Oh that's really good! The extended inventory and storage space will be very welcome.
Edit: I wish the cost of the new runes of holding was less though. I don't care for grinding Zaishen quests for the gold coins much these days.
Last edited:
Guild Wars (1) Memories and Screenshots [Image Heavy]
- Thread starter A Black Falcon
- Start date
Edit: I wish the cost of the new runes of holding was less though. I don't care for grinding Zaishen quests for the gold coins much these days.
Regarding that, I just noticed that Augury Rock is today's Zaishen mission. It's a very quick and easy one, even in hard mode, so that's a good source of easy Zaishen coins especially if you can do it on lots of characters.
9 - November 2005 - February 2006
OP
OP
That storage-size update is really cool! I heard online that they were working on it, but didn't know if it would actually release, but it has. That's great, more storage is needed. Giving some of it (the larger Zun'lai chests, that each tab holds more items now) out free is nice as well. I understand why the rest requires ingame currency or paid DLC (for the new storage panes), they have to pay for their continued work on the game somehow, but at least everyone gets something for free. I've already made some use of the larger Zun'lai panes.
Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots, Part 9: November 2005 – February 2006
This time, I'm kind of combining two posts into one by covering two things. I chose to do it this way because both sets end in January 2006, so this way it keeps the dating simpler, and also because under 40 screenshots didn't seem like quite enough for a solo article without much descriptive text.
Anyway, the first set are screenshots from release Guild Wars, 39 screenshots from after Halloween 2005 until mid January 2006. Included are a bunch of Sorrow's Furnace shots, from my many futile attempts to beat the Iron Forgeman, and the few pictures I took of Christmas 2005. I must not have had much time to play GW that holiday, but at least took a couple of screenshots when I could.
And second, there are 33 shots from the Guild Wars Factions Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend which ran from January 20 to 22, 2006. This beta weekend event was the first of two that preceded the release of Guild Wars Factions in 2006. This PvP-only beta introduced the Battle Islands, a new PvP-focused map with several outposts, which would, once Factions released, replace the previously on-map random arena, team arena, Tombs, and such outposts. Putting most of the PvP stuff in a single place was a good idea, so this was a welcome addition. If you had PvP character slots on your account, you could, additionally, create characters using the two new classes Factions would introduce, Ritualist and Assassin. If you didn't, they had free keys available for making a new account that you would presumably use only for the betas. In fact, those keys were available to anyone, not only current Guild Wars owners, as Factions would be a stand-alone title which does not require to original game to play. So, Arena.net let anyone who wanted to use those keys to create an account. I created a separate account that I used only for the betas, because my four character slots were full and this way was free while buying additional character slots costs $10 each. This beta was PvP-only, so making a new account didn't mean much, you only missed out on faction experience and such. That's fine. This is why the shots from this beta of the character select screen for the Factions beta have only the beta characters are present, and not my regular ones. I have checked, and this account does indeed exist. It uses a now-dead email address, but fortunately I managed to correctly guess the password and thanks to screenshots know a character name, so I logged in, and yeah, it's still there, with two characters but no games attached to the account. That's pretty cool, though it wouldn't be usable unless I bought GW again for it, and i don't really want to buy the game for an account attached to an email address I can't access anymore, so oh well. It still was pretty cool to see that it still existed.
In addition to the January test covered here, post-release beta accounts or characters would be accessible several more times, for the four Factions and Nightfall beta events in 2006. You had to use PvP-only or new characters for this beta, I believe, and I, like many people,,wanted to anyway in order to try the new classes. As a result, I've got some new character creation shots showing the interface used for this beta, and some of the character list because these are kind of temporary characters and not ones I could use in the main game. After Factions released I would use some of the Factions beta characters in the main game, by re-creating them in Factions' new character slots, but not all of them. Once Factions released, as with the base game, you couldn't bring anything from beta into the main game other than your character names, so if this was a temporary second account I didn't lose anything for it.
I should mention, I did not have these Factions beta screenshots in a folder named with the name of the event, so while it was clear from looking at them that they were from a beta, I had a hard time figuring out what event, actually, they came from. I knew about the second Factions beta, from March, but these did not seem to be from that PvE-focused event. Making things worse, the official Guild Wars Wiki does not mention this event! Yes, while all of the other betas have pages on the official Wiki, this one is somehow totally absent. After searching the internet for a while though I finally found what they have to have come from, the PvP beta weekend from January '06 I've named above. Here is the page for it on another Guild Wars Wiki which actually has info on the event: https://guildwiki.gamepedia.com/Guild_Wars_Factions_Global_Free-for-All_PvP_Weekend Arena.net or whoever oversees the official wiki really should correct this mistake and add a page for this beta somewhere, it did happen.
Guild Wars (Prophecies), November 2005 to January 2006
I'm honestly not sure exactly when I took this screenshot, but it definitely isn't from this point in time; it may be from one of the later pre-release Beta Weekend Events? It's either that or it's promoting the upcoming Guild Wars Factions Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend, which ran for a weekend in mid January. I'm not sure. But the image was in the folder with the rest of these, so I'm putting it here. (The email address is my usual one for the account, not something different.)
Yes, I'm in the desert now with my Ranger character, I've kept at it. Running around in Guild Wars can be boring, but between the great graphics and music fortunately usually it's pretty fun. It can be tense at times too if you're trying to avoid enemies, but I don't think I'm doing that here.
The desert area in GW is moderately sized and kind of empty, and is mostly made up of big open zones. It's a fun area to explore, but isn't as challenging as you might expect so it's not that big a part of the game. I kind of like that though, because being able to wander around and explore without having to constantly fight is nice!
Some of the enemies pack a punch though, for sure, particularly in the desert's Missions. It looks like I'm in a decent fight here.
There are a few oasis areas in the desert filled with plants, such as this pond here. The plants are appropriately desert-themed, with cacti, palm trees, and such.
And now something different, the Fire Islands, or maybe more likely the random arena fire islands map.
Here is my world map, for Talindra almost certainly, circa late 2005. As you can see I have gone to some areas in the game, but there are still big parts of the overworld that I hadn't explored. There are some sizable optional areas in this game, and I finally got around to going through a lot more of them in 2018, many years later — that is when I finally went along that long path connecting the North and South Shiverpeaks, went to the Falls, and such, for example.
Back to the ranger, my college guild definitely wasn't a PvP guild, as that default Rating shows.
I wonder if any of these people have played the game in the past, oh, decade…
First person view of a bridge in the desert. The first person view is very impractical in combat, but can look kind of cool at times when you're just running around.
And now I'm nearing the end of the bridge. Also, I know I've said this repeatedly, but having that U-key map open, the one on the left side of the screen, really is essential when exploring, it's much easier to remember where you've been that way! Good maps are an important thing in games.
Going back to Talindra, here is one of those Sorrow's Furnace attempts. The lighting here makes the cape look different… that's kind of cool.
Sorrow's Furnace is a fairly good-sized dungeon, so getting a random public group to both stick together and actually stay long enough to finish it was difficult. Witness, three people have abandoned us already in this run, and this is not near the end… but given that the party is mostly dead and our death penalty is high, I don't blame them; it's probably better to just start over at this point.
Here's the Iron Forgeman! He's big, and the battle is tricky; you don't just fight him, but have to stand on different points at the same time to be able to damage him.
Let's go in again, maybe it'll go better this time! At least the area looks pretty neat, with the reddish light and good texture work.
This area definitely does not look too hospitable to human life. And it looks like the party agrees… :p
But despite half of the team giving up, a few of us kept trying anyway, and talking about strategies for what to do in the chat.
It's just incredibly difficult to beat this guy at 60% down with only four people, unfortunately… still, it's great that I saved this chat with screenshots!
The strategy conversation continues. I really wish that I'd beaten the Iron Forgeman on one of these attempts, it's still something I'd love to do in the game…
At some point after this one we finally gave up. Oh well… I'll try again!
Long match? Just how long was this guy on the other team able to evade us for, exactly? Also… it's weird that I think I've never even made an account at The Guild Hall or its successor Guild Wars Legacy, no idea why really. That IGN Guild Wars forum shut down many years ago, after all. I did join the GW1 general Discord recently, though.
… Well, if that chat is accurate that WAS a pretty crazy-long match… 51 minutes, seriously? And we stayed. Heh… I don't know if that's really worth it, but you don't want to lose, you know? And we didn't.
Still lots of people here grouping for Sorrow's Furnace runs. Beating Sorrow's Furnace was much more plausible in late '05 than any time since, since finding player groups was so easy. Oh, and on another note, those white boxes are players who haven't loaded in correctly, or something like that. It was a much less common bug than the textureless white ground, but as you can see happened once in a while.
And now, a handful of shots of the first Christmas event. I must have been busy during most of this event because I only have a couple of Christmas '05 screenshots, but at least I have some! I'm liking this already, the giant presents are a nice touch. I love winter, and Christmas is a great holiday.
A giant candy cane! This is much nicer stuff than Halloween decorations…
Oh, yes, this is Lion's Arch that somehow has seen a snowfall. That's rare for a jungle city… but it happens every year anyway. Convenient!
Before the Battle Isles, again, the Team Arena was in the South Shiverpeaks, so grouping for it was done here. I don't know if this party filled up though, because the next shot is of something else.
Yes, it's the Iron Forgeman again. And a not-full party and high death penalty again, too. Sigh…
The Sorrow's Furnace area really does look great, though. This game in general has really impressive art design, but this area upped things versus the original release in some ways.
The Forgeman's design is great as well, even if it's a bit too hard probably.
… Yup, this is going about as expected, we keep failing and respawning and eventually more and more people leave as they give up. It was worth it though, even if not successful; Sorrow's Furnace is a cool dungeon and I really liked exploring it with player groups.
And last for this batch, a few shots of standing in fire in the Fire Islands PvP map.
Yes, I've started to collect Elite Scar Pattern armor. I'd eventually get the full set, and it's pretty much what I've been using ever since.
