RANT: A look-back at Rise Of Nations

Back in the early '00s, when gaming suddenly exploded and PC gaming still mattered, RTS and especially Age of Empires fanboys, like myself, were looking forward for the second coming of Jesus in the disguised form of a sequel to the Age of Kings. For some reason neither Microsoft nor Ensemble Studios seemed to share our feelings and kept cockslapping us with a number of other releases in the genre, such as "Age of Mythology", which gathered positive reviews, but I never quite got into, probably because I prefer my strategy games to be about little people riding tanks or trebuchets, instead of little people getting royally fucked by Zeus for the shits 'n giggles.

But then Microsoft released another RTS, developed by Big Huge Studios (overcompensating for something, guys?), which seemed original, deep and promising. Rise of Nations was that RTS and it was very well received. It featured a hybrid of RTS and TBS, the two polar opposite categories of strategy games, it was as deep as it looked and overall, a very satisfying package.

To this day it's considered one of the top titles in the genre. And it is; don't let what I'm about to say convince you otherwise. TBS and RTS crowds are hardly the same, but in the end they're both strategy game fans and both like some aspects of the other style, something that RoN understands and does a good job at mixing them.

The units look clean and defined, the civilization system is easy to pick up and requires less attention than having to learn politics on the fly to keep those cunts citizens in your city from rioting. The battle system is simple enough, in the sense that it's less about hitpoints and armor and more about water PokeMon beats fire Pokemon and that's that.

I used to play back in '03-'04 and then I dropped the game; for the life of me I couldn't remember why. I didn't really intend to pick it up again, but recently I had to, after the pleads of a friend, who heavily implied that if I made him play Age of Empires 2 one more time, he'd strap a plastic dick on and provide plenty of motivation for me to reconsider. So I found my disk, I popped an aneurism, because the bloody thing wouldn't work (yay, Windows) and after a Win reinstall, which was long overdue, it finally played.

I like to pretend I'm an undefeated King that people love and concubines have declared a god, so whenever I play AoE2, with friends or alone, I tend to go for the hardest difficulty level, with several AI opponents. I manage, most of the time, which is why I was surprised to find out that trying RoN in "Moderate", my country was soon invaded by entire batallions demolishing my buildings, slaughtering my citizens and leaving me with serious sexual insecurities. "It's OK", I thought, "Rise of Nations is more challenging. That's good".

Not really, though. The game is frustrating, instead of truly difficult, for the same reason that all those older RTS games are frustrating; the AI cheats. It just so happens that, with the exception of the C&C games (and especially the Red Alert spin-offs), I find myself completely indifferent toward current RTS games, because they jump straight into the combat and completely ignore the economy part; a part that I wholeheatedly enjoy. I'm starting to believe that the reason for this isn't so much a creative decision as it is a practical one; I can't imagine another reason why every single RTS game that handles economy has the AI cheating so blutantly, if not because the AI programmers can't do it differently. It's not the kind of cheating you find in the "dick" games (i.e. sports and fighting). The computer doesn't know what you'll do to stop you. It just grows at a super-human rate! It gathers resources faster than you, it makes units faster than you, it can do about 50 different things at the same time, while you still struggle with scrolling from one city to another. And hotkeys don't do much good either!

Now, like I said this is an issue every RTS used to have; including Age of Empires. The difference is that Age of Empires was a true RTS, whereas RoN is not. So, in AoE, you'd make your army and you'd know exactly how to approach a battle. It was very, very well-balanced. The simplified battle system of RoN becomes an obstacle at carrying out a proper fight that doesn't involve at least five nuclear missiles totalling your enemy's capital city and then have your infantry just walk in and collect the trophies... and probably turning into an army of grey Hulks in the process...

... which I guess would be kind of cool, if it did happen. It'd be a lot cheaper than handing out weapons to the useless twats...

But that's not even the worst thing. Because that aspect is dumbed down to such a degree, the developer tried to balance out the game (and especially, I assume, the multiplayer segment) by evening out the units hitpoints, regardless of the age the player's in. BULL. FUCKING. SHIT. It's ridiculous to have a caravel sink a submarine! It makes the game unplayable. You have the AI, which naturally comes with twice your resources and ten times your army, they're left in the Medieval Age, while you've progressed to the Industrial Age and they still fucking decimate your army! They send horses against your TANKS and they destroy them. They fire arrows, you fire bullets and you still lose! And because you've progressed, your army is more expensive and takes a lot more to resupply!

