An unexpected surprise. The game runs fine on Steam/Linux through proton, but it is a bit of a hassle to set up the first time.

Maybe now i will finally finish “Legendary Defender of Ascalon”, since death leveling is no longer the only method.

For anyone not familiar: this was a title given to players who got to max level (20) in the tutorial area of the first game. All quest XP combined would would get you from 1-8, or if you save up all the quests it’s almost enough to get from 19-20. The only other way to get XP was by killing monsters, and for every level above the monster you get, it gives less XP. once you are more than 5 levels over you’d get none. You cannot leave the area, since once you do there is a time jump and you can never return.

“Death leveling” was a technique where you’d let the highest level monsters (level 13 iirc) kill you repeatedly until they level up, then you kill them for XP once they are high enough to give you some. This would mean you’d have to die potentially over 100 times to get a tiny amount of XP, then you exit and enter the zone to respawn the monster and do it all again.

In the years since they’ve added a small few level 17 monsters and a low xp daily quest, so it’s still a huge grind but not as insane as before

On the one hand? Cool

On the other hand? Holy crap, GW1 has official gamepad support before GW2…

On my third hand (it is one of those pinchy grabby things): I am gonna be REAL curious how this shakes out.

I loved GW1 back in the day. Five or six months back I got it in my head to replay the campaigns and… they are REAL bad

1. Prophecies is the original campaign and is, narratively, the coolest (and really drills down how Humans are actually the Elves of Tyria which just went even farther with GW2). It is also the one that was specifically designed to require coop and the henchmen, if anything, make the game worse which is why general guidance is to not start in Prophecies or to make a mad rush to Nightfall to get proper Heroes). Laranity gonna have to work in overdrive to put out enough videos to tell people to not make a Prophecies character…
2. Even once you have a full roster of maxed out Heroes, the level scaling means that you are basically constantly in a slog against rapid healing enemies until you get the right skills to make the right builds to stop that… and the way skills work in GW1 is that you have to buy them from specific vendors (or steal them from specific bosses) which means you actively can’t make a solid build until a good chunk of the way through multiple campaigns
3. And, regardless of those builds, the way fast travel works is that you can only fast travel to towns/outposts. So to complete a quest or reach the next mission that often involves a 10-40 minute slog through one or more zones of constant level cap enemies just to find the next town/mission before you have to log off for the evening. Which is a REALLY bad feeling when you aren’t even sure what path to take to get to the next outpost

I DO think GW1 can be “modernized” with minimal changes.

1. Add more skill vendors to Lion’s Arch or even the starting hub areas. Especially since it sounds like Reforged is getting rid of the DLC/expansions and making it one bundle.
2. Arguably also allow us to buy those skills regardless of our class (so Necro can buy Mesmer skills). This removes a lot of the importance of Ascending but also makes building out those Heroes so much faster
3. Similarly, let’s add a Hero or two to Prophecies and Cantha so it isn’t a mad rush to Nightfall.
4. Add more fast travel points to the maps. I would almost say to just make all the respawn shrines fast travel points but there are probably balance issues there

Do that and GW1 stops being a slog where you need an hour or two per session to make any progress and instead lets people focus on the REALLY fun builds you can make for different characters.

Don’t do that and Laranity and CaffeineDad (or whatever his name is) are gonna be suffering come December.

And just for those curious on why Guild Wars weirdly has one of the coolest overall stories in MMOs? GW1 and 2 spoilers ahead

And just to rant a bit more about GW1 encounter design:

One of the tricks ANet loved in that era would basically be to set up an encounter akin to a party. So you have the damage dealers, the tanks, and the healers. The problem being that the healers can restore a large chunk of a health bar and their skill cooldowns are either the same as player’s or considerably faster (my money is on the latter but I never timed it). And there were often multiple healers in an encounter unless you very carefully kited them.

With additional humans? You coordinate and all DPS rush one healer, then the other, then the other. With Heroes? You give them all as many skill interrupt skills as you can and pray they use it while hoping they actually listen when you designated targets.

And then you realize you are doing that ten times on the way to a mission…

A lot of the people who think back to how GW1 wasn’t that bad are the ones who went REAL hard back in the day and even their new characters already have access to every good skill and so forth. Which is similar to the problem GW2 has where a lot of vets will assume everyone already has Advanced Gliding and a fully ranked Skyscale (although ANet helped a lot by making gliders and raptors default for anyone who buys an expansion).

Looks like it’s free to people who bought any of the existing campaigns. Not to new players.