Guild Wars Factions Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend, Jan. 20-22 2006
These are the Battle Isles, islands run by the Zaishen Order for the purposes of gathering together people who want to fight eachother together in one place. This is probably from a little cutscene introducing the Great Temple of Balthazar.
I made my first PvP character an Assassin, since that class sounded like the more interesting of the two. No, this isn't my character, just the party.
Here's my assassin, first Factions beta version. You could choose several different armor options in the character creator, and I chose this one.
And here we see the Factions beta character creator, as I decided to make a second character. Here's the default look of the Ritualist. The new background is for Factions, as each of the four campaigns introduced a new login and character selection screen. Unfortunately the first three have been inaccessible for a very long time now, as the Eye of the North snowy mountain has been the games' only selection screen background, and soundtrack, while the other three, such as this Factions one that was only in the game for about six months, languish semi-forgotten. It's unfortunate, they should add in the option to use any of the four.
Now the model from behind.
And here's the character creator itself, showing all the costume and skill options available here. Because these characters are created at max level, and are only usable in PvP, you can choose different armor options and set all your skill points as you choose. For the beta, if you made a new account with the beta key or made a new PvP character, a bunch of armors and such were unlocked for everyone; normally PvP characters can only use things unlocked on your account.
I believe this is from the tutorial stage a new PvP character has to go through.
Yeah, definitely. That's Kisai there most likely.
That isn't Aidan on the right though, but someone who looks somewhat like him, but factions style…
This is probably more shots of this AI character group than I needed. Oh well…
Now hopefully we'll actually get to some PvP gameplay, with this new class!
The Battle Isles look great, and were a nice introduction to the East Asian-themed setting of Factions.
Oops, I think the ground broke again…
And here we see that yeah, this definitely is not my main account. I'd made two beta characters so far, one of each new class, but was mostly playing this one.
Here's what I went with for a Ritualist. That's kind of a cool outfit, but it's never been a class I've played much of… I still don't have one in my main account, in fact.
I did play some hours of Assassin, though. Here we finally see some actual gameplay, from a Random Arenas bout.
Playing Assassin is all about chained skills that build on eachother, and is the games' second melee class, after the Warrior. I've played just enough Assassin to get the idea, but ultimately really do prefer ranged classes over melee.
Multiple costume options were available, so I switched to another one here. A fair number of people were playing this beta. There were a LOT playing the new classes though for sure… but as you can see, not all.
Another scene from one of the outposts in the Battle Isles. Cantha and the Battle Isles, the setting of Factions, are a generic East Asian setting, made by a Western developer, so it's a random mishmash of Chinese and Japanese elements, tossed in together into one place. What, China and Japan are different countries and actually aren't the same? Who knew… I mean, I like Factions a lot as a campaign, but this IS a very legitimate criticism. The main game's nations are similarly broad-themed though, so that's maybe more just the style of the game than historical ignorance. I hope.
It was always weird, and kind of amusing, when the ground textures broke, but things on top of the ground like this starting point were still fine…
Posing for a shot in the Nolani-styled Ascalon PvP arena. It's an alright map, but has some rarely-used elements in it with that central thing you can control and the like… but teams usually just fight like normal.
This map's better, I think… the Shiverpeaks map's great.
And here's my first shot of an area I have seen a lot of since, the Random Arenas. This is the multiplayer area in Guild Wars I've been in the most, since its introduction here. The higher level multiplayer of the rest of the game is great, but it's never been something I really wanted to get into myself.
Why not make a third character, just to see the new costume and skill options available here and such? First I need to choose an outfit… aeromancer?
Geomancer, maybe?
The costume I chose will be in one shot later, but now some first-person shots of NPCs. I wish I had more shots from actual PvP battles, but oh well, this will have to do… anyway, here's a warrior.
And a monk.
That ranger guy.
And the mage, probably Kisai from Factions I'm guessing.
Near the end I took shots of my characters in the beta yet again. I wish I'd also taken ones with their usernames, since I don't have any shots of the names of two of these three characters, but this is better than nothing. As I said this account still exists, but I deleted all three of these characters in the later betas and don't have any of them anymore. One Factions (Assassin) and one Nightfall character are in that account, but they aren't these. Here's my first Factions beta Elementalist. Yeah, I went with Pyromancer of course.
And the Assassin, in the costume I used the most. This is the character seen in the screenshots through most of this beta, so I do know this name, though the character is gone because I would change to a new character with a different name later that is the one that still exists.
And last the Ritualist, still little-played. It's a second healing-focused class, but with spirits you summon as the class's major focus. For some reason I didn't keep this character either, even though the account currently has only two characters on it.
Playing in the Random Arena again, before the beta ends.
These last two shots are from after the end of the January Factions beta event, I believe. So, these two are the only screenshots I may have taken in February; otherwise this whole set is from November to January. Either that or they were taken late in the event but with my regular account, and not the beta one. It's more likely the former, but either way, I'm in a Fissure of Woe attempt with a player group. With a two frames per second framerate for me as of this shot and a player dropped, though, I doubt this run lasted too much longer...
Here we are gathering people together in the Temple of the Ages for another go, probably at the Fissure again.
And that's all for this update. The next one is on my site now, and I'll post a forum version next time.
Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots, Part 9: November 2005 – February 2006
This time, I'm kind of combining two posts into one by covering two things. I chose to do it this way because both sets end in January 2006, so this way it keeps the dating simpler, and also because under 40 screenshots didn't seem like quite enough for a solo article without much descriptive text.
Anyway, the first set are screenshots from release Guild Wars, 39 screenshots from after Halloween 2005 until mid January 2006. Included are a bunch of Sorrow's Furnace shots, from my many futile attempts to beat the Iron Forgeman, and the few pictures I took of Christmas 2005. I must not have had much time to play GW that holiday, but at least took a couple of screenshots when I could.
And second, there are 33 shots from the Guild Wars Factions Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend which ran from January 20 to 22, 2006. This beta weekend event was the first of two that preceded the release of Guild Wars Factions in 2006. This PvP-only beta introduced the Battle Islands, a new PvP-focused map with several outposts, which would, once Factions released, replace the previously on-map random arena, team arena, Tombs, and such outposts. Putting most of the PvP stuff in a single place was a good idea, so this was a welcome addition. If you had PvP character slots on your account, you could, additionally, create characters using the two new classes Factions would introduce, Ritualist and Assassin. If you didn't, they had free keys available for making a new account that you would presumably use only for the betas. In fact, those keys were available to anyone, not only current Guild Wars owners, as Factions would be a stand-alone title which does not require to original game to play. So, Arena.net let anyone who wanted to use those keys to create an account. I created a separate account that I used only for the betas, because my four character slots were full and this way was free while buying additional character slots costs $10 each. This beta was PvP-only, so making a new account didn't mean much, you only missed out on faction experience and such. That's fine. This is why the shots from this beta of the character select screen for the Factions beta have only the beta characters are present, and not my regular ones. I have checked, and this account does indeed exist. It uses a now-dead email address, but fortunately I managed to correctly guess the password and thanks to screenshots know a character name, so I logged in, and yeah, it's still there, with two characters but no games attached to the account. That's pretty cool, though it wouldn't be usable unless I bought GW again for it, and i don't really want to buy the game for an account attached to an email address I can't access anymore, so oh well. It still was pretty cool to see that it still existed.
In addition to the January test covered here, post-release beta accounts or characters would be accessible several more times, for the four Factions and Nightfall beta events in 2006. You had to use PvP-only or new characters for this beta, I believe, and I, like many people,,wanted to anyway in order to try the new classes. As a result, I've got some new character creation shots showing the interface used for this beta, and some of the character list because these are kind of temporary characters and not ones I could use in the main game. After Factions released I would use some of the Factions beta characters in the main game, by re-creating them in Factions' new character slots, but not all of them. Once Factions released, as with the base game, you couldn't bring anything from beta into the main game other than your character names, so if this was a temporary second account I didn't lose anything for it.
I should mention, I did not have these Factions beta screenshots in a folder named with the name of the event, so while it was clear from looking at them that they were from a beta, I had a hard time figuring out what event, actually, they came from. I knew about the second Factions beta, from March, but these did not seem to be from that PvE-focused event. Making things worse, the official Guild Wars Wiki does not mention this event! Yes, while all of the other betas have pages on the official Wiki, this one is somehow totally absent. After searching the internet for a while though I finally found what they have to have come from, the PvP beta weekend from January '06 I've named above. Here is the page for it on another Guild Wars Wiki which actually has info on the event: https://guildwiki.gamepedia.com/Guild_Wars_Factions_Global_Free-for-All_PvP_Weekend Arena.net or whoever oversees the official wiki really should correct this mistake and add a page for this beta somewhere, it did happen.
Guild Wars (Prophecies), November 2005 to January 2006
I'm honestly not sure exactly when I took this screenshot, but it definitely isn't from this point in time; it may be from one of the later pre-release Beta Weekend Events? It's either that or it's promoting the upcoming Guild Wars Factions Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend, which ran for a weekend in mid January. I'm not sure. But the image was in the folder with the rest of these, so I'm putting it here. (The email address is my usual one for the account, not something different.)
Yes, I'm in the desert now with my Ranger character, I've kept at it. Running around in Guild Wars can be boring, but between the great graphics and music fortunately usually it's pretty fun. It can be tense at times too if you're trying to avoid enemies, but I don't think I'm doing that here.
The desert area in GW is moderately sized and kind of empty, and is mostly made up of big open zones. It's a fun area to explore, but isn't as challenging as you might expect so it's not that big a part of the game. I kind of like that though, because being able to wander around and explore without having to constantly fight is nice!
Some of the enemies pack a punch though, for sure, particularly in the desert's Missions. It looks like I'm in a decent fight here.
There are a few oasis areas in the desert filled with plants, such as this pond here. The plants are appropriately desert-themed, with cacti, palm trees, and such.
And now something different, the Fire Islands, or maybe more likely the random arena fire islands map.