I understand why you had to use this type of balance, but I was left with the impression that progressing to subsequent Ages was part of the fucking point. Otherwise, you might as well cancel out the entire civilization segment of it and turn it into a proper, full-blown, battle RTS game, where I can make sense out of each unit's strengths and weaknesses. A Modern Age unit deals a little more damage than a Medieval Age unit, but since they're never going to compete in a duel, it's a moot point! I think I reached my threshold when I was living my peaceful existence, having spent a considerable amount of resources to progress to the Modern Age, made a proud -in numbers- army and then got jumped by my AI opponent, who had just entered the Industrial Age, only to witness three batallions of my anti-tank rocket-wielding macho-men get blown to bits by WWI-era cannons and musketeers! And there's your problem; the balance is surprisingly shallow for a game otherwise deep. I know the unit that evolves into the anti-tank rockets isn't supposed to be effective against the unit that evolves into Musketeers (and later Riflemen), but they're wielding FUCKING ROCKETS. How can they not be more effective?

Shallow balance, arbitrary mechanics, cheating AI, game gets the fuck off! And it's a pity too, because otherwise, it is a bloody enjoyable game. Evolving in Real Time is fun! Seeing your barbarians tranform into sophisticated GI Joe's is strangely satisfying. Too bad they're too fucking useless!

First impressions on various MMORPGs

You know, if four years ago you told me I'd willingly pay a subscription to play a game I've already bought, I'd be literally insulted. But the wave of MMOs, popularized by Blizard's highly addictive "World of Warcraft", had quite an impact on the industry and, for better or worse, I wasn't left unaffected either.

And while in no way do I suddenly endorse the idea of continously paying for a product that I have (and server maintanance and new content can't cost nearly as much as how much the big guns make out of the subscriptions), it remains a fact that MMOs are the one genre that, much like gaming itself, is not going to go away. Ever. It became popular on the PC, it now makes its pass to the consoles and thanks to its structure that feeds it with new players at *least* at the same rate that it's losing old ones, it doesn't seem like it will come to an end.

So, I tried several MMORPGs and I thought I'd put here a few first thoughts; the reason for "first impressions" only is that most newbies to the entire genre are not likely to stick around based on gameplay depth, not with this plethora of games out there. I assume that, very much like it happened to me, whether a player will stick around or not has to do with the early impression a game makes. If you're better-versed on the genre and you're looking for reviews, you're much better off reading proper reviews by professional writers.

So, now that we're done with the lengthy intro, let's talk games:

- World of Warcraft: OK, let's start with the big daddy. I bought the game out of curiousity and in the 2 or 3 months I had paid for, I played for... two days, a total of 4-5 hours. WoW failed to impress, simple as that. I was preoccupied with other things at the time (and most of us are, usually) and the whole Tolkien-like world of elves and orcs and fantasy lands are things I generally dislike. In fact, WoW is one of the worst purchases I've ever made. I paid 40 Euros for the game, plus a 2-month game card at nearly 30 Euros. That's 70 Euros for a game that I played a total of five hours.

That sounds pretty bad, but here's the twist; it failed to impress me, but in those few hours, even I realized that WoW is as good as MMOs are going to get, at least until Jesus' second coming brings about the sequel. MMOs are usually judged by two things; content interconnected with community. And WoW has an abundance of both. I didn't get to explore much of the content, obviously, but the moment I logged in the first time, I came across some twenty toons/avatars running around, doing their stuff. What other games do with NPCs, this game does with actual players. It felt so... alive! And that sentiment didn't go away. About an hour in, I was already in my first low-level party, hunting down giant spiders in a cave. It was a quite addictive and immersive experience.

WoW is easy to pick up and fairly deep, gameplay-wise. It's well-balanced, it can be fun, it can be addictive. The game has become the subject of jokes and even woe for the effects it had on addicted gamers, but the fact is, much as we'd like to, we can't dismiss its importance to the industry or the genre; and playing the game even for a while makes the reasons for that quite clear. Whether you'll stick around and keep playing or you'll get easily bored and unimpressed and drop it, like I did, it's a game that anyone interested in MMORPGs should try at least once. Everything you'll see in other MMOs is going to be a throwback to WoW. There is a 14-day trial, I believe, get your hands on it.

