Guild Wars Prophecies

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Guild Wars Prophecies
Developer(s)	ArenaNet
Publisher(s)	NCsoft
Designer(s)	Mike O'Brien
Series	Guild Wars series
Platform(s)	Windows
Release date	April 28, 2005
Genre(s)	MMORPG
Mode(s)	Multiplayer
Rating(s)	ESRB: Teen (13+) PEGI: 12+ Australia: M (15+)
Media	CD (2) or Download (purchase of CD key online)
System requirements	Intel Pentium III 800 MHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 2GB Hard disk space, 32MB Radeon 8500 or GeForce 3 Series GPU, internet connection, Windows 98/ME/2000/XP

Guild Wars Prophecies (April 2005), officially known as simply Guild Wars, is the first campaign of the Guild Wars series of MMORPGs, developed by the Seattle-based ArenaNet game developer studio, a subsidiary of South Korean game publisher NCSoft. Prophecies introduced players to the world of Guild Wars, known as Tyria, and premiered several elements that are now known as core components of the Guild Wars games.

Like all Guild Wars campaigns, Prophecies contains a co-operative role-playing portion and a competitive Player versus Player (PvP) portion. Co-operative characters may be used in the competitive portion, or new PvP-specific characters may be created at maximum level and all skills unlocked to the accounts.

Contents 1 Gameplay 1.1 Professions 1.2 Co-operative missions 1.3 Player versus Player 2 Story 3 Critical response 4 Editions 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Gameplay

[edit] Professions

Guild Wars Prophecies introduced the six core professions of the game. These are:

Warrior 

A melee weapon-wielding character with a high armor level specializing in melee attacks. Often used as "tanks", which are players who lure all enemy attacks to themselves, due to their high defensive capabilities. Their energy management are relied on their "adrenaline skills" which are merely skills that need to be charged up by 'x' number of hits and they cost no energy to use.

Ranger 

A bow-wielding character of moderate armor level specializing in ranged attacks and environmental strategies. Also often accompanied by a pet.

Monk 

A spellcasting profession specializing in defensive and healing arts. Can also inflict holy wrath upon enemies, dealing a significant bit of damage. Most of the time, however, the monk serves as the party's healer, which makes them the first target of any knowledgeable adversary.

Elementalist 

A spellcasting profession specializing in the four elements (Air, Earth, Fire, Water). Depending on the specialization and choosing of a particular element, this class may be offensive, defensive, or a combination of both.

Necromancer 

A spellcasting profession specializing in corpse exploitation, hexes, life stealing and summoning undead minions.

Mesmer 

A spellcasting profession specializing in energy manipulation, illusion and trickery to punish adversaries for performing (or in some cases not performing) certain actions.

All four of the campaign-specific non-core professions (Dervish, Assassin etc.) can travel to Tyria via their port city, however these professions cannot be created in Tyria.

[edit] Co-operative missions

The main component of the co-operative story in Prophecies is told through a sequence of 25 storyline missions. Each mission consists of certain objectives that have to be fulfilled by a team of four to eight player characters and player-managed NPCs. The missions take place in a variety of settings: from the desolation of burned Ascalon to the snowy peaks of the Shiverpeak Mountains, the lush forests of the Maguuma Jungle, the unforgiving Crystal Desert, and finally the hellish Ring of Fire islands. See the plot below.

[edit] Player versus Player

Prophecies introduced the core competitive modes of Guild Wars: the Random Arenas with randomly assigned teams, the Team Arenas for four-on-four team combat, a global continuously running tournament arena for teams of 8 called Heroes' Ascent, and the ranked strategic Guild Battles mode. Initially the arenas were situated in the co-operative world, but they were subsequently removed to the separate Battle Isles designed solely for PvP combat, which is accessible from every campaign in the Guild Wars sequence. See Guild Wars for more information on these forms of PvP.

[edit] Story

Player characters begin the game in the fictional idyllic kingdom of Ascalon, which serves as the tutorial content for new characters. The setting is friendly, with few aggressive monsters and a number of easily completed quests. New characters are introduced to the main protagonists of the multi-campaign Guild Wars story: the monk Mhenlo, the warrior Devona, the mage Cynn, the ranger Aidan, and the necromancer Eve. Player characters also interact with Prince Rurik (voiced by Robin Atkin Downes), the heir apparent of the kingdom. After completing a number of initial quests and selecting a primary and a secondary profession, the character is then inducted into the Ascalon Vanguard, an elite force led by the prince himself who are fighting the armies of the Charr beasts who are planning an invasion of Ascalon. During the final quest in this tutorial world, the Charr complete a ritual to unleash a rain of fire and stone upon the world, breaching Ascalon's defensive Great Wall, and reducing most of its cities to ruins. This in-game event, referred to as the Searing, transports the characters into a post-apocalyptic world of constant strife, with no way of returning to the pre-Searing areas. The mechanic employed in the Searing is often cited by ArenaNet as a primary benefit of the instanced design of Guild Wars, which allows world-changing and time-advancing stories to be told individually to player characters instead of requiring the game-world to be static and timeless.^{[citation needed]}