Here is my world map, for Talindra almost certainly, circa late 2005. As you can see I have gone to some areas in the game, but there are still big parts of the overworld that I hadn't explored. There are some sizable optional areas in this game, and I finally got around to going through a lot more of them in 2018, many years later — that is when I finally went along that long path connecting the North and South Shiverpeaks, went to the Falls, and such, for example.
Back to the ranger, my college guild definitely wasn't a PvP guild, as that default Rating shows.
I wonder if any of these people have played the game in the past, oh, decade…
First person view of a bridge in the desert. The first person view is very impractical in combat, but can look kind of cool at times when you're just running around.
And now I'm nearing the end of the bridge. Also, I know I've said this repeatedly, but having that U-key map open, the one on the left side of the screen, really is essential when exploring, it's much easier to remember where you've been that way! Good maps are an important thing in games.
Going back to Talindra, here is one of those Sorrow's Furnace attempts. The lighting here makes the cape look different… that's kind of cool.
Sorrow's Furnace is a fairly good-sized dungeon, so getting a random public group to both stick together and actually stay long enough to finish it was difficult. Witness, three people have abandoned us already in this run, and this is not near the end… but given that the party is mostly dead and our death penalty is high, I don't blame them; it's probably better to just start over at this point.
Here's the Iron Forgeman! He's big, and the battle is tricky; you don't just fight him, but have to stand on different points at the same time to be able to damage him.
Let's go in again, maybe it'll go better this time! At least the area looks pretty neat, with the reddish light and good texture work.
This area definitely does not look too hospitable to human life. And it looks like the party agrees… :p
But despite half of the team giving up, a few of us kept trying anyway, and talking about strategies for what to do in the chat.
It's just incredibly difficult to beat this guy at 60% down with only four people, unfortunately… still, it's great that I saved this chat with screenshots!
The strategy conversation continues. I really wish that I'd beaten the Iron Forgeman on one of these attempts, it's still something I'd love to do in the game…
At some point after this one we finally gave up. Oh well… I'll try again!
Long match? Just how long was this guy on the other team able to evade us for, exactly? Also… it's weird that I think I've never even made an account at The Guild Hall or its successor Guild Wars Legacy, no idea why really. That IGN Guild Wars forum shut down many years ago, after all. I did join the GW1 general Discord recently, though.
… Well, if that chat is accurate that WAS a pretty crazy-long match… 51 minutes, seriously? And we stayed. Heh… I don't know if that's really worth it, but you don't want to lose, you know? And we didn't.
Still lots of people here grouping for Sorrow's Furnace runs. Beating Sorrow's Furnace was much more plausible in late '05 than any time since, since finding player groups was so easy. Oh, and on another note, those white boxes are players who haven't loaded in correctly, or something like that. It was a much less common bug than the textureless white ground, but as you can see happened once in a while.
And now, a handful of shots of the first Christmas event. I must have been busy during most of this event because I only have a couple of Christmas '05 screenshots, but at least I have some! I'm liking this already, the giant presents are a nice touch. I love winter, and Christmas is a great holiday.
A giant candy cane! This is much nicer stuff than Halloween decorations…
Oh, yes, this is Lion's Arch that somehow has seen a snowfall. That's rare for a jungle city… but it happens every year anyway. Convenient!
Before the Battle Isles, again, the Team Arena was in the South Shiverpeaks, so grouping for it was done here. I don't know if this party filled up though, because the next shot is of something else.
Yes, it's the Iron Forgeman again. And a not-full party and high death penalty again, too. Sigh…
The Sorrow's Furnace area really does look great, though. This game in general has really impressive art design, but this area upped things versus the original release in some ways.
The Forgeman's design is great as well, even if it's a bit too hard probably.
… Yup, this is going about as expected, we keep failing and respawning and eventually more and more people leave as they give up. It was worth it though, even if not successful; Sorrow's Furnace is a cool dungeon and I really liked exploring it with player groups.
And last for this batch, a few shots of standing in fire in the Fire Islands PvP map.
Yes, I've started to collect Elite Scar Pattern armor. I'd eventually get the full set, and it's pretty much what I've been using ever since.
Guild Wars Factions Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend, Jan. 20-22 2006
These are the Battle Isles, islands run by the Zaishen Order for the purposes of gathering together people who want to fight eachother together in one place. This is probably from a little cutscene introducing the Great Temple of Balthazar.
I made my first PvP character an Assassin, since that class sounded like the more interesting of the two. No, this isn't my character, just the party.
Here's my assassin, first Factions beta version. You could choose several different armor options in the character creator, and I chose this one.
And here we see the Factions beta character creator, as I decided to make a second character. Here's the default look of the Ritualist. The new background is for Factions, as each of the four campaigns introduced a new login and character selection screen. Unfortunately the first three have been inaccessible for a very long time now, as the Eye of the North snowy mountain has been the games' only selection screen background, and soundtrack, while the other three, such as this Factions one that was only in the game for about six months, languish semi-forgotten. It's unfortunate, they should add in the option to use any of the four.
Now the model from behind.
And here's the character creator itself, showing all the costume and skill options available here. Because these characters are created at max level, and are only usable in PvP, you can choose different armor options and set all your skill points as you choose. For the beta, if you made a new account with the beta key or made a new PvP character, a bunch of armors and such were unlocked for everyone; normally PvP characters can only use things unlocked on your account.
I believe this is from the tutorial stage a new PvP character has to go through.
Yeah, definitely. That's Kisai there most likely.
That isn't Aidan on the right though, but someone who looks somewhat like him, but factions style…
This is probably more shots of this AI character group than I needed. Oh well…
Now hopefully we'll actually get to some PvP gameplay, with this new class!
The Battle Isles look great, and were a nice introduction to the East Asian-themed setting of Factions.
Oops, I think the ground broke again…
And here we see that yeah, this definitely is not my main account. I'd made two beta characters so far, one of each new class, but was mostly playing this one.
Here's what I went with for a Ritualist. That's kind of a cool outfit, but it's never been a class I've played much of… I still don't have one in my main account, in fact.
I did play some hours of Assassin, though. Here we finally see some actual gameplay, from a Random Arenas bout.
Playing Assassin is all about chained skills that build on eachother, and is the games' second melee class, after the Warrior. I've played just enough Assassin to get the idea, but ultimately really do prefer ranged classes over melee.
Multiple costume options were available, so I switched to another one here. A fair number of people were playing this beta. There were a LOT playing the new classes though for sure… but as you can see, not all.
Another scene from one of the outposts in the Battle Isles. Cantha and the Battle Isles, the setting of Factions, are a generic East Asian setting, made by a Western developer, so it's a random mishmash of Chinese and Japanese elements, tossed in together into one place. What, China and Japan are different countries and actually aren't the same? Who knew… I mean, I like Factions a lot as a campaign, but this IS a very legitimate criticism. The main game's nations are similarly broad-themed though, so that's maybe more just the style of the game than historical ignorance. I hope.
It was always weird, and kind of amusing, when the ground textures broke, but things on top of the ground like this starting point were still fine…
Posing for a shot in the Nolani-styled Ascalon PvP arena. It's an alright map, but has some rarely-used elements in it with that central thing you can control and the like… but teams usually just fight like normal.
This map's better, I think… the Shiverpeaks map's great.
And here's my first shot of an area I have seen a lot of since, the Random Arenas. This is the multiplayer area in Guild Wars I've been in the most, since its introduction here. The higher level multiplayer of the rest of the game is great, but it's never been something I really wanted to get into myself.
Why not make a third character, just to see the new costume and skill options available here and such? First I need to choose an outfit… aeromancer?
Geomancer, maybe?
The costume I chose will be in one shot later, but now some first-person shots of NPCs. I wish I had more shots from actual PvP battles, but oh well, this will have to do… anyway, here's a warrior.
And a monk.
That ranger guy.
And the mage, probably Kisai from Factions I'm guessing.
Near the end I took shots of my characters in the beta yet again. I wish I'd also taken ones with their usernames, since I don't have any shots of the names of two of these three characters, but this is better than nothing. As I said this account still exists, but I deleted all three of these characters in the later betas and don't have any of them anymore. One Factions (Assassin) and one Nightfall character are in that account, but they aren't these. Here's my first Factions beta Elementalist. Yeah, I went with Pyromancer of course.
And the Assassin, in the costume I used the most. This is the character seen in the screenshots through most of this beta, so I do know this name, though the character is gone because I would change to a new character with a different name later that is the one that still exists.
And last the Ritualist, still little-played. It's a second healing-focused class, but with spirits you summon as the class's major focus. For some reason I didn't keep this character either, even though the account currently has only two characters on it.
Playing in the Random Arena again, before the beta ends.
These last two shots are from after the end of the January Factions beta event, I believe. So, these two are the only screenshots I may have taken in February; otherwise this whole set is from November to January. Either that or they were taken late in the event but with my regular account, and not the beta one. It's more likely the former, but either way, I'm in a Fissure of Woe attempt with a player group. With a two frames per second framerate for me as of this shot and a player dropped, though, I doubt this run lasted too much longer...
Here we are gathering people together in the Temple of the Ages for another go, probably at the Fissure again.
And that's all for this update. The next one is on my site now, and I'll post a forum version next time.
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I played relatively lot of Guild Wars, but have few memories of it. I was never quite hardcore and didn't have a grasp on the mechanics, world, lore or anything. I think I only ever did one PvP thing which I suppose were an important part of the game. I have much more nostalgic memories of some other games from the period I played significantly less. Feels a bit weird!
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That's a good point, and somehow I hadn't mentioned that in this last update so I added in my thoughts on that to one of the Factions beta screenshots. That is, I agree. It really is too bad that the first three login and character selection screen environments have been MIA from the game for over 11 years now, because as great as the Eye of the North one is, the other three before it were pretty great as well. The game really should have some kind of selector in it that lets you view any of the four of them... and the Factions one particularly got shortchanged, as it was only in the game for two beta weekends and six months, the least of any of the four.
