between the good graphics, music, and gameplay, almost all of it feels worthwhile. Looking at these screenshots makes me want to go play Guild Wars, in fact...
![[Image: AvXgkKfP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/60/eb/AvXgkKfP_o.jpg)
And last for this update, a first-person shot of my Moa Bird. Er, Strider, technically. Again, I've stuck with this pre-Searing Strider all of the time since day one. Sure, I could get other pets, but technically the Strider is pre-Searing only... the Moa Bird of post-Searing may look the same, but they have a different species name. There also was a longstanding rumor that Striders and Moa Birds were different, that Striders were larger, but I don't think that is true. Even so, GW would eventually add a place where your Ranger characters can release pets, the Zaishen Menagerie, to collect them all, but adding a Strider or Moa only puts Moas in the Menagerie to tame, so if I did that I'd lose the Strider permanently. And even if they really are identical I like the Strider, so I've always had to ignore every charmable animal in the game... oh well.
Next time: More Sorrow's Furnace attempts, and a few shots of the first Christmas event. Unfortunately unlike Halloween I have only a couple of Christmas '05 shots, so the next update will get to early 2006.
RE: Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 8th March 2019
Following those two screenshots at the end of the last post from after the end of the January Factions PvP beta weekend, my screenshots jump straight to the next Factions beta in late March 2006. Arena.net’s writeup of the beta still available is here: http://gw1101.gtm.guildwars.com/events/ingame/factionspreview.php. I guess I wasn’t playing much Guild Wars that spring. I did graduate from undergrad college that spring, so I was busy. My retro gaming collection was growing fast as well.
Anyway, so, as that article says, from March 24 to 27, Arena.net ran a second beta test for Guild Wars: Factions, which would release the next month. I may not have been playing much in the two months between these tests, but I was back for this beta, because I was looking forward to Factions. This time the PvE and PvP sides of Factions were shown, and we could explore a chunk of the world in Echovald Forest and the Jade Sea, though I only went to one of those areas. Again using my second account most of the time, I created a new Factions character there and explored the forest. Other than the first shot here, all the rest of my screenshots from this test are either of the character creation screens or of me playing as a new Elementalist character that I made in the second (beta) account.
The second part of this article covers the month from after the second Factions beta until Factions’ release in late April. It isn’t a very exciting image set, there is not much there really worthwhile. I have at least some more good screenshots to post in this series, though.
Factions Preview Event: March 2006
![[Image: GRAWjj6d_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d9/c8/GRAWjj6d_o.jpg)
This shot shows my regular Guild Wars character Talindra in the Battle Isles. So, this test definitely allowed regular PvE characters to access the Battle Isles, which might have been a new thing; I’m not sure that the previous test from January allowed that. This is the only shot I have of any of my regular characters in the new Factions beta areas, though, so I found it kind of confusing when I saw it. But that has got to be what’s going on here.
![[Image: lgWzZFnx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6c/00/lgWzZFnx_o.jpg)
Here we see my new character (again, in that second account at this point) – an Elementalist, because I always have preferred ranged classes to melee and I like combat classes more than healing. Also I was interested in making a new one, other than the Prophecies Elementalist I also had.
![[Image: yHLCrIgU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5b/b0/yHLCrIgU_o.jpg)
Here we see one of the 37 screenshots I took in the character creator for this beta. I took screenshots of a lot of the costumes available to female characters of all of the classes. Yeah, female ones only this time; I just wasn’t interested enough in the male costumes, I guess. I think I will post a side-article part of this series eventually where I post most of the character-creator screenshots I took in three of the betas, namely two of the early pre-release betas and then this one. It’s not that exciting, but I took all these screenshots, so why not? It is at least a little bit interesting to see the options they gave you, I think.
![[Image: 1y0oN7y4_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/fa/06/1y0oN7y4_o.jpg)
I took a bunch of shots of some of the Kurzick NPCs in this test. Right from the beginning I preferred the Kurzicks to the Luxons, both for character and environment design, and you see that here as I didn’t do their side right from the start here. Even as of writing this I still have actually never finished the Luxon side of the split portion of the Factions campaign, though last year I did finally play through most of it. The Jade Sea is a beautiful area indeed, I’m glad to finally have explored it. Echovald Forest is also a great area, though. Factions is maybe a bit too short, but it’s a fantastic campaign I have always loved, for the most part. It’s my second favorite of the four Guild Wars campaigns, after the original.
![[Image: ESSZRnfm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d8/a1/ESSZRnfm_o.jpg)
Despite Factions’ Asian theme, the Kurzicks have a quite gothic look to them, to say the least. Despite how much I like Factions, I have always found it a little weird how past the city the last two areas are this gotic forest and a frozen, somewhat Asian/Greek-ish pirate area. I know this is a Western game and you can tell, with how the city and such is a mishmash of Chinese and Japanese elements in a way you probably would not see from an Asian game, but still it’s a little odd. The visual design here is great, but how Asian-inspired is the Kurzick area? Anyway, this is Danika, one of the leading members of the Kurzicks and someone who you can fight with as a healer henchman. Behind her are her pets, two Rot Wallows who also are henchmen. Yes, really.
![[Image: uoh1ZifJ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/09/65/uoh1ZifJ_o.jpg)
And here are two more of the Kurzick henchmen, a mage and a guardian (warrior-healer). Most of the frozen Echovald Forest is made of petrified trees, but some areas are bright green with returning life, such as this ground here.
![[Image: zDgy4X94_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bf/bc/zDgy4X94_o.jpg)
Yes, the classic henchies are here as well. Well, some of them are; they divided them between the Kurzick and Luxon areas, so the main party — Devona, Aidan, Eve and Cynn here, and such — are in the Kurzick areas, and others in the Luxon. Mhenlo is not available as a henchmen in Factions, unfortunately; he’s a major story character and doesn’t have the time to explore around, pretty much.
![[Image: dqc69v8P_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ee/da/dqc69v8P_o.jpg)
A disaster turned this whole forest to stone. You learn more when you play the full game, here we were thrown into this part of the campaign that ended up being fairly far in. It’s a really cool concept and they executed on it very well.
![[Image: ra0xP4Uh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/33/c7/ra0xP4Uh_o.jpg)
Henchmen. The assassin woman in front is on the Factions box. But yeah, the character models still look good, but those rock wall textures in the background have not…
![[Image: rA7rB3l7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1e/46/rA7rB3l7_o.jpg)
This is not Danika, just someone else who looks kind of similar. The Luxons and Kurzicks both use consistent design themes throughout.
![[Image: GL7WDOOl_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/7d/d3/GL7WDOOl_o.jpg)
And here, the same shot but with the interface off. The image quality looks about the same this time though, really…
![[Image: 77Fp65gm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/25/36/77Fp65gm_o.jpg)
Yes, some other people were playing this beta as well.
![[Image: q4E5yasQ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/43/d9/q4E5yasQ_o.jpg)
Mesmer Kurzicks have weird masks like this one.
![[Image: eImh8FKJ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/71/f5/eImh8FKJ_o.jpg)
And now, finally some actual gameplay! I wish I’d taken more gameplay shots, and less in towns… oh well. Anyway, this area of the Kurcick cathedral is nice.
![[Image: E4ikOT3P_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6e/be/E4ikOT3P_o.jpg)
Run! This looks like a shot from a cutscene here, but I think I’m just exploring, not playing the mission. It’s an alright shot though I think.
![[Image: KR76TQPs_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/83/a2/KR76TQPs_o.jpg)
Yes, I am thoroughly exploring this zone.
![[Image: tmA0gLGG_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/dd/0d/tmA0gLGG_o.jpg)
See? I think I’ve covered almost every bit of it now!
