Happy birthday to the game of all time!

[anghraine]

I am, of course, referring to my beloved Guild Wars, which rewired my brain back in 2005. My family were early players via a friend of ours and have bought every expansion of every Guild Wars since we started figuring out GW(1) in pre-Searing Ascalon 21 years ago. And now there are actual updates again because the 20th anniversary was so successful last year—it's so fun to see tons of people in pre-Searing Ascalon City again, people chatting and figuring the game out again, etc ever since Reforged "came out". I just saw the anniversary announcement today: they're making GW1 playable on mobile(!!!!) this summer, something I have no desire to do ever and am deeply ambivalent about, but still vaguely support on the principle of doing more with GW1 than maintenance. And they've stuck to the basic principle of once you buy it, You Bought It Forever, even with the mobile game—it has no ads for people who already own GW1 but is F2P with ads if you don't.

Honestly, over 20 years of evading the subscription model for both a MMO-in-name-only in GW1 and the real deal in GW2 has earned a lot of affection beyond my emotional investment in the game and world itself. So I'm glad it's the one that I got obsessed with as a 19-year-old baby gamer. 

A taste of the opening of GW1 while I'm here, actually (open in a new tab for full size, if you want):







And here I'm playing with my parents last February to check out all the new updates, with my mother's character in white and mine in black: