I played in the BETA events and compared to other online games (pretty much any other RPG), it sucks. There's like really no way to tell whats going on in battle except if your opponent has more or less HP than you. There's no status messages telling you what's going on. You can't see how long your sepll is along in casting, no way to see exactly how much damage you're doing, nothing. And the fact that it is not truly an MMORPG but a "get 4 of your friends and play together" game. There isn't a single main town, but about 100 versions of it so you're extremely lucky if your friends can get on the same one (you can switch manually but when me I went to the one it said my friend was one, we still weren't on the same isntance of the main town).
It had some good ideas (like orderable NPCs to help you quest if you couldn't get any), I'll give it that, but they just aren't carried out well (eg: Those NPCs have extremely bad AI and don't heal you, only themselves). The graphics are nice, but I'm afraid graphics alone don't make a game.
And we here at Shadow Inc. give Guild Wars a 2 out of 5.