Guild Wars Factions |  | From: NCsoft
Category: Video Games
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $11.95
You Save: $18.04 (60%)
New (28) Used (2) from $11.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  62 reviews
Sales Rank: 368
Platform: Windows Xp
ESRB: Teen
Media: DVD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Age: 12 - 20 years
Operating System: Windows XP
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 1.3
Legal Disclaimer: Warranty does not cover misuse of product.
MPN: FG-XP-GW2ST-001
UPC: 875646000017
EAN: 0875646000017
ASIN: B000ELW4D6
Release Date: April 28, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Factory Sealed - Never Used
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| Features:
| • | Hundreds of new creatures, guild halls, skills and more | | • | Two new professions: the deadly Assassin and the necromantic Ritualist | | • | A whole new continent, Cantha, either connects to the lands of Tyria or stands on its own | | • | Guilds band together into alliances to gain control of towns and access exclusive Alliance Missions | | • | New game types include missions with ranked scoring and large-scale Alliance vs. Alliance battles |
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Product Description
Guild Wars: Factions is a stand-alone adventure you can play independently or as part of the Guild Wars world. The stand-alone Guild Wars: Factions is the second campaign in ArenaNet's massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Explore an entire new continent, with a wide range of professions, skills, missions, and monsters. There are also new options for Cooperative and Player-versus-Player (PvP) play, and enhanced features for guilds.
Amazon.com Product Description
When NCsoft released the original in 2005, it promised a revolution in Massively Multiplayer Online games: an online game with no monthly fees and completely standalone expansion packs. With simple gameplay, and endless multiplayer and solo options, the first game gained a devoted following of experienced and new players alike. Exactly one year later, Guild Wars Factions widens the horizons of Guild Wars, almost doubling the size of the world. The expansion pack offers whole new worlds to explore, and it doesn't require Guild Wars to play. Players can explore the new continent of Cantha by traveling from the lands of Tyria or they can travel in Cantha alone--and even those who only own one of the Guild Wars games can invite their friends to join their questing areas and share the game content without forcing each other to buy the other game. 
Cantha's elegant castles house both beauty and intrigue. View larger. | 
Exotic new armor sets, faces and hair styles offer even more unique character options to players. View larger. | 
Hundreds of new monsters await in 50 new quest areas.View larger. | Cantha's Warring Factions
The expansion pack adds whole new ways to experience the game: alliances and factions. In Tyria, players banded together in small guilds and warred against each other, but Cantha is a land of much more complicated politics. Guilds can join together in alliances, align themselves with one of Cantha's two warring factions, and battle other alliances to gain and hold territory. The epic Faction Battles can change the face of Cantha in real time, shifting borders and changing the control of entire cities and towns as battles are won and lost. The Battle Isles play host to most of the new Player vs. Player content, providing alliances a huge battlefield to supplement the Tyrian arenas. 
Player versus Player combat reaches a new dimension with massive Alliance Battles.View larger. | Alliances will also have access to two new kinds of missions, Alliance Missions and Elite Missions. Alliance Missions feature multiple teams battling for control over resources and strategic locations, earning faction points for their alliance. The best and most powerful alliances can venture on Elite Missions, which are designed to be the ultimate challenge for even the most experienced teams. New Player Options
Solo players have not been neglected either, and those who choose to remain separate from alliance and faction politics still have a lot to enjoy in the expansion. Two new professions are available to the denizens of Cantha: the deadly Assassin and dark Ritualist. Assassins wield daggers with fatal precision and can teleport to strike down enemies up close, while Ritualists summon the spirits of the dead to control the battlefield. New faces, hair styles and armor sets give the two new professions their own distinct look, evoking the exotic feel of Cantha. To allow players to experience the new professions without deleting their old characters, four extra character slots will be added to players who have previously existing Guild Wars accounts. 
