Guild Wars Prophecies - Critical Response

Critical Response

Guild Wars has been well received by critics and players alike, especially for its attractive character designs. It received a score of 89.67% on GameRankings and 89/100 on Metacritic.

In 2005, it won several prestigious awards including IGN's Best PC RPG and GameSpy's MMORPG of the Year awards. In 2006 Computer Games Magazine listed Prophecies as #4 in their Best Game collection, giving it in addition the Best MMO Debut and Best Technology awards. Guild Wars has been listed in every major Editors' Choice category in both print and online publications. As of August 2007; Prophecies and the two subsequent campaigns Guild Wars Factions and Guild Wars Nightfall have together sold more than 5 million copies.

Published criticism of Prophecies has centered around the following key elements. First, that the number and placement of creatures encountered in the PvE world can be overwhelming, especially since the party size and number of skills are both limited to eight. There is also a related problem of repetitiveness, as noted by IGN: "As fun as combat is, and as pretty as it looks, plowing your way through low-level mobs can and will get tiresome, since they don't give much (if any) experience points and will be dropping items that are virtually useless to you." This problem is lessened however by the fact that a player can freely and instantly teleport into any cities in the game their character has previously visited.

Secondly, several reviews (such as IGN's) have cited the lack of a sophisticated in-game trading system such as auction houses as exist in other MMORPGs, so the only way for players to sell items is to advertise on a trade channel that is shared by all players in the same map but may be muted by individual players. (This issue has been addressed to some extent with the recent addition of an in-game trading interface). IGN's review comments, additionally, that itemization in the game lacks variety because the only way to distinguish suits of armor is by dying them different colors.

Thirdly, both players and published reviews have commented on the unnatural coupling of cooperative and competitive matches, which require very different playing styles. At the game's release, PvP focused players were required to "unlock" their skills and items by playing through the cooperative game, even though a PvP player may have no interest in cooperative gaming. This issue, however, has been addressed by ArenaNet, firstly by introducing Balthazar Faction in June 2005 which enabled unlocking through playing PvP and further in August 2006 by making skill unlocks for the individual professions of the Prophecies campaign available in the game's online store. Unlocks for the professions of the Factions and Nightfall campaigns are also now available.