14 DAY TRIAL // 
The computer games market has seen a steady increase in releases over the past years. Five years ago you could only find a couple of titles to fight for the game of the year supremacy, but nowadays the gaming scene is saturated. Concerning the latest trend of online role playing games, all you have to do is take a peek on www.mmorpg.com and see for yourself the amount of games that are being developed. Sadly, most of them will see limited success and will fade away in the backwaters of gaming history. Things will never be the same again, yet the same they remain as there still are only a handful of titles that have imposed themselves on the market. This might very well be the case with NCSoft Corporation's Guild Wars who reached its next chapter with the release of the standalone expansion Guild Wars: Factions on the 28th of April 2006.
Story The lands of Tyria have ever been in conflict, some say since the very creation of the world. War took many shapes and forms but continuous evolution of the human kingdoms presented it with the finest: the guild wars. They were the expression of power hungering within the magical races of the land, as guilds rose stronger than kingdoms and kings alike. Conflict wore down all nations and their denizens grew weary of all the constant fighting. Eventually the guild wars did come to an end, only to hail an even greater war brought by the beastly Charr. They poured down from the north in vast numbers, like a plague that swept all three human kingdoms alike. Ascalon, Orr, and Kryta engaged in conflict for more than fifty years dropped their older disputes and formed an alliance of convenience in order to survive the new threat. With great sacrifice, the ravaged kingdoms eventually repelled the invasion in Guild Wars Chronicles, but this has not yet come to pass. Guild Wars Factions takes place on the continent of Cantha, way south of Tyria, roughly two years after the Charr invasion. Here, new and existing Guild Wars players alike join the epic quest to defeat an ancient evil and save the war-torn empire, pretty much as they did in Chronicles.
Gameplay Guild Wars learned the lessons provided by the existing MMORPGs on the open market, therefore gathering a wide set of mixed features. Its new mission based design eliminates some disputed aspects in those games. Each time the player leaves a town or an outpost, his group enters a unique copy of map. I can tell you that instancing is overused in Guild Wars, Chronicles or Factions alike. This makes camping, kill-stealing and long waiting times to complete quests obsolete. It is a feature and a problem in itself as it kills off both solo PvP and a large part of player interaction. I always gave quite an importance to the "massive" factor in MMO and over instancing the game's areas is not the right way to ensure it. This does open up the way for some interesting tweaks, such as instant travel between map areas. It is all there, in the grand scheme of things, where NCSoft wants us to enjoy ourselves without the burden of excessive downtime or boresome walks to remote key zones. Unlike other MMORPGs, here you are paired up with a bunch of NPC teammates right off the start in order to plan a strategic approach to the game's combat challenges. The Factions campaign can be enjoyed even without the original Prophecies campaign as the addon does not require the original game in order to be played. I don't have to tell you how great that is, from a player's perspective. The current level cap of 20 is not going to be higher in Factions or any other future addon due to balance issues. There are the six professions available from Prophecies and two new ones fresh from the oven, namely the assassin and the ritualist. Besides the implementation of about 300 new skills (out of which 90 are elite) the new professions are a landmark to the new series of missions in Factions.
The assassin is a powerful yet versatile killing machine, that can use the added benefits of dual wield, teleportation and stealth to bring down his foes. Clearly a fighting profession, it lacks most of the defensive capabilities that are available to the Warrior. It makes up through special combo moves and the added ability to cripple and do extra damage on cursed opponents. This way the Assassin is most suited for team combat as the main damage dealer with excellent support for Mesmers. The ritualist is a master of the spirit. With the help of his otherworldly companions he uses his powers to protect and heal allies. The impact of a ritualist's spells is directly linked to the number of spirits he calls forth; otherwise it is in many ways a profession similar to the Monk. Not a good damage dealer at all, the ritualist is a healing and support class. The Ritualist is a spirit summoner who will use lots of minions to attack, heal, defend, buff players, or power up spells. Neither of them is invulnerable, yet the possibilities are numerous since every character in Guild Wars has a primary, unalterable, profession as well as a secondary, easily changeable one. As a side note, both the assassin and the ritualist greatly enhance the already frantic PvP experience and their abilities have not yet been tested by the players to their fullest extent. This ensures a great flow of new characters - almost half the city dwellers I've encountered are assassins or ritualists - as well as non standard and rather abusive strategy developments.
Essential improvements in character customization are to be found, as face, hair, skin color, clothes color, height, sex plus the endless supply of armor and weapon models and colors will keep you puzzled while you search for the most suitable combination. Of course, you can always skip this and cut right to the chase. So here we are, after a thorough customization, surfacing Shing Jea Island, 1582, ready to learn from the greatest living hero of Cantha, ritualist Master Togo. It is quite annoying to see they implemented a rather stuffy tutorial now. In Prophecies there were no mandatory tutorials and NPCs rarely held one back from exploring and killing monsters. In Factions, there is no way to bypass the tutorial once you created a new role playing character. The waiting and all this docile clicking is driving me mad as I would very much rather I was smashing up some monsters, be they level 0 as they are. It's still more fun. Eventually you get out of the Jin Monastery and can experience the game for real. There is the same problem with newly created PvP-only characters. It takes ages until you get out of the tutorial zone and unlike the previous title; there are no real PvP battles in the beginning. Just endless PvE team battles where you must kill off NPC teams with help from henchmen or other players. Once you learn the base mechanics of the game, you should have the appropriate character level to go out and enjoy your first cooperative mission, one of many that will guide your progress until level 20 and beyond.
