Guild Wars Review
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Guild Wars is almost entirely instanced. Once you have your party together, you go off on your chosen quest. From that point on, you have no contact with other players outside of your party until the quest is finished. While you lose the sense of user scale of other games, the trade-offs are impressive. For a start, the game assesses your party, works out what you know, what you've seen, who you've killed, and frames the quest accordingly. Also, because the world is yours, you can affect it all you like. Burn down the forest, blow up the bridge, it doesn't matter. You're the only ones who are going to need it. So, like Starcraft, what you do in one quest affects what happens in the next one. You get a sense of saga, instead of the usual repetitive Fed-ex quests of other games. Instancing everything eliminates many of the annoyances of other MMORPGs: kill-stealing, spawn-camping, and loot stealing are simply impossible.