The Assassin emerges from the shadows as a playable profession in Factions. View larger. | While the level limit has not yet been raised from 20, players who still love the six professions from the core game have not been forgotten. Dozens of new skills are available for the older professions as well. Players have more options than ever before, and the new story missions and quest areas will test their ability to adapt to new styles and situations. Hundreds of all-new weapons, items and pets offer characters a huge amount of customization, and a new mission type will put each player's skill to the test. Challenge missions are cooperative missions with scoring objectives, and NCsoft will post the highest scores and display the rankings in-game, adding a new competitive element to the game that doesn't require direct combat. NCsoft has taken care to cater to their entire player base with Guild Wars Factions. Team players have new options that range from Braveheart-style mass PvP battles to the online RPG version of organized sporting events. Solo players and lone wolves have plenty of character customization to play with as well as the continuation of the Guild Wars story. Even those who only own Guild Wars Factions or Guild Wars can expand their game experience by sampling the content with players who own the other game, making Factions an expansion in the true sense: it broadens the horizons without being essential to enjoying the complete game.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 57 more reviews...
 gw factions July 1, 2008
Factions is a good game as an add on to the orginall guild wars group. these moduals can be ran with others or as a stand alone . factions should not be your first on though start with the origanl proficies or nightfall first then add factions for complete enjoyment
Expanding the Guild Wars experience May 28, 2008
Guild Wars: Factions is the second Guild Wars campaign, and adds the continent of Cantha on a separate map from the original (Prophecies) campaign. The storyline is new, with only minor connections to Prophecies, and the areas and NPCs have a distinctly oriental appearance to them. Factions adds new PVP elements to the Guild Wars experience, new skills and classes, and faction allegiance elements.
On the PVE side, Factions adds a new campaign and two new classes- the ritualist and the assassin. In general, assassins are very strong vs. single targets- similar to rogues in World of Warcraft- but are not cut out to tank or to do massive area damage. Ritualists are one of the more versatile classes in the game due to their selection of spirits and spells, and can make good healers or damage dealers. Of special note, they have many skills that either create or assist them while carrying items, which means that with certain builds you can actually do fine with no weapons. This is certainly the only class for which that holds true. You can often find henchmen of these classes available, which is a nice touch.
You start characters at a relatively easy pace on Shing Jea island, and by the time you leave there you will probably be around level 15. Leveling characters off the island is a very rapid process, as most quests give upwards of 3,000 experience. In fact, the Factions mainland is by far the fastest means of leveling characters in any of the Guild Wars campaigns. If you own other campaigns, you can take your characters directly to the mainland, and your Factions characters can enter other campaigns once they reach it. Note here that Factions does not, in itself, support heroes. If you want heroes, you'll need to get either Nightfall or Eye of the North (highly recommended, as henchmen in general are quite flaky teammates). Once you do, there is only one hero available in Factions itself- the assassin Zenmai- so you'll have to travel to the other campaigns to recruit the others.
New skills in factions include a lot of unique- some quite useful- regular skills, plus a handful of 'cloned' skills that are identical to existing Prophecies skills, and of course some new elite skills. Some of the elite skills are available in Eye of the North, and in some cases are substantially easier to acquire in that campaign. Though at first one might think the cloned skills are useless, they can actually be quite useful if you really like the skill in question. This is because they don't share cooldowns, enabling you to essentially use the same skill twice in a row. The most new skills are, naturally, for the assassin and ritualist. However, since you can take those classes as secondary professions, it's likely you'll find many of these that will be useful for other characters. In particular, assassin skills tend to be useful in PVP, and ritualist skills can make some very difficult PVE encounters a joke.
The Factions campaign is very standard Guild Wars fare, with one major difference from the prior Prophecies campaign. That is, you can't complete missions out of order- you are physically barred from proceeding to new areas until you pass the requisite missions. This is good for the story flow, but it can be frustrating for those that love to take shortcuts. The campaign story is about what you would expect- nothing that will knock your socks off, but not bad either. Some of the missions offer departures from the norm, such as a few that can involve two separate parties of 8 players. In practice, however, these tend to run very similar to standard Prophecies-style missions. For example, there rarely is another player waiting to do those two-party ones, so you usually just end up with a ton of henchmen. In most cases, you achieve the mission bonus by simply finishing under a certain time, not by doing special tasks as in Prophecies or Nightfall. Generally, the areas are quite well done, and you'll see a lot of new enemies and settings. Even the henchmen are quite unique, including such oddities as giant trained necromancer rats and a ranger that has a pet crab. This is generally a good thing, but there is one major point of irritation: different outposts have different henchmen, so often when you arrive in another town you'll lose part of your party and have to replace them. Also, there's a few outposts that have highly impractical henchmen, including at least one where the only healers available are mediocre at best. I suppose this is the price one pays for variety, which is probably why Nightfall and Eye did away with it. Completing various stages in the campaign allows you access to new items and armor, as well. Some of these armors use materials tied into faction (more on that later) and most of them are quite unique in appearance.