I remember playing Guild Wars a lot on my old ISDN connection way back when. The way the game handled areas actually worked out well for low bandwidth connections like mine. I really liked how the first Guild Wars had this Mediterranean feel to it, everything was so sunny. I think I was put off by GW2 starting off in a snowy area.
Never got into the expansion sets though, but the screenshots in this thread look good and certainly brought me back to those carefree days on the old HP Pavilion.
Never got into the expansion sets though, but the screenshots in this thread look good and certainly brought me back to those carefree days on the old HP Pavilion.
This was my most favourite RPG but the Ascension mission was painful! You really needed a great team for that. My friend could never get past it even after possibly 20-30 attempts. Amazing game where the sequel ended up not being nearly as good in my opinion
I've been wishing they would do this for a while now. Either an option to choose from the menu screen or random shuffle.
I think it's just a couple of guys at Arena Net that have been doing these updates and one of them asked the other for assistance if I'm not mistaken, otherwise there would just be the one. I imagine that most of the money they'll make from the new storage panels and material storage upgrades will probably go into Guild Wars 2 development actually. I do think the material storage upgrade is overpriced though - anyone paying £9 each time is doing so just to increase the cap on a set of values that are already held on the servers. But then, it's not out of the ordinary when nearly all of these games charge a lot for such account upgrades and services. This is probably one of the cheaper examples! I only really have a problem with the in-game upgrades, the new runes of holding, because that's a great deal of grinding - if my awful maths is not failing me, that's 15,000 copper Zaishen coins to fully upgrade the inventory space for just one character. :\
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That's great to know! I'm looking forward to the updates to the game.
Almost as bad, though, is that this new storage can only be used for weapons and equipment, and not other items. I do find that pretty annoying as well...
They really should. I wonder if it's on the list.
I agree about the cost for the new character inventory storage, it's pretty crazy. All I've got is the basic 10-item one on my main and nothing for the other characters, but anything more than that is far too expensive with a currency I've never tried to get many of, Zaishen coins. I've just never played that part of the game much... and why charge so much for more weapon storage, anyway? It doesn't make much sense, you can't buy Zaishen coins with real money or anything.
Almost as bad, though, is that this new storage can only be used for weapons and equipment, and not other items. I do find that pretty annoying as well...
Man, Guild Wars 1 really was one of a kind game.
I wonder if it would be that hard porting it to current gen consoles, specially Switch.
It's would run properly, since it is a game from 2005, but the art style makes it pleasant to play even these days.
It would bring new life into it and maybe they could resume expanding the game from where they left it.
Wishful thinking, GW1 is my most played game ever lol
I wonder if it would be that hard porting it to current gen consoles, specially Switch.
It's would run properly, since it is a game from 2005, but the art style makes it pleasant to play even these days.
It would bring new life into it and maybe they could resume expanding the game from where they left it.
Wishful thinking, GW1 is my most played game ever lol
10 - March - May 2006
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Yes, it's time for the next update! This time, March to May of 2006.
Following those two screenshots at the end of the last post from after the end of the January Factions PvP beta weekend, my screenshots jump straight to the next Factions beta in late March 2006. Arena.net's writeup of the beta still available is here: http://gw1101.gtm.guildwars.com/events/ingame/factionspreview.php. I guess I wasn't playing much Guild Wars that spring. I did graduate from undergrad college that spring, so I was busy. My retro gaming collection was growing fast as well.
Anyway, so, as that article says, from March 24 to 27, Arena.net ran a second beta test for Guild Wars: Factions, which would release the next month. I may not have been playing much in the two months between these tests, but I was back for this beta, because I was looking forward to Factions. This time the PvE and PvP sides of Factions were shown, and we could explore a chunk of the world in Echovald Forest and the Jade Sea, though I only went to one of those areas. Again using my second account most of the time, I created a new Factions character there and explored the forest. Other than the first shot here, all the rest of my screenshots from this test are either of the character creation screens or of me playing as a new Elementalist character that I made in the second (beta) account.
The second part of this article covers the month from after the second Factions beta until Factions' release in late April. It isn't a very exciting image set, there is not much there really worthwhile. I have at least some more good screenshots to post in this series, though.
Factions Preview Event: March 2006
This shot shows my regular Guild Wars character Talindra in the Battle Isles. So, this test definitely allowed regular PvE characters to access the Battle Isles, which might have been a new thing; I'm not sure that the previous test from January allowed that. This is the only shot I have of any of my regular characters in the new Factions beta areas, though, so I found it kind of confusing when I saw it. But that has got to be what's going on here.
Here we see my new character (again, in that second account at this point) – an Elementalist, because I always have preferred ranged classes to melee and I like combat classes more than healing. Also I was interested in making a new one, other than the Prophecies Elementalist I also had.
Here we see one of the 37 screenshots I took in the character creator for this beta. I took screenshots of a lot of the costumes available to female characters of all of the classes. Yeah, female ones only this time; I just wasn't interested enough in the male costumes, I guess. I think I will post a side-article part of this series eventually where I post most of the character-creator screenshots I took in three of the betas, namely two of the early pre-release betas and then this one. It's not that exciting, but I took all these screenshots, so why not? It is at least a little bit interesting to see the options they gave you, I think.
I took a bunch of shots of some of the Kurzick NPCs in this test. Right from the beginning I preferred the Kurzicks to the Luxons, both for character and environment design, and you see that here as I didn't do their side right from the start here. Even as of writing this I still have actually never finished the Luxon side of the split portion of the Factions campaign, though last year I did finally play through most of it. The Jade Sea is a beautiful area indeed, I'm glad to finally have explored it. Echovald Forest is also a great area, though. Factions is maybe a bit too short, but it's a fantastic campaign I have always loved, for the most part. It's my second favorite of the four Guild Wars campaigns, after the original.
Despite Factions' Asian theme, the Kurzicks have a quite gothic look to them, to say the least. Despite how much I like Factions, I have always found it a little weird how past the city the last two areas are this gotic forest and a frozen, somewhat Asian/Greek-ish pirate area. I know this is a Western game and you can tell, with how the city and such is a mishmash of Chinese and Japanese elements in a way you probably would not see from an Asian game, but still it's a little odd. The visual design here is great, but how Asian-inspired is the Kurzick area? Anyway, this is Danika, one of the leading members of the Kurzicks and someone who you can fight with as a healer henchman. Behind her are her pets, two Rot Wallows who also are henchmen. Yes, really.
And here are two more of the Kurzick henchmen, a mage and a guardian (warrior-healer). Most of the frozen Echovald Forest is made of petrified trees, but some areas are bright green with returning life, such as this ground here.
Yes, the classic henchies are here as well. Well, some of them are; they divided them between the Kurzick and Luxon areas, so the main party — Devona, Aidan, Eve and Cynn here, and such — are in the Kurzick areas, and others in the Luxon. Mhenlo is not available as a henchmen in Factions, unfortunately; he's a major story character and doesn't have the time to explore around, pretty much.
A disaster turned this whole forest to stone. You learn more when you play the full game, here we were thrown into this part of the campaign that ended up being fairly far in. It's a really cool concept and they executed on it very well.
Henchmen. The assassin woman in front is on the Factions box. But yeah, the character models still look good, but those rock wall textures in the background have not…
This is not Danika, just someone else who looks kind of similar. The Luxons and Kurzicks both use consistent design themes throughout.
And here, the same shot but with the interface off. The image quality looks about the same this time though, really…
Yes, some other people were playing this beta as well.
Mesmer Kurzicks have weird masks like this one.
And now, finally some actual gameplay! I wish I'd taken more gameplay shots, and less in towns… oh well. Anyway, this area of the Kurcick cathedral is nice.
Run! This looks like a shot from a cutscene here, but I think I'm just exploring, not playing the mission. It's an alright shot though I think.
Yes, I am thoroughly exploring this zone.
See? I think I've covered almost every bit of it now!
Here is another female Kurzick NPC, albeit one with a much less fancy outfit.
Zoomed out to see more of the environment, Echovald Forest is still pretty beautiful. Cutting something that looks like a church out of that petrified tree is interesting and looks great.
The sky in Echovald Forest mostly is not visible because of the giant petrified trees. Here is one shot of the sky, or rather, the branches…
And here is another. It's yet another great touch in this fantastic area of the game. Echovald Forest has always been one of my favorite parts of Guild Wars to explore around and look at…
The ground is mostly dead in the forest, but with so little light getting through those branches you'd expect that. I like the look of that tree in the center here, the light in this otherwise dead tree is pretty cool.
Now, I've returned to an outpost. Unlike the depths of the forest above, this is not one of the forests' best-looking areas. Sure, it looks alright, but the giant trees are the best…
A Factions-style dragon, in this outpost? And is that a dead person on the ground on the left side? What is going on here… is this normal, or an end-of-beta event?
It's not a huge crowd, but at least some other people were playing this beta near the end here.
Another shot of my character from the front, the direction you rarely see in games. GW has great character designs, but the Kurzick building here is pretty great as well.
We're probably getting close to the end of the beta now…
Before the end though, I took four screenshots of what, exactly, I had explored in the ten or so hours I'd played the beta. Yeah, I spent almost the entire time in this beta exploring the forest in PvE with this Elementalist character, neglecting the other things you could do — much PvP, the Alliance battles, and such. See the link at the top to Arena.net's article for more on those other events.
North of that last shot, we see the upper part of Echovald Forest. Factions areas really aren't that large.
Oh yeah, I got far on the Luxon side… yup…
On the Kurzick side, though, I did as much as I could! You couldn't explore everything in this beta, but I got to most of what was there.
And last, to conclude the beta, I … explored the forest a bit more, because I was really having a lot of fun doing it. I took a screenshot of my playtime at this point as well, since I was on a second account so I knew a record of how long I'd played the beta would be valuable. And indeed it is.
