Bought the game again to support ArenaNet. Now I just need to figure out what I was doing 20 years ago on these characters.

They should have added new optional servers for Reforged. The original server's economy is so deep-fried from botting that all of the items have effectively no value, and you can just ask and get infinite ecto/plat/zaishen coins for free. This isn't how the original game even was. And it isn't fun playing an MMO that is only kept interesting if you don't interact with the other players and the greater economy. That defeats the purpose of it being an MMO. Please rate this up so ArenaNet knows we want optional fresh servers.

So you can't create a new account that isn't steam based, my old GW2 account says "invalid email".. and if you make an account via steam then you can't purchase items from the Guild Wars store because logging into the store via steam is broken.. I'll update my review when they fix this but for now I'm sad because I just want to play the game and have the ability to purchase items for the GW store.

Runs AMAZING on the Steam Deck. I can finally achieve Guild Wars bed rotting.

This nostalgia bait is not worth the effort. If you're coming back, or have existing ArenaNet or GW2 accounts, be warned: you could be coming back to accounts being locked out or buried. Linking this to a GW2 account is impossible. I somehow managed to get a 'log in with Steam' once, but now it wants an account name that I don't have. Password reset emails won't come. And now that I've used the CD key, I am now locked out. Trying to submit a ticket to Guild Wars support requires a log in. EVEN IF YOU HAVE A LOG IN PROBLEM!

It arrives with no fanfare, no tolling or alarms. Those who remember, will speak fondly of the warm morning breeze.

Felt very dated Thanks steam for giving me my money back :)

Absolutely nothing changed about this. What's even the point of this re-release? Wait for Guild Wars II instead.

Other companies: "Pay us each month and we'll let you sub to the classic game." ArenaNet: "So here's the classic game, but if you already bought it, this is just a nice update. Have at it boss."

First of all, the game itself is great and I recommend it very much, but RF is just a bad deal and was basically just a minor patch. I really don't wanna be that guy and as I said, generally speaking I'm happy, GW1 gets attention again, but unless you really want it on steam, the Reforged Bundle is almost WORSE than the Guild Wars: The 20th Anniversary Masterpiece Collection. For the almost same price as Reforged and EotN and the Bonus Missions (so 36€) you could have bought the 20th the same content + bonus items and bank tabs. Ofc now that version is gone, so you are forced to buy the RF version, I wonder why... Also, I really like GW1, but it's still a 20+ year old game and 36€ is waaaaay too much compared to what other things you can get with 36€, including GW2 itself, where you can get the first 2 expansions for only 30€ WITHOUT it even being on sale. And they know, that it is way too pricey, which is why the 20th bundle was even on sale almost only a half a year ago (around 7 months) for 2 weeks and was only 8€! This following is just my assumption, but IMO this screams to me, that they saw the GW1 community event with the release of the 20th 7 months ago and now make as much buzz as they can for basically a quest log patch, so they can make huge profits on that potential cash flow without much work and as a justification to not make a sale and go for 8€ again for a long time, since they "reforged" it. As it currently stands, Reforged is borderline a scam and really tries to live up to its name-twin WC3:Reforged... And while I'm at it and even tho it has nothing directly to do with RF, but for the love of god, they should give us at least enough character slots to have 1 char of each class. I own every non-MTX content, but can't even play every class, 2 classes are missing for me. They already make "post sale" money with the bank tabs, increased mat storage and mercenary slots, they don't need to lock me off of content I already paid for. It would also make it so much easier to convince friends to give a 20+ year old game a try instead of saying "yeah, unless you pay 12€ extra for a 20+ year old game for only 2 more char slots or just straight up buy a 2. copy for almost the same price, which won't share its progress with the other copy, you won't be able to play all classes you paid for" Edit: Not sure why ppl are confused about the 36€, but I can repeat it here separately again: RF only has the 3 base games and is 20€, EotN is 10€ and the bonus missions are 6€ and are not part of RF, meaning you have to pay 36€ for everything. Before they removed the 20th edition, it had everything in it + the extra bank tabs for 40€ and was on release (around 8 months ago) 8€ for 2 weeks. Hope this helped reducing the confusion, altho that info was already in my review.

forced mouse smoothing, locked to 400 fps

The only thing reforged is the price of the game.

