Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #776 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: NCsoft
• Released on: 2006-03-17
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 2000
• Original language: English, German, French

Manufacturer's Description
Guild Wars takes the best elements of today's massively multiplayer online games and combines them with a new mission-based design that eliminates the tedium of those games. You can meet new friends in towns or outposts, form a party, and then go tackle a quest together. Your party always has its own unique copy of the quest map, so camping, kill-stealing, and long lines to complete quests are all things of the past. Within a quest you have unprecedented freedom and power to manipulate the world around you: your magic can build bridges and open up new pathways, or it can burn down forests and tear the ground asunder.

You don't have to spend countless hours on a leveling treadmill to get to the interesting parts of the game, because combat is designed to be strategically interesting and challenging right from the beginning. You don't have to spend hours running around the world to prepare for a quest, because Guild Wars allows you to instantly travel to the beginning of any quest that you've previously unlocked. You'll never spend days playing only to discover that choices you made early on have left you with a permanently uncompetitive character, because the unique skill system in Guild Wars allows infinite experimentation but doesn't allow bad decisions to ruin a character. And you'll never meet new players only to discover that you can't play with them or compete against them because their characters are on a different server than yours; in Guild Wars, all characters live in one seamless world.

Built for Competition
After learning the game and building up your first character, you may choose to test your skills in head-to-head competition or guild warfare. The game is designed to reward player skill and teamwork, not time spent playing, so you won't need to spend hundreds of hours leveling up your character to compete.

The game includes integrated support for guilds, with guild banners and halls, chat rooms and forums. Guilds can challenge other guilds to battle, compete for control of key parts of the world, and be ranked on a worldwide ladder.

Unique Streaming Technology
ArenaNet's unique streaming technology forever eliminates the concept of patching a game. You don't have to wait a month for the next big patch to experience new content. Instead, the game constantly and intelligently streams new content to your computer in the background while you play. The world can change continually. This allows us to build a much more dynamic game world than any that has existed before.

Customer Reviews

Way better than expected
I used to really dislike MMORPG's for the reason most people don't like them, I thought they were for nerds. Yeah, I know that's pretty shallow and stereotypical, but I know a boy at college who is probably the biggest geek on the planet (I'm not picking on him, he admits it) and all he does is play World of Warcraft. Sad. So obviously that put me off quite a bit. But one of my friends (who doesn't really play MMO's but loves this) eventually convinced me to try Guild Wars, so I thought why not, it's free isn't it? I don't think I've ever been so addicted to a game! It really is great. I gave in and downloaded a free trial of WoW after getting this, and I just thought it was slow and boring with bland graphics, and why should you have to wait til you're about level 20 (which would take frigging ages, I got to level 4, nearly died of boredem and gave up) just to enjoy the game. Guild Wars on the other hand is superb. It's a joy to play from level 1 onwards (I'm at level 10 after only about 8/9 hours of play, I wonder how long it would take to get that far on WoW?-_-zzzz). The graphics are great, and whoever has a problem with the fighting system and says WoW's is better. WHY!!?? It's pretty much exactly the same, except that GW actually moves along whereas WoW is slow and tedious. Also, I found the community in Guild Wars very friendly and helpful. One person I met pretty much showed me the ropes and hepled me get going. So any problems? Well just one. I would have liked to have seen alot more slots for skills as there's so many awesome skills to learn, it can be hard to choose just 8 of them sometimes.
Pretty much a perfect online game as you don't have to pay a monthly fee and is overall just brilliant. Another good online game I got a trial of is Tabula Rasa, although you do have to pay for that one.
Guild wars = very highly recommended.

Long lasting love
A genuine alternative to WoW - really!

Buy the game then play it on-line for free (broadband connection required!).

Regular free updates and relatively cheap add-on packs which are games in their own right.

GW Prophesies, Factions and Nightfall are stand-alone games, each based in a different massive continent.
BUT if you own more than one, you can travel your characters between them.

When I swing a sword (bow, hammer, staff, wand, etc) I swing a sword in Guild Wars.

Good but Boring
I played this game for about 1 year, got far but got very bored. The graphics in this game are very good and was pleased with the story line. But i soon found that it started getting repetitive.Overall i thought this game was good. But it can get very boring! The max lvl you can get upto is 20!! ... Think carefully