Guild Wars – March – May 2004, Prophecies and then the Factions launch
With the beta over, I went back to only infrequently playing GW over the next month as I probably focused more on school and classic games, something I was really getting into in 2006. Factions released April 28th, and I'm not sure exactly when I bought it — I bought a physical box, so I probably waited a weeks until after college ended — but I'm sure I got it by sometime in May. Here we see my first few shots from the tutorial area. Next time, more Factions release shots, and the first Nightfall beta. My favorite time for Guild Wars is 2004-2005, but despite my paucity of screenshots, 2006, up until the release of Nightfall, was also a great time for Guild Wars. I played the game a lot less than I had in '05, but still was playing some of the game, again, even if I wasn't always taking screenshots of what I was doing.
Sometimes in this game, you die while exploring when deep in an area, close to your objective. But your death penalty is high, so you run all the way across the stupid map from the respawn shrine near where you started, only to find…
Gah! Died again, barely getting any farther. Back to square one… well, at least the few enemies I got past last time are dead now! When you are in these kinds of situations and then actually surpass the challenge and make it through it's incredibly satisfying; despite the occasional frustration this is a thing I really love about Guild Wars.
And here we see, I've gone back to playing as my Monk character and that's why I am going through the desert this time. Healing is hard, and I found the standard Heal-focused build less interesting, so as you see from my skillbar instead I have a mixture of healing and protection skills at this point.
I know I keep saying this, but even on this aging computer Guild wars really did look great most of the time. I'm thinking that again while looking at this screenshot.
And now, back to the Shiverpeaks. Heh… edge of the world, again! Usually you aren't supposed to be able to get to the actual edge of a map, but some pathing glitch allowed it here. That's fun stuff.
And here's another shot of this edge of the map. Again, usually there are walls, visible or invisible, that keep you from getting to areas like this.
The glass-like water in GW is pretty great as well. Or is this ice? It is cold out, after all.
And now I'm exploring something back in Ascalon… no idea why, though, beyond that Ascalon is one of the best parts of Guild Wars, so it's fun to go back to once in a while.
The area outside of Sorrow's Furnace here clearly has more going on than any of the Shiverpeaks areas in the original launch game, both in design and in art. They put a lot of effort into Sorrow's Furnace, it's too bad that they didn't do much else like it afterwards. On another note, I've stuck with this outfit for my Monk because it's probably my favorite Monk clothes. She still has it.
66% of Tyria explored with my main… I've gotten that number a lot higher since. Anyway though, that's a big monster up ahead! I'm sure this will go fine…
At this point the people from school I was in this guild with decided to make a new guild, so we were switching over to the new one at this point. I took a few shots of all the people, but won't post those. This one's fine though.
See? I've got a new guild cape. I didn't take any shots of the new guilds' player list and such at this point, but the cape changed for a reason. The color is wrong, though, because this is the team arenas and I'm on the blue team.
And here is the new capes' its actual color, red. The new guild has a pretty dumb name, and I've always kind of hated the acronym… but I'll get to that later.Anyway, I'm exploring the snowy forest. Those snow-covered trees are, as always, one of my favorite background objects in this game…
Next though, I decided to log in to the second account, and take screenshots of the three characters I had used in the second Factions beta. Yes, I did have three characters, and not only the one seen in all of the screenshots from part one of this article. This Assassin is the one that I'd delete here after Factions released and recreate in my main account.
And here is the new Elementalist, which I would eventually also delete and recreate in my main account. … Yes, both of my Elementalist characters have Fire-focused skillsets. I really should branch out but always have preferred the Fire skills…
And here's the other Assassin. No, this isn't the one from the first Factions beta, but another one. I was trying more Asian-style names than that one had, and chose the other one over this. This character still exists, however; I logged in to this second beta-only-use account of mine today, albeit with a different hair style for some reason. I must have recreated the character at some point in the Nightfall betas, I guess? I don't remember, and unfortunately this is the only old screenshot I have of the character, so who knows.
Yes, I had logged in to the other account to choose which character to delete to create in my main account, since I've gotten Guild Wars: Factions! As I said, I chose one of the Assassins. Unlike Prophecies, Factions has a much faster pace — this campaign is only maybe half as long as Prophecies. That game takes me a bit over a hundred hours a character to finish, while this one is 50 or 60 hours. It's a densely packed 50 or 60 hours, though, without anywhere near as much downtime and aimless wandering as Prophecies has. Despite the short length, it's a great campaign and my second favorite of the four overall, after Prophecies of course.
New Factions characters start on Shina Jea Island, a very traditional-Japan area which looks beautiful.
Unfortunately, I did not take any more gameplay shots in this set. Instead, all I've got are a handful of shots of (mostly female) NPCs and such… blah. I mean, this character has a good, interesting design, but still…
A warrior woman. As for the background, yeah, Shing Jea Island is quite Japanese. Then the city on the mainland is much more Chinese, and then the Kurzick and Luxon areas are gothic and asian-pirate themed for whatever reason. Of course characters from Shinge Jea Island and the mainland have a mixture of Chinese and Japanese names, because East Asia is all the same, right? To be fair, Guild Wars Prophecies is similarly mixed together — Ascalon stands in for just about all of fantasy-medieval Europe, after all, not any one nation, but it's something I noticed because it is a common thing in Western depictions of Asia.
Here we see some Henchmen from Shing Jea Island. There isn't much healthy, green areas on the mainland, other than one zone and some bits of grass here and there, so the island really stands out. It's kind of too bad it's all very easy content, though Hard Mode adds at least some challenge to it…
Yup, it's another character creation shot. This time it's only one, though. No, I did not make this character; it wouldn't be until 2018 that I actually made a semi-serious effort at playing Mesmer… it's a tricky class due to all the timing requirements on Mesmer skills, and has never been one of my favorites as a result.
And last, we have… another NPC in an interesting outfit. Okay. The next screenshot batch is better, though, really.
Following those two screenshots at the end of the last post from after the end of the January Factions PvP beta weekend, my screenshots jump straight to the next Factions beta in late March 2006. Arena.net's writeup of the beta still available is here: http://gw1101.gtm.guildwars.com/events/ingame/factionspreview.php. I guess I wasn't playing much Guild Wars that spring. I did graduate from undergrad college that spring, so I was busy. My retro gaming collection was growing fast as well.
Anyway, so, as that article says, from March 24 to 27, Arena.net ran a second beta test for Guild Wars: Factions, which would release the next month. I may not have been playing much in the two months between these tests, but I was back for this beta, because I was looking forward to Factions. This time the PvE and PvP sides of Factions were shown, and we could explore a chunk of the world in Echovald Forest and the Jade Sea, though I only went to one of those areas. Again using my second account most of the time, I created a new Factions character there and explored the forest. Other than the first shot here, all the rest of my screenshots from this test are either of the character creation screens or of me playing as a new Elementalist character that I made in the second (beta) account.
The second part of this article covers the month from after the second Factions beta until Factions' release in late April. It isn't a very exciting image set, there is not much there really worthwhile. I have at least some more good screenshots to post in this series, though.
Factions Preview Event: March 2006
This shot shows my regular Guild Wars character Talindra in the Battle Isles. So, this test definitely allowed regular PvE characters to access the Battle Isles, which might have been a new thing; I'm not sure that the previous test from January allowed that. This is the only shot I have of any of my regular characters in the new Factions beta areas, though, so I found it kind of confusing when I saw it. But that has got to be what's going on here.
Here we see my new character (again, in that second account at this point) – an Elementalist, because I always have preferred ranged classes to melee and I like combat classes more than healing. Also I was interested in making a new one, other than the Prophecies Elementalist I also had.
Here we see one of the 37 screenshots I took in the character creator for this beta. I took screenshots of a lot of the costumes available to female characters of all of the classes. Yeah, female ones only this time; I just wasn't interested enough in the male costumes, I guess. I think I will post a side-article part of this series eventually where I post most of the character-creator screenshots I took in three of the betas, namely two of the early pre-release betas and then this one. It's not that exciting, but I took all these screenshots, so why not? It is at least a little bit interesting to see the options they gave you, I think.
I took a bunch of shots of some of the Kurzick NPCs in this test. Right from the beginning I preferred the Kurzicks to the Luxons, both for character and environment design, and you see that here as I didn't do their side right from the start here. Even as of writing this I still have actually never finished the Luxon side of the split portion of the Factions campaign, though last year I did finally play through most of it. The Jade Sea is a beautiful area indeed, I'm glad to finally have explored it. Echovald Forest is also a great area, though. Factions is maybe a bit too short, but it's a fantastic campaign I have always loved, for the most part. It's my second favorite of the four Guild Wars campaigns, after the original.
Despite Factions' Asian theme, the Kurzicks have a quite gothic look to them, to say the least. Despite how much I like Factions, I have always found it a little weird how past the city the last two areas are this gotic forest and a frozen, somewhat Asian/Greek-ish pirate area. I know this is a Western game and you can tell, with how the city and such is a mishmash of Chinese and Japanese elements in a way you probably would not see from an Asian game, but still it's a little odd. The visual design here is great, but how Asian-inspired is the Kurzick area? Anyway, this is Danika, one of the leading members of the Kurzicks and someone who you can fight with as a healer henchman. Behind her are her pets, two Rot Wallows who also are henchmen. Yes, really.
And here are two more of the Kurzick henchmen, a mage and a guardian (warrior-healer). Most of the frozen Echovald Forest is made of petrified trees, but some areas are bright green with returning life, such as this ground here.
Yes, the classic henchies are here as well. Well, some of them are; they divided them between the Kurzick and Luxon areas, so the main party — Devona, Aidan, Eve and Cynn here, and such — are in the Kurzick areas, and others in the Luxon. Mhenlo is not available as a henchmen in Factions, unfortunately; he's a major story character and doesn't have the time to explore around, pretty much.
A disaster turned this whole forest to stone. You learn more when you play the full game, here we were thrown into this part of the campaign that ended up being fairly far in. It's a really cool concept and they executed on it very well.
