Guild Wars

For specifically the first released game of the Guild Wars series, see Guild Wars Prophecies.

Guild Wars is an episodic series of multiplayer online role-playing games created by ArenaNet, a Seattle game development studio and a subsidiary of the South Korean game publisher NCsoft. As of February 2007, three episodes (called campaigns) have been released and a fourth is in production to be released sometime in 2007. Each campaign features a particular continent of a common fictional game world, and premiers new classes, mechanics, and competitive modes.

Although strictly a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), Guild Wars has important differences from other games in this genre; to emphasize these distinctions, ArenaNet calls the Guild Wars games cooperative/competitive online role-playing games (CORPGs). Primary among the differences from other commercial MMORPGs is that Guild Wars has no subscription fees: players are offered unlimited playing time on the game servers and their accounts never expire. Guild Wars also has several features designed to promote casual play by reducing grind: low maximum levels, instanced game zones, player-managed NPC henchmen (similar to bots), and instant travel between in-game outposts, for example.

A key design goal for Guild Wars is "balanced competitive gaming". Player characters may be created at the maximum level specifically for player versus player (PvP) matches, and equipment and skills in the game are balanced to ensure a level playing field for such characters. ArenaNet monitors the usage of the gameplay elements and publishes regular game updates to maintain balance and promote variety in competitive strategies and tactics. ArenaNet regularly hosts official Guild Wars tournaments where the most successful player guilds may compete for the chance to play live at gaming conventions and win cash prizes up to 50,000 USD.

Campaigns

The Guild Wars games are released in episodes known as campaigns. Players must purchase access to a campaign in order to access the game elements specific to that campaign, but all campaigns are linked together in the game world of Tyria. Each campaign is independent of the rest, so players may opt to play just the campaigns that interest them.

ArenaNet have planned to release new campaigns regularly at the rate of two every year. The first campaign, Guild Wars Prophecies, was released in April 2005, followed by Guild Wars Factions in April 2006 and Guild Wars Nightfall in October 2006. The next campaign is still in production, and has been scheduled for release sometime in 2007; according to the review of NightFall by GameSpy, the fourth campaign was "well underway" in May 2006.

Each campaign features a new co-operative storyline, new professions and skills, and new campaign-specific competitive arenas. A player who chooses not to purchase a campaign may still interact with those who do, which includes trading with them for items specific to the campaigns they haven't purchased. Players who own two campaigns may additionally transport their characters freely from one campaign to the other.

Accounts

A new player must create a Guild Wars account using a unique email and an access key received from the purchase of the game box or through the online store. Once created, additional keys may be added to the account; these keys can belong to additional campaigns that are linked to the account, or certain purchasable features (such as additional character slots) purchasable from the online store. Keys cannot be removed from an account, once added, and accounts cannot be merged.

An account is initially set to a specific game region depending on the version of the game purchased; Europe, America, Korea, Taiwan or Japan. Players from Europe and America may change territories up to four times.

A new account has four character slots, each additional campaign added to the account adds two additional character slots, and additional slots may be purchased from the online store.

Gameplay

Guild Wars combines aspects of action-based RPGs, online RPGs, and competitive multi-player games in a single framework. A player can participate in a story-driven RPG campaign just as easily as in team-based competitive arena matches. Players may create player characters for the co-operative Player versus Environment (PvE) story, or enter directly into competitive Player versus Player (PvP) with specifically designed characters.

Guild Wars has been likened to collectible card games such as Magic: the Gathering because of the way skills are used in gameplay. A player must choose a limited number of skills from the pool of available skills prior to entering battles, similar to assembling decks of Magic the Gathering cards. Players may consider a specific strategy for the area they are entering, or use a general skill-set up which utilizes synergies between groups of skills. When a team is formed, the strengths and weaknesses of player professions is also taken into account, allowing players to specialize into particular tasks and allows more complex skill combinations.

Co-operative gameplay

The co-operative parts of Guild Wars use several standard troves of the MMORPG genre. Players explore the game-world, kill monsters, perform quests, and complete missions to earn rewards and advance the story. Rewards include experience points, skill points, skills, gold, and items for the player character. Some of these rewards advance not only the particular character but also unlock features of the game account-wide.

The player is encouraged to form parties with other players or player-controlled NPCs. Parties are formed in in-game outposts called towns; each town allows a maximum party size, which varies from a minimum of one in the initial stages of the game to a maximum of twelve in advanced missions. Guild Wars uses instances for the co-operative areas of the game-world: on leaving a game outpost, each party is placed in a unique instance of the world created just for them. All non-verbal interaction between parties is, thus, limited to the towns.

In each campaign the player is involved in a linear story which they interact with by performing a series of primary quests and missions. Quests are given by NPCs by text dialog read by the player prior to accepting and completing the quest. As quests are completed new areas and missions are opened for the player's character to access. Missions are used for major events in the storyline, such as significant battles againt the main antagonist. These feature in-game cut scenes before, during and after completing the mission which advance the story and provide context to the actions which follow. Cut scenes are in the third-person, often feature the character, and may reveal elements of the story to the player which their character would normally not be aware of, such as revealing the actions of the antagonist.

Competitive Gameplay

Player versus Player (PvP) combat in Guild Wars is consensual and team-based. Such combat is restricted to special PvP areas, the majority of which are located on the core area known as The Battle Isles. Individual campaigns also have certain campaign-specific PvP arenas.

Players may participate in PvP combat with either their role-playing characters or with characters created specifically for PvP. Characters are rewarded with experience points for victories in competitive battle, and, in addition, the player account acquires faction points redeemable for in-game rewards.

The primary competitive arenas are:

Random Arena

Four-on-four matches with teams randomly composed from those waiting to enter combat. There are many different arenas with different victory conditions; deathmatch and kill-count.

Team Arena

Four-on-four matches with player-managed teams. These matches are played in the same areas as the Random Arena.

Heroes' Ascent

A continuous tournament where players form teams of six to battle for the favor of the gods. Teams progress by victory through a series of stages, leading to the final area of the tournament known as the Hall of Heroes. Stages in the Heroes' Ascent tournament include deathmatch, altar-control, and capture-the-relic victory conditions. Victories in the Heroes' Ascent award players with fame points that can be used to determine the rank of the player.

Guild Battles

Two guilds meet in guild halls and stage a tactical battle with the aim of killing the opposing Guild Lord, a well-protected NPC. Victory in guild battles affects the rank of the guild in the global Guild versus Guild (GvG) ladder. Until February 2007, the ladder used to be periodically reset between tournament seasons, and the top guilds at the end of a season would usually compete in official tournaments for prize money. Since then, ArenaNet has begun to make comprehensive alterations to the ladder mechanism such as phasing out ladder resets, but the full nature of the changes is yet to be announced.

Competitive matches may be observed by players by means of an observer mode. Important PvP matches such as matches in the Hall of Heroes or between highly rated guilds may be observed (after a certain delay) by others in order to see the tactics used by successful teams and attempt to learn or counter them.

Interaction between gameplay types

The designers of Guild Wars intended the game to offer "balanced competitive gaming". Because the core gameplay elements of skills and equipment are shared between the co-operative and competitive modes, elements of one style have an influence on the other. The following are some examples:

• Skills that are modified to ensure that they are not abusable in one style of play may cause unforseen problems in the other style. A few skills are available only in the co-operative modes.
• The level cap of 20 is crucial to balancing the competitive game; thus, role-playing characters are also limited to a level of 20, though they may routinely fight monsters of higher levels.
• The damage from weapons and the protection from armor are balanced with respect to competitive gaming. Monsters in the role-playing world are not subject to these same restrictions.

While it was the intent that the two gameplay types be closely linked, two communities of gamers have formed around each game type: those who play Guild Wars strictly as a co-operative RPG, and those who play it as a competitive PvP game.

Victories in the Heroes' Ascent tournament can alter the global favor of the gods, a gameplay mechanic that allows or restricts access to certain high-level co-operative areas of the game, and allows players in the territory with favor to obtain temporary bonuses from statues of Tyrian gods. In the Guild Wars Factions campaign, alliance faction earned in alliance battles can be used to gain control of game outposts, the best of which contain guarded entrances to the elite missions.

Player characters

Professions

File:Gw classes.jpg

The six core professions.

"Professions" are the Guild Wars analogue of character classes in role-playing games. A Guild Wars player character has a primary and secondary "profession" that together determine the skills and attributes available for that character.

The primary profession determines the character's appearance and armor, and gives the character the ability to use the primary profession more effectively using a primary attribute line. For example, the Elementalist profession receives the specialized Energy Storage attribute that boosts their energy reserves and improves skills associated with this attribute.

The secondary profession allows the character to access the skills and all but the primary attributes of the profession. A character may change his secondary profession freely in game outposts after unlocking the profession with a quest (or by paying a profession changer to do so).

There are six different professions available to players creating characters for Guild Wars Prophecies, and two additional professions in each of Guild Wars Factions and Guild Wars Nightfall. The six professions of Guild Wars Prophecies are considered to be core professions, and are present in every campaign. See the individual campaign articles for more information on the professions.

Skills

Players may select up to eight skills of their primary and secondary professions from that character's unlocked skills for use in combat. The skills are displayed in the skill-bar, from where they may be activated using the numerical keys 1–8, or using the mouse. Among the skills, certain skills are termed elite because they have features that are better than average skills. A player may equip at-most one elite skill in their skill-bar. The skill selection may be freely altered in the game outposts, but are fixed once the character enters an instanced dungeon or competitive arena. There are several varieties of skills: an attack skill, for example, is an enhanced attack action using a weapon, whereas a spell is a skill that uses magic to cause or heal damage or other effects. Skills also involve strategic and tactical conditions: wards and wells, for example, can be used for territorial control by creating zones of favor or opposition, and binding rituals can create stationary attacking units similar to turrets from real-time strategy games. Most skills have a number of counter skills to negate its effects, or helper skills to ameliorate them.

The pool of skills available to the player and his characters is initially limited. Additional skills are unlocked through progression in the game's story or by redeeming faction points. Skills may also be captured from slain bosses. Finally, a full set of skills for a profession may be purchased in the form of an unlock pack from the game's online store. When a skill is first acquired, it is unlocked for the entire account, making it available to all PvP characters made on the account.

The effectiveness of a skill is based on the level in the attribute linked to the skill. To improve the effectiveness of skills the player must allocate a number of attribute points to an attribute (from a maximum of 200 attribute points). Higher levels in an attribute require greater numbers of attribute points, thus forcing the player to specialize in only a few attributes.

Equipment

Player characters may be equipped with armor specialized for a primary profession. Each armor type has associated bonuses such as additional energy or lowered duration for hexes. Armor bonuses in the first two Guild Wars Prophecies and Guild Wars Factions campaigns were not modifiable, but Guild Wars Nightfall introduced a new kind of armor that may be modified using insignias.

Runes may be used to modify armor to improve certain attributes. The more powerful runes come at a cost to the health of the character, but these may be countered with runes that increase the character's health. Each armor piece may have at most one rune, thus limiting the total number of wearable runed items.

There are many different types of weapons. Weapons may be used by any class, but their associated skills are only available to particular professions. For example, although all professions may use a longbow, only (primary or secondary) rangers may use the longbow to perform bow-related skills such as skill interruption or poisoning opponents. Swords, axes, spears and wands or rods are one-handed weapons, which also allow the character to wield a shield for additional defense, or a focus for additional energy. Weapons can have certain modifiers that affect the damage dealt by the weapon or provide bonuses to the wielder. These modifiers may be randomly generated, with the best modifiers produced on the rarest weapons which are described in a gold color, or they may be pre-assigned on certain unique weapons that use a green color in their descriptions. Certain modifications are salvageable from weapons to be used on other weapons.

Weapon modifications and runes that are found during role-playing are automatically unlocked for the account. Weapons, modifications and runes may also be sold to other players or NPC merchants, but one does not unlock features by buying modifications or runes. PvP characters may use any modifications or runes that have been unlocked for the account.

Builds

A particular combination of skills, attributes and sometimes armor and weapons is known as a build. It is common for a build to be made up of 8 skills. Some builds are more effective at particular tasks than others, and so are more common than others. A build may be at an individual player level, or include all of the roles in a team to utilize skill interactions across multiple players.

Builds may be saved in the form of templates to the local hard-drive for efficient re-loading at a later time. These templates may be used to keep track of effective builds one has discovered, or may be exchanged between players in order to share builds.

Guilds

As the name suggests, guilds are a core element of Guild Wars, manifesting not only as social units but also being closely linked with the game mechanics. Though a player is not required to join a guild, it adds value to the gaming time and increases camaraderie. Often, joining a guild is a good way to get help from more experienced players as the in-game guild interface allows communication between guild members.

The guild leader who creates the guild can furnish it with a cape and a guild hall; the latter may also be upgraded with NPCs providing services to guild members. The leader recruits new players to his guild, and promotes a number of them to guild officers, who can then continue with recruitment and further promotion of officers. Guild officers can dismiss players from the guild, but only the leader retains the power to dismiss officers and disband the guild.

In addition to membership in guilds, a player may be a guest member of a number of other guilds. Guest privileges are limited to visiting the guild hall and participating in guild combat, and they expire after a certain time.

Up to ten guilds may ally together to form an alliance. Members of an alliance may communicate over a shared chat channel, and visit the guild halls of the other guilds of the alliance. Each alliance has a leader guild that initiates the alliance, the leader of which guild is also the alliance leader, who may admit or dismiss guilds from the alliance. Each guild is, in fact, initially an alliance of one. The ability to form alliances is restricted to guilds whose leaders own the Guild Wars Factions campaign, where the concept of alliances was introduced. Each alliance must be devoted to either the Kurzicks or the Luxons, two in-game nations locked in perpetual conflict.