The year is 2005. No, this isn’t a flashback. I’m not recommending this game because it’s stuck in 2005. When ArenaNet announced Guild Wars Reforged, I was hyped. Hell yeah. The game my buddy and I put over a thousand hours into was getting re-released with some new updates after 20 years. There was no way I was missing the opportunity to relive those days. I remember how much I loved the original game—how we’d spend entire Saturdays playing through Nightfall just to experience the story. Of all the fond memories I have with MMORPGs, Guild Wars holds a special place in my heart. This time, I decided to use the Steam login for a completely fresh start. All my old characters were still sitting there in my ArenaNet account, untouched. It’s cool that ArenaNet never wiped them, but I wanted the new-player experience. And somewhere in those 12 hours of playtime is where the game slowly fell apart and quietly died for me. It has not aged well. What was an amazing experience 20 years ago is now an inconvenient relic that time forgot. I understand that ArenaNet has focused on Guild Wars 2—that’s their flagship MMORPG—but the fact that this game hasn’t meaningfully evolved leaves it stuck in a strange state of limbo. I booted up the game and chose Prophecies to start, which was my first major mistake. Prophecies was always the weakest of the three campaigns. I knew this, but I had a plan: start in Prophecies, move to Factions as soon as possible, hit level 20, then return and complete Prophecies, Factions, and Nightfall in that order. This game is slow. Very, very slow. I picked a Mesmer—something I’d never played before—because I wanted a fresh experience. Even early on, monsters took far too many hits to kill. I spent roughly four hours in the prologue before thinking, “Wow… this is way longer than I remember.” I rushed to end it just to get to the main game. At first, I was enjoying myself—but only because of nostalgia. It wasn’t the game I was enjoying; it was the memory of the game. Once I cleared the prologue, I started slogging toward Lion’s Arch so I could jump to Factions. This is where I ran headfirst into the Mandela Effect. I could have sworn that once you finished the prologue, the Factions quest was immediately available in the first town. It isn’t. You need another 10–12 hours of gameplay to unlock it. So I pressed on. By the time I reached my first mission, I remembered something else I’d forgotten: missions in Guild Wars—the primary way the story is told—are very long. A single mission can easily take over an hour, and there are no checkpoints. That was common in early 2000s design. Even World of Warcraft dungeons often took 45 minutes minimum, and that was considered fast. But in Guild Wars, the entire campaign is structured this way. Fail near the end of a mission, and you start from the beginning. I pushed through three missions and made it to Yak’s Bend—only two missions away from my goal. But by then, the nostalgia had worn off. I realized I wasn’t having fun anymore. There’s another major problem with Guild Wars, and this one I did remember—just not as a problem back then. The game is absolutely flooded with invisible walls. Want to get around a small hill or stream? Nope. There’s no jumping. No falling. No shortcuts. If you want to go from point A to point B, you’re walking the entire route exactly as the game dictates. What should take seconds becomes a 10-minute detour. You’ll hit invisible walls constantly, and you will get lost in the maze of forks and side paths scattered across every map. It made me realize that I have changed. I don’t tolerate this kind of design anymore. Invisible walls are basically synonymous with disappointment in my mind now—and this game is overflowing with them. Even navigating towns can be frustrating; something as simple as getting to your storage box can feel like a chore. Maybe I’m just getting old. The “Reforged” aspect doesn’t add much in the way of meaningful features. The big addition is controller support, which I was genuinely excited about. Pair that with Steam Deck support, and you had my attention immediately. The controller implementation is… fine. Lazy, but functional. My gold standard for MMO controller support is Final Fantasy XIV. That game nails menu navigation, cross-hotbars, and targeting. Guild Wars doesn’t even come close. Skill mapping works well enough—there are only eight skills on your bar—but the menus are handled poorly. Calling it “full controller support” feels generous when so much of it boils down to moving a mouse cursor with the left stick. Does it work? Yes. Does it feel good? Not really. Steam Deck support works exactly as expected. Honestly, I would’ve flipped a table if a 20-year-old game didn’t run well on the Deck. Given how good Proton is, this shouldn’t surprise anyone—even without verification. I’m genuinely sad and disappointed that this game has aged so poorly. Design decisions that were acceptable in 2005 just don’t hold up anymore. Every invisible wall felt like another mark against it, and the hour-long missions eventually broke me. I gave up mid-mission, uninstalled the game, and called it there. For the history and the memories, Guild Wars, I raise my glass to you. I had some truly fond times. But I’ve moved on, and this game no longer meets my standards. You were special 20 years ago—but today, you’ve been worn down by time, and you’re best left as a cherished memory of something I loved when I was younger.

Controller support is meh. They only added a joystick cursor to navigate the UI instead of adding things like radial menus and other modifiers.

It's the same sh*tty game from the 2000s with some minor unnoticeable graphic features. Even if you somehow manage to enjoy it (thanks to nostalgia) the community is very small and it's gonna be almost non-existent in a few weeks, guaranteed. The future is now, boomers.

