So, Guild Wars 1 is still a thing. Miraculously, we were gifted 10 skills in 2020, and there is tiny signs of life
here and there. I picked it up because it looked like something that could be run on my x86 rasberry clone (it is). That was allmost a year ago... But somehow I picked it up again recently.
You know, back in the day, everybody I knew got guild wars 1 because it basically marketed itself like an mmorpg without subscription model. As an mmorpg substitute, it was not
that outstanding. But nowadays, that I occasionally revisit old games, and judge them on their own merits, and do not weigh them against the whole market ecosystem of their time, I couldn't care less if you can't jump in guild wars 1 today. If you judge it as a classical tactic game à la heroes of might and magic, or x-com, or socom, or pillars of eternity, or neverwinter nights, it suddenly makes a lot more sense and seems more appealing as a product. Can't say I am not hooked right now, and there is like easily 400h of gameplay before you stand a chance of finishing all campaigs, my oldest char has like 560hours and they're like 2,2/4 campaigns done.
What surprises me is how active the reddit seems, maybe even more active than the dual universe reddit. I mean the barrier of entry is much lower and the game is much older so it kinda makes sense, but since in my head I mostly considered the game a failure it still feels odd. Feel free to pm if you want to add me, currently I am having a blast playing around with heroes (they weren't a thing in prophecies and I hardly played factions and nightfall and eye of the north), trying to really cheese a game that was meticulously designed to have equal power levels accross the board (there was a little power creep, but each campaign alone is kind of balanced). But the heroes do have their limitations, and I still remember the days were you had to play with humans, because with only henchmen this game was terribly difficult to beat. Nowadays one could probably beat the whole content with a team of heroes with the same skills throughout. But the last 5 missions of prophecies have me trying and tuning a lot allready, I dread factions
those zones are nasty.