500,000 Gamers Log Onto Guild Wars Nightfall Preview News

With the impending release of Guild Wars Nightfall on October 27th, ArenaNet has today announced that the recently held Preview Weekend was a success with over 500,000 participants spending an average of 8.5 hours in the game.

We knew we had struck a chord with our players as soon as the Nightfall World Preview Event got underway," said Mike O'Brien, co-founder of ArenaNet. "Their response has been amazingly positive to everything in the game; especially the Heroes." Heroes are a new feature of Guild Wars Nightfall. They are non-player characters integral to the storyline that players can customize and control throughout the game. "Heroes gain experience, follow player direction in battle, and can be equipped with skills, weapons, and even secondary professions of the player's choice, said O'Brien. "They are a wildly popular component to this game that we've spent significant time developing, and we're thrilled our fans have responded to it the way they have."

A similar preview event was held earlier in 2006 for the second Guild Wars campaign, Factions, which saw three million hours of gameplay clocked up.

It seems that NCsoft's subscription-free MMO continues to gather steam; we'll have more on Guild Wars Nightfall shortly...