Guild Wars® Reforged

The classic reforged! I've really enjoying coming back after almost 20 years! Guild Wars has stuck around this long for a reason! Game is awesome.

Its fun once you do some light reading and preparing what to do about the game. Doesn't hold your hand all the way and you have to figure it out. Its rich in skill building, addictive, and fun.

To begin with, I would like to point out that many years ago I played "Guild Wars" along with all of the expansions released for this title. I know this game extremely well — I spent hundreds of hours playing it in both PvE and PvP modes. I also ran my own guild with 100 members, which is why I have a great deal of attachment to this title and remember very well what it was like during its golden age. Years later, when I saw "Guild Wars® Reforged" on sale, I decided to give the game another chance. I invited a friend to play with me, someone with whom I explored the same world many years ago. However, the initial excitement and nostalgia quickly began to give way to disappointment and disbelief. The first warning sign was the graphics settings, which feel extremely limited and underwhelming. Even worse, the game running on maximum visual settings is practically indistinguishable from the version running on the lowest settings. It is difficult to understand why, after so many years, the developers did not introduce more noticeable improvements to the visual presentation. The longer I played, the more problems I began to notice. Many quests turned out to be impossible to complete on the first attempt because NPCs or quest-related objects would become stuck or appear in incorrect locations. Having to repeatedly leave towns and restart the same quests right at the beginning of the game was extremely frustrating. A good example is the bee quest in the village — the creatures would get stuck before the bridge, respawn underneath it in the river, and fail to follow the person carrying the honeycomb. Another example is the quest involving Duke Gaban, who instead of performing his intended role and collecting eggs, would simply run after the party despite all Devourers already having been defeated. However, the problems are not limited only to quests. While exploring the world map, we encountered invisible obstacles, walls, and areas where even small differences in terrain height completely prevented movement. At times, I had the impression that the current version of the game contains more bugs than the original Guild Wars had on its release day. In my opinion, "Guild Wars® Reforged" is an example of an extremely conservative approach to refreshing a classic title. Instead of receiving a remaster that takes advantage of the franchise's potential, we received a product that feels like it lacks even the basic improvements players could reasonably expect after so many years. One of many examples is the lack of features that improve navigation in the game world. When traveling in a party, I would expect my party members to be marked on the map with a different color than NPCs. Instead, when we moved apart in a town, finding my friend became almost ridiculous — the minimap was filled with identical green markers, making it difficult to determine where a specific player was located. The situation is similar with NPCs who provide quests. They are still not properly marked on the minimap, forcing players to search for golden exclamation marks above characters' heads. In crowded locations, with uneven terrain and many characters on screen, this becomes simply inconvenient. There is also no clear indication of merchants and traders, meaning players have to manually check every encountered character. The biggest disappointment, however, remains the visual presentation. The game looks almost identical to how it did years ago — there are no higher-resolution textures, improved character models, better-designed armor sets, or refreshed environmental elements. Trees and many other objects are still blocky and look as if they were taken directly from the early 2000s. It is difficult to describe the disappointment caused by returning to a beloved game after many years only to discover that the product received does not give it the respect it deserves. The developers give the impression that they failed to take advantage of the opportunity to show that they still care about their creation. It is difficult to call "Guild Wars® Reforged" a full-fledged remaster because it is hard to see the amount of work that one would expect from such a project. I cannot recommend this edition to people who want to return to the world of Guild Wars after many years. A good example of how a classic game remaster should be handled is "Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition" — a title that preserves the spirit of the original while also demonstrating the significant amount of work put into improvements, updates, and adapting the game to modern standards. Guild Wars was once a truly exceptional production, full of atmosphere and personality. Unfortunately, instead of refreshing those memories, "Guild Wars® Reforged" feels like a missed opportunity. Summary: After thoroughly examining "Guild Wars® Reforged", I was unable to find practically any advantages that would justify the release of this version. The very fact that a game released as a remaster can visually and technically look worse in some aspects than the original version released in 2005 is, in my opinion, unacceptable. A remaster should be a tribute to a classic production and an opportunity to introduce it to a new generation of players, not merely a way to resell the same product without meaningful improvements. The biggest issues: - no noticeable graphical improvements despite more than 20 years having passed since the original release; - textures, character models, armor, and environmental elements looking almost identical to the original version; - extremely limited graphics settings that do not result in any real improvement in image quality; - numerous quest-related bugs preventing completion without restarting areas; - stuck NPCs, quest items, and incorrectly functioning mission mechanics; - invisible obstacles, walls, and terrain geometry issues making exploration difficult; - lack of basic interface improvements after so many years; - no distinction between party members and NPCs on the map; - lack of a basic party feature that would indicate the direction in which party members have moved away. As a result, cooperative exploration often turns into pointless searching for each other across the entire map, which is especially frustrating in larger and crowded locations; - lack of proper markers for merchants, traders, and quest-related characters; - the need to manually search for NPCs in crowded areas; - absence of quality-of-life features that players would naturally expect from a modern release; - the impression that the project was completed with minimal effort instead of being developed as a full remaster. "Guild Wars" was an exceptional game that built a massive community over the years and earned its place as one of the most respected MMORPGs ever created. This makes it even more disappointing that an edition called "Reforged" does not feel like a project made out of respect for the original, but rather like a missed opportunity and an attempt to monetize players' nostalgia.