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Guild Wars: Factions - Hands On Preview
Jon Wilcox
01/03/2006
ArenaNet introduces TVG to the new Guild Wars Campaign, and the land of Cantha...
ArenaNet co-founder & President Jeff Strain is a man who really believes in his company's product. Ten months after the US developer launched its first title, the MMO Guild Wars, the player base has topped more than one million, and ArenaNet is in the final months of preparation for the game's inaugural standalone campaign, Guild Wars Factions. It seems that the company, which was founded by former employees of Blizzard, has a right to be happy as he proclaimed in a recent interview with TVG, "... we couldn't be happier; this is the first product from a new company. We've blasted past a million [users] right off the bat very rapidly...On a scale of one to ten, well, you know I'd say perhaps put it at eight."
TVG was recently invited to a preview of Guild Wars Factions, which included a demonstration of the game from Strain, in anticipation of its release later in the Spring. Based on the continent of Cantha, described as being far south of the original Guild Wars land of Tyria, Factions is the first in the series of twice-yearly campaign releases that ArenaNet has planned for the sub-genre CORPG (Co-Operating Role Playing Game) in order to expand content as well as negating the need for a monthly subscription. Creating a new business model that removes what remains to be a stumbling block for many would-be MMO players, Guild Wars' non-subscription based ideal seems to be logical enough, especially in the wake of an expanding portfolio from other developers/publishers including Codemasters, Turbine, and SOE, as well as competition closer to home such as City of Heroes. And that's without even mentioning that current colossus of the MMO genre, World of Warcraft. One thing that does have to be mentioned is that Guild Wars: Factions is far from being an expansion pack to the original title. It's a standalone product that doesn't require Guild Wars to run, which will be an advantage in future years since newcomers to the game won't have to go back to the beginning and collect the other installments.
Guild Wars Prophecies (the new name for the original title at the dawn of this new multi-Campaign era) tried to break the mould in a number of ways beyond the lack of a subscription fee. There's a definite emphasis on Guild vs. Guild (GvG) gameplay over the role-playing and the level cap is extremely low for an MMO standing at just 20, with ArenaNet attempting to create a game that doesn't reward long playtime to the extent of other titles in the genre. All were a result of ArenaNet's new model; something that Strain was keen to point out would be adopted by others in the MMO market as a future trend.
Back to Guild Wars Factions. Based heavily on Far Eastern cultures and their respective mythologies, the continent of Cantha is the result of countless hours of work by the design team with everything from imperial red pagodas and Chinese stylised dragons to the solidified jade seas inspired by oriental art and architecture. That isn't to say that the design is skewed towards any one Oriental culture; Strain insists that instead, "...what we're trying to enforce is all of them." One thing's for sure, Cantha certainly doesn't reflect the medieval European cultures of the original Guild Wars, it's strikingly different. It doesn't hurt either that Factions takes advantage of new shader technology and other DirectX 9 features, which brought the environments out from the screen to great effect.
During the course of both the demonstration and his interview with TVG, Jeff Strain commented that every Campaign in the Guild Wars franchise would have its own unique gameplay features. Hearing that, it doesn't come as a surprise that one of these features in Factions is the introduction of, well, Factions. Set amongst the backdrop of a dynamic battlefront, Cantha is split between two key factions, the Luxons and the Kuzicks who battle it out for land and key positions across the continent. For this reason, guilds will have to choose which of the two factions to ally with, with the inevitable consequence that guilds will end up having to work together in order to push forward the battle front of their faction. Changes in the battle line are updated on a daily basis, which certainly seems to set up the prospect for some really dynamic, player-led gameplay situations.
Further gameplay amendments came with a closer integration of the PvP/GvG elements and the role-playing aspects, something that was found lacking in the original game. Describing the original Guild Wars, Strain explained that, "...what we really saw was that we had a fantastic PvP community in Guild Wars and a thriving GvG community, and a really good Role-Playing community; but these were two very separate communities...We really wanted to look for ways to bring them together." In an attempt to bring those two communities together, the gameplay in Factions is broken up into five new mission types: Elite missions (extremely difficult Role-Playing quests with lucrative rewards and loot), Co-operative missions (where two teams go on the same mission to achieve the same goals), Competitive missions (where teams battle for a resource points, which go towards an assault on a settlement), Challenge missions (co-operative scored based missions linked to Leaderboards which see teams battle against wave after wave of enemies), and Alliance Battles (these are big 12-a-side PvP battles.)
All five modes work together so that enemy settlements are defeated and held by new forces. Holding settlements will activate alliance specific elite missions together with the different abilities including spawning parades through the streets. The overall idea from ArenaNet is that Role-Playing benefits PvP, and vice-versa, so that PvP battles push the battlelines forward which then enables role-players to take control of the city through a series of co-operative and challenge missions. A battle to take control of a city was demonstrated by ArenaNet, which featured Luxon forces with their cannon mounted turtles lumbering across the land in what can only be described as a strange cross between the giant elephants of Lord of the Rings, and the space-faring Discworld turtle. The action did convey the intensity of battle really well, so here's hoping that players will really take to the missions when the game is finally released. ArenaNet did confirm that there will be fewer missions in Factions compared to the original title, but described them as being richer and more dense, with a refinement that hopefully means players won't have to complete 'Fed Ex' style missions all the time.
Besides the focus on Faction-based play, the primary story of the Campaign revolves around the story of Shiro Tagachi, a bodyguard who murders the Canthan Emperor before being caught and executed. During his execution Tagachi unleashed a cry so powerful that it physically petrified the forests and turned one section of the sea to solid jade (the results of which are there to be seen in all their glory.) The histories of both factions are inextricably linked by this event. The Kurzicks were originally forest dwellers that were forced to carve new settlements into the petrified forests created by Tagachi's wail, whilst the Luxons were originally seafarers, who were stuck on the solid seas of Jade. In the time that followed the Luxons transformed themselves into a nomadic culture that uses giant turtles to mount new dwellings and mine the Jade.
Through the demonstration we were shown several key locations from across Cantha, including both the Jade Sea and the Petrified Forest, together with settlements such as the Wajjan Bazaar, which enabled ArenaNet to show the progress within the city from richer areas to the skyscraper-like slums. Throughout the tour there was one key element missing that did stand out: a distinct lack of population. Thankfully this was for the sake of the demo to enable us to take in the full effect of the environments created by the team, and that the streets will be very populated by the time Factions is finally released sometime in the Spring.
Perhaps the most well known feature of Guild Wars Factions is the inclusion of two new professions: the Assassin and the Ritualist. Seemingly cousin professions with the Necromancers, the Ritualists are spiritualists with the power to call up spirits to help or hurt other characters in the game. The profession is very Native American in style, and characters always wear blindfolds into battle so they can see into the spirit world. The second profession exclusive to Factions is the Assassin, which have fast execution attacks and a greater level of speed than the other professions. One of the characteristics of Assassins is their ability to teleport, with the profession also having a more original set of skills compared to some of the others. The original six professions from Guild Wars Prophecies are still open for creation in Factions, although each has a different look because of the new culture on Cantha. In addition, Factions is set to include a raft of new features for gamers to take advantage of, including 300 new skills (75 each for the Assassin and Ritualist, and 25 for each of the original professions), and the ability to put merchants into Guild Halls. Factions also features over one hundred new creatures and monsters, which was more than the original Guild Wars chapter.
FARLEY
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