![[Image: C5vmnW6v_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b5/4c/C5vmnW6v_o.jpg)
Here is another female Kurzick NPC, albeit one with a much less fancy outfit.
![[Image: RHGzgDCt_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5e/76/RHGzgDCt_o.jpg)
Zoomed out to see more of the environment, Echovald Forest is still pretty beautiful. Cutting something that looks like a church out of that petrified tree is interesting and looks great.
![[Image: wObkVCSM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3c/2e/wObkVCSM_o.jpg)
The sky in Echovald Forest mostly is not visible because of the giant petrified trees. Here is one shot of the sky, or rather, the branches…
![[Image: qKyAA2mA_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/45/09/qKyAA2mA_o.jpg)
And here is another. It’s yet another great touch in this fantastic area of the game. Echovald Forest has always been one of my favorite parts of Guild Wars to explore around and look at…
![[Image: uvO5N6M0_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d1/95/uvO5N6M0_o.jpg)
The ground is mostly dead in the forest, but with so little light getting through those branches you’d expect that. I like the look of that tree in the center here, the light in this otherwise dead tree is pretty cool.
![[Image: JCw8v6zu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/af/fb/JCw8v6zu_o.jpg)
Now, I’ve returned to an outpost. Unlike the depths of the forest above, this is not one of the forests’ best-looking areas. Sure, it looks alright, but the giant trees are the best…
![[Image: YkR2VteZ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/da/71/YkR2VteZ_o.jpg)
A Factions-style dragon, in this outpost? And is that a dead person on the ground on the left side? What is going on here… is this normal, or an end-of-beta event?
![[Image: YxTR1s2h_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/14/65/YxTR1s2h_o.jpg)
It’s not a huge crowd, but at least some other people were playing this beta near the end here.
![[Image: t0PGkwbN_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/fd/ca/t0PGkwbN_o.jpg)
Another shot of my character from the front, the direction you rarely see in games. GW has great character designs, but the Kurzick building here is pretty great as well.
![[Image: 81igGlBv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cf/5b/81igGlBv_o.jpg)
We’re probably getting close to the end of the beta now…
![[Image: EkbNtjEI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0e/37/EkbNtjEI_o.jpg)
Before the end though, I took four screenshots of what, exactly, I had explored in the ten or so hours I’d played the beta. Yeah, I spent almost the entire time in this beta exploring the forest in PvE with this Elementalist character, neglecting the other things you could do — PvE, Alliance battles, and such. See the link at the top to Arena.net’s article for more on those other events.
![[Image: mLruYaHP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/de/f9/mLruYaHP_o.jpg)
North of that last shot, we see the upper part of Echovald Forest. Factions areas really aren’t that large.
![[Image: v12DOlLU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/35/d0/v12DOlLU_o.jpg)
Oh yeah, I got far on the Luxon side… yup…
![[Image: Dl3ZHVIj_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1b/13/Dl3ZHVIj_o.jpg)
On the Kurzick side, though, I did as much as I could! You couldn’t explore everything in this beta, but I got to most of what was there.
![[Image: JLNpEiIT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b4/6c/JLNpEiIT_o.jpg)
And last, to conclude the beta, I … explored the forest a bit more, because I was really having a lot of fun doing it. I took a screenshot of my playtime at this point as well, since I was on a second account so I knew a record of how long I’d played the beta would be valuable. And indeed it is.
Guild Wars – March – May 2004, Prophecies and then the Factions launch
![[Image: CLxF0tTZ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d2/b3/CLxF0tTZ_o.jpg)
With the beta over, I went back to only infrequently playing GW over the next month as I probably focused more on school and classic games, something I was really getting into in 2006. Factions released April 28th, and I’m not sure exactly when I bought it — I bought a physical box, so I probably waited a weeks until after college ended — but I’m sure I got it by sometime in May. Here we see my first few shots from the tutorial area. Next time, more Factions release shots, and the first Nightfall beta. My favorite time for Guild Wars is 2004-2005, but despite my paucity of screenshots, 2006, up until the release of Nightfall, was also a great time for Guild Wars. I played the game a lot less than I had in ’05, but still was playing some of the game, again, even if I wasn’t always taking screenshots of what I was doing.
![[Image: 2qNbu9lA_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ac/f8/2qNbu9lA_o.jpg)
Sometimes in this game, you die while exploring when deep in an area, close to your objective. But your death penalty is high, so you run all the way across the stupid map from the respawn shrine near where you started, only to find…
![[Image: Mhp4egVg_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/dc/d9/Mhp4egVg_o.jpg)
Gah! Died again, barely getting any farther. Back to square one… well, at least the few enemies I got past last time are dead now! When you are in these kinds of situations and then actually surpass the challenge and make it through it’s incredibly satisfying; despite the occasional frustration this is a thing I really love about Guild Wars.
![[Image: palf6umT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e5/57/palf6umT_o.jpg)
And here we see, I’ve gone back to playing as my Monk character and that’s why I am going through the desert this time. Healing is hard, and I found the standard Heal-focused build less interesting, so as you see from my skillbar instead I have a mixture of healing and protection skills at this point.
![[Image: jqsIHCcR_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6d/43/jqsIHCcR_o.jpg)
I know I keep saying this, but even on this aging computer Guild wars really did look great most of the time. I’m thinking that again while looking at this screenshot.
![[Image: zMDHAd8v_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/90/ca/zMDHAd8v_o.jpg)
And now, back to the Shiverpeaks. Heh… edge of the world, again! Usually you aren’t supposed to be able to get to the actual edge of a map, but some pathing glitch allowed it here. That’s fun stuff.
![[Image: IyB6rFoj_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e9/43/IyB6rFoj_o.jpg)
And here’s another shot of this edge of the map. Again, usually there are walls, visible or invisible, that keep you from getting to areas like this.
![[Image: 47Xc6fgX_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/31/83/47Xc6fgX_o.jpg)
The glass-like water in GW is pretty great as well. Or is this ice? It is cold out, after all.
![[Image: fGLz56D9_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b7/68/fGLz56D9_o.jpg)
And now I’m exploring something back in Ascalon… no idea why, though, beyond that Ascalon is one of the best parts of Guild Wars, so it’s fun to go back to once in a while.
![[Image: Zzg2aLvT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/83/5c/Zzg2aLvT_o.jpg)
The area outside of Sorrow’s Furnace here clearly has more going on than any of the Shiverpeaks areas in the original launch game, both in design and in art. They put a lot of effort into Sorrow’s Furnace, it’s too bad that they didn’t do much else like it afterwards. On another note, I’ve stuck with this outfit for my Monk because it’s probably my favorite Monk clothes. She still has it.
![[Image: FWIJjdbo_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bd/ce/FWIJjdbo_o.jpg)
66% of Tyria explored with my main… I’ve gotten that number a lot higher since. Anyway though, that’s a big monster up ahead! I’m sure this will go fine…
![[Image: 8kUS6XR7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/45/68/8kUS6XR7_o.jpg)
At this point the people from school I was in this guild with decided to make a new guild, so we were switching over to the new one at this point. I took a few shots of all the people, but won’t post those. This one’s fine though.
![[Image: f8ZXdNUm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/99/e2/f8ZXdNUm_o.jpg)
See? I’ve got a new guild cape. I didn’t take any shots of the new guilds’ player list and such at this point, but the cape changed for a reason. The color is wrong, though, because this is the team arenas and I’m on the blue team.
![[Image: NMSLVrl9_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ab/40/NMSLVrl9_o.jpg)
And here is the new capes’ its actual color, red. The new guild has a pretty dumb name, and I’ve always kind of hated the acronym… but I’ll get to that later.Anyway, I’m exploring the snowy forest. Those snow-covered trees are, as always, one of my favorite background objects in this game…
![[Image: 40E3RKPY_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/03/d4/40E3RKPY_o.jpg)
Next though, I decided to log in to the second account, and take screenshots of the three characters I had used in the second Factions beta. Yes, I did have three characters, and not only the one seen in all of the screenshots from part one of this article. This Assassin is the one that I’d delete here after Factions released and recreate in my main account.
