the play girlz gaming blog

Guild Wars Gets My Goat

by Erin on April 21st, 2006

I’ve done it. I’ve done what I have been avoiding doing for years; what, for the sake of my personal relationships and attachment to the realm of reality, I feared doing.

I have taken my first baby steps into MMO territory.

Thanks to Grimwell, a good friend of mine that has been trying to get me to try an MMO pretty much since I met him, I’ve been tinkering around in his Guild Wars account for the past couple days. Now some may argue that Guild Wars isn’t exactly a true blue MMO, but when you consider that I haven’t even set foot in any other persistent world environment…baby steps for Erin, baby steps.

What do I think? Considering that I played around in the very simple (shamefully so) character builder for almost an hour to get just the right combination of colour and sass. I created, out of a burning love of fire, an Elementalist, and began wreaking my particular brand of havoc on the online world.

I have killed, quested, assisted and explored my way to an astounding (for me) level 8. From a simple Elementalist I have evolved my secondary Ranger profession with no small sense of glee at my exploding arrows. I have picked up a pet stalker, lovingly named Faustus, who makes scary growling noises and often gets stuck trying to move around NPCs and buildings. I have cursed in annoyance at the tiny holding capacity of my backpack, which does not allow me to pick up all the neat shiny objects I liberate from the twitching carcasses of mine enemies. I customized weapons, dyed things for fun, and upgraded my avatar’s delightfully skimpy outfit. The downside to upgrading my elementalist’s clothing? Damn things are all purple trimmed, which like, so completely ruins the blue and gold esthetic that I had going on.
The best indicator that I’ve entered into a dangerous phase of Guild Wars addiction? The game talks to me. It tells me “You have been playing for 3 hours. Please take a break.” Break? What is this break you speak of? “You have been playing for 26 hours. For the love of god don’t you sleep?”

The game is not without fault, but the attractiveness of no monthly fee (I don’t care what people say, I’m not tossing away that much money per month just for one game) brings a sense of casuality that I quite like. I’m looking to get an account of my own as soon as pay day rolls around . There are some things that I, as a newbie, need to work on, such as my complete and utter avoidance of other people. I think I formed a party only twice, as quests demanded, but on the whole I generally recoil at the sight of most of the other players. I have done the whole thing solo. I don’t think this is the point. It is my sworn goal to try this ’social interaction’ thing my doctor keeps telling me I need more of.

Follow-up impressions to come…

*Note: the picture is a poor approximation of my character, but I was too frightened of getting hooked for a few more hours if I opened up the game to take a proper screenshot. -whimper-

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POSTED IN: MMORPG, Musings, Online Gaming