In the post-Searing world, the initial portion of the non-tutorial plot sees the protagonists and player characters try to recover their footing against the Charr in the ruined kingdom of Ascalon. In a climactic event, Prince Rurik realizes the battle is lost, and beseeches the king to give the kingdom up and escape alive to the neighboring human kingdom of Kryta. The stalwart King Adelbern—his father—sees no merit in Rurik's plea, and banishes the prince for daring to suggest abandoning his country. A few refugees, including the protagonists and player characters, follow the now-exiled Rurik to Kryta; during the trip, Rurik is trapped and slain by the Stone Summit dwarves, a xenophobic faction who seek to control the passes through the Shiverpeak Mountains and are waging war against the other human-allied Deldrimor Dwarves.

The protagonists arrive in Kryta leaderless and attempt to set up a refugee settlement. Soon, they become involved in the war brimming between the White Mantle who govern Kryta and an army of undead who are laying waste to the Krytan countryside. During a sequence of missions, the players help the Mantle hold back the undead, for which they are rewarded by being allowed to participate in a Choosing ceremony. During the ceremony, it is revealed that the Mantle are actually murderers who worship obscure evil beings known as the Mursaat and use the souls of the slain Chosen villagers to power arcane magical devices. The protagonists quickly decide to put an end to the Mantle. This plot twist also introduces the leader of the undead and the main antagonist of the story, the Lich Lord, who in life was the vizier Khilbron of the destroyed divine kingdom of Orr. Unbeknowst to the protagonists, Khilbron is enacting an ancient prophecy, the Flameseeker Prophecy (from which the campaign derives its name), wherein the prophesied one obtains control of a race of demonic beings called the titans and becomes the ruler of Tyria. He is stymied by the Mursaat, who have sealed the portal between the titans and Tyria located in the volcano in the Ring of Fire islands. As both the players and Khilbron find themselves opposing the Mantle and their overlords, Khilbron appears to the players in a human form and conspires to use them as his pawns against the Mantle and the Mursaat.

The first step of Khilbron's plan involves the players journeying to the Crystal Desert to partake in the ritual of Ascension (as foretold in the prophecy). Ascension consists of a sequence of missions with various victory conditions that simulate the player versus player mode of the Guild Wars game, with NPCs instead of other players. One mission, for instance, requires the players to annihilate a number of other "teams" of NPCs in a simulation of deathmatch; another has them hold an altar against a siege, which is one of the victory conditions in the Hall of Heroes PvP game. The final ascension mission requires the player character to defeat its exact double, forcing players to choose their skills wisely and be mindful of their counter skills. These ascension missions are an obvious tutorial for the competitive Heroes' Ascent arena, which initially was accessible immediately after ascending. (This arena was later moved off the continent of Tyria in a prelude to the Factions release that consolidated all core PvP arenas in a separate location called the Battle Isles.)

After ascension, the players have an audience with the ancient dragon Glint, the author of the Flameseeker Prophecy. She aids them in a sequence of missions against the Mantle and the Mursaat, leading eventually to the volcano where the titans are sealed. Still beguiled by Khilbron, the players storm the Mursaat stronghold built around the volcano and release the seals on the door to the titans. Khilbron then reveals himself as the evil Lich Lord, takes command of the titans, and proceeds to attack the Tyrian capital cities. The players must defeat him in the final mission of the campaign before his titan army succeeds.

Sorrow's Furnace

Released half a year after the campaign, the free Sorrow's Furnace expansion returned players to the Shiverpeak mountains, specifically to the caverns underneath it. There, they participate in a sequence of quests with the final goal of defeating the Iron forgeman, an immence automaton used by the Stone Summit dwarves to drive their war effort. Sorrow's Furnace introduced "unique items" to Guild Wars: these are items of set stats dropped by bosses. This model was repeated and expanded in the following Factions, Nightfall and Eye of the North releases.

