NCTY – Guild Wars

It is an interesting game that is more like Quake arena than most MMORPG games. It went to open beta today in China. By the way, this game was released in the rest of the world on April 26, 2005.

That’s right, you hear me, April 2005, Almost two years ago.The following is a good review of the game:

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/video_player/popup.php?sid=6123668&pid=914653

An in-game game play video:

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/video_player/popup.php?sid=6123665&pid=914653

I think it is a very innovative game. But I am not quite sure of its success in China. This game has a great technology in that it is able to use a single server (or actually a server consists of many computers). Therefore, it allows for truly massive multi-player playing. Instead of limit to a server of 5000 users, you are really playing in a world of millions of players.

If only TX2 has that kind of technology, imaging how wonderful will that be when doing castle seige.

But back to Guild Wars, by doing single server configuration, it severely limits players interactions. The RPG part of the game are limited to quests, it plays almost like if you are playing a single player game or a local area network game during the quest.

The calling card of this game is not the RPG part, but the guild warfare. Players form little guild and fight it out with other guilds from all over the world. But then, it will be very similar to Local area network game.

There are tons of pirate servers that allows players to play multiplayer version of starcraft or warcraft for free in China, hard to see why would players pay.

In the west, NCSoft doesn’t make money from Guild Wars from players paying monthly fee, but buying expansion pacts. There is no way they can do that because of the piracy. I don’t know how NCTY will monetize this game.

For an innovative game like this, I do expect a widely successful open beta. But it will be interesting to see how this game fares in China after commercial operation.