Henchmen. The assassin woman in front is on the Factions box. But yeah, the character models still look good, but those rock wall textures in the background have not…
This is not Danika, just someone else who looks kind of similar. The Luxons and Kurzicks both use consistent design themes throughout.
And here, the same shot but with the interface off. The image quality looks about the same this time though, really…
Yes, some other people were playing this beta as well.
Mesmer Kurzicks have weird masks like this one.
And now, finally some actual gameplay! I wish I'd taken more gameplay shots, and less in towns… oh well. Anyway, this area of the Kurcick cathedral is nice.
Run! This looks like a shot from a cutscene here, but I think I'm just exploring, not playing the mission. It's an alright shot though I think.
Yes, I am thoroughly exploring this zone.
See? I think I've covered almost every bit of it now!
Here is another female Kurzick NPC, albeit one with a much less fancy outfit.
Zoomed out to see more of the environment, Echovald Forest is still pretty beautiful. Cutting something that looks like a church out of that petrified tree is interesting and looks great.
The sky in Echovald Forest mostly is not visible because of the giant petrified trees. Here is one shot of the sky, or rather, the branches…
And here is another. It's yet another great touch in this fantastic area of the game. Echovald Forest has always been one of my favorite parts of Guild Wars to explore around and look at…
The ground is mostly dead in the forest, but with so little light getting through those branches you'd expect that. I like the look of that tree in the center here, the light in this otherwise dead tree is pretty cool.
Now, I've returned to an outpost. Unlike the depths of the forest above, this is not one of the forests' best-looking areas. Sure, it looks alright, but the giant trees are the best…
A Factions-style dragon, in this outpost? And is that a dead person on the ground on the left side? What is going on here… is this normal, or an end-of-beta event?
It's not a huge crowd, but at least some other people were playing this beta near the end here.
Another shot of my character from the front, the direction you rarely see in games. GW has great character designs, but the Kurzick building here is pretty great as well.
We're probably getting close to the end of the beta now…
Before the end though, I took four screenshots of what, exactly, I had explored in the ten or so hours I'd played the beta. Yeah, I spent almost the entire time in this beta exploring the forest in PvE with this Elementalist character, neglecting the other things you could do — much PvP, the Alliance battles, and such. See the link at the top to Arena.net's article for more on those other events.
North of that last shot, we see the upper part of Echovald Forest. Factions areas really aren't that large.
Oh yeah, I got far on the Luxon side… yup…
On the Kurzick side, though, I did as much as I could! You couldn't explore everything in this beta, but I got to most of what was there.
And last, to conclude the beta, I … explored the forest a bit more, because I was really having a lot of fun doing it. I took a screenshot of my playtime at this point as well, since I was on a second account so I knew a record of how long I'd played the beta would be valuable. And indeed it is.
Guild Wars – March – May 2004, Prophecies and then the Factions launch
With the beta over, I went back to only infrequently playing GW over the next month as I probably focused more on school and classic games, something I was really getting into in 2006. Factions released April 28th, and I'm not sure exactly when I bought it — I bought a physical box, so I probably waited a weeks until after college ended — but I'm sure I got it by sometime in May. Here we see my first few shots from the tutorial area. Next time, more Factions release shots, and the first Nightfall beta. My favorite time for Guild Wars is 2004-2005, but despite my paucity of screenshots, 2006, up until the release of Nightfall, was also a great time for Guild Wars. I played the game a lot less than I had in '05, but still was playing some of the game, again, even if I wasn't always taking screenshots of what I was doing.
Sometimes in this game, you die while exploring when deep in an area, close to your objective. But your death penalty is high, so you run all the way across the stupid map from the respawn shrine near where you started, only to find…
Gah! Died again, barely getting any farther. Back to square one… well, at least the few enemies I got past last time are dead now! When you are in these kinds of situations and then actually surpass the challenge and make it through it's incredibly satisfying; despite the occasional frustration this is a thing I really love about Guild Wars.
And here we see, I've gone back to playing as my Monk character and that's why I am going through the desert this time. Healing is hard, and I found the standard Heal-focused build less interesting, so as you see from my skillbar instead I have a mixture of healing and protection skills at this point.
I know I keep saying this, but even on this aging computer Guild wars really did look great most of the time. I'm thinking that again while looking at this screenshot.
And now, back to the Shiverpeaks. Heh… edge of the world, again! Usually you aren't supposed to be able to get to the actual edge of a map, but some pathing glitch allowed it here. That's fun stuff.
And here's another shot of this edge of the map. Again, usually there are walls, visible or invisible, that keep you from getting to areas like this.
The glass-like water in GW is pretty great as well. Or is this ice? It is cold out, after all.
And now I'm exploring something back in Ascalon… no idea why, though, beyond that Ascalon is one of the best parts of Guild Wars, so it's fun to go back to once in a while.
The area outside of Sorrow's Furnace here clearly has more going on than any of the Shiverpeaks areas in the original launch game, both in design and in art. They put a lot of effort into Sorrow's Furnace, it's too bad that they didn't do much else like it afterwards. On another note, I've stuck with this outfit for my Monk because it's probably my favorite Monk clothes. She still has it.
66% of Tyria explored with my main… I've gotten that number a lot higher since. Anyway though, that's a big monster up ahead! I'm sure this will go fine…
At this point the people from school I was in this guild with decided to make a new guild, so we were switching over to the new one at this point. I took a few shots of all the people, but won't post those. This one's fine though.
See? I've got a new guild cape. I didn't take any shots of the new guilds' player list and such at this point, but the cape changed for a reason. The color is wrong, though, because this is the team arenas and I'm on the blue team.
And here is the new capes' its actual color, red. The new guild has a pretty dumb name, and I've always kind of hated the acronym… but I'll get to that later.Anyway, I'm exploring the snowy forest. Those snow-covered trees are, as always, one of my favorite background objects in this game…
Next though, I decided to log in to the second account, and take screenshots of the three characters I had used in the second Factions beta. Yes, I did have three characters, and not only the one seen in all of the screenshots from part one of this article. This Assassin is the one that I'd delete here after Factions released and recreate in my main account.
And here is the new Elementalist, which I would eventually also delete and recreate in my main account. … Yes, both of my Elementalist characters have Fire-focused skillsets. I really should branch out but always have preferred the Fire skills…
And here's the other Assassin. No, this isn't the one from the first Factions beta, but another one. I was trying more Asian-style names than that one had, and chose the other one over this. This character still exists, however; I logged in to this second beta-only-use account of mine today, albeit with a different hair style for some reason. I must have recreated the character at some point in the Nightfall betas, I guess? I don't remember, and unfortunately this is the only old screenshot I have of the character, so who knows.
Yes, I had logged in to the other account to choose which character to delete to create in my main account, since I've gotten Guild Wars: Factions! As I said, I chose one of the Assassins. Unlike Prophecies, Factions has a much faster pace — this campaign is only maybe half as long as Prophecies. That game takes me a bit over a hundred hours a character to finish, while this one is 50 or 60 hours. It's a densely packed 50 or 60 hours, though, without anywhere near as much downtime and aimless wandering as Prophecies has. Despite the short length, it's a great campaign and my second favorite of the four overall, after Prophecies of course.
New Factions characters start on Shina Jea Island, a very traditional-Japan area which looks beautiful.
Unfortunately, I did not take any more gameplay shots in this set. Instead, all I've got are a handful of shots of (mostly female) NPCs and such… blah. I mean, this character has a good, interesting design, but still…
A warrior woman. As for the background, yeah, Shing Jea Island is quite Japanese. Then the city on the mainland is much more Chinese, and then the Kurzick and Luxon areas are gothic and asian-pirate themed for whatever reason. Of course characters from Shinge Jea Island and the mainland have a mixture of Chinese and Japanese names, because East Asia is all the same, right? To be fair, Guild Wars Prophecies is similarly mixed together — Ascalon stands in for just about all of fantasy-medieval Europe, after all, not any one nation, but it's something I noticed because it is a common thing in Western depictions of Asia.
Here we see some Henchmen from Shing Jea Island. There isn't much healthy, green areas on the mainland, other than one zone and some bits of grass here and there, so the island really stands out. It's kind of too bad it's all very easy content, though Hard Mode adds at least some challenge to it…
Yup, it's another character creation shot. This time it's only one, though. No, I did not make this character; it wouldn't be until 2018 that I actually made a semi-serious effort at playing Mesmer… it's a tricky class due to all the timing requirements on Mesmer skills, and has never been one of my favorites as a result.
And last, we have… another NPC in an interesting outfit. Okay. The next screenshot batch is better, though, really.
Last edited:
11 - June - October 2006
OP
OP
First, I just finished making a nice, fully broken-down table of contents page for this series on my website. It is here: http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?page_id=1174 Of course all of the posts are in this thread as well, but I like having this table of contents page is great. While putting it together I also did a little work on the previous articles, adding chapter headings within each article and making a few little text changes here and there. There are now multiple sections in every post in the series. For now I'm just going to leave them on the site and not here, because it's not a big change, but I might edit them in later.
Anyway, this one is a long one. In this 73-screenshot article with some good and some not so interesting screenshots, I will cover five things: the first Dragon Festival in late June to early July and more of release Factions; the first, PvP-only Nightfall beta in late July; the period in between the Nightfall betas; the second, PvE Nightfall beta; and last some more Factions gameplay from after that beta. Originally this post contained only 55 screenshots, but I realized that the 25-screenshot set of Factions gameplay actually is from after the second Nightfall beta and not before it, and that I'd forgotten to post most of the handful of second Nightfall beta screens that I have. So, after multiple edits to correct the timeline, this post is now very long and one of the biggest in the series. Sorry about that, it probably should be two articles.
