Kill Ten Rats

One Guild Wars design decision that beats the competition is the crafting storage tab. Crafting materials stack up to 250, and one tab of your storage holds one stack of each. All storage in Guild Wars is shared, so all your (post-Searing) characters have access. You could duplicate the effect by giving players two more storage tabs, since this is effectively 36 slots, but this comes pre-organized and of course for the specific purpose of crafting. (NCSoft could also remove the cap of 250, which seems arbitrary, low for common materials and very high for rare.) Aligning with other design decisions, Guild Wars does not have tiers of crafting materials as you level up, although having a crafting tab would be even more useful there (potentially messier in the UI).

Splitting “crafting storage,” Guild Wars crafting is not exactly rigorous. The crafters are basically collector NPCs with shared materials. Storage in Guild Wars is simple, shared, and rather inadequate if you want to keep all those collector drops. The vault is expandable at $10/pane, which feels a bit pricey, although it’s tempting with all these frog and bug bits about. I need to do some muling.

: Zubon

Here is a bad design decision that seems easy to band-aid. Guild Wars starts missions in Prophecies and Nightfall with a button under the character list, while in Nightfall and Eye of the North with an NPC dialogue. This is poor, having something be a UI element in one place and part of the world in another. I started in Nightfall, as most seemed to recommend, then played some Eye of the North and just this week visited Factions. Nothing tells you about the “enter mission” button. There is absolutely nothing in-game that tells you how to start the mission unless you notice that a button appeared in the UI.

I have commented on how Guild Wars players and wikipedians assume that you have a sizable resource base. It reaches a new tier when the developers forget that they designed the game as three expand-alones rather than a base Guild Wars with expansion packs (and then one actual expansion pack shared across the three). There is a handy mission to introduce you to the other campaigns, but whoever wrote it must never have thought that you might be starting with Nightfall and not already know how things work in Prophecies and Factions.

The in-game help is already a link to the wiki. Your players should not need to then Google to try to figure out what they need to ask the wiki.

: Zubon

Psychonauts did the same thing by giving you inventory items without telling you that you have an inventory or how to access it.

In Guild Wars, you buy skills once, at that even unlocks them for heroes on the account. Guild Wars has the rather odd design feature that not every skill trainer has the same skills. If you want to get all the skills for your class, you need to tour around to different cities. Not all the cities and outposts have skill trainers. Secondary profession changers might be somewhere else entirely, and you need to have swapped to that profession to buy the skills. Some of the trainers are in explorable zones, so you cannot change your build after picking up the new skills.

Is there anything at all to recommend this design for skill training? I’m down with picking up elite skills from bosses, but aside from having a few early trainers with only a few options, which you could also do by hiding some skills until level X, what benefit is there to having this random spread of skills and trainers across the zones? And campaigns, because not all the basic skills are in all the campaigns.

: Zubon