Guild Wars: Factions [PC]

Guild Wars' mostly-an-MMORPG approach has always made it a hard game to categorize. Sure, it's massive, multiplayer, and online, but it lacks the monthly fees and repetitive gameplay that all too often characterize the genre. So it's appropriate that Factions, in essence its first expansion pack, doesn't quite match the traditional definition of an expansion either.

First up, you don't need the original game to play it. You can buy Factions, start a new character, and begin exploring Factions' new continent, Cantha, straight away. Factions characters and those from the original Guild Wars campaign, Prophecies, can interact with each other. Factions also comes with 300 new skills, piles of new equipment, monsters, guild features, warring factions for players to ally with, and so on.

But hold on a minute. Great big expensive expansions are not quite what we were lead to expect from this game. With the game fee-less from day one, the development team planned to pay their bills by releasing a series of small, modestly-priced non-compulsory expansions.

Instead, we have a much more traditional MMO expansion packthat carries a considerable $50 price tag. Perhaps that episodic model turned out to be a little too risky, or perhaps the astonishing success of Guild Wars at retail meant the lure of putting more boxes on store shelves proved too great. Whatever the reasons, here it is.

If you're already a Guild Wars player, the first change you'll notice, on adding your Factions keycode to your account, is the appearance of two extra character slots, making six in total. If you're new to the world, you'll just have the standard four. Either way, two new character classes join the existing six competing for these slots: assassin and ritualist.

Make an assassin, and perhaps you'll be struck by the archetype's similarity to the Diablo II: Lord of Destruction character of the same name. (Hardly surprising, given the Guild Wars' team's much-publicized quantity of Blizzard alumni.) Assassins have high-damage melee attacks, but are a little on the squishy side -- a challenging combination, and one that should be a match for any Guild Wars vet. They fight with a heavily structured special move system: Lead attacks are followed by off-hand, then dual-hand moves.