![[Image: Eej7j5Ma_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ff/58/Eej7j5Ma_o.jpg)
And here is the new Elementalist, which I would eventually also delete and recreate in my main account. … Yes, both of my Elementalist characters have Fire-focused skillsets. I really should branch out but always have preferred the Fire skills…
![[Image: 1x1sz5uv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e8/be/1x1sz5uv_o.jpg)
And here’s the other Assassin. No, this isn’t the one from the first Factions beta, but another one. I was trying more Asian-style names than that one had, and chose the other one over this. This character still exists, however; I logged in to this second beta-only-use account of mine today, albeit with a different hair style for some reason. I must have recreated the character at some point in the Nightfall betas, I guess? I don’t remember, and unfortunately this is the only old screenshot I have of the character, so who knows.
![[Image: dGVd4U4I_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8d/fe/dGVd4U4I_o.jpg)
Yes, I had logged in to the other account to choose which character to delete to create in my main account, since I’ve gotten Guild Wars: Factions! As I said, I chose one of the Assassins. Unlike Prophecies, Factions has a much faster pace — this campaign is only maybe half as long as Prophecies. That game takes me a bit over a hundred hours a character to finish, while this one is 50 or 60 hours. It’s a densely packed 50 or 60 hours, though, without anywhere near as much downtime and aimless wandering as Prophecies has. Despite the short length, it’s a great campaign and my second favorite of the four overall, after Prophecies of course.
![[Image: zhDiTXtw_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/30/4f/zhDiTXtw_o.jpg)
New Factions characters start on Shina Jea Island, a very traditional-Japan area which looks beautiful.
![[Image: X7FluYs1_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ac/7d/X7FluYs1_o.jpg)
Unfortunately, I did not take any more gameplay shots in this set. Instead, all I’ve got are a handful of shots of (mostly female) NPCs and such… blah. I mean, this character has a good, interesting design, but still…
![[Image: yzdFCAwv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3c/46/yzdFCAwv_o.jpg)
A warrior woman. As for the background, yeah, Shing Jea Island is quite Japanese. Then the city on the mainland is much more Chinese, and then the Kurzick and Luxon areas are gothic and asian-pirate themed for whatever reason. Of course characters from Shinge Jea Island and the mainland have a mixture of Chinese and Japanese names, because East Asia is all the same, right? To be fair, Guild Wars Prophecies is similarly mixed together — Ascalon stands in for just about all of fantasy-medieval Europe, after all, not any one nation, but it’s something I noticed because it is a common thing in Western depictions of Asia.
![[Image: Is0PnLKU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1c/bc/Is0PnLKU_o.jpg)
Here we see some Henchmen from Shing Jea Island. There isn’t much healthy, green areas on the mainland, other than one zone and some bits of grass here and there, so the island really stands out. It’s kind of too bad it’s all very easy content, though Hard Mode adds at least some challenge to it…
![[Image: 6T07EAcm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/14/9e/6T07EAcm_o.jpg)
Yup, it’s another character creation shot. This time it’s only one, though. No, I did not make this character; it wouldn’t be until 2018 that I actually made a semi-serious effort at playing Mesmer… it’s a tricky class due to all the timing requirements on Mesmer skills, and has never been one of my favorites as a result.
![[Image: SXbkZ7lG_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0c/96/SXbkZ7lG_o.jpg)
And last, we have… another NPC in an interesting outfit. Okay. The next screenshot batch is better, though, really.
RE: Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 24th March 2019
First, I just finished making a nice, fully broken-down table of contents page for this series on my website. It is here: http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?page_id=1174 Of course all of the posts are in this thread as well, but I like having this table of contents page is great. While putting it together I also did a little work on the previous articles, adding chapter headings within each article and making a few little text changes here and there. There are now multiple sections in every post in the series. For now I'm just going to leave them on the site and not here, because it's not a big change, but I might edit them in later.
Anyway, this is a long one. In this 73-screenshot article with some good and some not so interesting screenshots, I will cover five things: the first Dragon Festival in late June to early July and more of release Factions; the first, PvP-only Nightfall beta in late July; the period in between the Nightfall betas; the second, PvE Nightfall beta; and last some more Factions gameplay from after that beta. Originally this post contained only 55 screenshots, but I realized that the 25-screenshot set of Factions gameplay actually is from after the second Nightfall beta and not before it, and that I’d forgotten to post most of the handful of second Nightfall beta screens that I have. So, after multiple edits to correct the timeline, this post is now very long and one of the biggest in the series. Sorry about that, it probably should be two articles.
But yes, despite Factions only being a few months old, Arena.net was already advertising their upcoming third campaign with betas. My screenshots from the first Nightfall beta are almost all from the character creator, so it looks like I didn’t play it much, but I do have a few gameplay screens from the second beta. It was interesting that they were already showing Nightfall in July, though; that was only a couple of months after Factions released, and Nightfall would not release until October. This is a similar timetable to Factions, in that the first Factions beta was also a PvP weekend event three months before the game launched, but there was a year between the original Guild Wars’ release and Factions, while Nightfall came only six months after Factions. It felt different with the campaigns so close. I know I will keep repeating this point, but it’s what I think.
Anyway, while 2006 was a great year for Guild Wars, going from my screenshots and memories, as I’ve said before 2004-2005 was when I played the game the most. That should be easy to see in this post — there are a lot of screenshots here, but it also covers a full five months, so compared to 2004 or 2005 it’s clear I was playing the game less than I had before. The slow decline of my hours in GW would continue, unfortunately. That may be part of why I was not as hyped for Nightfall as I was Factions, I still had plenty more Factions to play when Nightfall released. I kind of wish ANet had spaced out Guild Wars’ expansions more evenly, but they seem to have kept changing their minds about what they should do with the game, until eventually abandoning it for its far worse sequel. That part of the story is pretty sad and frustrating, but fortunately Guild Wars 1 is still fantastic regardless of how badly I think things went with the second game.
A. Guild Wars Factions – First Dragon Festival, June 30 – July 6, and the rest of July as well
A month after the release of Factions in late April, Arena.net added a new, third festival to the yearly calendar. They would eventually have seven time-limited festivals that run at different times of the year, and this was the third after the Halloween and Wintersday (Christmas) events which started in 2005. The Dragon Festival is Guild Wars’ Fourth of July event, occurring annually from the end of June to early July, but it’s Asian-themed fitting with its Canthan setting. This event introduced the Shing Jea Boardwalk and several limited-time minigames, including the Dragon Arena and three little minigames. The other main Boardwalk minigame, Rollerbeetle Racing, would be introduced in 2007. These events are only playable during the Canthan New Year and Dragon Festival events, in January-February and June-July each year.
I guess I either didn’t take many screenshots or had waited a while before getting Factions, because these screenshots are the next ones I took after the ‘I got Factions’ Factions tutorial area batch from the last update. The Dragon Festival was pretty cool, though; I really liked the new minigame, and it would be a good sign of things to come as more minigames would be added to Guild Wars over the year following.
![[Image: 6n81yyop_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ad/9e/6n81yyop_o.jpg)
Heh… I’m clipped right on top of another character, so the two models are kind of merged together…
![[Image: h64hhiaK_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d7/c1/h64hhiaK_o.jpg)
This is the Dragon Arena, or rather probably the lobby area for it. The Dragon Arena was a new limited-availability mode that, again, is only available in the January and July events. This arena is a random arena with some unique skills and rules which make for an amusing and unique challenge. Unfortunately, I don’t have any shots of the skillbar, only interface-off shots like this. That’s too bad because, as I said, the Dragon Arena uses its own exclusive skills, not your usual ones.
