There's something about Guild Wars that I don't see mentioned much: it has a very friendly interface that encourages casual play.

  • The CD doesn't have to be in the drive. When I'm thinking of playing, I don't need to take the previous CD out of the drive, put the Guild Wars CD in, and then start the game. I can just start the game right away. Since it's no hassle, I play a lot more.
  • When I start the game, it goes right to the login prompt. No publisher splash screen. No developer splash screen. No video card maker splash screen. No sound library splash screen. No introductory movie. No copyright screen. No disclaimer screen. No menu. No loading progress bar. It's really quick and easy to get into the game. This encourages me to play more.
  • While you're playing the game there are Minimize, Maximize, Close buttons at the top right corner. This lets you easily switch to another application or run the game in windowed mode or just stop playing. It acts much more like a standard application, and it's very smooth. I feel like I can play at any time, and then switch back to whatever I was doing.

All of these seem very minor but I think they add up to something big: I'm playing Guild Wars a lot (over 200 hours). I wish all games would be this way.

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– Amit – Sunday, June 19, 2005

3 comments:

Anonymous wrote at July 05, 2005 7:30 AM

I wish I got to play that game. It looks stunning! I live in Brazil and nobody is distributing it here. Maybe I should start my own publisher/distributor and make millions. :)

Very nice website, congratulations.

Amit wrote at July 05, 2005 9:12 AM

It is an absolutely beautiful game!

Anonymous wrote at January 08, 2006 11:41 AM

i havent played or even seen the game but i wish the friendliness spread to other games, just to play a quick 20minutes of bf2 or fm2006, i have to open the cd drive, take out the old cd, put the cd in the box, locate the next game cd i wanna play, open the box, put it in the cd drive and wait of the cd drive to refresh, load the game (aswell as cancel the autorun launcher), wait for useless meaningless brand logos to make stupid loud noises on my pc even before i get to log in, arrgh, well done guild wars for being nice :)

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