But yes, despite Factions only being a few months old, Arena.net was already advertising their upcoming third campaign with betas. My screenshots from the first Nightfall beta are almost all from the character creator, so it looks like I didn't play it much, but I do have a few gameplay screens from the second beta. It was interesting that they were already showing Nightfall in July, though; that was only a couple of months after Factions released, and Nightfall would not release until October. This is a similar timetable to Factions, in that the first Factions beta was also a PvP weekend event three months before the game launched, but there was a year between the original Guild Wars' release and Factions, while Nightfall came only six months after Factions. It felt different with the campaigns so close. I know I will keep repeating this point, but it's what I think.
Anyway, while 2006 was a great year for Guild Wars, going from my screenshots and memories, as I've said before 2004-2005 was when I played the game the most. That should be easy to see in this post — there are a lot of screenshots here, but it also covers a full five months, so compared to 2004 or 2005 it's clear I was playing the game less than I had before. The slow decline of my hours in GW would continue, unfortunately. That may be part of why I was not as hyped for Nightfall as I was Factions, I still had plenty more Factions to play when Nightfall released. I kind of wish ANet had spaced out Guild Wars' expansions more evenly, but they seem to have kept changing their minds about what they should do with the game, until eventually abandoning it for its far worse sequel. That part of the story is pretty sad and frustrating, but fortunately Guild Wars 1 is still fantastic regardless of how badly I think things went with the second game.
A. Guild Wars Factions – First Dragon Festival, June 30 – July 6, and the rest of July as well
A month after the release of Factions in late April, Arena.net added a new, third festival to the yearly calendar. They would eventually have seven time-limited festivals that run at different times of the year, and this was the third after the Halloween and Wintersday (Christmas) events which started in 2005. The Dragon Festival is Guild Wars' Fourth of July event, occurring annually from the end of June to early July, but it's Asian-themed fitting with its Canthan setting. This event introduced the Shing Jea Boardwalk and several limited-time minigames, including the Dragon Arena and three little minigames. The other main Boardwalk minigame, Rollerbeetle Racing, would be introduced in 2007. These events are only playable during the Canthan New Year and Dragon Festival events, in January-February and June-July each year.
I guess I either didn't take many screenshots or had waited a while before getting Factions, because these screenshots are the next ones I took after the 'I got Factions' Factions tutorial area batch from the last update. The Dragon Festival was pretty cool, though; I really liked the new minigame, and it would be a good sign of things to come as more minigames would be added to Guild Wars over the year following.
Heh… I'm clipped right on top of another character, so the two models are kind of merged together…
This is the Dragon Arena, or rather probably the lobby area for it. The Dragon Arena was a new limited-availability mode that, again, is only available in the January and July events. This arena is a random arena with some unique skills and rules which make for an amusing and unique challenge. Unfortunately, I don't have any shots of the skillbar, only interface-off shots like this. That's too bad because, as I said, the Dragon Arena uses its own exclusive skills, not your usual ones.
In the Dragon Arena everyone has these wand things which you shoot at eachother with. You don't use your usual weapon. As the Guild Wars Wiki says, gameplay was inspired by dodgeball — you need to avoid enemy shots, while hitting them with your own.
The festival grounds are all decorated for the event, with lanterns and everything. It's a nice looking area.
Here we have another shot from an ongoing match in the Dragon Arena. Yes, everyone has those wands.
I also spent some time doing regular missions during this festival, though. Here I am exploring Shing Jea Island. As this is a Prophecies character you don't have to do that, but I wanted to because it's a pretty nice area with some beautiful sights to see.
Shing Jea Island feels quite Japanese and pastoral, and it's a great contrast from the big city and ruined landscapes of the rest of Factions. This is a beautiful area.
Back to the town, which is all decorated for the festival.
Those lanterns all over are nice and definitely add to the atmosphere. You know a special event is on when you go to a place you've seen in its normal state hundreds of times, except this time it looks different… after this the Dragon Festival might have ended, but I'll break the article where I started a new images folder, instead of after this screenshot.
I'm not sure why I took this one, but I do like those snowy Guild Wars trees.
From this point you have an overlook which allows you to see the town, far below in the distance. You're above the fog, which looks like it's actually a flat layer. It works though, so sure, why not. Today this scene would look better, as the 'full detail to the horizon' patch from 2018 does wonders for vistas like this one! Not that I would ever enable that option on a computer running a GeForce 2 like the one I took all these shots on has, though.. you'd be lucky to see a frame per second, probably…
I think we might all be poisoned here? That's what the green auras emitting from the characters means, I believe… it makes for a pretty nice shot though, with the green glow and light rays lighting this dark area.
And without that light you get this, very dark areas. I took three screenshots of this character (or player?) running back and forth in the distance for some reason. I don't know why, now… but here's one of them.
Back in the city, we have a well-dressed NPC official in a not too nice looking part of the city center.
Arena.net's artists and graphical designers made some truly impressive things in Guild Wars, and this area is definitely among them! This shot is another one of my favorites from this update. The sickly red-yellow light, in this dark area, looks great… ominous, but great.
Oops, the ground textures broke again! At least we can finally see a skillbar here… but yeah, with broken ground textures the chat is unreadable because lines do not disappear so long as you're looking at the ground, everything just overlaps.
B. Guild Wars Nightfall PvP Preview Event: July 28-30, 2006
Only two months after Guild Wars Factions released, Arena.net was already starting to preview their next expansion, Nightfall. For an expansion as large as it is, as I said at the top in this post I kind of think that Nightfall might have released too soon. I know Factions is a short campaign and many people surely were ready for something new, but I was taking my time with it and definitely wasn't done yet! But no, here's a huge new campaign to play, and it's a pretty hard one too. Well, at least all this content has given me something to do with the game over the years since, and that's a very good thing considering that ANet started abandoning this game in 2008…
Anyway, following Asian-themed Factions, Nightfall is African-themed. It has a North African theme specifically, with a mostly desert and sahel environment. As with Factions, two new classes were added, one melee and one ranged. Nightfall is a great campaign, but I have never liked these classes as much as the original ones, and the campaign took me a very long time to finish as well. The first beta, as the name suggests, was PvP only, so it served to test the two new classes but did not show off any of Elona, the new continent where the campaign was set. There would later be a second beta with PvE content in it, much like Factions had.
As a note, I don't seem to have played this beta much at all. In fact, of the dozen or so screenshots from it I took, only two are from out of the character creator, and only one of those two is worth posting! So yeah, enjoy like ten pictures from the character creator, I guess… yay? It is at least a little interesting, though, as where else will you see the two new Nightfall classes, the Dervish and Paragon, existing in front of the Factions select screen / character creation background? Only in this beta, that's where!
So as I said, almost all of my pictures from this beta are from character creation. It is pretty interesting to see a Dervish in the Factions login-screen environment, though…
Rear shot of this outfit.
This shows some of your options for new characters in this test. You had more options than a regular new character since they gave everyone some stuff to play with for the beta.
Side view of this second, less skimpy outfit.
And here's a third one, with hanging blades that match the scythe weapons Dervishes favor.
This is the one I went with for my character. I changed the colors to green though, of course! It only colors the highlights and not the main dress, but that's better than nothing.
Starting a battle. This is a very interesting environment indeed… it's definitely something new, this isn't from Prophecies or Factions.
This area was the main little taste of Elona you could see in the beta. It's a small area where your new characters go through before you fight in PvP.
And here we see my account, with my five regular characters and one empty slot that I was using for a test character in the beta. (I thought about keeping this character, but ultimately did not and made a different Dervish eventually instead, after Nightfall released.)
Rear view.
This shot is from after the end of the beta, but as you see, after that I deleted that character and created a Paragon, to also try out the other new class. Male Paragons have Roman legionnaire-styled outfits which are kind of cool. I never have played much Paragon at all, though… I should try it sometime.
C. August 22 to September 23, 2006: Between the Nightfall Betas
The first Nightfall beta ran in late July, and the second in late September. This first shot is from mid August, though, so either I didn't play for a month or the file date is wrong, but I don't think the file date is wrong in this case, so perhaps I just hadn't taken any screenshots in a month, if I played any. In the interim, as expected I went back to playing more of the great game that is Guild Wars Factions.
Before Nightfall released and I decided to do with the character slot, I decided to take another screenshot of this Paragon character.
Rear shot of him.
I was slowly progressing through Prophecies with my Ranger, here and there.
The Canthan official outfits are good designs.
This is just a lobby area in Cantha. It looks pretty nice from a distance like this though, like it could be from a cutscene… but it isn't. The environment is somewhat low-poly of course, but the art design is impeccable.
At this point, I decided to abandon following my college friends from guild to guild as they made new ones, and just stayed in this one ever since, despite its very dumb name that I've never liked. I did make one big change, though…
Yes, I brought back my Lego Black Falcon shield-inspired guild cape! I tried a few designs before settling on the final one. I love this design, it looks great…
This solid-color pattern looks nice, but ultimately I stuck with the cross-hatched one.
And here we see the results, my guild cape. I still really like the look of it.
This is a street in the city in Cantha. The polygon count doesn't come even close to what games can do today, but back then this looked very nice… though of course in art design it still does!
She's got a quest now, apparently. The background's more interesting though, with those nice trees in front of a wall of shack-like houses.
D. Guild Wars Nightfall World Preview Event: September 22-24, 2006
As I previously mentioned, similar to Guild Wars Factions, Nightfall had a second, PvE-focused beta several months after its first one. This beta occurred in late September and I participated. And again, just like Factions, this beta is, for some strange reason, not mentioned at all in the official Guild Wars Wiki! As before this confused me while putting these articles together, and I had this mislabeled previously. I should have figured this all out correctly before posting these screenshots instead of a month later… oh well, at least the record is correct now. I will post another small update mentioning the corrections. Here is another Guild Wars wiki that mentions this event: https://guildwiki.gamepedia.com/Guild_Wars_Nightfall_World_Preview_Event.
For the event, I decided to make a new character, another Dervish this time. This isn't my character though, just a henchman.
Here we see the beginning of the Nightfall intro mission, before you reach the main town.
Here we see my new character. This character was made in my main account, and I still have it, though barely played… I've just never liked melee classes in Guild Wars nearly as much as ranged ones.