PVP is supposed to be one of the main enhanced aspects in this expansion, and to some degree it is indeed better. There is one new PVP mode in Factions: Alliance Battles (AB). In this, you form a group of 4 and enter battle alongside 2 other groups, either fighting for the Kurzick or Luxon sides. It is a very straightforward game of domination, with only a few minor features like resurrection orbs to set it apart from any other domination mode in the scores of multiplay games out there. There are 5 AB maps, and only one of them is truly 'fair.' The others either slightly or strongly favor one side, and are determined by the state of the territorial border between the Kurzicks and Luxons. Thus, if the Luxons control most of the territory, the maps will favor the Kurzicks, and vice versa. In theory this sounds like a cool idea- it encourages the sides to push each other for territory, since having your favorite outposts in enemy hands is inconvenient (for one, resurrection shrines near them won't work unless you bribe the priests). It also means everyone will get a chance to win. In practice, it makes Alliance Battles a really boring wait. The problem is that people KNOW that when their side has most of the territory, the map will heavily favor the enemy. And let's face it, nobody likes to lose an endless string of battles in a row. The fact that you have no idea who is going to be in the other two teams in your match doesn't help, since even the best 4-man party isn't going to be able to do much with 8 supporting nimrods or AFK'ers.
Additionally, there are static PVP missions- Fort Aspenwood and the Jade Quarry- in which individuals join an 8v8 scenario with more wrinkles than simple domination or deathmatch. These are generally quite fun, but also tend to run a lot longer than AB and- especially in the case of Jade Quarry- have very few participants in comparison. For those seeking faction, you can also run competitive missions, which reward you based on your score, and repeatable quests. The latter are by far the fastest way to earn faction, but due to their very nature are also the most boring. The main advantage of these non-PVP faction farming methods is that you don't have to wait in a queue, and you can easily do any of them solo.
To facilitate the factions style of competition, guilds can form alliances with other guilds of the same allegiance (Kurzick or Luxon). Joining such a guild allows you to contribute faction to your alliance, which in turn allows your alliance to compete for 'ownership' of outposts. The benefits of ownership are largely simple prestige, but also help determine the border between the factions. Contributing faction to your alliance grants double points for the Kurzick/Luxon title track, which affects the power of Kurzick/Luxon PVE-only skills. These skills are very powerful- at higher title track ranks, clearly overpowered- and (unlike most other titles) progress in the title track is shared across all characters in your account. You can also spend faction to acquire the skills themselves, or to buy materials for Kurzick or Luxon armor (two looks for each).
Factions is, generally speaking, a good game. For newcomers to Guild Wars, I wouldn't recommend it above the others, but it makes a good expansion for veteran players. In particular, those who want a bit more PVP in the game will like what Factions offers, though I should caution that it's still a long way from true 'world PVP.' The campaign is decent, particularly if you like to level up characters quickly, and has some nice extras and rewards. Additionally, the two new classes are great, and are probably worth getting the game for just by themselves.
Review of Guild Wars: Factions May 8, 2008
This game is awesome. I suggest you start out with a Warrior/assassin. It's so much fun!!!
Decent addon to the Guild Wars franchise May 2, 2008
This is a good expansion to the Guild Wars experience. Along with a whole new continent to explore, you also get 2 new character types to use...the ritualist and the assassin. They key gameplay difference between this a the original Guild Wars is that you level MUCH quicker in this game. You can max out in several hours of playing time. This is because all of the missions and quests are much more difficult that in Prophecies and you will encounter many more high-level enemies in the beginning of the game. Another cool feature is that you can carry Prophecies characters into the world and Factions characters into Prophecies once you reach a certain point in the game.
This is also a standalone game. It works well in conjunction with Prophecies or totally on it's own. If you liked the original Guild Wars game, you will love this one.
Guild Wars Rocks April 28, 2008
This is arguably the best game of the Guild Wars series. Not only does it have great graphics like all the other games, the storyline is unique and it takes very surprising, unexpected turns...kinda like in a good book. The new content in this game is amazing, and the end-game gear is awesome.
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