Introduction
Yes, this series is back, though it surely won’t be as interesting as before due to my interest in the game being highest in its first few years. This article will be short, with 19 screenshots, but the shots are much higher resolution and detail now as I got a new PC. The next update, covering my shots from 2008, should have about the same number of images as this one does. Expect that article soon.
In early 2007, I got a new computer. No longer was I using a rapidly-aging Pentium 4 with WinME, instead I had a brand new Core 2 Duo machine with the then-new Windows Vista OS. Despite this, I found myself playing computer games less and less. By 2007 I had mostly abandoned modern games in favor of my growing retro game collection, and that’s very much where my attention focused. I remember wondering if the new PC would revive my interest in modern games, but for the most part it did not. That wouldn’t happen until 2017.
As an aside, while I still have the WinME machine and it still works, though, sadly the Vista computer stopped working several years ago and I haven’t been able to figure out how to fix it. At first I thought it was the motherboard, but replacing that did nothing. So maybe I managed to break something in the power supply? Argh. Oh well. I miss Windows Vista and its nice transparent windows, it’s so much more interesting to look at than Windows 10 is on this machine I have now, but… oh well. If only one of the two older machines could work, it’s far better for the WinME machine to work than the Vista one since a lot of games do not run well on a modern machine but do on that one, while there are very few games that don’t work on Win10 but do on Vista. Still, I’m one of the few people who really liked Vista, so I miss the PC that these screens come from working… ah well.
But anyway, getting back to Guild Wars, as the article title suggests I wasn’t exactly playing much Guild Wars in 2007 or 2008. I never would go back to playing hundreds of hours of the game, instead just playing the game a bit here and there instead of playing GW1 all day as I did sometimes particularly in 2004-2005. And so, the 700-something hours I was at in April 2007 would take a long, long time to get to a thousand. In fact, checking today, I’m at 1013 hours. Yeah, barely more than than I had in early ’07. Oh well. On the one hand this means that there is a huge amount of content in Guild Wars that I’ve never experienced, including finishing most of the dungeons, playing most of the harder free content they added in the runup to Guild Wars 2, and more, but on the other hand, it means there’ still something to do in the game, you know?
And there are reasons why I stopped playing. One is that I particularly loved the random player groups in this game, and after ’06 that element of the game mostly faded away. These screenshots start in April 2007, right when random player groups were dying off. One part of that probably was declining interest in the game — most of the people I was playing with at college lost interest within a year or two, for instance — but also it was because of the addition of Heroes, those much more customizable and controllable AI allies Nightfall added. As I said in a previous part in this series the late 2006 addition of Heroes in the Nightfall expansion was fantastic for solo players and the long-term playablity of the game once the playerbase was too low to rely on other people always being around, but it mostly killed off random player groups so I’ve always had mixed feelings about the change. I liked the game better before Heroes than I have since, that much I know.
So yeah, to repeat from previous articles, I love the base game of course and really liked the first expansion to Guild Wars, but I wasn’t as much of a fan of the second expansion, late ’06’s Nightfall. It took me something like ten years to finally finish the Nightfall campaign. It’s actually pretty good, I should have played the rest of it sooner. Maybe if player groups had survived 2006 I would have, but they didn’t. But we’ll get to my finishing Nightfall much later.
Making the whole situation worse, I’m not one to be in a large guild or often be able to play the game with friends after the mid ’00s, so from this point on I was playing mostly solo or in the Random Arenas only. The problem is, a lot of the later content that ANet added to the game after 2007 is very difficult for the solo player. With good builds for you and your Heroes, people can beat that stuff solo. I always preferred to just play the game with whatever build I’ve come up with myself and like and not look up good builds, though, so my attempts at the harder added content mostly ended up in frustration and with me giving up. I probably should have spent more time looking up good Hero builds, but I didn’t do that enough for them to be good enough to get me through the harder content, and without any other humans to group with like 99+% of the time after 2006, I often found it too hard to proceed. It’s nice that they added more content after the last of the too-few expansions, but most of it is aimed at the dedicated, very good players with humans to play with and such. I’m neither of those things. I love games a lot but never have been great at many of them. Oh well.
Despite that, though, and despite that I haven’t really played Guild Wars at all in several years now, I deeply love this game and know I will get back into it sometime, like how I’ve really gotten back into Starcraft for the past month or two. And so, here it is, my mostly-forgettable screenshots from 2007. Though maybe that’s wrong; I really like the last two, they look great…
My Guild Wars Screenshots, April to November 2007
Here I’m talking with some random group party member about how much we’ve played the game. As mentioned, between declining interest and Heroes random groups were dying by this point but you could still find one once in a while.
The map, showing my progress in the city. Yes, I was continuing to play through Factions again instead of playing Nightfall, even though I’d finished Factions before and very definitely not Nightfall. It was probably the right decision, Factions is a great campaign…
733 hours played since launch? That’s not much higher than my last hours count. As I said it’s only at 1013 hours today. But yeah, I’m back to playing as my main, Talindra, some. That skillbar’s very similar now to how it is in this 2007 screenshot, and my character’s costume, the 15k scarpattern set, is unchanged.
Here is a shot of the first panel of my inventory. Look, it’s a birthday gift! ANet gave characters one each year. Now you just get a birthday voucher, which is still nice I guess.
This is very similar to the last shot, but note the sellers in chat. For some reason the Nightfall main city, Kamadan, quickly became the main community hub in Guild Wars, a position it still retains. I honestly have no idea why.
Looking at how weird it is that some things disappear underwater while others don’t is endlessly entertaining. Why does hair disappear, for instance? How strange. Anyway, this is the Random Arena hub area. Player populations have clearly declined, given how it hasn’t found a match.
Well, it finally found a match, and here we are fighting in the Random Arenas. I hope the match went well…
Bah, that run must not have gone long. It looks like we won that last match but not many, if any, more.
I’m probably looking at my Ranger’s two year birthday present now, and maybe exploring Seared Ascalon some as well.
A timed mission? I’ve always hated timed modes in games unless the timer isn’t tight. I don’t think this one was bad, though. The graphics sure do look a LOT better on this computer though, don’t they? The post-processing effects and such add so much. Guild Wars’ exceptional art design has held up extremely well, this still looks great.
Run…
Here we get to some of the best-looking GW1 screenshots I’ve taken. The ‘disable the interface for this shot’ command results in some impressive stuff at times. This winter forest scene looks beautiful.
And for another of the best shots in this update, an image of the sky and the crescent moon. Guild Wars really does have some of the best art design ever.
Winter is my favorite season. I’ve never been in an ice structure or cave like this but I’m sure it would be quite beautiful. The one in Guild Wars sure are.
Don’t get too distracted by the scenery, watch out for those ice golems… they’re not hard, sure, but still, in this game you can never be too careful.
It’s a new environment in this ice area, with a lot of squared-off somewhat diamond-like ice blocks. Impressive stuff.
Some of my AI party members, running through the snow.
The rest of the shots I have from 2007 are from this tournament from a quest. You fight the tourney here against a bunch of your Henchman allies, including some members of the main four heroes. I took screenshots of a bunch of the text lines because I thought it was interesting to see their thoughts about the tourney. Each character says something before and after your match against them. I won’t post most of them for now, though; play the game yourself instead of being spoiled!
I’ve got to post this one, though. A Joe & Mac reference, really? Heh, that’s random… amusing, however!
And with that, my screenshots from 2007 end. I would not play the game much in 2008 if my screenshots are to believed; I’ve got just one shot from January and only 18 for the rest of the year combined. I hope some are as good as some of these are.
