Guild Wars: Factions

May 8,2006 -

Guild Wars brought something new to the online gaming genre last year by offering to do something no other game had done, offer free online play. Sure it may have been devastating, but fans quickly caught on to the action/rpg style of gameplay and have been steadily growing over the past year. With the release of Factions, not only does Arenanet gives fans more of what they want, but they do it in an extraordinary manner.

Factions takes place in a world called Cantha, a new place brimming with Asian beauty. After participating in the short tutorial you find out that a plague has broken out and is killing helpless citizen all around Cantha. After discovering that an evil warrior named Shiro, who died hundreds of years before, is behind the outbreak, you go on a quest to uncover the origins of who killed Shiro all those years ago and devise a plan to defeat him again. At this point in the game you meet two faction groups, the Kurzicks and the Luxons, who both had a hand in defeating Shiro. While the Kurzicks honor loyalty and innovation, the Luxons rely on strength and honor. It is up to you to decide which side you inevitably choose to join an alliance with, as your allegiance will help in controlling the massive worlds. After choosing your respected side you will continue the main story by earning faction for your alliance. As more faction is earned the land is divided accordingly by who has control.

This is where Alliance and Faction battles come into play. Alliance battles can feature up to 16 players per team, each fighting for a piece of faction. After one side becomes victorious, the line which separates the two factions sways, showing the new boundaries between the territories. The line never really falters, and choosing one side over the other is based entirely on personal preference. If you do happen to join one of the winning teams and you compete in an Alliance battle, than you are rewarded with Elite missions, which offer substantial amounts of experience points and prizes. Not only do Alliance battles give PvP the thrill of full-scale war, but RPG players have a chance of participating in the rare missions as well. However, Alliance battles are not required in order to gain faction for your desired side. If PvP is simply not your thing, than you could try your hand in selected Challenge missions. These new missions are basically a race against the clock, either by defeating a selected number of enemies or reaching said destination in the allotted time. If you manage to complete your goal, your side will gain faction and the team will earn rare goodies.

Essentially Factions offers more to Guild Wars players than Alliance battles. What makes Guild Wars Factions so enjoyable is perhaps the ability to create your own unique character. From the get-go, you are prompted to create your own custom character, whether you choose to tackle it out in the storyline or delve straight into the PvP mode, the character development process still remains the same. Once your basic appearance is set at hand, the next task has you picking your character’s class. Overall, depending on which class you choose to make your character, there will always be one class that will be better and worse than it. This type of strategic decision leaves the game open for anyone, and doesn’t neglect Factions to become only a single player game. Perhaps the biggest addition to Factions are the two new character classes, Ritualist and Assassin. While the Assassin can deal massive amounts of damage in nearly shorts amount of time, they have poor defense and require almost non-stop protection for success in battle. Ritualists tend to base their role on support, summoning spirits in battle to help fight or giving allies selected effects to help boost their attack or defense.

Along with the previous six, players will have the ability to choose from eight classes to give their character, all ranging from melee fighting to healing. Each class has nearly 75 different skills to choose from, and once you pick your secondary profession the total can rise to over 150. This gives the player an incredible amount of strategic playing, as only eight skills can ever be equipped at one time, and choosing the right skills for the job can always be a make or break decision. As you progress through the storymode, your character will level up. Although the max level cap in Faction is 20, the game does a great job of focusing on teamwork, as most of the enemies in future locations are leveled higher than you. Leveling is done much faster in Factions as in the previous game. While the original game has players doing nearly 20 hours of the storymode before they reached level 20, Factions players can achieve that goal in a mere 3 or 4 hours. Although some may find this rather unnecessary, it acts as more of a tune-up to the players in the original game.

If you have the luxury of owning both games, than you have the ability to travel to both worlds. Once you reach the required city, you can than travel from Cantha to Tyria, or vice versa, at will by using the click of the mouse. Essentially, when original Guild Wars players bring their players over to the new world, they already would have been max level, with all of the best weapons, armor, and skills. The fast leveling in Factions offers new players the chance to play alongside these hallowed veterans, and not be cast aside as some outsider. As stated before, Factions relies heavily on teams. There is not one class that dominates all others; so naturally organizing a well-balanced team is part of the fun. However, if human people sometimes are ineffective for you, there is always the option to ally yourself with the AI controlled henchman. Although the hench have been notorious for being slightly stupid, they have been upgraded rather nicely in Factions. There are some minor bugs with the hench, like the warriors who will run ahead and cause all the enemies to attack you, or the healers who heal themselves before anyone else, but overall it is nothing to drive you away from using them. Once you engage in battle, it is up to the team to fight together to take down the enemies.

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