- Lineage 2: Ah, the game I love to hate and hate that I sort of love. Lineage 2 was the very first MMORPG I played, on a private server, before I even knew the genre or that I had to pay monthly for the bloody thing. Lineage 2 also takes place in a fantasy land of elves and humans and other so ridiculously unorignal stuff that everybody and their dog dreams about these days. It's quite different than WoW, however, gameplay-wise. It ditches the more action (using the term very loosely, mind you) approach for something more... classic: an old, Diablo-style point 'n' click RPG. Remember those?

Lineage 2 is very popular. It offers quite the community itself; nowhere near the same as WoW, of course, but still, many people thrive on it. People with no lives, most likely, since it's even more demanding than WoW! Yes, see, WoW is demanding for the addicted ones. The people who want to experience every litte thing a game has to offer, those have to make a second life out of it and explore every bit of the content (when marriages became a factor in games, you knew something's gone terribly wrong). Lineage isn't of that kind; the bloody thing almost forces you to devote ridiculous amounts of time for the most basic things! And that's exactly why I hate it!

It's punishing. Pure and simple. L2 is a deep game; it's even a good game. But it doesn't like you. At all. It hates you. That's why it's so difficult. Getting your character to a bigger level is a time-costly and nerve-wrecking procedure that requires a lot of hunting down NPC monsters, usually for DAYS, so that you can take one, little, somewhat fun quest to go on and kill more things. The games hates you for playing and it's made it its purpose in life to make sure you kill yourself in the end. I mean, this is the only MMO that I know people play illegally in private servers (though technically, having a private server is a illegal, not playing in one), not because they don't want to pay for it, but because private servers bend the rules and allow faster gameplay!

Last time I played the game, recently, in a private server, I made the same elf, with the same name, with the same clothes I made all the other gazillion times I tried to play the bloody thing. Well, that lasted for about six days, FOUR out of which I spent inside the damn Elven Fortress, hunting all sorts of crap. I'm still in there, I think. And getting stuck there isn't quite the worst part of it; no. What truly causes violent outbursts that have your neighbors quickly get in their cars and drive to the nearest bomb shelter is doing the same thing over and over! As if it's not enough that dying costs you a good chunk of experience points as penalty (you can actually drop a level), imagine dying, respawning back to your village and then making the same trip to the same goddamn place over and over and over!

And yet, I can't drop it for good. I never play much (I think I reached my threshold the one time I played in an official server; got to level 22 and by then all the fun had gone way out of the window), but I always come back. The reason is simple: it's fairly reminiscent of the era when games weren't accessible to anyone but the nerdy kids with the giant glasses that lived off of games (a.k.a. the NES era). You know, back when Karate Kid or Contra were out and you'd lose over and over and you'd scream, but you wanted to beat the little fucker.

So, what's good about L2? Lots of stuff. What's good for a newbie? Not much. The presentation is. I'll have to admit, even though it doesn't compare to current gen standards, L2 remains a quite visually-captivating game. Attempting a more cinematic approach than WoW's cartoony one, the lighting is beautiful and the setpieces look great, top to bottom. Also, L2 has some of the best, most effective music pieces out there. Like I said, I don't even like the theme, but L2's overall presentation is always a pleasure.

So, here's the thing with L2; it's in no way a bad game, but it's a hardcore game. To truly appreciate it, you have to be very interested in lots of "farming" (that is spending hours or more, just killing monsters without reward, aside from exp) and partying. Parties in L2 are said to be one of the game's best features, because they require great coordination between players, but the problem is you don't really get to experience that until your mid-20 level and to get there, it's quite a hassle. I, myself, haven't bothered beyond the early 20 levels. If you're a newbie that's interested in trying stuff out to stick to one, Lineage 2 is probably not for you; it *is* going to become your life.

- EVE Online: Before I even go into it, go see Yahtzee's review of the game. Go, I'll wait. Done? Good. Now you know all you need to about EVE Online. EVE is a much-advertised game on the Internet. Nearly every bloody site has this little flash ad, with the spaceships engaging in massive battles that look awesome. How delightfully misleading!

