Campaign

From Guild Wars Wiki

Guild Wars is split into several games - each is stand-alone, and does not require a user to have any of the others to play it. Each of these games is called a campaign or chapter, although the latter term was deprecated after ArenaNet decided to allow each campaign to be used as a stand-alone.

Each campaign has its own storyline, skills, armor, and locations. They also, however, share some "Core" content that is available in all of the campaigns. This core content includes some common skills, professions and locations.

Guild Wars is currently made up of 3 campaigns:

• Guild Wars Prophecies (April 2005)
• Guild Wars Factions (April 2006)
• Guild Wars Nightfall (October 2006)

A fourth campaign, Utopia, was canceled early in its development in favor of Guild Wars 2.

The economic model to fund Guild Wars hardware, maintenance, bandwidth, and staff costs is rather unique in that it builds upon optional campaigns rather than monthly fees or other such obligatory funding. Two campaigns are developed concurrently with each other, and each has an approximate development time of one year. Since campaign development is made on separate teams on a partially overlapping schedule, this allows ArenaNet to release new campaigns at most every half year. As they are done, campaigns are sold as actual physical and boxed products in regular stores carrying computer games.

Campaigns can be likened with other games' expansion packs, however, the major difference would be that these campaigns are all stand-alone and do not expand on prerequisites. Despite being stand-alone, campaigns can still be "merged" for a player to enjoy the benefits from all campaigns under a single user account.

The first campaign, Guild Wars Prophecies, was initially known simply as Guild Wars at its release in April 28, 2005.

[edit] Notes

• Guild Wars Eye of the North isn't a stand-alone campaign, but a traditional game expansion which can be added to any of the prior stand-alone campaigns.
• The Guild Wars Bonus Mission Pack is a little add-on as well.