Guild Wars Preview

The Cesspit has posted a preview of Guild Wars, citing the game’s flaws and strong points after the recent World Preview Event. A snippet:

What about the combat and graphic awe? The graphic is easier to deal and explain. The engine is smooth, good engine graphically. It performs very well on different kinds of hardware and they’ll also be able to optimize it better since they offer mostly instanced content. So it will probably stands out against WoW and EQ2. It is luscious but it is luscious on *your* computer, not in a promise-dream for the goons to fulfill (maybe) in the next years (EQ2 ?). But the graphic is another of those elements that cannot be considered alone. The graphic also involve the style you choose and the style is about the personality. I’ve already said that Guild Wars feels too much “excessive” and this to hide a real lack of depth to offer. The blandness of the gameplay reflects directly into the blandness of the setting. It’s a good looking cliche, it looks awesome at the first impact and the screenshots will always look particularly nice. But being excessive *always* and *everywhere* will soon reveal the lack of depth and its disposable nature. You won’t encounter real “characters” that will involve you in a story. Instead you’ll encounter good looking excuses to open the next road to follow and the new panorama to discover. The main point (another of those recurring) is that “what you see” isn’t “what you play” and this affects everything because you’ll soon notice that even if the monsters looks very good, they still offer repetitive gameplay. This is also the tie between the two questions, combat and graphic. You’ll notice soon that the gameplay is repetitive and simple. You can choose only a very limited number of special actions to perform and each encounter will be a repetition of the same strategy. Yes, there are monsters with different ways to attack or defend but how you’ll interact with them is unchanged.