One of our favorite games this year also happens to be the best MMO that was released in 2005. It's difficult not to heap praise on Guild Wars: it has a novel approach to PvP, it has great PvE content, and there's no subscription fee to play it. When you consider that last point, it's easy to assume that the game's quality simply isn't up to par with subscription-based MMOs, but, as anyone whose played it can attest, that is simply not the case.

But perhaps "MMO" is a bit of misnomer in Guild Wars' case. The genre is, traditionally, restrictive and unapproachable. Guild Wars' designers have seemingly gone out of their way to so that this won't be the case with their game. Progressing through character levels is only your focus for a fraction of the time you'll spend playing the game. That's because the game (correctly) works under the premise that players want to get to the fun stuff as soon as possible -- the "fun stuff," of course, being the PvP.

Many MMOs have attempted to focus on PvP, with varying degrees of success. Guild Wars' approach, however, is pretty ingenious. By incorporating elements native to team-based FPS's, the game has managed to provide PvP battles that range from short, contained skirmishes, to full-on guild-on-guild battles, all the while avoiding the pitfalls associated with this type of combat in the genre: namely, griefing. In short, Guild Wars is the most novel MMO to be released in a long time, let alone this year, and it's not solely because of the game's content.