![[Image: qUsOrdVl_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/39/20/qUsOrdVl_o.jpg)
In the Dragon Arena everyone has these wand things which you shoot at eachother with. You don’t use your usual weapon. As the Guild Wars Wiki says, gameplay was inspired by dodgeball — you need to avoid enemy shots, while hitting them with your own.
![[Image: M8PBQ6h3_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/71/7d/M8PBQ6h3_o.jpg)
The festival grounds are all decorated for the event, with lanterns and everything. It’s a nice looking area.
![[Image: Iesg4yze_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b9/c9/Iesg4yze_o.jpg)
Here we have another shot from an ongoing match in the Dragon Arena. Yes, everyone has those wands.
![[Image: cD453mwF_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/97/aa/cD453mwF_o.jpg)
I also spent some time doing regular missions during this festival, though. Here I am exploring Shing Jea Island. As this is a Prophecies character you don’t have to do that, but I wanted to because it’s a pretty nice area with some beautiful sights to see.
![[Image: G04ohzlc_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/75/67/G04ohzlc_o.jpg)
Shing Jea Island feels quite Japanese and pastoral, and it’s a great contrast from the big city and ruined landscapes of the rest of Factions. This is a beautiful area.
![[Image: OZRqnutA_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5d/2a/OZRqnutA_o.jpg)
Back to the town, which is all decorated for the festival.
![[Image: 5DcSKj94_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/8b/44/5DcSKj94_o.jpg)
Those lanterns all over are nice and definitely add to the atmosphere. You know a special event is on when you go to a place you’ve seen in its normal state hundreds of times, except this time it looks different… after this the Dragon Festival might have ended, but I’ll break the article where I started a new images folder, instead of after this screenshot.
![[Image: 86rMVDeH_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c9/26/86rMVDeH_o.jpg)
I’m not sure why I took this one, but I do like those snowy Guild Wars trees.
![[Image: McqDytmv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/48/0b/McqDytmv_o.jpg)
From this point you have an overlook which allows you to see the town, far below in the distance. You’re above the fog, which looks like it’s actually a flat layer. It works though, so sure, why not. Today this scene would look better, as the ‘full detail to the horizon’ patch from 2018 does wonders for vistas like this one! Not that I would ever enable that option on a computer running a GeForce 2 like the one I took all these shots on has, though.. you’d be lucky to see a frame per second, probably…
![[Image: c3eXqHUo_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/63/d2/c3eXqHUo_o.jpg)
I think we might all be poisoned here? That’s what the green auras emitting from the characters means, I believe… it makes for a pretty nice shot though, with the green glow and light rays lighting this dark area.
![[Image: WnOrh6hm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/70/64/WnOrh6hm_o.jpg)
And without that light you get this, very dark areas. I took three screenshots of this character (or player?) running back and forth in the distance for some reason. I don’t know why, now… but here’s one of them.
![[Image: E3bEExAu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/09/83/E3bEExAu_o.jpg)
Back in the city, we have a well-dressed NPC official in a not too nice looking part of the city center.
![[Image: KSI02AP2_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/37/c7/KSI02AP2_o.jpg)
Arena.net’s artists and graphical designers made some truly impressive things in Guild Wars, and this area is definitely among them! This shot is another one of my favorites from this update. The sickly red-yellow light, in this dark area, looks great… ominous, but great.
![[Image: SxFkDtJh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5b/2e/SxFkDtJh_o.jpg)
Oops, the ground textures broke again! At least we can finally see a skillbar here… but yeah, with broken ground textures the chat is unreadable because lines do not disappear so long as you’re looking at the ground, everything just overlaps.
B. Guild Wars Nightfall PvP Preview Event: July 28-30, 2006
Only two months after Guild Wars Factions released, Arena.net was already starting to preview their next expansion, Nightfall. For an expansion as large as it is, as I said at the top in this post I kind of think that Nightfall might have released too soon. I know Factions is a short campaign and many people surely were ready for something new, but I was taking my time with it and definitely wasn’t done yet! But no, here’s a huge new campaign to play, and it’s a pretty hard one too. Well, at least all this content has given me something to do with the game over the years since, and that’s a very good thing considering that ANet started abandoning this game in 2008…
Anyway, following Asian-themed Factions, Nightfall is African-themed. It has a North African theme specifically, with a mostly desert and sahel environment. As with Factions, two new classes were added, one melee and one ranged. Nightfall is a great campaign, but I have never liked these classes as much as the original ones, and the campaign took me a very long time to finish as well. The first beta, as the name suggests, was PvP only, so it served to test the two new classes but did not show off any of Elona, the new continent where the campaign was set. There would later be a second beta with PvE content in it, much like Factions had.
As a note, I don’t seem to have played this beta much at all. In fact, of the dozen or so screenshots from it I took, only two are from out of the character creator, and only one of those two is worth posting! So yeah, enjoy like ten pictures from the character creator, I guess… yay? It is at least a little interesting, though, as where else will you see the two new Nightfall classes, the Dervish and Paragon, existing in front of the Factions select screen / character creation background? Only in this beta, that’s where!
![[Image: kW47BiEn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b8/41/kW47BiEn_o.jpg)
So as I said, almost all of my pictures from this beta are from character creation. It is pretty interesting to see a Dervish in the Factions login-screen environment, though…
![[Image: 2UTaeFkP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/73/3c/2UTaeFkP_o.jpg)
Rear shot of this outfit.
![[Image: 8S1pLHIJ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a1/25/8S1pLHIJ_o.jpg)
This shows some of your options for new characters in this test. You had more options than a regular new character since they gave everyone some stuff to play with for the beta.
![[Image: TTfNvjjW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6f/88/TTfNvjjW_o.jpg)
Side view of this second, less skimpy outfit.
![[Image: ejGBLwmn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/7b/6e/ejGBLwmn_o.jpg)
And here’s a third one, with hanging blades that match the scythe weapons Dervishes favor.
![[Image: 7x5coGSL_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e6/13/7x5coGSL_o.jpg)
This is the one I went with for my character. I changed the colors to green though, of course! It only colors the highlights and not the main dress, but that’s better than nothing.
![[Image: NRa0SrNc_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3f/ff/NRa0SrNc_o.jpg)
Starting a battle. This is a very interesting environment indeed… it’s definitely something new, this isn’t from Prophecies or Factions.
![[Image: xEMc71Jx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f1/5f/xEMc71Jx_o.jpg)
This area was the main little taste of Elona you could see in the beta. It’s a small area where your new characters go through before you fight in PvP.
![[Image: JXpwv9V4_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0d/a1/JXpwv9V4_o.jpg)
And here we see my account, with my five regular characters and one empty slot that I was using for a test character in the beta. (I thought about keeping this character, but ultimately did not and made a different Dervish eventually instead, after Nightfall released.)
![[Image: g2IEsiJq_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d7/c2/g2IEsiJq_o.jpg)
Rear view.
![[Image: x9a74gcN_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c0/3e/x9a74gcN_o.jpg)
This shot is from after the end of the beta, but as you see, after that I deleted that character and created a Paragon, to also try out the other new class. Male Paragons have Roman legionnaire-styled outfits which are kind of cool. I never have played much Paragon at all, though… I should try it sometime.
C. August 22 to September 23, 2006: Between the Nightfall Betas
The first Nightfall beta ran in late July, and the second in late September. This first shot is from mid August, though, so either I didn’t play for a month or the file date is wrong, but I don’t think the file date is wrong in this case, so perhaps I just hadn’t taken any screenshots in a month, if I played any. In the interim, as expected I went back to playing more of the great game that is Guild Wars Factions.
![[Image: BWR48Q13_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cf/cc/BWR48Q13_o.jpg)
Before Nightfall released and I decided to do with the character slot, I decided to take another screenshot of this Paragon character.
![[Image: AqMjrpyJ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a4/6c/AqMjrpyJ_o.jpg)
Rear shot of him.
![[Image: nhm7NWwK_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/61/e2/nhm7NWwK_o.jpg)
I was slowly progressing through Prophecies with my Ranger, here and there.
![[Image: ar8p4nTV_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2f/ee/ar8p4nTV_o.jpg)
The Canthan official outfits are good designs.
![[Image: j3j1G51O_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b9/8a/j3j1G51O_o.jpg)
This is just a lobby area in Cantha. It looks pretty nice from a distance like this though, like it could be from a cutscene… but it isn’t. The environment is somewhat low-poly of course, but the art design is impeccable.
![[Image: Av3OA71Q_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/eb/36/Av3OA71Q_o.jpg)
At this point, I decided to abandon following my college friends from guild to guild as they made new ones, and just stayed in this one ever since, despite its very dumb name that I’ve never liked. I did make one big change, though…
![[Image: DeTg8yL5_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d8/71/DeTg8yL5_o.jpg)
Yes, I brought back my Lego Black Falcon shield-inspired guild cape! I tried a few designs before settling on the final one. I love this design, it looks great…
![[Image: wLrCSQcW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/03/93/wLrCSQcW_o.jpg)
This solid-color pattern looks nice, but ultimately I stuck with the cross-hatched one.
![[Image: hBywYsr5_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a8/9e/hBywYsr5_o.jpg)
And here we see the results, my guild cape. I still really like the look of it.
![[Image: InwRiFtR_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/33/9a/InwRiFtR_o.jpg)
This is a street in the city in Cantha. The polygon count doesn’t come even close to what games can do today, but back then this looked very nice… though of course in art design it still does!
![[Image: ADGQrcuL_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/81/0b/ADGQrcuL_o.jpg)
She’s got a quest now, apparently. The background’s more interesting though, with those nice trees in front of a wall of shack-like houses.
D. Guild Wars Nightfall World Preview Event: September 22-24, 2006
As I previously mentioned, similar to Guild Wars Factions, Nightfall had a second, PvE-focused beta several months after its first one. This beta occurred in late September and I participated. And again, just like Factions, this beta is, for some strange reason, not mentioned at all in the official Guild Wars Wiki! As before this confused me while putting these articles together, and I had this mislabeled previously. I should have figured this all out correctly before posting these screenshots instead of a month later… oh well, at least the record is correct now. I will post another small update mentioning the corrections. Here is another Guild Wars wiki that mentions this event: https://guildwiki.gamepedia.com/Guild_Wars_Nightfall_World_Preview_Event.
![[Image: LKrHzT2s_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/52/4d/LKrHzT2s_o.jpg)
For the event, I decided to make a new character, another Dervish this time. This isn’t my character though, just a henchman.
![[Image: G0X2mZHh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5c/e2/G0X2mZHh_o.jpg)
Here we see the beginning of the Nightfall intro mission, before you reach the main town.
![[Image: 4jQlYb28_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cb/10/4jQlYb28_o.jpg)
Here we see my new character. This character was made in my main account, and I still have it, though barely played… I’ve just never liked melee classes in Guild Wars nearly as much as ranged ones.
![[Image: SPsT6HhF_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1b/7c/SPsT6HhF_o.jpg)
Elona is a nice-looking area, as always for Guild Wars, but with a unique look to it you don’t see elsewhere in the game or, as I said, all that often in games in general. You see some hints of that here.
![[Image: DjDs0SwZ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4d/62/DjDs0SwZ_o.jpg)
When you pull the camera overhead, the way the grass textures are attached in the ground here and there to look like a field becomes exposed…
![[Image: 1bhpweD7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/af/8f/1bhpweD7_o.jpg)
After playing this beta I was looking forwards to Nightfall, but given how much of Factions I still had left, I definitely wasn’t as excited for it was I had been for Factions. I know I’ve said it already, but the timing for these campaigns was perhaps not the best. Oh well, at least it meant that we got lots of content to play in this game, enough to last for many years!
![[Image: v7I0eBsY_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/1b/c4/v7I0eBsY_o.jpg)
And here’s my character in the select screen. I also took a couple of shots of my Paragon in the second account, showing that I did load that account up again for this beta, but none of the shots are worth sharing. That may have been the last time I was able to play those characters though, unless the Eye of the North beta also unlocked accounts without a key and I actually loaded up the second account. My guess is I probably didn’t, though.
E. Guild Wars Factions Screenshots: September – October 2006
With the Nightfall beta over, I continued on my way through Guild Wars Factions, only occasionally taking shots from the other campaigns. There are a few Prophecies screens in this set at the start, but it’s mostly Factions. As I just said I was kind of looking forward to Nightfall, but was much more interested in playing more of Factions. So, I did.
![[Image: XE19cCIg_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/95/25/XE19cCIg_o.jpg)
I kept trying every so often to finish Prophecies with my Prophecies Elementalist.
![[Image: R0inYNd7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a3/04/R0inYNd7_o.jpg)
Unfortunately, while the cape is great, not so great is that I’d pretty seriously stalled out with this Elementalist by this point. I’m late in Kryta here and have probably barely made any progress with the character since I took these screenshots back in 2006…
![[Image: FFE8eYbq_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3b/c9/FFE8eYbq_o.jpg)
My six characters as of fall 2006, all together. Nightfall was not released yet at this point, of course, so I'll need to wait before playing this character again.
![[Image: HWFnfpmc_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/27/bd/HWFnfpmc_o.jpg)
But instead of continuing with the elementalist, I went back to the new campaign, Factions, with my main Talindra. Yeah, the clipping in Guild Wars is kind of weird. Most games don’t just let you clip through everything like this one, or at least offline games don’t; maybe it’s common in online games for technical reasons? Anyway, this is the big city in Cantha, the continent in Factions. This woman NPC in front of me may be a bureaucrat, that looks like one of their outfits. East Asian-inspired Cantha has a very large bureaucracy.
![[Image: fVQqtez9_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ff/4f/fVQqtez9_o.jpg)
And here we have some players, albeit in a screenshot that’s not so great, with all of the close characters being on one side of the image and all.
![[Image: GG8HDLiM_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/48/df/GG8HDLiM_o.jpg)
Running along in this game is so much fun! I really like this kind of shot, it accurately represents a substantial part of the game. Factions has some pretty cool environments, and this one is definitely one of those.
![[Image: s779ZcZI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5c/98/s779ZcZI_o.jpg)
Tahnakai Temple has statues of several of Cantha’s legendary heroes of the past. I took screenshots of a few, starting with this one. I forget who this is offhand… the shrine, including candles and statue, is nicely done though.
![[Image: 6WYipDsn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3d/db/6WYipDsn_o.jpg)
This female warrior hero gets a large podium as well.
![[Image: ylq9i47M_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/71/f2/ylq9i47M_o.jpg)
Deity statues, such as this one in Tahnakai Temple, look the same in Cantha as they do in Tyria. There are fewer of them, but the ones there are are the same. The environment doesn’t look the same at all, though! The city in Cantha is incredibly dense and built up, so you often have ceilings like this which appear to be made of buildings. That ring of cloth sunshades up ahead isn’t normal, though; this is a special area.
![[Image: 6Fo6usWP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f4/c2/6Fo6usWP_o.jpg)
I’m not sure why this statue is there, other than to have yet another scantily clad female figure in an MMO, as if there aren’t enough of those already… the environment’s pretty nice though, and well modeled.
![[Image: FegjMmGw_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c8/29/FegjMmGw_o.jpg)
This is the important hero from the past, the assassin who killed Factions big bad Shiro Tagachi. You talk to her ghost at one point.
