Guild Wars: Factions

Overall score:

The original Guild Wars, named Prophecies, was a quirky entrant into the MMORPG genre that played like a lush, 3D version of Diablo 2—it had a well-formed fantasy world, point-and-click combat, and free online play. This is not surprising, given that it was created by many of the same people who pioneered Diablo 2 at Blizzard North. It also managed to be a much deeper game than Diablo ever was, because the endless search for unique items was replaced by an endless search for powerful yet narrow skills: before venturing out into the wilds you would choose eight skills to take with you, combining them in new ways to create a unique and fascinating character. The skill system has often been compared to building a deck for a collectible card game, and the resemblance is certainly strong. Take that depth of gameplay and wrap it up in a very simple interface and a humongous, gorgeous, story-driven world, and you have a game that everyone will love.

The trouble is, you don’t get to that level of gameplay until at least level 10, and you don’t really hit the game’s full stride until you max out at 20. The early levels are really intended as tutorial to prepare you for what’s next; whereas most MMORPGs struggle to fill the end game, Guild Wars was all end game with a very slow, unappealing early game that turned off a lot of players before they ever got to see what the game had to offer. Compounding that problem was the Searing, a game event that was cool in narrative but very awkward in practice—after you’d messed around in the kingdom of Ascalon for a while you could elect to move on to the next stage, at which point Ascalon is invaded by monsters and the entire kingdom is destroyed. Like I said, this makes for a neat story, but in terms of gameplay it’s confusing and annoying—you’re very limited pre-searing, the awesome graphics depict only an ugly wasteland post-searing, and you’re still not out of the tutorial section so it feels like a false start. Many a player has quit in post-searing Ascalon never knowing that a really awesome game was just a few missions away, once you finally leave the wasteland, explore some awesome new terrain, and start finding the really juicy skills.

So what does all this have to do with Guild Wars: Factions? We’ll start by summing up those first two paragraphs in one sentence: Guild Wars was a great game obscured by an initially poor user experience. Now I’ll sum up Guild Wars: Factions in another sentence: it fixes all of these problems, making the gameplay more accessible and the endgame (by which I mean “the real game”) far easier to reach. Now I’ll sum it up again: it’s awesome.

First of all the searing is gone, replaced by the much simpler device of a training island. The game takes place on a new continent in the same world, with a distinctly asian theme (not any culture or language specifically, but an amalgamation of them all). The island you begin on is home to a training monastery, and over the course of your first few hours of play you’ll be ably instructed, in-game, in how to play, how to group, how to combine skills and find new strategies, and more. Secondly, the pace has been accelerated to help give you more money, more skills, and more levels a lot more quickly than you got them in the original game, so that even a casual player can probably finish the “tutorial” portion of the game in less than a week and make it to the main continent (probably around level 14 or 15, for most people). Even better, you never feel like you’re wasting your time in “just a tutorial,” and the gorgeous graphics are put to use on a beautiful island rather than an irritating wasteland.

The asian theme shines through in many different way in different areas of the game. The training island is pastoral and lush, but once you make it to the main continent you’re thrust into the nation-spanning city of Kaineng, seemingly built entirely out of scrap and perfectly evoking a dark fantasy version of Hong Kong. Later you will arrive in two stunning and unique landscapes, one a massive jade forest and other a solidified jade sea. The art direction for the game is superb, and manages to present a lot of fascinating sites that you’ve never seen before in games or movies—an impressive feat on its own.

The game's storyline is not as strong as it was in the first Guild Wars, which is disappointing. I loved the driven, linear feel of the Prophecies campaign that had you desperately searching for a way to lead the Searing refugees out of ruined Ascalon, over the icy mountains, and into a new land to rebuild their nation. That sense of epic urgency is strangely missing from Factions, which pits you instead against a spreading plague and the political machinations of two feuding houses. The story of each campaign is more complicated than I describe them here, of course, and they are both interesting stories that I still enjoy playing through, but the plot of Factions and the individual missions don’t feel as vital or gripping as they should have.

Perhaps the hottest new development in Factions is the introduction of two new classes, the Assassin and the Ritualist. I found each one to be fairly interesting, and a nice change if you’ve already played the existing classes to death, but neither one seems as fully-formed as the classes in the base game. The Assassin, in another obvious nod to Diablo 2, uses a combo system that allows you to stack attacks on top of each other for extra damage and effects. They can teleport short distances and do some interesting stealth tricks, but all in all they feel like a subset of the warrior class, expanding what they can do without really bringing anything new. Their almost inescapable dependence on knives as weapons hampers their ability to mix well with other class abilities, though in the right combinations they can work well and offer a lot of new options.

The Ritualist is an oddity—a pet class that summons only stationary pets. Dark Age of Camelot tried a similar thing in their first expansion, but it was very difficult to use and made it hard to quest; the nature of the pets makes them excellent at defense, and that shined through in Realm vs. Realm combat but offered very little to a fast-moving dungeon party. The Ritualist deals with similar issues, but copes with them much better. The pets are easier to place, the mana flows a little better, and the variety of skills and effects—especially in combination with some of the other classes—offers a ton of options in character design and play style. One of the more interesting skill groups available to Ritualists are called Weapon Enchants, where you can enhance your and your party’s weapons to make them far more effective in combat. I was very successful with a Ranger/Ritualist hybrid that didn’t bother summoning pets at all, and focused instead on buffing and ranged damage. The Ritualist is a fascinating class, and the graphics are pretty impressive—your summoned pets look like tortured spirits, shackled to the ground with ethereal chains—but they are not for everybody.

The Guild Wars model in general is a good one, with lots of room for growth: each expansion is a free-standing game that adds to what has gone before but does not require it. They offer new classes, new missions, new stories, and amazing new environments. Since they take place in the same world they are fully compatible, and if you own more than one campaign you can take your characters back and forth between them for added content. I found Guild Wars: Factions to be immensely enjoyable, and I recommend it especially to people who didn’t get into the first game.

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Written by Fellfrosch on August 04th, 2006