Guild Wars Factions Interviews

Both Evil Avatar and Just RPG have published interviews with ArenaNet co-founder Jeff Strain about their newly released standalone MMORPG, Guild Wars Factions. A snip from Evil Avatar’s interview:

Q: What’s the general world view of Guild Wars?

A: Guild Wars is the only online role-playing game that is simultaneously played from around the world by everybody in one virtual world. In other words, it’s not like a normal MMO where you have servers deployed in the US, Brazil, Australia, or Korea, and everyone’s playing on their own sets of servers. We have servers all over the world, but they work together to produce one single world for everybody to play together. So from that stand point, it’s truly an international game. We have people from 50-60 countries playing Guild Wars at any given moment, so we really wanted to capture that international flavor in the design of the world itself, the artwork and character models. The original Guild Wars prophecy campaign is mainly based in your traditional medieval fantasy world with castles and knights and things like that; Factions is based in historical Asian fantasy traditions. It’s not really Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, but instead draws from the shared cultural elements. Future campaign will explore different cultural traditions from different mythological frameworks, so each campaign will be very distinct from the others, including not only the designs of the cities, the architecture, but also the costuming, all the way down to the faces of the characters that you play.

And a snip from Just RPG’s interview:

Q: In Factions, Guilds can join together to form Guild Alliances. What are the advantages of these Alliances, and how do they impact the game?

A: The advantage to Guild Alliances is, first of all, the new features it enables. You will be able to travel to allied Guild Halls and skirmish with them. Guild Skirmishing is a new feature that we’re introducing that we’ve just announced. You’ll also be able to have Alliance Chat, where you share chat with everyone in your Alliance. It’s also the fundamental unit in several of our new mission types. For example, we have Alliance Battles, which are large 12 versus 12 PvP battles where you and your Alliance fight against members of another Kingdom.

The same is true for owning cities. One of the new features in Guild Wars: Factions is that you can take control of cities. Your Guild Alliance will take control of the city, so all of the players in the Guild Alliance will have ownership of the city, and you’ll be able to do unique things like triggering a parade or special event. You’ll also have access to unique areas within the city that no one else can go to, including elite missions, which are new very high-level role-playing missions with substantially enhanced rates of loot dropping and loot acquisition. The Alliance is the gateway into all of those features.