Gods' Realms

Prophecies also introduced two high-end dungeons that have been present in every subsequent Guild Wars release: the Fissure of Woe and the Underworld. These areas are accessible by the avatars of the in-game gods (for a small fee), and contains some of the most prestigious weapons and armor in the game series. It is, therefore, one of the most intensively farmed areas of the game.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Critical response

Guild Wars Prophecies has been well received by critics and players alike. In 2005, it won several prestigious awards including IGN's Best PC RPG^[1] and GameSpy's MMORPG of the Year^[2] awards. In 2006 Computer Games Magazine listed Prophecies as #4 in their Best Game collection, giving it in addition the Best MMO Debut and Best Technology awards.^{[citation needed]} Guild Wars has been listed in every major Editors' Choice category in both print and online publications. As of August 2007; Prophecies and the two subsequent campaigns Guild Wars Factions and Guild Wars Nightfall have together sold more than 5 million copies.^[3] While the lack of active subscriptions renders an exact comparison impossible, these new sale numbers would put the Guild Wars series as the second most popular MMORPG after World of Warcraft

Published criticism of Prophecies has centered around the following key elements. First, that the number and placement of creatures encountered in the PvE world can be overwhelming, especially since the party size and number of skills are both limited to eight.^[4] There is also a related problem of repetitiveness, as noted by IGN: "As fun as combat is, and as pretty as it looks, plowing your way through low-level mobs can and will get tiresome, since they don't give much (if any) experience points and will be dropping items that are virtually useless to you."^[4] This problem is lessened however by the fact that a player can freely and instantly teleport into any cities in the game their character has previously visited.

Secondly, several reviews (such as IGN's) have cited the lack of a sophisticated in-game trading system such as auction houses as exist in other MMORPGs, so the only way for players to sell items is to advertise on a trade channel that is shared by all players in the same map but may be muted by individual players. (This issue has been addressed to some extent with the recent addition of an in-game trading interface). IGN's review comments, additionally, that itemization in the game lacks variety because the only way to distinguish suits of armor is by dying them different colors.^[4]

Thirdly, both players and published reviews have commented on the unnatural coupling of cooperative and competitive matches, which require very different playing styles. At the game's release, PvP focused players were required to "unlock" their skills and items by playing through the cooperative game, even though a PvP player may have no interest in cooperative gaming. This issue, however, has been addressed by ArenaNet, firstly by introducing Balthazar Faction in June 2005 which enabled unlocking through playing PvP^[5] and further in August 2006 by making skill unlocks for the individual professions of the Prophecies campaign available in the game's online store. Unlocks for the professions of the Factions and Nightfall campaigns are also now available.

[edit] Editions

In addition to the standard edition, there are many other editions of Guild Wars Prophecies available on the market. All of them contain the basic Account Creation Code and Manuscript Book, as well as other added features listed below,

Pre-order Edition 

The Pre-order edition was a disc available for purchase as a stand alone short duration access, or obtained by pre-ordering the full version of the game. The key allowed the player to access the Guild Wars beta testing. Added to a full account the key gives the player access to a unique weapon or offhand customized for their account.

Collector's Edition 

The Collector's Edition was available for purchase at the games official release. The Collector's Edition comes with a Guild Wars branded Logitech headset, a free 3-month trial for Teamspeak's "SpeakEasy" service, the soundtrack by Jeremy Soule on an audio CD, The Art of Guild Wars Book 1 and Divine Aura, a glowing light around the hands of a character when they use an emote.

Special Edition 

The Special Edition contains a (PvP) Skill Pack code which allows 7 regular skills, 1 elite skill, and 2 runes to be unlocked for the account from a Priest of Balthazar. The Special Edition also contains a special music-code to access in-game music from DirectSong.com, the Official Guild Wars Soundtrack CD, The Art of Guild Wars Book 2 and a map of Tyria.

Game of the Year Edition 

The Game of the Year Edition contains the full version of Guild Wars Prophecies, and was released one year after the game's initial release. It contains an access key which unlocks seven exclusive weapons and accessories, each geared towards one of the six core professions. Each weapon has maximum damage stats according to its type, and each character created can get a customized copy of the weapons. This version was released as the One Million Edition in Europe and is also available as an upgrade to any earlier Prophecies editions via the online store.

PvP Edition 

This edition of Guild Wars is available for the three released campaigns, and is only available from the online store. This version has all of the skills and professions available in the respective version unlocked, but does not allow the player access to the PvE campaign and areas. The edition may be purchased as a stand-alone game, or may be added to an existing account.

Guild Wars Platinum Edition 

Guild Wars Platinum Edition is a bundle containing both the Prophecies campaign and the Eye of the North expansion. It was released with Eye of the North on August 31st, 2007.

Many of the earlier editions are marketed simply as Guild Wars, which is how Guild Wars Prophecies was initially known.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• The official Guild Wars website
• The official Guild Wars Wiki
• ArenaNet's listing of recognized Guild Wars fansites

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