![[Image: vi6cGkuE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/50/14/vi6cGkuE_o.jpg)
The giant city is such a cool environment, it’s definitely one of my favorites in Guild Wars. This scene is just one example of why! This is a pretty interesting area, with those buildings on one side, rocks on the other side, and buildings in the background…
![[Image: 0vssuHWI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bc/3f/0vssuHWI_o.jpg)
Yes, Danika is in the city as well, for a while at least, with her pets/fellow henchmen. This area with the exposed rock pillars is on an edge of the city.
![[Image: 6044UvlG_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/10/e8/6044UvlG_o.jpg)
This one is definitely one of my favorites from this update. It shows off the city well, and this mostly still looks pretty good. Sure, the ground textures aren’t the most detailed, but it mostly looks really nice. The beam of light is well placed as well, breaking through the gloom of the layers of buildings…
![[Image: u2a0vJTT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/10/0b/u2a0vJTT_o.jpg)
It would be hard to see the sun much in some parts of this city, with how many things are built on top of other things. On another note though, shots like this showing me exploring with just henchies is a nostalgic thing, with how ever since Nightfall I’ve mostly explored with Heroes. Talindra’s skillbar is familar, however; it hasn’t changed much since.
![[Image: WWg6G2Y3_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/38/92/WWg6G2Y3_o.jpg)
And here we see the party, or rather, me (not visible due to using first person view) and a bunch of AI helpers. This city’s crazy stuff, with how huge the spaces are and how overgrown with buildings everything is… it might be my overall favorite Guild Wars environment, I’m not sure.
![[Image: WqUpJ5V1_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/84/ad/WqUpJ5V1_o.jpg)
I’ve gotten out of the city now though, as were we meet some Luxons and one of their giant turtles. The green open space between the city and the Luxon and Kurzick areas stands alone in Factions, there are other green places in the campaign but none quite like this one. … oh, and yeah, that’s obviously a player there with that chat window in the background…
![[Image: Y0e9CXHI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/90/29/Y0e9CXHI_o.jpg)
Here's another Luxon woman NPC, at this camp.
![[Image: Tn6LwzvT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/08/f2/Tn6LwzvT_o.jpg)
And here is my first shot of the Jade Sea, the bright green frozen ocean. The same disaster that petrified Echovald Forest turned this former inland sea into jade. Green is my favorite color so I do really like the look of the Jade Sea, but despite that I’ve always preferred the Kurzicks so there won’t be too many Jade Sea screenshots here for quite some time. Still, it’s a great area which, like much of Factions, makes me kind of wish that the game had the kind of scale of Prophecies. Its relative denseness, with many fewer zones in the game compared to the first campaign and how Factions mission areas that can also be explored as regular explorable areas instead of separating the two, makes for a strong contrast when you compare Factions to Prophecies. The result is that if you take a regular, straight path through the game, this game is half the length of Prophecies, 50 hours for a new character instead of over a hundred. Nightfall kind of splits the difference, with more areas than Factions, but fewer than Prophecies. I know I just said I wish Factions was larger, and I do, but it is kind of nice that the game has this variety; you can play a shorter or longer, harder or easier, campaign depending on your preference.
![[Image: PAXCMWXh_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/56/32/PAXCMWXh_o.jpg)
Moving the camera overhead is rarely a good idea in gameplay, but it does at least make for a slightly different-looking screenshot. Otherwise, this text is just henchman chatter, not humans saying things.
![[Image: hbq6AU9j_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/18/5d/hbq6AU9j_o.jpg)
Now I’m in Echovald Forest, which I posted a bunch more shots of in the beta set in the last update. What’s going on here…
![[Image: ZYhxe1Md_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/46/19/ZYhxe1Md_o.jpg)
A lot of exploration, apparently, is what was going on, going by how many dots are on that map! And I’ve completed several quests as well, and gotten a new elite skill — you can only have one at a time, so the only way to have two as you see here is to capture it and not go back to a town yet, as once you do one will be unequipped.
![[Image: KnPENlUv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/b0/af/KnPENlUv_o.jpg)
Ahh, snow… I love snow, winter is great. I’ve got something else to celebrate, too — I’ve finally finished my elite scar pattern armor set! If you look at the screenshots above in this set, I still didn’t have the glove piece yet, but now I do. Getting all of the materials to build this set took quite some time, and many trips to the specific area of the South Shiverpeaks you had to go to to make it, but it was worth it. … Well, honestly I have always thought that I should have an armor set that includes actual clothing, instead of this thing which obviously does not, but still haven’t bought another elite armor set for either this or any other character. I really should do something about that…
![[Image: Ge4DfPlX_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f7/9f/Ge4DfPlX_o.jpg)
Yes, it’s another shot of the very cool tree-sky of Echovald Forest. It’d be pretty awesome to see a high-def version of this done with modern graphics tech…
![[Image: Nf5mlbaU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d1/a5/Nf5mlbaU_o.jpg)
It’s the Jade Sea! But continuing from my last comment, looking at this shot makes me think that yes, some things about this game have aged graphically. It still looks very impressive, for a game that hasn’t had much work done to it since 2007, but that creature in the background here sure doesn’t look great.
![[Image: 8JWGttbo_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/6a/da/8JWGttbo_o.jpg)
These really giant turtles don’t move, only the smaller ones do.
And that’s all for this update. At least a few of these screenshots were nice, so I guess I’m glad to share them. Next time, the 2006 Halloween event, and more Factions gameplay. The next article will be the last one for a long time entirely taken on the by-this-point-aged computer from 2001 I took all of these screenshots so far on, so look forward to a significant increase in screenshot image quality starting in two Guild Wars Memories updates from now.
RE: Guild Wars (1) is still one of the best games ever - A Black Falcon - 12th August 2019
In late October 2006, Arena.net started up the second annual Halloween event. This builds on 2005's event, but with some new stuff added to give players more to do. At the same time, Guild Wars Nightfall released. Yes, Nightfall released right when the Halloween event began. I once again took a whole bunch of screenshots... and once again took almost none of the Christmas event, even though that is my favorite holiday. Actually, this time there are none at all from Christmas; as far as holidays go it skips from Halloween to the second Dragon Festival in early 2007. Oh well. In between, I play more Factions, and finish it with my main. So yeah, this is a pretty decent image set which covers a lot of ground. It includes 52 screenshots.
A. Guild Wars Halloween 2006: late October-early November
While I had always played Guild Wars with a download, for Prophecies and Factions, I bought a retail box and entered the key from that box in order to unlock those campaigns in the game. This time, however, with Nightfall, I did something new for me: I bought a game digitally. Getting computer games digitally, without a box or disc/disk at all, was still a somewhat uncommon thing in 2006, though it was becoming a lot less uncommon. There are positives and negatives to digital-only game purchases, but Arena.net encouraged digital purchases by offering some Halloween rewards you could only get by visiting Kamadan, the main city of the new campaign, during this short 5-day Halloween event. This was enough to convince me to buy the game digitally, and so I did. Much later I would get a box for the game for a few dollars from Goodwill, just to have one, but a digital-only game purchase still felt new and interesting at the time. Today I see more of the negatives of digital-only game playing than the positives, for example because it allows companies to control what games you are allowed to play with far less to no recourse for people to play shut down or delisted games they may be interested in, but fortunately Arena.net is still around and running Guild Wars' servers, so in this case at least so far that is not a problem yet.
![[Image: b0TbeKu2_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f5/a2/b0TbeKu2_o.jpg)
These first two shots are from before Halloween. It looks like I'm playing at least a little bit on the Luxon side here, that's Luxon clothing.
![[Image: zVRARDjz_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cf/36/zVRARDjz_o.jpg)
This field would look a LOT nicer on a video card with post-processing and better antialiasing, that's for sure.
