From reports here at Stratics and most fansites you could easily be under the mistaken impression that Guild Wars is almost entirely Player vs. Player (PvP). Even the name would suggest that it's a PvP only game, but a lot of people enjoy Player vs. Environment (PvE) gaming and ArenaNet has kept this in mind throughout development. In this article I will attempt to shed some light on the often over-looked PvE elements of Guild Wars.

In the spirit of full disclosure I think I should preface this by saying: I hate PvE. It doesn't matter what game or what genre, fighting computer controlled opponents just does not amuse me at all. Guild Wars brings a lot of real innovation to this field though and ArenaNet deserves real credit for it. Look at the minor differences between all the UO or EQ clones and you'll see a common theme of “Camp, wait for spawn, Kill, Camp, wait for spawn, Kill”. This is affectionately referred to as “grind” by the alleged players. Guild Wars takes this standard game-play for all MMORPGs and throws it cleanly out the window.

Quotations can be used to convey irony.
There is no camping spawns in Guild Wars. There is no killing or loot stealing in Guild Wars. There is no lining up to wait for your turn to kill the boss for “teh phat lewt”. There is no tedious grinding away in the same spot all day long in Guild Wars . All of the missions in Guild Wars are individual and unique instances. This means that when your party (or you alone; squads are a helpful in most GW missions but not required) leaves the outpost or city region and enter a mission you step out of the massively multiplayer part of the game and into a personalized part of the game. Only your party is seeing the specific monsters and bosses. It's an amazingly smooth transition, one minute you're in a town with hundreds of people trading and talking; the next minute you could be in a far away mountain pass with just your good friends ready for a personal adventure that cannot be ruined by anyone.

It's pretty safe to say that everyone making MMORPGs is trying to recapture the feeling of sitting with friends playing AD&D around a table with paper and dice. Guild Wars is honestly the closest any game has come to achieving this thanks to the instancing of missions. I know it sounds like I'm blowing a tremendous amount of smoke up your ass on this one, but there's been a lot of speculation about instancing ruining the Massively-Multiplayer aspect of the game. The only Massively-Multiplayer part of the game that is missing is some random guy running by and giving you grief.

Which one of you is Frodo?
One of the key elements of paper and dice role-playing is the feeling that it's just you and your buddies fighting to save the world against the evil of the day. In MMORPGs this is often lost as you progress along a mission and see 50 other fellowships carrying the same ring. Suddenly you're no longer Ordo the Mighty off to slay Balthazar, Ruiner of worlds… You're Ordo the Ordinary waiting your turn to kill the stupid AI that spawns every 15 minutes. With instancing it's really just you and your buddies. You're totally drawn into the moment and the fiction. There is no out of character randomness or long lulls in the action as you wait for something to spawn. There is no waiting for anything to spawn!

ArenaNet has really taken advantage of its opportunity here and has created truly epic missions that go far beyond the tedious Delivery Boy missions you'll find in most MMORPGs today. Not once has ArenaNet had the nerve to tell me to play FedEx Man and call it a quest. I think they clearly understand what fun is and try to provide as engrossing and interesting missions as possible. One calls upon you and your friends to be the saviors of a village being ravaged by an undead army. You're even thanked individually by each citizen you manage to save. These little details are spread throughout all of the missions with lots of NPCs trying to keep you involved in the fiction to keep you in character with the pace of things.

Every PvE mission has two objectives. There is a primary that you're told about as soon as you enter (typically from a NPC urgently asking your party to assist). A secondary objective is also available to be discovered if you explore the map. And I do mean explore! Every single map is huge which gives you a real open-ended and exploratory feeling. Instead of being confined to a single path you can often achieve your objectives with multiple routes.

Although the maps are large they maintain a great pace. You always feel like you've got to keep going and achieve your objective because you really want to. Everyone is counting on you to be the hero! You're not going to let them down are you? You don't want to stop and smell the roses when you've got a world to save! Although interestingly enough the roses are quite pretty and you can just stop progressing in the mission to take time to enjoy them if you'd like. I would be very surprised if anyone can play any mission in this game without at some point returning just to look in awe at all the great visuals. At the end of every mission is a cinematic cut-scene that is rendered in real-time using the game engine, showing off your party and the rewarding results of your efforts. (I'd include some screenshots of this but the NDA prevents me from doing so. But at least I can tell you guys about it which is more than most NDAs allow!)

It is also worth noting that travel in Guild Wars is mercifully easy. You have to explore through one mission to get to the next, and after you've reached that mission you are now able to return to it instantly at any time from the world map. This is a huge convenience and demonstrates ArenaNet's commitment to keeping game-play fun rather than a chore.

You are dead.
I've never understood why so many people like Death Penalties in games. I have honestly seen people demand that they be penalized tremendously and sometimes even permanently for dieing in many mainstream games. For whatever masochistic reasoning there are none of the heinous penalties you may have become accustomed to from other games.

