Godrik Gandolfi
Meet Godrik Gandolfi, my first ever MMO character, created in October 2010 when I started playing Guild Wars with my two oldest sons. That was the real beginning of my fascination with virtual worlds and MMORPGs, and the start of a journey that is still unfolding years later. At the time, the older boys were reaching the stage where they both enjoyed video games, and we’d already had some success playing real-time strategy together, most notably Microsoft’s Age of Mythology. The problem was that multiplayer in that RTS could be flaky at best; we spent almost as much time coaxing network games into life as we did actually playing them, so we started looking for something more reliable that would let us explore a game world as a family. My old friend Mat, from university days, suggested we try Guild Wars, and before long the four of us were happily working our way through the campaigns together.
Guild Wars has since taken its place as one of the more notable titles in MMO history. Released in 2005 by ArenaNet and published by NCSoft, it arrived at a time when the big names in online RPGs were almost all tied to monthly subscriptions. Guild Wars broke from that pattern with a buy-to-play model: you bought the box and could then play online without ongoing fees, something that felt almost radical at the time and has since become much more common. The design pushed cooperative storytelling and a tight, instance-based combat system that encouraged careful skill selection and positioning rather than endless open-world grinding.
ArenaNet itself was founded by former Blizzard developers including Mike O’Brien, who had worked on titles such as Diablo and the early Battle.net infrastructure. The team set out to address some of the perennial complaints about MMOs: repetitive levelling, high time investment, and the sense of paying month after month just to keep the doors open. Instead of a giant seamless world, Guild Wars built most of its content around instanced missions and explorable areas, each entered with a small party, which allowed for more controlled encounter design and modest system requirements. The result was a game that could run on fairly modest hardware yet still offer large-scale cooperative play and structured PvP.
The game is set in Tyria, a high-fantasy world that mixes familiar genre tropes with its own geography and lore. In the original campaigns you play a human character choosing from a range of professions—Warrior, Elementalist, Monk, Ranger, Mesmer and Necromancer at launch—each with a distinct combat role and skill pool. One of Guild Wars’ core ideas was dual professions: every character chooses a primary and a secondary, opening up a large space of possible builds and letting you experiment with combinations that would be impossible in more rigid class systems. Later campaigns and expansions added further professions and, with Nightfall in 2006, the Hero system: customisable AI companions whose skills, attributes and equipment you could adjust to fit your own playstyle. Heroes blurred the line between solo and group play, allowing you to tackle much of the story content with a personal squad while still leaving room for human party members when you wanted them.
Visually, Guild Wars has a distinct look that sits somewhere between painterly concept art and traditional fantasy illustration. Character models offer a decent amount of customisation, but the real showpieces are the environments: sweeping views, dramatic lighting, and strong use of colour to define each region. The original Prophecies campaign moves from ruined European-style kingdoms to alpine passes and jungle ruins; Factions then shifts the scene to Cantha, with its sprawling Asian-inspired cities, drowned forests and coastal archipelagos; Nightfall heads to Elona’s deserts and savannahs, all dust, long shadows and warm, dry light. While the underlying technology inevitably shows its age next to modern titles, the strength of the art direction means the game still has a certain atmosphere that screenshots don’t quite capture.
The franchise extended its reach in 2012 with Guild Wars 2, a full sequel built for a different era of MMOs, but the original game has never entirely slipped into obscurity. Its once-unusual business model has become part of the standard toolkit for online games, and its focus on skill-based combat, flexible builds and strongly instanced story content still appeals to players who prefer a finite, crafted experience over an endless treadmill. Guild Wars today offers a complete set of campaigns that can be played through at your own pace, without the sense that you are perpetually chasing the next gear tier or seasonal reset. Server support has been pared back to a light-touch, largely automated “maintenance mode”, but the world remains online, and there is still an active community running missions, vanquishes and titles.
Looking back from the vantage point of more than twenty years after launch, Guild Wars stands out as a game that quietly went its own way and, in doing so, helped shift expectations of what an online RPG could be. The mixture of distinct regions, flexible professions, Heroes and a lean, functional art style gave it a character all of its own. Long after Godrik Gandolfi’s first steps in Ascalon, Tyria remains one of the virtual worlds I return to with particular fondness.