First of all, I want to say that at the time GW was an amazing game. It had interesting PvE content and probably the best PvP system out there (if you were willing to wait around enough for everyone to get organized, it sucked for casual players). Right now, reforged version has pretty much nothing new except.. wait for it... quest notifications on the side of the screen! So not much. Everything is unchanged and the game is really not in a state it can compete with any similar games right now. Unique PvP formats are pretty much dead/not nearly as good as they were due to low playerbase. PvE can have some fun and challenges but it is very, very outdated. Also, the game doesn't come with Eye of the North which is sold separately. This is not a remake or even a remaster, it is just Steam port of 20 year old game, that now supports higher resolution.

This game simply does not want to be played, and nobody is addressing this elephant in the room. This game is composed by lobbies scattered in open maps that are essentially private instances; there are 3 campaigns to choose from, but if you want to play chronologically, you start from Prophecies. After a long and nice tutorial area (where you can actually work on getting max level to receive a special title) you receive the possibility to create a party with henchmen, all of different classes, as an alternative to other players.. and here the problems begin. These henchmen have the issue of being extremely weak, but they're also essential to provide you a safety net against group of enemies: once they get (easily) wiped, you're done for. And this frustration will be carried until you reach Nightfall, the LAST campaign, where you'll receive heroes, which are more powerful characters that can be fully customized. So you take quests, and realize that these maps are large... but completely empty. You talk to an npc, kill a few enemies, escort another weak character (which will have a 50% chance to bug out or straight up disappear in different ways), rinse and repeat. Oftentimes you'll face missions, which are dungeons scattered throughout the map where all of these problems are cranked to 100, condensed, and with an added objective called "bonus", that the majority of the time is either bugged, or poorly designed at the limits of frustration: this last aspect will basically force you to keep the wiki open for every single instance, cause sometimes the triggers are so random that (and check it yourself if you don't believe it) they almost look like easter eggs. Now, the community is mostly very friendly and welcoming, willing to boost you with better equipment and skills: they're simply excited to see new people joining after two decades. But the rest is composed of elitists who don't take a single critique of their favourite game, have everything already figured out and will keep spamming 24/7 how "Anet lost its touch with gw2, gw1 is simply superior, and if you don't agree or have any issue you're simply stupid". This black or white situation is eye rolling to say the least. In conclusion: there is a huge balance issue that most old players will never admit, and this "Reforged" update didn't even touch all these pain points. Veterans will say "skip everything and go to nightfall to get better heroes, no?" but why would i skip the whole game to make it slightly more enjoyable? Among npcs that die before you even get to them, escort sessions that fail cause the character bugs in teleports or straight up disappear, overtuned enemies in early areas (even at your max lvl) this is NOT how you would manage a game of this caliber. As an old GW2 player with more than 2.5k hours, this saddens me. The "its a 20 year old old game" excuse doesn't hold up anymore. The update is here, it brought nothing relevant to the table but a "promise" that something will be done. A marketing stunt for the sake of bringing more people, without providing relevant quality of life, bug fixes and balance. Surely i will receive a lot of hate for this, maybe some aforemented childish player will mock me with a clown Steam award like i saw around here a lot, cause people grew up with this game and some seem unable to provide proper criticism with fresh eyes, but this is the reality. Its not a "git gud" situation, its old game design that despite the various patches and updates never changed, and as of now i cannot recommend this game. I hope the few devs left will take this into account. P.S.: i apologize if my way of writing is wrong or uninteresting, english is not my first language but i wanted to reach as many people as possible. Thank you.

new player, wouldn't let me log in. bad support

Game wont lauch unless I use the exe in the folder and then I cant make an account without cd key that doesnt show up when I click on CD-Key in steam. Shouldnt be this much of a hassle to play a 20 year old game

Time playing game : 0 mins Times crashed to desktop with no error reported: 26 Times crashed to restart: 8 Times reinstalled: 3 This game is malware to my computer.

For losers stuck in 2005. Outdated mechanics.

