My Rekindled Obsession: Guild Wars

If you’re not familiar with Guild Wars, it’s a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) similar to World of Warcraft. What’s nice is that there’s no monthy subscription to play, and once you purchase one campaign, you’re good forever.

Backing up a bit…up till I discovered GW, I had never been a gamer, unless you count Solitaire on the PC. Sometimes Minesweeper, but that one was a tough one. I did play Atari back in the day, though. Does that count?

Anyhoo, 11 years ago (!), I discovered an ex-boyfriend from high school on MySpace and we started talking and he told me about GW. I was kinda intrigued, but really didn’t think it was my cup of tea, but I let him show me stuff. And…I liked it. And….I was hooked. The graphics are so amazing. You can create a character the way you want to (my first character actually was thrown together in my haste to get to the meat of things but I still love her). You choose a profession out of six (well, at least with the Prophecies campaign, which I started with): Warrior, Monk, Ranger, Necromancer, Mesmer, Elementalist). Can you guess what my first character’s profession was?

….

If you guessed anything but Necromancer, you have not be paying attention. 😉

So you go through these quests to “learn” your profession. Then you get to select a second profession! So it’s really cool.

So you get all these kick-butt skills. You do quests, and missions. The missions have a story to them, so once you finish (“beat the game”) you’ll know the entire thing. You “level up” – basically, every monster, person, or boss you kill has “experience points” attached to them. When you kill them, you get those points. So the more points you get, you go through the levels. Twenty is the highest (confession: I only have one character at level 20). (Apparently, in GW 2, you can go up to 80!). But as you go up in levels, things get progressively harder. The monsters are harder to kill, and some aren’t even worth experience points. (But you can do “farming” which is killing for the purpose of obtaining the cool stuff that drops — weapons, money, etc). Also, which I’ve found to be a bit frustrating is that the missions will open up another section of the world for you. So if don’t do the missions, you are kind of stuck in the same places. Which can be a bit repetitive (unless you get a “run” to a restricted place. It’s not allowed, but people do it).

So, anyway, I played and played and played and played. One Sunday, I played 6 hours and went to bed at 1am and got up for work at 7am (this was back in the days when I could short myself sleep and not pay too badly for it). My ex and got together all the time and played, and it was great fun.

And then we had a falling out, and things got kinda weird. I still continued to play, but my heart wasn’t in it.

And…the other problem? At some point you need to have human players. Henchies (computer henchmen) can only take you so far. I kept getting killed constantly, and had a hell of a time finding people to play with. My ex had introduced me to a friend of his from the game, and we are friends to this day. I think we played together some, and it was fun, too.

So I got all disenchanted and frustrated and said to hell with it. I only meant to stop for a few months, but it ended up being 9 years (!). Ouch. I thought about it from time to time, but never got the motivation to get back on there and do it.

And then I was talking to a writer friend on a forum and we were talking about gaming and I’m like, “yeah, I used to play Guild Wars…” and that was it. I wondered if my account was still intact (it was) and I remembered my password and a character name and within a few days, I was absolutely addicted again.

So now I have the fun experience of wanting to play GW and having other things that I need to do and and and just wanting to play and and and just for an hour and and and just one more quest and and and just five more minutes and and and this is my fifteenth attempt at this damn mission, let’s do it again b/c I know I can do it THIS TIME and and and why oh why do I have to go to work? and and and God, I miss GW and and and it’s so much fun and and and why —

You get the idea. 😉 I’ve been pretty good at keeping it at bay for the moment (b/c book deadline, hello!) and have been only playing on weekends. But once my book’s turned in, hello, I’ll be at it probably every night.

Unless I get frustrated again. But maybe not. I’ve approached this a bit differently. I’m going to keep trying. Or, damn it, find some people to play with me! I’m trying to get my hubby to buy a campaign. He’s also not a gamer. But, hey, non-gamers can be turned to the dark side — er, turned on to GW.

Confession: 5 out of 6 of my characters are named after characters in a specific book I wrote called Pirouette. The 6th is named after a character in someone else’s book (spoiler alert: Kahlan in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series).

1 – Alisia Duval (Necromancer/Mesmer – and, she actually is a necro in the book!)
2- Priestess Marah – Monk/Ranger
3 – Lilia Immortalia – Necromancer/Dervish (different campaign – they’re so cool!)
4 – Mistress Morrighan – Dervish/Mesmer
5 – Resanna Wynterrose – Ranger/Necromancer
6 – Kahlan Windfire – Elementalist/Warrior

The only professions I haven’t used as primaries are Warrior and Mesmer. From the other campaign (Nightfall), there’s also the Paragon which I’d love to try.

Anyhoo, that’s my story. If you’re a GW player, give me a shout. Maybe we can play sometime. 😉

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