![[Image: Rf6EdB10_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c6/07/Rf6EdB10_o.jpg)
And here we go, Halloween '06 has started. Here we are in the center of Lion's Arch by the great kettle.
![[Image: 07F1GZ1n_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/5c/cf/07F1GZ1n_o.jpg)
Mad King Thorn is here again, so it's Halloween day! The visits worked similarly to '05's. There are a lot of people here for the event, that's nice.
![[Image: WJxvkMMV_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/54/4a/WJxvkMMV_o.jpg)
Yup, He's as capriciously evil as usual. Dance or die!
![[Image: B1bKzKjj_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/98/41/B1bKzKjj_o.jpg)
I'm not certain, but that disco ball is probably a party item someone set off and not part of the event.
![[Image: ma5J5lhL_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d5/17/ma5J5lhL_o.jpg)
Do what he wants now...
![[Image: 1qQorsmP_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9d/c9/1qQorsmP_o.jpg)
Everyone there to see Mad King Thorn got a new pumpkin crown. At the time the only way to get these was to be at this specific event, the ability to get old hats you missed wasn't added until many years later.
![[Image: lkFlb0AL_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0f/c4/lkFlb0AL_o.jpg)
Yup, rock-paper-scissors-with a name change returns. It's as random as it sounds.
![[Image: 5pMriMlp_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/0c/04/5pMriMlp_o.jpg)
This cardboard cutout haunted house standee has always reminded me of the haunted house in the classic early '90s PC adventure game Hugo's House of Horrors... it doesn't look the same as that one, but it's close enough to be somewhat similar.
![[Image: 3rbAUpxf_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9e/c0/3rbAUpxf_o.jpg)
Yeah, the green water, sinking ship, and transformed Krytans return from last year.
![[Image: aaBnaWL0_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/20/75/aaBnaWL0_o.jpg)
Here's something new, though: Halloween in Kamadan, the main city in Nightfall! I bought Nightfall day one, digitally, in part so that I could experience the Halloween '07 event, and here it is. Here are a bunch of candy corn guards.
![[Image: dlnzogZ5_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/2c/9c/dlnzogZ5_o.jpg)
And here's Mad King Thorn in Kamadan. This crowd looks smaller than the one in Lion's Arch, which makes sense; surely many people hadn't bought Nightfall yet.
![[Image: NVt52qu0_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/08/9e/NVt52qu0_o.jpg)
There are still a good number of people here to "enjoy" Mad King Thorn's games, though.
![[Image: AqYKzC5i_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/18/2d/AqYKzC5i_o.jpg)
Kamadan has been decorated for Halloween as well. This thing is interesting... and the way the moon is just in the background's kind of cool too.
![[Image: RjBr6run_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/9e/8a/RjBr6run_o.jpg)
Hah, is that a cardboard cutout of a monster to take photos with your face in? Silly...
![[Image: 6S5Xc8wC_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ec/de/6S5Xc8wC_o.jpg)
Looks like Talindra has a witch hat now, one of the new things for this event. You could only get this hat by being in Kamadan during the '07 Halloween event.
B. Guild Wars Gameplay, November 2006 - mid February 2007
After the seasonal event ended, I went back to mostly not playing Nightfall, as this next image set will show. There are a couple of Nightfall shots here, but that's it. Instead, I kept going towards the end of Factions with my main, and used one of my new character slots for something else...
![[Image: nhqZSRmD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/47/3c/nhqZSRmD_o.jpg)
Here I logged in to my other account for a moment to look at the three remaining characters there, and decide if I wanted to remake any of them in my main account, since the new campaign gave me two new character slots... so who should it be? A second Elementalist perhaps?
![[Image: MKtG3HTC_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cc/ff/MKtG3HTC_o.jpg)
Second, another Assassin.
![[Image: C4tZ6f1o_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/53/10/C4tZ6f1o_o.jpg)
Last, a Paragon. I really should actually play this class at some point. Yes, I still haven't really, for no good reason.
![[Image: GrJRZ2qu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/06/11/GrJRZ2qu_o.jpg)
First, though, my Ranger has gotten to the Fire Islands now, so I'm closing in on the end of the Prophecies campaign with my original GW character...
![[Image: kyEvitf7_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f8/14/kyEvitf7_o.jpg)
And here we see what I chose: Yup, I made a second Elementalist, this time a Factions one, in one of the two Nightfall character slots. The other one still has that Nightfall Dervish in it. I like the start of Factions, it's a very quick starting island -- a quite dramatic difference from the long, slow trip to level 20 Prophecies brings you through -- but it looks beautiful and is fun to explore, so that's alright. It's nice to have options, either the slow 20 of Prophecies, the mid-speed one of Nightfall, and the quick one of Factions. This area of the starter island has the only snow in the Factions campaign, so of course I took some screenshots there.
![[Image: pn16JATW_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/40/a5/pn16JATW_o.jpg)
Don't worry, Wulf Cragfist is a friendly giant, not an enemy. He'll help you out here.
![[Image: U4QfcYKo_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/63/99/U4QfcYKo_o.jpg)
A Kurzick in Luxon territories? Either this is an enemy, which is possible but seems unlikely from the pose, or a guard near an outpost in the Jade Sea side of the map owned by a Kurzick guild. Factions has a faction-war element where player guild align with either the Kurzicks or the Luxons and can fight eachother in two PvP combat areas and buy outposts for their guild. When a guild owns an outpost their name is listed on the map, and the territory around that outpost is shown as belonging to the Luxons or Kurzicks on the map, depending. Neither side can actually win this war, because the home bases of both sides can only be controlled by their side, but it gives players something to do. Kurzick-aligned guilds have been fairly dominant a lot of the time.
![[Image: OJ8uyjnO_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/7b/5e/OJ8uyjnO_o.jpg)
Here in this outpost, the ground has loaded in but the player models have not yet. So, you can see the names where players are, but not their characters... it's kind of amusing stuff.
![[Image: LENqz5yQ_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/de/cc/LENqz5yQ_o.jpg)
Hey, it's Nightfall! As you can see I've gotten really far in it with my main Talindra here, all the way to the first outpost in the starter island...
![[Image: DazXENCf_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/34/c3/DazXENCf_o.jpg)
And here's another shot of some of the people in that outpost. Nightfall does have a pretty cool aesthetic to it, you don't see African-themed videogames very often at all.
![[Image: 8O4ZzWdm_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c5/fa/8O4ZzWdm_o.jpg)
Now though, back to Factions. This definitely does not look like a good part of town. Those white boxes in the background are interesting, though -- I've mentioned them before, but those are another way that characters who hadn't loaded properly would appear on this computer, as a large white box instead of a person.
![[Image: xsR66tPD_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/fa/a7/xsR66tPD_o.jpg)
I got new clothes for this character I guess, I haven't dyed them green yet like I usually do. This is a pretty generic screenshot, but I'll post it anyway. Even average Guild Wars environments like this looks good.
The Canthan New Year Festival and the Ending to Factions (And This PC) - mid to late February, 2007
This final image set is 23 screenshots. I must not have played for a little while, busy with school perhaps, but I came back to Guild Wars in February for the Canthan New Year seasonal special event. I had ordered a new computer in February, finally, after having used my GeForce2-powered WinME machine for 5 1/2 years, but it hadn't arrived yet so I was still playing on this machine. This, then, excepting a few screenshots from late '09 I took on the machine, will be the last batch of screenshots on the computer I used for the first two and a half years of Guild Wars' life since the first public test in May 2004. I'm sure I spent more time playing GW in that 2 1/2 years than I have in the more than twelve years since then, but that's alright, I love the game regardless. It may seem kind of strange that I'd play the game less once I finally got a computer able to run it at a stable framerate, as opposed to the often very low framerates the performance monitor shows I was getting on the WinME PC, but I'd gotten used to the sometimes-low framerates so it wasn't as bad as it may seem.