There is a temporary penalty that does not impede your leveling or progress. You receive a 15% penalty to your Health and Energy every time you die (to a maximum of 60%) which you will quickly work off as you gain experience. It is really not even a remotely annoying until you get to past 30%, and if you're up to 30% you're probably in over your head anyhow.

You don't even drop any items! Your sword and armor doesn't take damage or get worn out. You don't have to run to your corpse. You don't have to try and find your corpse. And everyone has access to the Resurrect Signet, so it's entirely probable that someone in your group has equipped it as a skill before entering and there will be no problems or delays in finding someone to resurrect you.

You could literally spend as little as about 30 seconds being inconvenienced by death. On average you will spend no more than a minute or two out of the action. If really annoying impediments on your ability to effectively play the game as a result of dieing is a must for you, Guild Wars is probably not the game for you. If you want to play a game for fun and not to get punished, Guild Wars is a welcomed relief from your kinky task masters at whatever MMORPG you're playing now.

Treadmills: For when you can't make a fun game.
Now is a good time for me to talk about Leveling Treadmills , or rather the complete lack thereof in Guild Wars. The term, popularized by victims of Everquest and its clones, is used to describe a style of game-play in which you level perpetually. While many games will have a level cap, this is usually extended with expansions or is in some cases irrelevant as you continue to gain experience to assign towards increasing effectiveness.

This leveling treadmill is a vicious cycle because casual players are often left feeling inadequate next to power-gamers 100 levels their senior. So they have to kill spiders for four hours, before they can kill rats for four hours, before they can kill goblins for four hours, so they can eventually kill Dread Vampires of Doom for four hours. This is the leading cause to most of the social and emotional disorders associated with MMORPGs. Suddenly you're being pressured to play continuously and endlessly to keep up with your friends, who are also playing compulsively to keep up with you.

There is none of that in Guild Wars. The level cap is 20. While you can continue to gain new skills, you cannot get any new attribute points once you're capped. This is an important balancing factor here. You can only bring eight skills into any mission, so it doesn't matter how many skills you have total, and the determining factor in the effectiveness of those skills is your attribute points. Someone who is level 20 and only played for a week will have exactly the same effectiveness as someone who is level 20 and played for months. Remember its Player vs. Player not Character vs. Character.

There is absolutely nothing compelling you to play continuously or endlessly. Just play to have fun and enjoy the missions or the PvP. The Leveling Treadmill is a bad gimmick to keep people playing a poorly designed game. Guild Wars offers innovation to keep you entertained and playing instead of some artificial ploy. The contrast is startling and for many of the E3 For Everyone participants. They were ruined and unable to return to their old MMORPGs because they realized how fundamentally flawed the treadmill is.

People are really going to send me hate mail for this.
While there is more than enough PvE to keep PvE enthusiasts happy, there are a lot of people who are going to just want to get to the PvP. Once you've leveled up one character and gone through all the missions, these PvPers will not be inclined to play through these missions again with other characters. Instead many people will opt for macroing. This is one of the more disappointing parts of Guild Wars, as you are unable to gain experience from PvP.

Many other games have been ruined by macros. Some are responsible for artificially inflating the player economy. Others have made quests or maps impossible for others to participate in because they are killing all of the monsters. Still others have distorted PvP balance due to people macroing continuously, gaining more experience, while people who play the game legitimately are left in the dust. With Guild War's instanced missions and relatively low level cap there will not be any level disparities in PvP or interference with people trying to play the game normally.

Macros that “farm” items and gold will unfortunately be a factor for ArenaNet to face in maintaining balance within Guild Wars. And because the game encourages people to learn to set up a macro in order to skip the PvE missions and get to the PvP, more and more people will be prepared to write complex macros capable of farming. These people will need to furnish their macroed characters with new armor and weapons since they do not complete the PvE portions of the game as intended.

Do not kid yourself for even a second if you think the top guilds won't be running macros day and night. When you're competing against other skilled guilds you're going to need a diverse roster with many different character professions available. You'll need every member of your guild to have a monk character, for instance, just in case one of your dedicated monks is unable to make it one night. Some weeks you'll want to explore strategies with more Elementalists than your usual roster permits. But who wants to go through the trouble of leveling up a new character when you can just macro one in your sleep. Guilds macro-farming loot and gold will be able to woo and equip new recruits faster than guilds that do not.

This is a real problem in an otherwise polished and cohesive game. On the one hand PvP is a big draw, but on the other hand you're forced to play PvE missions for loot and experience. I wish people solely interested in PvP would be able to level and equip their characters from this alone, but ArenaNet is understandably proud of their innovative and elaborate missions. Unfortunately they do not seem to acknowledge that it is the PvP that attracted many of us to a game called “Guild Wars” instead of the myriad PvE centric games available.

As always, if you have any questions or comments please post them in our forums here. If you missed it part 1 of this series offers a guide to PvP: Getting ready for World Preview Event.