Terrible game. Very complicated combat, massively powerful enemies right from the start, and a really convoluted weapon and upgrade system. As you progress through the map in pursuit of your goal they give you points were you will respawn if you die, but the distance to the target is a long way off and each time you die, which will be many times, you lose some health and energy until you reach 96 health and 8 energy. The problem with this is that there are usually a lot of enemies waiting for you at the final point and they are powerful and many, and you are now weak with diminished health and energy. You simply will not win the fight as they gang up on you and the only way to reset your health and energy is to go back to a town which also resets all the enemies you fought along the way. I guess the DEV's thought they were clever. Energy is needed to cast spells, especially heal. Also, many times when you are in a fight for your life the game will crash and you have to leave and come back in starting all over gain. Very frustrating indeed. To kill or attack an enemy you need to move the mouse cursor over them and click it. Imagine doing this with 5 or more super powerful enemies wearing your ass down until one hit takes all your health, not to mention they run around all over the place so getting your mouse cursor over them is dam hard. The default target next enemy key "spacebar" doesn't always work, in fact it leaves you struggling to place the mouse cursor on an enemy while you are getting thoroughly strapped by the enemy. The mouse cursor also gets extremely hard to see during the combat because the colors and chaos of combat obscure it very badly and you'll have a hell of a time getting the mouse cursor on an enemy to attack. I am quite sure many people bought this game and its sequels and abandoned them due to the super difficulty. It almost seems like the devs want to force you to use other real life players to help you complete missions and that is not always possible. I like to play solo, so if you want to go solo, FORGET IT. You will get slaughtered EVERYTIME. You can choose a party of four AI characters to help you but they are useless in combat. If you can get this game for a $1-$2 maybe it's ok. The games also have a store, of course. Pay us more money and we will give you some mediocre slightly more powerful gear. 99.9% of the gear that the enemies drop are completely useless, so if you think you can grind and find the mighty tub thumping axe of murder, forget it. The crap they give you is all worthless. The devs are most certainly a wee bit out of touch and insist on this super advanced player difficulty, right from the start no less. I seriously do not recommend this garbage. The ironic thing is that this game has been around for many years and I played it in the earlier years and it was reasonably difficult, but doable. Today they changed the code to slaughter you constantly. Kind of like Path of Exile.

fun for several hours then you are trapped in some crap map with no escape and impossible quests fun "game"

Avoid this game at all costs. All the praise that gets heaped on it comes from the nostalgia-brained that were children with too much time and no money. Every element of this game, EXCEPT for the skills/builds, is strictly worse than other RPGs. This game is made to waste your time. The maps are giant and empty, except for uncountable amounts of trash mobs. If you die, you get teleported back to the start, and have to rewalk the entire distance and get a minus 15% debuff. Meaning, there's a really high chance you'll have to reset, meaning you get to REDO the ENTIRE 20 MINUTES again and again. Missions are nothing but maps that go on FOREVER, and you get reset back to the very start of the mission if you die. You might've just spent 30 minutes on a deathly boring trash-mob-a-thon, then you die to some bullshit (like multiple enemy healers being effectively unkillable tanks) and you get to redo the ENTIRE 30 MINUTES!!!!!! There's not a single part of all this tedium that is actually required. None of them have anything to do with skills or builds, the only redeemable quality of this game.

4,300+ hours played over 241 months

I first picked up Guild Wars in October 2005 for one very simple reason: my parents refused to pay a subscription fee for World of Warcraft. It is funny how decisions like that end up shaping your life. What I found instead was a world that stayed with me for over two decades. My first character was a ranger. Then I switched to a warrior. Then, inevitably, a ranger again - because in this game certain things just feel right. Nightfall and Eye of the North were the most polished experiences, but Prophecies is home. To this day, Yak's Bend is my comfort place. A safe haven for exhausted refugees, gathered around a large bonfire and that quiet feeling of "we will make it through this." I still chase that feeling elsewhere in life. Guild Wars taught me English. Not through textbooks, but through late-night messages, Ventrilo calls, and the kind of cooperative gameplay that brings strangers together. Some of the people I met as an 11-year-old kid are still in my life today. What makes Guild Wars special is what always made it special: the clever multiclassing system, the eight-skill Magic: The Gathering style buildcrafting, the creatures and worldbuilding, and the freedom to be whoever you wanted without turning the game into a full-time job. I played almost entirely PvE, creating a gallery of lore-friendly characters with carefully dyed armor sets simply because it felt right. It still feels right. When I saw the announcement for Reforged I almost ugly cried. After so many years of silence, seeing real developer attention again, and now seeing actual crowds of players where there was emptiness a month earlier, is surreal in the best possible way. Reforged does not drastically change the game. It should not. The magic was always there. What it does bring is hope: that Tyria is alive again, that someone is looking after it, and that little quality-of-life improvements (yes, even Remember my Password) are signs of more to come. If you are looking for a game that respects your time, does not demand a second life to enjoy it, and offers a world full of heart, history, and community, Guild Wars Reforged is absolutely worth playing. This is an honest recommendation from someone who has spent 4,300 hours across 241 months wandering Tyria, growing up with it, and returning to it whenever I needed something familiar and safe. Welcome to Guild Wars - or, if you have been here before, welcome home.