Alliance Faction, a crutial element in the Guild Wars Factions campaign, is an in-game reward given to players for completing certain quests or achieving victory in the alliance battles. This faction is actually earned by the players for the entire alliance. If an alliance acquires enough faction to make it to the top few, they are given control of an in-game outpost belonging to their corresponding nation. Control of outposts have several benefits: they give member of the controlling alliance access to restricted areas of the outpost, containing merchants that sell items at discounted rates, and a "fireworks vendor" who can organize a fireworks display for a fee. The top outposts of the Kurzicks and the Luxons, their respective capital cities, contain entrances to the elite missions. Members of the controlling alliances may transfer players from outside the alliance into these elite missions, an activity that is known as ferrying or taxiing. Alliance faction degrades over time at a logarithmic rate, so alliances that do not keep replenishing their faction will eventually lose control of their outposts to other alliances with higher faction.

Technical features

Development

Guild Wars is the first game created by developer ArenaNet. Senior developers from Blizzard Entertainment, some involved in the early development of World of Warcraft. left to create ArenaNet to develop a game which took risks with game design and business model.

Guild Wars was developed in an environment following the release and success of EverQuest where many MMORPGs were proposed and in development hoping to capitalize on Sony's success. As a result ArenaNet positioned Guild Wars in a niche in the online RPG genre, offering online gameplay without a subscription fee. ArenaNet believed that players prefer not to pay subscription fees for every game they play and paying a fee causes players to make a "lifestyle commitment" to a particular game, rather than switching between different games which they considered to be more usual gaming behaviour. Jeff Strain, a founder of ArenaNet, states "It is our opinion that the free online gaming model combined with frequent content updates is the optimum online paradigm for interfacing with consumers and creating a significant, enduring gaming franchise."

ArenaNet has used open beta testing throughout the development of the Guild Wars series. For Prophecies first public appearance in April 2004, in conjunction with E3 2004, people were encouraged to download the client and play an online demo of the game to test its networking capabilities. This was followed by a preview event and several beta test weekend events. Both Factions and Nightfall had similar test weekends prior to their release. Nearly 500,000 players spent an average of 8.5 hours playing the Nightfall PvE content during its second beta test weekend.

Aspects of both Factions and Nightfall were influenced by player feedback. Gameplay for Prophecies was altered after release to introduce changes to skill capture and experience acquisition and add faction to PvP parts of the game.

No further playable content, such as quests and missions, is expected to be developed for players who only own the Guild Wars Prophecies and Guild Wars Factions campaigns. Modifications to interfaces, such as the changes prior to the introduction of Nightfall, and skill balances are globally applied so players of any campaign continue to get access to these changes. Bug fixes and minor enhancements continue for all campaigns.

ArenaNet also continues to develop in-game events coinciding with real-world events for players of all campaigns. These events feature minigames, quests, town decorations, masks and collectible gifts. Smaller events also occur which include weekends where the rate at which certain items drop while out questing is increased or the rewards from PvP play are improved.

Guild Wars development was first announced in April 2003. Guild Wars Prophecies, initially marketed simply as Guild Wars, was released in April 2005. Sorrows Furnace added further playable content to Prophecies in September 2005. Guild Wars Factions was released exactly a year after Prophecies in April 2006 followed six months later by Guild Wars Nightfall in October 2006. A fourth campaign is known to be in development, but no release date has yet been announced.

Game engine

ArenaNet developed their own game engine for Guild Wars. Engine components developed for Guild Wars are available to be licensed to other NCSoft companies and have been used in other NCSoft games. However this technology will not be made available to non-NCSoft companies.

Content delivery and network architecture

To support their fee-free approach to online gaming the server architecture developed for the game was core to minimizing the bandwidth costs associated with maintaining game servers. Infrastructure design was influenced by the developers experiences with Battle.net development.

The game client is small. Each time there is an update to the game the existing client automatically downloads a new version of the client which examines a manifest of files to determine which files have been modified and therefore need to be downloaded to the client machine. This manifest is prioritized, the most important files are download prior to the player being able to start the game, the rest are downloaded in the background while the player is playing. ArenaNet uses this rapid update technology to make changes on demand and close exploits in the system.

ArenaNet also utilizes their update technology to preload content from new Guild Wars campaigns onto existing players' accounts prior to the release of that campaign. The content is only activated after the right key is added to the player's account and the game servers allow the campaign changes to go live.

The game is server hosted. Much of the game intelligence is performed or verified by the game servers. The Guild Wars servers are set up in a distributed model. Players are presented with what appears to be a single server but their data is moved to different locations or servers depending on where in the world they are playing and server load at the time.

External links

• The official Guild Wars website
• GuildWiki, an unofficial Guild Wars wiki