EVE Online is, simply put, the most BORING game I have played. In my life. I've complained about boring games before; we all have. They're usually the kind of game that they're OK at what they do, but what they do is just not captivating enough. But not EVE. EVE is truly dull. It's literally a very expensive, well put-together chore.

People who play the game tend to praise it for being different than the majority of other MMOs and especially WoW. Which is true, I guess, in the sense that there is no farming, there is no action, the entire massive space feels dead and there's not a whole lot to see. Good going there guys, major selling points. I played the 14-day trial, out of which I only managed to survive about five very, very long days. I saw very little, very unoriginal, very uninspiring action, I saw several backdrops of pretty lights and the hangar of several space stations. I was left to believe that the game counts a lot on its extensive (by all means) economy system. Which is good for the kind of people who enjoy this kind of thing, I guess, but once again we have a very specific game for a very specific audience; like Lineage 2, minus the appeal.

Really, the game requires a lot more patience than anyone should ever have to have. Every time I bought something, I had to travel there to get it. Fine in theory, but when the trip takes over ten minutes (I timed it, literally), we have a problem there. For ten minutes, I had set up the autopilot and I had minimized the game, which apparently proceeded to playing itself and I was looking at pictures of random nude girls. My penis had more fun "playing" a space-related-RPG than the rest of me. HOW IS THIS GOOD FOR THE GAME IN ANY WAY?

When eventually shit turned serious and I got blown to bits, I found myself in a new ship, but without any of the equipment that I had to buy again. Which makes sense, yes, but I had to travel to a gazillion different stations to do so. By that point I said "fuck it" and uninstalled the bloody thing.

And while we're at it, what's the idea behind the skill system? Not only is it ridiculously extensive, to the point that half of the skills make me look stupider just by reading their names, but it requires DAYS to learn them? You want me to quit playing the game, completely break the flow and come back in "1 Day and 9 Hours" to continue? Are you people fucking stupid?

This is intended as a loose newbie guide, so we'll just call this one another hardcore of the bunch. It wants to make you believe that it matters; it doesn't really. It's like the old, humoristic picture of the lady who married for the money and when she has sex with her husband, she's doing her nails at the same time. I'm playing EVE Online, but hey, why not do something else at the same time too?

- City of Heroes: Now that I'm done venting, I can go to something good. "City of Heroes" was the first MMO I took seriously and played for an extensive amount of time, though not consistenly. To put it simply, it's WoW with superheroes. First off, there is a very extensive character creation tool, unlike any other game of the genre. At first it seems a bit too much, but in a game where you're inevitably going to colaborate with many other players, it's good to be able to maintain your individuality, even visually. In fact, it's a problem I have with most other MMORPGs; they have you going through the trouble of making your own unique character, only to slap the same bloody armor on all of you a few hours into the game. CoH has been out since '04, I've been playing since '06 and to this day, I don't think I've ever seen two players who looked alike... except for the sad fanboys who have to make characters look like Chinese knockoffs of Superman and Spider-Man dolls.

The game itself is fun. The interface is simple and functional, the gameplay is easy to pick up and play, without sacrificing depth and if you're a comic book geek, it makes a great job at portraying a comic book world, filled with superheroes and an extensive storyline that's never too complicated. And you know something? The reason I liked City of Heroes was because it didn't force a specific gameplay attitude on me. The battles are more action oriented and yes, the basic idea is still that of turn-based attacks that work based on random chance, but by having control over your "powers", it gives you the freedom to utilize them the best way you can. In fact, if it weren't for the inevitable lag, you'd probably be able to dodge enemy attacks too; I've done it plenty of times myself.

At the same time it offers all the conventions of MMO content, like PvP, auctions, events, salvages, supergroups (the equivelant to guilds) and all that stuff that I never really gave a crap about. And the game doesn't hate me for it! For all these years it lets me play it the way I choose to! You don't like farming? You don't really have to do it! There is ALWAYS going to be a mission (aka quest) for you to undertake. You might find yourself farming to grow and make your subsequent missions easier, but it's all up to you. Leveling is easy, the penalties aren't too harsh and the community is large and satisfying and teams are all around great. It's rare for someone to fuck up, strategy is good, but not always essential and the whole experience is very much worthwhile. People complain that once you reach level 50, there is nothing else to do in the game, which might be true, but not everyone starts an MMO with the sole purpose of playing it all day for the rest of their life. I've never managed to get a character to level 50.

