Guild Wars Factions
Guild Wars: Factions is a stand-alone adventure you can play independently or as part of the Guild Wars world. The stand-alone Guild Wars: Factions is the second campaign in ArenaNet’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Explore an entire new continent, with a wide range of professions, skills, missions, and monsters. There are also new options for Cooperative and Player-versus-Player (PvP) play, and enhanced features for guilds.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars AWSOME
I love Guild Wars and was very happy that you have it for sale. I had went to so many different stores and websites and overall your’s was the lowest price which was wonderful!
Thank you for your great service!
Loyal Customer,
Tianna Brady
1 Star Pffft - No Thanks!
I gave this a one because the graphics are good, but the game itself fell extremely short of my expectations. If you want action without complication, try Runescape … the game leaves my character stranded and me confused. Sorry to all the GWF lovers but this game blows.
5 Stars Great new GW campaign
Factions adds another two professions to the Guild Wars universe, and tens of hours of extra gameplay. The new assassin profession is a ton of fun to play, and the plot is pretty good. I enjoyed this game quite a bit, and there’s no monthly fee to worry about. The interface is clean and easy to use, and the game will run on most computers, even those with only modest specs. The combat system is great and the game is not difficult to learn at all. For anyone looking for a great PvP experience, this game/series is where you should start. But never fear PvE players. This game has more than enough for you as well. Overall, this is a great game.
4 Stars Solid, but not for the beginner
Factions is the second game in the Guild Wars series. It can stand alone, like its predecessor (Prophecies). But it’s unlike the first game in many respects.
The most obvious difference is the difficulty. Prophecies starts out slowly, with an extended tutorial and a slow leveling curve. You can make it halfway through the story before hitting the maximum level of 20, and it can take quite a few hours to do so, since you’ll go through numerous story missions along the way.
Factions has a brief tutorial, which you can choose to skip — then it drops you into the middle of the action. You run into higher-level creatures more quickly. Quests are more difficult, in general. They also offer greater rewards, both in experience and in gold.
By the time you leave the starting island, you’ll have done two story missions. If you’ve done other quests on the island, you can easily be somewhere between level 17 and level 20. And this can take as little as three hours or so.
Aside from that difference and its Asian theme, Factions is more developed in subtler ways, too. There are two new classes, the assassin and the ritualist. (These can be taken “backwards” to Prophecies, if you own that game, as well as to the subsequent Nightfall or Eye of the North.) There are different henchmen. There are different monsters (mostly more difficult ones). There are different skills to find, many of which are less straightforward than Prophecies skills — a skill might have an extra effect only in certain circumstances, for instance. Finding synergies becomes even more important.
The story is surprisingly solid — a mysterious plague is spreading, and you quickly track the cause to a long-dead traitor, now returned. It’s classic fantasy material, but some of the twists it takes from there are a bit less predictable.
Factions is probably the least forgiving of the three campaigns for new players to start in, but an experienced player will find it the quickest starting point, and there’s a lot to like. The main downside is that the henchmen are no smarter than they were in Prophecies — the “hero” NPCs of Nightfall are far superior.
4 Stars Guild Wars Asia
First the basics: this is the second chapter of the Guild Wars series. The first is now called “Prophecies” (Guild Wars).
Despite the sound of that, this chapter, as well as the one following this one called “Nightfall” (Guild Wars Nightfall), are independently playable chapters that do NOT have any prerequisites. In other words, you don’t need to have the first chapter to play the second chapter, etc.
Also like the other two chapters, there is NO MONTHLY FEE for playing Guild Wars. Just pay them once for the game and connect to play as often as your family members will allow.
Now for the things that you typically don’t find from other reviews: the game itself is based on an East Asian (blend of Japanese and Chinese influences) motif and offers an interesting alternative to the typical fantasy setting that is usually based on old Europe. Characters, as well as the various locations and background, have an East Asian look about them. Names like “Jatoro Musagi,” “Yijo,” “Jamei,” “Chiyo,” etc. are common. It may take some getting used to if you’re used to dealing with Anglo-sounding names. Opulent pagodas are juxtaposed against shanty towns to suggest a dichotomy of the affluent and the poor among the citizens of the Canthan Empire that your characters will be based on. There are also other interesting bits and pieces of the culture that would’ve been fascinating had the game spent time to explore them.
But this is a first and foremost a fighting game, so most of the attention will be spent on armor and skill acquisition. The mechanics of the game is similar to that of the first chapter: you learn and arm your characters with eight skills that, along with your weapons, consume various types of energy/mana type of resource and pretty much try to wear down your opponents’ health before yours reaches zero and dies. Different sets of skills, each requiring different activation times, energy consumption, and recharge times, allow different combination to accommodate different situations and enemies. And much of your time will be spent on tuning your character to have the most effective collection of skills (you only can arm eight skills at any one time, out of possible hundreds) for the role, location, and enemy you are facing.
There are two modes of game play: PvE (player vs environment) where your character (optionally participating in a team with other players) follows a story path and finish various quests that leads you through various locations in the game, and PvP (player vs player) where your character get to fight against other players’ characters in teams. The first is more relaxed, and you progress at your own pace. The latter is more intense, and you get/have to deal with the dynamics of peer players.
Lastly, there are guilds. These are similar to clans, gangs, whatever name you apply to a group of like-minded players that share a common cape and “guild hall” where you can initiate larger forms of PvP like guild-vs-guild and Alliance Battles that involve multiple guilds on both sides, something new introduced by this chapter exclusively. This chapter has a slight bias toward PvP, as you will find many opportunities to engage in PvP battles toward the latter parts of the game when you need to join one of the two “factions” that seem to perpetually be at war with one another. And once you join one, you have a ton of enemies built-in.
Have fun fighting.
Filed under: MMORPG Software