| Guild Wars: Prophecies | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | ArenaNet |
| Publisher(s) | NCsoft |
| Designer(s) | Mike O'Brien |
| Series | Guild Wars series |
| Engine | Guild Wars engine |
| Platform(s) | Windows |
| Release date(s) | April 28, 2005 |
| Genre(s) | Action RPG CORPG |
| Mode(s) | Multiplayer |
| Rating(s) | |
| Media/distribution | 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 |
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Guild Wars: Prophecies (April 2005), officially known as simply Guild Wars, is the first campaign of the Guild Wars series of Action RPGs, 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 |
Guild Wars: Prophecies introduced the six core professions of the game. These are:
All four of the campaign-specific non-core professions (Ritualist, Assassin, Paragon, and Dervish) can travel to Tyria via their port city, however these professions cannot be created in Tyria.
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.
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 virtual environments as the player progresses across the game world.
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.
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, led by an Undead Lich, 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 and use the souls of the slain Chosen villagers to power arcane magical devices. The protagonists quickly decide to join a resistance organisation known as the Shining Blade and put an end to the Mantle. This plot twist also introduces the vizier Khilbron of the destroyed divine kingdom of Orr. However the White Mantle are more powerful than expected, and after some successes by the player they call upon their masters, a powerful race of beings known as the Mursaat, to destroy the Shining Blade and drive the players out of Kryta.
Vizier Khilbron helps the players escape to the Crystal Desert to partake in the ritual of Ascension. This is the first step to them fulfilling the Flameseeker Prophecies.
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 power to destroy Good and Evil" is kept sealed. At the urging of Khilbron, the players storm the Mursaat stronghold built around the volcano and release the seals on the door, releasing the Titans, an army of powerful beings of fire from beneath the earth. Khilbron then reveals himself as the evil Lich Lord who was leading the undead in Kryta and who has been manipulating the player since they arrived from Ascalon. He reveals that he is the Flameseeker in the prophecy, not the player, and takes command of the titans and orders them to attack all of Tyria. The players then defeat him in the final mission of the campaign, using his life force to seal the Titans back in their prison.
And so the prophecy is fully fulfilled. The evil Mursaat have been destroyed by the player and the Titans. The Lich's life energy is enough to keep the Titans imprisoned for millennia, removing the need to sacrifice Chosen to maintain the seal.
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 immense 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 game-currency 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.
Guild Wars: Prophecies has been well received by critics and players alike, especially for its attractive character designs. In 2005, it won several prestigious awards including IGN's Best PC RPG[2] and GameSpy's MMORPG of the Year[3] 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. 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.[4]
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.[5] 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."[5] 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.[5]
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[6] 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.
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,
Many of the earlier editions are marketed simply as Guild Wars, which is how Guild Wars: Prophecies was initially known.
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