If you're looking for an MMO to pull you right into the action and you like the comic book theme, CoH is for you.

- Matrix Online: I feel that whatever I say about this game is going to be unfair. The game was very much a failure. It had a hype that it didn't live up to and it wasn't all its fault. Back when MMOs were still new, the virtual world of six billion people who live in a state of induced delusion seemed the perfect setting and "The Matrix" was the shit! And then... ugh... "Reloaded" and "Revolutions" came out. Talk about brutally murdering one of the most popular franchises faster than a speeding bullet-time. That and the fact that the game just wasn't all that great kind of killed it pretty early on.

Well, not entirely. It's not dead, it's just very, very unpopular these days. The game itself had several issues, technically, that even I had the luck to experience. I played the game about a year ago, in my -then- brand new gaming PC and I would notice very frequent framedrops and lagging. The computer was powerful the servers pretty light on load, so I can only assume somebody fucked up the code pretty badly. It wasn't unplayable, though and it wasn't really terrible. It did a fairly good job at adapting the "urban noir" atmosphere and style of "The Matrix", the battle system was quite original and the storyline wasn't bad at all either.

But it also had problems, like overly repetitive missions, the fact that the city looked dead, the immersion broke every other second, because of the lagging and the community was pretty damn small. I played for about two weeks and rarely did I ran onto another player. It's said that "Matrix Online" has one of the tightest communities out there and, while small, once you become part of it it's pretty damn great. But that's assuming you find something to get you interested in that kind of thing.

Like I said, I'm afraid that whatever I'll say about "Matrix Online" will just be unfair. It's really not bad; it was mostly unlucky and it doesn't really hold up well against the competition. It's also quite hard to find these days, but if you do, it'll be cheap (I got mine for 10 Euros), which is always a plus. The thing here isn't that the game is bad, it's that whatever good it offers will probably wear off very early on. I wouldn't really recommend it, because there are better choices out there, unless the idea of a Matrix game fascinates you.

- Guild Wars: I've been on the lookout for "free" MMOs for a while now. I still don't find a reason to pay a considerable amount of money per month for rare content I don't give a fuck about. Plenty of people had recommended "Guild Wars" to me and reviews all around the Internet praised it. The only problem was that the retail versions around here were a bit too expensive. Yes, I truly believe that if you're going to offer an MMO without the subscription crap, you are correct to keep the retail package at full price, but that doesn't mean I can afford it. Until it hit me one day that the game might offer a small trial period. And a trial it offered.

The trial lasts 15 days, but only gives about 10 hours of free play. It might look a bit tight-handed at first, but the truth is you'll know all you need to about the game in the first hour of gameplay. What did I think of it? I fucking loved it! I fell for it in the very first minute. It's pretty, it's simple, it's functional. It adheres to the old "easy to play, hard to master" school of thought and it's the only one that truly has a semblance of a coherent storyline. Playing felt important. It felt like I had an endgame; a different endgame that pissing off new players and teabagging them happily, before I ride off on my pet horse (not that I ever did that). I was ready to buy it, from the first hour I played. The moment I'd get off my ass and put some money in my prepaid card, I knew I'd buy this game.

... AND THEN, I went into a mission. I spend a good 40 minutes there, making my way through hordes of monsters with my party (my NPC party; yes, it has one of those) and I reached the very end of the mission. There, something went wrong and we died. All of us. There is no exp penalty when you die, which is good; you just get teleported back into the nearest town. The problem is that the mission had been reset! I had to do the whole fucking thing from the start! That's a dick-move, ladies and gentlemen! So much so, that now I'm debating whether I should buy the game or not. It's not really something terrible, most missions are easy enough to do, so it shouldn't cause that much trouble, but it's still pretty fucking annoying. Even in CoH, when you die, you get teleported, but you continue the mission from where you'd left off. It would only reset if you quit the game. Here dying=reset. I wasn't going to go through the same forty minutes again, of course, so I haven't touched the game since.

But you know what? That BS. In the end it's still a pretty damn good game, especially for its age and I'm sure I'll end up buying it anyway, just maybe not as soon as I thought I would. And the best part? It's free! Which makes me instantly appreciate ArenaNet, the developer, because they don't try to feed off me! Especially in an industry where every publisher and their dog bitch and condemn piracy and go out of their way to stop it, not because it's immoral, but apparently because raping the other guy is a right reserved for them!

