… bestow a monthly fee upon its gamers. Guild Wars that is. Since the first true Massively Multiplayer Onlince Roleplaying Game (MMORPG for short) Ultima Online there were and are many contenders for the throne of this market - Everquest 2, Dark Age of Camelot and Asheron’s Call to name a few. World of Warcraft started a whole new hype for MMORPGs, particularly because it was both easy on beginners to the genre, and also hard to master for the experts - just like all of Blizzard’s games. Though any of these games use completely different worlds, inhabitants, engines and play mechanics, they have one thing in common: first they want money from you for the game on CD/DVD and then they want a monthly fee so you can play the game you just bought.

I recognize that developing games and getting the server farm needed for such bandwidth-heavy online games, and keeping them alive all the time costs (a lot of) money. It’s just that not everyone (and I believe almost noone) can and will play the game in question every day-in day-out. So if you got an exam-ridden time at college, you got another nice game, or for whatever reason you just can’t play the game for some weeks, you are still paying as if you did.

Guild Wars is the first Massively Online game that doesn’t use a monthly-fee system. Instead the publisher will release expansions on a regular basis, but you can still play and even meet people who got the extension, if you didn’t buy it. So you really only play for what you get, and not for what you already got.

Great, at the start I wanted to give a quick review on Guild Wars and point out all the things that are so great about it, but then I quickly driftet into politics and business. So I will just give you some likes to reviews from guys that do them much better than me anyway ^_^

GameSpy Review
pc.IGN.com Review
Game Revolution Review
UGO Review