Guild Wars Previews

GamingGroove and GameOver are the latest websites to offer up hands-on previews of Guild Wars, once again based on the game's recent beta events. Here's a snippet from GamingGroove's article:
Combat is your standard fare, with you and your party wailing away at creatures who in turn do the same to you. Since it is an RPG, your character will determine his/her battle capability based on stats and skills. Casting spells, which look quite impressive for the most part, is added into the mix, as well as spell-like abilities that allow you to turn a single arrow into 2 or special melee attacks and the like. In the tutorial, everything is understandably weak and doesn't present much of a challenge, which only makes sense really. After all, how many players are going to stick around if the tutorial is pantsing them (yeah, that's right, pantsing). Going through this area of the game was quick and easy and did exactly what it was meant to do: get me used to the mechanics of the game in a quick and fun manner. Once this area was finished, I found myself in the first town available and surrounded by other gamers, as well as NPC's of various sorts.

And a bit from GameOver's article:
The characters are really customizable and there are quite a few options to choose from. Well, the actual character is, not so much on the looks. Like Diablo, there are skills that can be purchased but not in a tree form per se. Each character has two different classes depending on individual play styles that range from healing to straight fighting and anything in-between. Of course, each character type has different types of skills based on what they've chosen to do. There are quite a few different builds that people can play with in the initial offering and who knows how many more later on.