With Guild Wars Factions we'll see the introduction of Alliances between Guilds, alliances that are made up of ten guilds. Once an Alliance obtains a city, it will have access to elite PvE quests. The challenge level of those missions scales to the size of the city. Over the course of 24 hours, whichever faction wins the most battles for a city will own it. These Alliances will share a chat channel and be able to visit each other's guild halls. More importantly, Alliances will have access to a real-time map of the struggle between Luxon and Kurzick. The Kurzicks are the socially frozen, highly conservative and religious culture. In fact, the world of the Kurzicks is a mirror of the petrified forest in which they carve their homes. The Luxons, on the other hand, are a wild nation of seafaring nomads who have traded in their ships for magical walking machines that traverse the jade ocean. As a group, they believe only the strong survive, therefore driving themselves to new experiences in order to enrich their lives. Imagine being able to take control of a whole city, trigger special events, get access to exclusive areas, and work with allies to coordinate global strategy in order to take over the world! That's taking it one step further than most MMORPGs I've seen.
On another note, the ladder system involves guilds rather than individual players. In the end game, Guild Wars Factions is all about team play and team tactics. Most character skills can be acquired with relative ease in player versus environment play. The great thing about this skill system is that players can easily change their secondary profession to better suit their purposes, be they cooperative PvE missions or PvP frenzy. Combined with the free point reallocation system, the versatility of your avatar's powers is limited only by the use of imagination. Guild Wars was not designed to be a colossal time sink, neither early nor late game. As the developers stated on numerous occasions, the main goal was to give an equal fighting chance to the casual player as well as the hardcore gamer, a goal splendidly achieved. Of course, this does mean that the average lifespan of a Guild Wars account will be lower than, let's say, a World of Warcraft account, purely because farming and long instance runs will keep the player glued to the seat for longer periods of time. The simplification of this particular game mechanic is a blade with two edges.
Sound and Video Character customization is one of the assets Guild Wars made itself known for and I have to agree, characters look simply amazing. Having breathtaking detail and full freedom of choice regarding the way your body, weapons and clothes look is good for the ego, be it in game as it is. It even went so far that armor and weapon dyes are sort of a second type of currency, besides regular gold. Players go out of their way to paint themselves using black dye, being the most expensive. After all, you can't look grim and evil without putting some effort into it.
The designers put extra care into the drawing and rendering of those models. Their effort can be widely appreciated especially when you do some non standard moves, by emoting sitting, sleeping, dance, laughter or salutes. Overall, the game has beautiful graphics that will look just fine even if you're using an older video card. Often enough you'll find yourself pausing the gore filled action for a minute or two and simply admire the landscape. Either tall mountains, covered with vast forests, bare rocks where waterfalls descend into oblivion or deserts filled with trickery, they all have an exotic, oriental feeling about them that you will learn to enjoy.
Community Eventually, Guild Wars developers went to the next level, introducing new game content with the least of effort and the best of results. What do I mean about this? Easy, major in game events such as the newly completed Dragon festival, a great way of getting players to delve even more into the game's cultural and ethnic particularities. The event is one of a kind, assuming they won't reenact it the next year, but that's a long time. Participants in the Dragon Festival can join in fun carnival-type games, play new mini-missions and special PvP gameplay, undertake unique quests, and collect Asian-flavored treats such as red bean cakes and rice wine. Ceremonial Dragon Masks will be awarded to those players who are able to collect enough globes filled with the Jade Wind essence that changed Cantha two hundred years ago.
Support There is no in game support in Guild Wars: Factions. Sadly enough, the only thing that resembles support is found on the game's website and in fact is nothing more than a detailed and steadily updated FAQ. As there is no monthly fee required for playing on the Guild Wars: Factions server, the lack of support is almost understandable. The game is quite stable, with no major video issues reported and servers rarely, if ever, go down. ArenaNet's unique streaming technology eliminates the concept of patching. You don't have to wait months for the next big patch to arrive in order to experience new content. Instead, the game constantly streams content to your computer, in the background, while you play. The world changes continually, in fact, in just a couple of days we had the game for testing, it changed versions at an alarming rate.
Conclusion Guild Wars is a subscription free online role-playing game where players explore a bewitching fantasy world, develop fully personalized characters in both appearance and skills, and compete in massive battles with players from all around the world. Developed by a group of ex-Blizzard employees, the game has done the seemingly impossible task of surviving World of Warcraft's obliterating grip on the gaming scene. It's managed to promote originality and with that gather up a dedicated fan base of over two million players.