Buy Guild Wars. It's the best option that comes to mind. If the retail's too expensive, NCSoft has them up for digital purchase. Go!

- 9Dragons: Remember "Acclaim"? They used to be a major company back in the '90s and the 16-bit era. I think they even handled the Mortal Kombat titles originally. Heard from them recently? I don't blame you; they've sort of fallen from grace and they're sleeping with the little ones of the industry. So what do they do? They make games of course, but they profit through ads and voluntary subscriptions. So the games themselves are free to play.

"9Dragons" is one of these games. An MMORPG, reminiscent of L2 gameplay-wise, that takes place in ancient China and it's martial arts-themed. And for that alone, we have a winner! I don't have much to say about 9Dragons. The theme is always engaging; martial arts. The cartoony presentation is effective, the gameplay is unoriginal, but well-balanced, it's not terribly hard and the storyline is decent too, while it also has a considerably large community, for its range. It's really the kind of MMO that you'll want to try when you've gotten bored of all the "big games" of the genre.

But that's that. I got my character, originally, up to level 22 and I'd continue with the game, until I realized that I couldn't find anything else to do. My contacts wouldn't give me new quests or hints about finding new contacts who would. The world is considerably large and when I traveled to another zone, I found a couple of people that assigned missions to me, but soon these were done too; and still no hints about new contacts. This became problematic, because from some point on, jumping to other zones meant dealing with high-leveled mobs and most attempts to cross the zones ended up in my getting brutally beaten and sent back to the village.

That's also why I can't see 9Dragons as being anything more than a pleasant break from other MMOs. It's fun, I started again myself last night (after I realized that my original character had been deleted due to inactivity; a fucking heads-up would've been appreciated, Acclaim!) and, in fact, it could serve like a good appetizer for people who only now start to become familiar with the genre. But nothing more. And finally...

- Every other free MMO out there: I tried several free MMORPGs the past week or so, so I find it a bit discomforting that I don't have much to say about them individually. Quite a few small companies have been in the business of free MMOs as of late and the work they put into them, analogies considered, isn't bad per se. I'm certainly not one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, but if they intend to start making a profit from these horses, they have to keep a few things in mind.

One of the main issues I had with every other game I tried to play is that they didn't even work. For one reason or the other, they'd crash, they'd freeze, they'd reboot the PC (thank you both for that, Gameguard and Comodo) and a variety of other little things. Hardware can be a bitch and without the resources and the budget to adjust the code to as many hardware pieces as possible, you can't be sure they'll work. But still, a big fucking problem this is for people who want to try the games.

And then, we have the theme and the presentation. Developers, big or small, have to finally give up the ancient-looking, fantasy world with pointy-eared babes and heroes who look like they just reached puberty. There is *this* many different things you can do with a mudhat-filled village and a castle town. For example, there is this game, "Metin2". It's adequate, a bit on the ugly side, it could use some direction here and there, but it's decent and fairly popular. But the moment I started playing, I knew I had seen everything elsewhere: in L2 and Guild Wars! Why would I want to stick to a game I have much better alternatives for? Also, Metin2 suffers from a very bad case of Engrish and spelling SNAFUs. Seriously, guys, I understand you don't speak English well and I'm OK with the occasional grammar error. But good God, just send the script to me. I'll personally go over it. Free of charge. Promise.

Some bad design here and there is also murderous for a game, like "12 Sky", a martial-arts-themed game that's... well... It attempts an L2-like presentation, but the moment it starts, it throws you in a map, without a tutorial or a hint about where you're supposed to go and you're instantly bombarded by countless spam messages of other players' in-game stores. I tell you, the Add/Remove app couldn't open fast enough.

The one other free MMO I found interesting, oddly, was "Shin Megami Tensei Imagine". The game is anime-themed. It's about post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where Demons prowl and a high-tech organization of Demon Busters tries to restore peace and save humanity. The game has you create your own anime-like character, it has a coherent and progressing storyline and it's well-balanced. I didn't get much into it myself, but for anime fans it looks a pretty ideal choice. You might want to go that way.

So, that's it. That's all I could stomach. Personally, I'll have another run at 9Dragons and I'll probably end up at City of Heroes once again. And Guild Wars.

~Neo