Guild Wars Is up and Running.

[Thecla]

I found myself "LOCKED" in battle once engaged.  I tried to Run using Left/Click & move or my Arrow keys, but that Never worked...the Only way I was able to move was using W-S-A-D key movement, mostly by backing up turning and Running like hell, altho most Mobs followed you till they killed you, some only followed to the edge of their Spawning zone.  If you got surrounded "Forget About It" Dead :D

Combat vs. monsters in GW seemed well worked out and quite challenging. At least, my ranger had a hard time taking on more than one monster of a comparable level on her own once they got into melee range. The movement controls need to be worked on -- no good mouse control on directions plus collision detection meant that in combat you really had to use arrow/wsad keys to move in the directions that were possible (assuming you have any left :) ). I also found the camera angle annoying to control in combat or in flight (or otherwise, though it didn't matter so much then!).

Maybe the most memorable moment I had was in the mission where a large mob was guarding a catapault part -- the rest of my party rushed in and got killed (it was hard to coordinate good strategy in pick-up games), although they did take out out many of the monsters. I was left with two Charr warriors on my tail. I ran a long way with them right behind me -- they seem to keep aggro almost indefinitely, and either I hadn't figured out how to use the skills to get them off me, or the skills just didn't work properly in the alpha -- until I got cornered . Fortunately, it turned out that only one of them could attack me in my cornered position, and I was able to keep healing myself enough to recover the damage inflicted from one guy and take them down one by one (if both of them had been beating on me at the same time, I would have been dead). Then I could go back and use my one rez to revive a dead monk, draw the other monsters off the other two, so the monk could rez them as well. All in all, it was a pretty exciting battle, and a bit like D1 in that you're ok if you manage the combat properly, but if you don't, you're dead.

All the classes were effective, but warriors (tanks) and monks (healing + rez's) seemed to be pretty essential for almost any mission.

They still have to work on the skills (e.g. for rangers, poison arrow was quite powerful, but as far as I could see ignite arrow made a nice explosive ring and did absolutely no additional damage). But, for an alpha, there were remarkably few bugs, even though I never did find a Lynx.

Overall, I think it's a very interesting and well done game. The PvP aspect (which I didn't try) seems well worked out as a competitive part of the game with no griefing. Given GW's (IMO) basically non-MMORPG design (like Diablo, and this is not at all a bad thing), I think they will be able to offer it for free and have people pay for additional content which will be easy for them to plug in. Personally, for PvE I'm not sure that GW's emphasis on missions -- with enforced grouping and specific goals -- and the de-emphasis on character building will give it the longevity that Diablo had; but then again maybe the possible variety of class/skill combinations and tactics will substitute for that.