Guild Wars: Factions

Guild Wars: Factions is the second chapter in the Guild Wars Universe. Again, it is subscription free.

Factions is set in the Japanese touched world Cantha; actually it’s a continent south of Tyria for those who own Prophecies. The story begins with a letter from Master Togo to his old friend Brother Mhenlo, where he explains that a plague is spreading though Cantha and the healers can’t find a way to cure it, so he asks for Mhenlo's help. As a veteran, you already know Mhenlo, so he asks you to help him help the Canthans. If you start a new game, you will begin on an isolated tutorial-like island off the coast of the continental Cantha, and you will experience the story directly from the start. Ultimately, as Cantha is split into two powerful, yet rival, factions – the Luxons and the Kurzicks, you will have to choose a side and battle the other one.

Like Prophecies, Factions is a so-called CORPG rather then a MMORPG, which stands for Cooperative Online RPG. This means that the only true MMORPG-like environments are the cities or mission start locations; only there you can meet with hundreds of other players, chat with them, trade with them, or create or join groups. Once you leave the cities into an explorable area or start a mission, your group is on its own in an individual game instance.

At the PvE side (Player vs. Environment – basically the RPG part) you can solve a huge amount of quests (you gain experience and later Faction points from them) or participate in a mission (missions are big quests which advance the story).

On PvP side, you can now not only play in the various arenas or battle a Guild vs. Guild match, but now some Missions are story-related PvP Missions. This is also the primary way, once you choose your Factions side, to conquer and control cities and open special elite missions for the faction you are allied with.

Gameplay wise, as already said, you start in a city, where you create or join a group, either with other players or with NPCs (though you can also play alone, but then you may have difficulty beating the enemy). And while it is called an Online RPG, you can play it without other human players, not just the quests, but also the missions. You can control your character with either the mouse or the keyboard, moving though the instances. Once you have two towns on the world map, you can jump between those towns without walking the way.

When creating a character, you have to choose the class and later go dual-class, ultimately allowing 56 class combinations from the 8 classes: Warrior, Ranger, Necromancer, Monk, Elementalist, Mesmer, Assassin (new) and Ritualist (new). When playing a character, you have access to up to 8 skills/spells which you can take with you in an instance, and those can be chosen from 100+ skills per character class (but you have to gain them in the first place of course). There are both Prophecies-Skills (limited number) and Faction-Skills in the game, only those who own both chapters have access to all skills.

And since your maximum level is locked at level 20 (and the enemy level is not locked there), you have to carefully plan what classes should be in a group and what skills they use, because particularly if you are in a mission and your group is wiped out, you have to restart it (though while questing, you are revived at the next respawn portal – but with a hit point penalty of up to 60%).