Guild Wars Reforged Review – Guilded Lily

It’s probably hard to explain to younger gamers, kids who were born within a few years after the Millennium, just how much the gaming landscape has changed over the last twenty years or so. A time when World of WarCraft was still a “new” game, relatively speaking. When the notion of “live service” games was a pipe dream in the diseased brains of CEOs with more greed than sense. And when always-on Internet connectivity for games simply was not found outside of MMORPGs. It truly was a different time, which made ArenaNet’s development of Guild Wars all the more surprising. MMORPGs weren’t new, but the early 2000s were a time when everybody and his dog seemed to be trying to put out an MMO while trying to fight off established titles like Ultima Online and City of Heroes, alongside new hotness like World of WarCraft. Far too many of those MMOs have vanished, their servers shut down, their worlds now accessible only in the memories of those who once played them. Yet Guild Wars has, miraculously, managed to hold on all this time. And with ArenaNet releasing Guild Wars Reforged, it seems less like a remaster so much as a very dedicated polishing pass for a classic.

Guild Wars Reforged puts you in the world of Tyria, allowing you to create characters from one of twelve different professions and taking a second profession to complement it. It doesn’t add any new content, but gathers the campaigns of the three main releases (the base “Prophecies” campaign, Factions, and Nightfall) into one big tent. Instead of stupidly large damage numbers, skill rotations that read like an algorithm, and an ever-increasing level cap, Guild Wars keeps things small. Hit points for player characters rarely get above the mid-three figures, energy/mana levels don’t even get past the mid-double digits, and you’ve got exactly eight skill slots to build your hero in a broad variey of ways using a broad catalog of possible skills. It was a very different MMORPG when it launched, and it hasn’t lost any of its uniqueness in the twenty years since.

The biggest work in Guild Wars Remastered was centered on the visuals, and it’s really the little things that have been touched. No radical recreations of character meshes or terrain geometry. Just little glow-ups, things like sky bloom effects and other lighting tricks which weren’t possible twenty years ago. The beauty is found in the restraint. The UI is easy to use, and each skill card is a piece of art in and of itself. Character models already looked good when Guild Wars first released, and the remaster seems to polish them up instead of just wholesale replacing them. The various structures may still seem a bit blocky, but it has the feeling of deliberate aesthetics and organic choices within the world instead of the limitations of computer hardware from ten generations in the past. Visual effects are still clean, still a joy to look at, and still useful for players to see what’s going on with their characters and their targets. The people responsible for the remaster, 2weeks (made up of former Guild Wars staff), deserve high marks for their efforts in this regard. This is how a good remaster should be handled.

As with video, so with audio. Guild Wars Reforged already had an excellent musical score from Jeremy Soule, and listening to those pieces playing now is still a pleasure even if you’re not doing anything but standing around and soaking in the vibes. Audio effects have been polished, but they’re still crisp and well executed. You probably won’t get to appreciate new tweaks like positional audio without a good headset or a truly awesome speaker setup, but that’s OK. As for voice acting, nothing’s changed, and that’s a good thing. The cast is still a joy to listen to, whether it’s Steve Blum’s ubiquity, Kari Wahlgren’s versatility, or Maurice LaMarche’s winking nod to one of his better known roles (and seeing a text bark making a similar reference still gets a laugh). Players who didn’t pick up Guild Wars when it first came out are in for a treat when it comes to the soundscape.

From a gameplay perspective, Guild Wars Reforged hasn’t touched a thing that didn’t need to be changed. There are little refinements as far as quest tracking and such, but the meat-and-potatoes gameplay mechanics are the same as they were before. Picking a campaign to start in affects the starting professions you can select for your character (you won’t be able to start an Assassin character in the Prophecies or Nightfall campaigns, for example). And changing the secondary profession you ultimately select isn’t going to be an option till late in any campaign. With only eight skill slots and four weapon set slots, you have to think very carefully about your builds. Are you expecting to fight a lot of a specific type of target? Are you just bumming around, grinding skill points after hitting the level cap? Are you trying to hunt down elite skills? Theorycrafting and testing new stuff out? You can save a particular skill loadout for later use (which is good), but don’t expect to hit the right combo the first time. Every character is going to be a work in progress for a long time, and with literally hundreds of possible skills to obtain, and probably more combinations than can easily be factored, you can lose a lot of time just tweaking your favorite toon. Add in the ability to adjust loadouts for the Hero characters you can attach to your party once you unlock them, and it gets even more elaborate.

I had forgotten just how vast the environments were. While your character lacks the ability to jump, there’s plenty of nooks and crannies to explore, and the fact there’s only a couple entry points in any one zone map makes exploring a genuine pleasure (if occasionally hazardous if your loadouts aren’t quite firmed up). Between quests and mission maps, you’re going to be covering a lot of territory and learning how best to move through it. And with three different campaigns, plus the territory in the “Eye of The North” expansion, you will not lack for things to do.

Is it Guild Wars Reforged perfect? Not quite. While the fundamental gameplay is still enjoyable, there’s some little things I would have liked to have seen introduced. The lack of a “photo mode,” or at least a way to toggle the UI off, is a tad disappointing given the lushness of the environments. Having a way to better organize the various mini-pets and tomes that you get when you start getting into the “Eye of The North” content, and keep them from taking up the very limited bag space you have available, is the sort of quality of life improvement that should have been considered. And as of the time of this writing, there’s not a direct method of adding on to the Steam version things like character slots or storage expansion. This is probably the biggest speedbump for new and returning players alike, and the sooner that integration gets sorted out, the better.

Overall, Guild Wars Reforged took the minimalist approach towards its remastering efforts and it has paid off. It’s been twenty years since its initial release, and it might be another twenty before a similar effort is required. Step back into gaming history, and enjoy one of the deepest MMORPG experiences ever produced.

Axel reviewed Guild Wars Reforged on PC with a purchased copy. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.