ArenaNet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ArenaNet

Type of Company	Private (subsidiary of NCSoft)
Founded	March 2003
Headquarters	Bellevue, Washington
Key people	Mike O'Brien
Industry	Computer and video game industry
Products	Guild Wars Guild Wars Factions Guild Wars Nightfall
Employees	140^[1]
Slogan	N/A
Website	ArenaNet

ArenaNet is a computer game developer and part of NCsoft Corporation, founded by members that played important roles in developing the highly successful computer games Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Diablo II, and the Battle.net gaming network, then as developers at Blizzard Entertainment. ArenaNet's offices are located in Bellevue, Washington.

In the Guild Wars community, ArenaNet is often referred to as A.Net, in a similar fashion to the abbreviation B.Net for Battle.net.

1 Titles
2 Notes
3 External links

[edit] Titles

[edit] Guild Wars

Guild Wars is a game that attempts to merge the MMORPG and the RPG game genres into one, with competition in both the player versus player (in random matches, teams, tournaments, or guild battles), and player versus environment (in missions, quests, or area exploration) forms. The developers call this blend a CORPG, short for competitive online role-playing game. Important goals of the game are both to minimize the amount of repetitive actions a player has to perform to become a respectable force in the gaming world (called grind), and also to keep a player's dependency on game items to stay competitively low. These are two goals that set the game apart from most MMORPG's, where one hardcore player will gain major advantages when competing against another more casual gamer simply from having played the game more and found better items. In Guild Wars, the advantages in battle will instead come from how well a player use the character's skills, an art that is hard to master even for professionals, with the game's hundreds of available skills. The game will also be different from most MMORPG's in that it will never have any additional recurring fees, but base revenue on standalone game expansions, or "campaigns", sold every 6-9 months instead.

[edit] Guild Wars Factions

Guild Wars Factions is the first sequel to Guild Wars, and among other things adds a new world map with accompanying missions, two new professions (the Assassin and Ritualist), several new gaming modes, and "titles" which measures the advance of characters in several tasks. It is sometimes referred to as the second "chapter", with the first one being the released game itself, but then with the label Guild Wars: Prophecies to make a distinction between the chapters. Be aware that this is not an expansion pack, but a stand-alone product, meaning that it does not require Guild Wars: Prophecies to play, although it enhances the player's gaming experience to have both titles.

[edit] Guild Wars Nightfall

The third chapter in the Guild Wars saga, titled Guild Wars Nightfall was released on 27th October 2006. As with the previous chapters, this is a stand-alone product, but it can be merged with the previous campaigns to enhance the gaming experience. This third chapter introduces a new world map, two new professions (the Dervish and Paragon), a new PvP mode, but its most remarkable new feature is the introduction of "Heroes" who travel with the character between missions and campaigns and are fully customizable by the player.