![[Image: JQtzyeip_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/bd/ae/JQtzyeip_o.jpg)
Some time has passed, I didn't take any screenshots around Christmas (Wintersday) apparently, and it's now early 2007, time for the 2007 Canthan New Year festival. This was the first Canthan New Year festival, and it ran from Feb. 16 to 19 2007 according to the Wiki. Today Canthan New Year festivals run from Jan. 31 to Feb. 7 each year. The Canthan New Year festival centers on Shing Jea Island, so that is where I have gone. You can tell that the Canthan New Year is on because of the decorative lanterns in the background. The Shing Jea Boardwalk from the Dragon Festival that started in summer 2006 also re-opens during this event, which is great because the two minigames there, Rollerbeetle Racing and the Dragon Arena, are pretty good.
![[Image: yJCl7shb_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cb/b0/yJCl7shb_o.jpg)
This game still looks great, even with grass as pixelated as this is...
![[Image: xYoQeEBs_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/96/b2/xYoQeEBs_o.jpg)
Here is one of the festival NPCs, offering a limited-time quest only available during the Canthan New Year. Each year, starting in 2007 of course, a miniature pet was offered to players who were there. I have the one from 2007, the Miniature Pig, since 2007 was the year of the pig in the Chinese Zodiac that this goes by. Guild Wars added more miniature pet gifts from other holidays as well as time went on, and as with festival hats, eventually you could get ones you previously missed, instead of only people who were at the initial event having them. You could also get a Lion Mask during this event for doing certain things, but I don't believe I got that.
![[Image: jD5tzXJu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a1/88/jD5tzXJu_o.jpg)
Those three are all I've got for the Canthan New Year for a while... kind of. This shot is from after it ended, after all; yes, the datestamps on screenshots are accurate again, thankfully, in this folder. I will get to that "kind of" near the end of this article, and I'm not sure what to make of it, but as for this screenshot, I'm exploring a nice, though ruined, environment. I like teh design of the area.
![[Image: 9436Gnmx_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/81/83/9436Gnmx_o.jpg)
Hey, it's a human player group in a mission! By this point that was becoming a somewhat less common thing, as Nightfall added more options for solo players and the userbase scattered across three campaigns, but this is a hard mission near the end of the Factions campaign, and human help is very welcome.
![[Image: qB4Zxqkp_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/09/18/qB4Zxqkp_o.jpg)
And here we are, Raisu Pavilion at the end of the Factions campaign... near several people in Obsidian Shard armor. Crazy expensive stuff, that is!
![[Image: qxcCPYkT_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a9/46/qxcCPYkT_o.jpg)
Another view of the Obsidian Shard armor.
![[Image: EZwkZFuU_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/98/78/EZwkZFuU_o.jpg)
Hmm, what's happening here... oh right, I know where this is!
![[Image: wucDMlcV_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/61/d3/wucDMlcV_o.jpg)
That's right, I've finished Factions, with a player group too so it probably was a lot easier than when I did it solo with heroes with other characters later on. The Factions campaign only takes about 50 hours to complete, half the length of Prophecies, but it's a very fun 50 hours so that's okay. I did not take any screenshots of the ending to the story, so there are no spoilers here really; these shots are just of the celebration at the end, and of some of the people you can talk to in the ending corridor. Everyone else has left, but I'm taking my time here since I hadn't beaten this campaign before. These end-of-campaign areas are ones you can only be in after beating the final mission, after all; you can't just warp into these zones from the map.
![[Image: dowksHu5_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/58/89/dowksHu5_o.jpg)
Some nice fireworks celebrate my victory over Shiro Tagachi. Pretty!
![[Image: hPxXbn4L_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/cf/d0/hPxXbn4L_o.jpg)
They look better in motion to be sure, but you can get the sense of it from the screenshots.
![[Image: EPlPD30W_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f0/32/EPlPD30W_o.jpg)
In addition to fireworks, the games' credits roll on the screen during a part of in these end-of-campaign zones, if you wait around long enough. I don't think I have any shots of the credits here though, for whatever reason.
![[Image: EjbH5Lgo_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ca/37/EjbH5Lgo_o.jpg)
Here we can see Raisu Pavilion from above, in an upper gallery you only get to as a part of the ending celebration area. Also, clipping two characters right on top of eachother, like I'm doing here, is always kind of amusing...
![[Image: rUrgRCjs_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/3d/82/rUrgRCjs_o.jpg)
Here is one last shot of my victory. After that it's back to the game, to do more quests and such. Hard mode would not be added to the game until April 2007, and the postgame Canthan plague story arc until 2011, so for the moment that was all I could do in Factions, unless I wanted to go back and play the Luxon side of things that is, which I didn't really do then.
![[Image: OPk248aE_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/22/96/OPk248aE_o.jpg)
There are always more quests to do in this game, unless you spend a WHOLE lot of hours in it that is... but I haven't, so there's always more to do in a campaign, even after finishing it. The green arrow over her head here shows this person probably has a quest.
![[Image: WmfkMUHv_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/a7/06/WmfkMUHv_o.jpg)
When a character is not selected, they're shadowed, matching the environment, as you can see here.
![[Image: 8dJ2hOvI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/96/25/8dJ2hOvI_o.jpg)
Click on the character, however, and they light up so you can see them clearly. It's not realistic but works well in a videogame.
![[Image: u9fMpmwu_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/f1/6b/u9fMpmwu_o.jpg)
I've started some mission in the city, probably one of the harder quests.
![[Image: BL604YNn_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/24/67/BL604YNn_o.jpg)
... Uh, this looks like it could have gone better... I hope those dead people are all enemies!
![[Image: AqVVxYCB_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/e3/e6/AqVVxYCB_o.jpg)
Ah, it's the Undercity, one of Factions' unmappable, dungeon-like areas. It's a tricky area which is pretty fun to explore.
![[Image: MsCjI99a_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/4a/6b/MsCjI99a_o.jpg)
Here is one of those screenshots I mentioned earlier which have me confused. So, this file is dated February 25, 2007. This is well after the stated ending of the Canthan New Year on Feb. 19, at which point the Dragon Arena should be rendered inaccessible again until the next Dragon Festival. However, as this shows, the Dragon Arena seems to still be open, because here I am in it! Perhaps it was open for the rest of the month, or something? I've done some searching online and haven't found anything yet that says so, so I'm not sure. That's pretty interesting, I wish I remembered why this is. I've been playing for quite a while, too, as the "you have played for 5 hours, please take a break" message says.
![[Image: eS5ramFI_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/c9/8f/eS5ramFI_o.jpg)
In this shot, we see the post0game scoring summary for a Rollerbeetle race, the other Shing Jea Boardwalk minigame you can only access during those two festivals. They must have been open for some time after the end of the festival. Rollerbeetle Racing is fun stuff. As with everything in GW it comes down to being about skill usage, but the skills are unique to this event and the racing theme is done well; you do need to race down the track, while using skills to get ahead.
![[Image: jWepJIUV_o.jpg]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ff/9b/jWepJIUV_o.jpg)
And last, a random shot of my Ranger character, showing some stuff in my inventory including the Halloween pumpkin mask rewards from 2006 and 2007, some Halloween party items, and such.
And with that, my time playing Guild Wars on the computer I had used up to this point came to a close: my new PC arrived in early March. As I've said, I responded by playing this game a lot less, so when I next do an article in this series it will cover even more ground -- I've only got 45 screenshots for the rest of 2007 and all of 2008 combined. I will continue with these articles, though I'm almost past the most nostalgic part for me now, but next time, I'll take a little break from this with something else.