Elona is a nice-looking area, as always for Guild Wars, but with a unique look to it you don't see elsewhere in the game or, as I said, all that often in games in general. You see some hints of that here.
When you pull the camera overhead, the way the grass textures are attached in the ground here and there to look like a field becomes exposed…
After playing this beta I was looking forwards to Nightfall, but given how much of Factions I still had left, I definitely wasn't as excited for it was I had been for Factions. I know I've said it already, but the timing for these campaigns was perhaps not the best. Oh well, at least it meant that we got lots of content to play in this game, enough to last for many years!
And here's my character in the select screen. I also took a couple of shots of my Paragon in the second account, showing that I did load that account up again for this beta, but none of the shots are worth sharing. That may have been the last time I was able to play those characters though, unless the Eye of the North beta also unlocked accounts without a key and I actually loaded up the second account. My guess is I probably didn't, though.
E. Guild Wars Factions Screenshots: September – October 2006
With the Nightfall beta over, I continued on my way through Guild Wars Factions, only occasionally taking shots from the other campaigns. There are a few Prophecies screens in this set at the start, but it's mostly Factions. As I just said I was kind of looking forward to Nightfall, but was much more interested in playing more of Factions. So, I did.
I kept trying every so often to finish Prophecies with my Prophecies Elementalist.
Unfortunately, while the cape is great, not so great is that I'd pretty seriously stalled out with this Elementalist by this point. I'm late in Kryta here and have probably barely made any progress with the character since I took these screenshots back in 2006…
My six characters as of fall 2006, all together. Nightfall was not released yet at this point, of course, so I'll need to wait before playing this character again.
But instead of continuing with the elementalist, I went back to the new campaign, Factions, with my main Talindra. Yeah, the clipping in Guild Wars is kind of weird. Most games don't just let you clip through everything like this one, or at least offline games don't; maybe it's common in online games for technical reasons? Anyway, this is the big city in Cantha, the continent in Factions. This woman NPC in front of me may be a bureaucrat, that looks like one of their outfits. East Asian-inspired Cantha has a very large bureaucracy.
And here we have some players, albeit in a screenshot that's not so great, with all of the close characters being on one side of the image and all.
Running along in this game is so much fun! I really like this kind of shot, it accurately represents a substantial part of the game. Factions has some pretty cool environments, and this one is definitely one of those.
Tahnakai Temple has statues of several of Cantha's legendary heroes of the past. I took screenshots of a few, starting with this one. I forget who this is offhand… the shrine, including candles and statue, is nicely done though.
This female warrior hero gets a large podium as well.
Deity statues, such as this one in Tahnakai Temple, look the same in Cantha as they do in Tyria. There are fewer of them, but the ones there are are the same. The environment doesn't look the same at all, though! The city in Cantha is incredibly dense and built up, so you often have ceilings like this which appear to be made of buildings. That ring of cloth sunshades up ahead isn't normal, though; this is a special area.
I'm not sure why this statue is there, other than to have yet another scantily clad female figure in an MMO, as if there aren't enough of those already… the environment's pretty nice though, and well modeled.
This is the important hero from the past, the assassin who killed Factions big bad Shiro Tagachi. You talk to her ghost at one point.
The giant city is such a cool environment, it's definitely one of my favorites in Guild Wars. This scene is just one example of why! This is a pretty interesting area, with those buildings on one side, rocks on the other side, and buildings in the background…
Yes, Danika is in the city as well, for a while at least, with her pets/fellow henchmen. This area with the exposed rock pillars is on an edge of the city.
This one is definitely one of my favorites from this update. It shows off the city well, and this mostly still looks pretty good. Sure, the ground textures aren't the most detailed, but it mostly looks really nice. The beam of light is well placed as well, breaking through the gloom of the layers of buildings…
It would be hard to see the sun much in some parts of this city, with how many things are built on top of other things. On another note though, shots like this showing me exploring with just henchies is a nostalgic thing, with how ever since Nightfall I've mostly explored with Heroes. Talindra's skillbar is familar, however; it hasn't changed much since.
And here we see the party, or rather, me (not visible due to using first person view) and a bunch of AI helpers. This city's crazy stuff, with how huge the spaces are and how overgrown with buildings everything is… it might be my overall favorite Guild Wars environment, I'm not sure.
I've gotten out of the city now though, as were we meet some Luxons and one of their giant turtles. The green open space between the city and the Luxon and Kurzick areas stands alone in Factions, there are other green places in the campaign but none quite like this one. … oh, and yeah, that's obviously a player there with that chat window in the background…
Here's another Luxon woman NPC, at this camp.
And here is my first shot of the Jade Sea, the bright green frozen ocean. The same disaster that petrified Echovald Forest turned this former inland sea into jade. Green is my favorite color so I do really like the look of the Jade Sea, but despite that I've always preferred the Kurzicks so there won't be too many Jade Sea screenshots here for quite some time. Still, it's a great area which, like much of Factions, makes me kind of wish that the game had the kind of scale of Prophecies. Its relative denseness, with many fewer zones in the game compared to the first campaign and how Factions mission areas that can also be explored as regular explorable areas instead of separating the two, makes for a strong contrast when you compare Factions to Prophecies. The result is that if you take a regular, straight path through the game, this game is half the length of Prophecies, 50 hours for a new character instead of over a hundred. Nightfall kind of splits the difference, with more areas than Factions, but fewer than Prophecies. I know I just said I wish Factions was larger, and I do, but it is kind of nice that the game has this variety; you can play a shorter or longer, harder or easier, campaign depending on your preference.
Moving the camera overhead is rarely a good idea in gameplay, but it does at least make for a slightly different-looking screenshot. Otherwise, this text is just henchman chatter, not humans saying things.
Now I'm in Echovald Forest, which I posted a bunch more shots of in the beta set in the last update. What's going on here…
A lot of exploration, apparently, is what was going on, going by how many dots are on that map! And I've completed several quests as well, and gotten a new elite skill — you can only have one at a time, so the only way to have two as you see here is to capture it and not go back to a town yet, as once you do one will be unequipped.
Ahh, snow… I love snow, winter is great. I've got something else to celebrate, too — I've finally finished my elite scar pattern armor set! If you look at the screenshots above in this set, I still didn't have the glove piece yet, but now I do. Getting all of the materials to build this set took quite some time, and many trips to the specific area of the South Shiverpeaks you had to go to to make it, but it was worth it. … Well, honestly I have always thought that I should have an armor set that includes actual clothing, instead of this thing which obviously does not, but still haven't bought another elite armor set for either this or any other character. I really should do something about that…
Yes, it's another shot of the very cool tree-sky of Echovald Forest. It'd be pretty awesome to see a high-def version of this done with modern graphics tech…
It's the Jade Sea! But continuing from my last comment, looking at this shot makes me think that yes, some things about this game have aged graphically. It still looks very impressive, for a game that hasn't had much work done to it since 2007, but that creature in the background here sure doesn't look great.
These really giant turtles don't move, only the smaller ones do.
And that's all for this update. At least a few of these screenshots were nice, so I guess I'm glad to share them. Next time, the 2006 Halloween event, and more Factions gameplay. The next article will be the last one for a long time entirely taken on the by-this-point-aged computer from 2001 I took all of these screenshots so far on, so look forward to a significant increase in screenshot image quality starting in two Guild Wars Memories updates from now.
Anyway, this one is a long one. In this 73-screenshot article with some good and some not so interesting screenshots, I will cover five things: the first Dragon Festival in late June to early July and more of release Factions; the first, PvP-only Nightfall beta in late July; the period in between the Nightfall betas; the second, PvE Nightfall beta; and last some more Factions gameplay from after that beta. Originally this post contained only 55 screenshots, but I realized that the 25-screenshot set of Factions gameplay actually is from after the second Nightfall beta and not before it, and that I'd forgotten to post most of the handful of second Nightfall beta screens that I have. So, after multiple edits to correct the timeline, this post is now very long and one of the biggest in the series. Sorry about that, it probably should be two articles.
But yes, despite Factions only being a few months old, Arena.net was already advertising their upcoming third campaign with betas. My screenshots from the first Nightfall beta are almost all from the character creator, so it looks like I didn't play it much, but I do have a few gameplay screens from the second beta. It was interesting that they were already showing Nightfall in July, though; that was only a couple of months after Factions released, and Nightfall would not release until October. This is a similar timetable to Factions, in that the first Factions beta was also a PvP weekend event three months before the game launched, but there was a year between the original Guild Wars' release and Factions, while Nightfall came only six months after Factions. It felt different with the campaigns so close. I know I will keep repeating this point, but it's what I think.
Anyway, while 2006 was a great year for Guild Wars, going from my screenshots and memories, as I've said before 2004-2005 was when I played the game the most. That should be easy to see in this post — there are a lot of screenshots here, but it also covers a full five months, so compared to 2004 or 2005 it's clear I was playing the game less than I had before. The slow decline of my hours in GW would continue, unfortunately. That may be part of why I was not as hyped for Nightfall as I was Factions, I still had plenty more Factions to play when Nightfall released. I kind of wish ANet had spaced out Guild Wars' expansions more evenly, but they seem to have kept changing their minds about what they should do with the game, until eventually abandoning it for its far worse sequel. That part of the story is pretty sad and frustrating, but fortunately Guild Wars 1 is still fantastic regardless of how badly I think things went with the second game.
A. Guild Wars Factions – First Dragon Festival, June 30 – July 6, and the rest of July as well
A month after the release of Factions in late April, Arena.net added a new, third festival to the yearly calendar. They would eventually have seven time-limited festivals that run at different times of the year, and this was the third after the Halloween and Wintersday (Christmas) events which started in 2005. The Dragon Festival is Guild Wars' Fourth of July event, occurring annually from the end of June to early July, but it's Asian-themed fitting with its Canthan setting. This event introduced the Shing Jea Boardwalk and several limited-time minigames, including the Dragon Arena and three little minigames. The other main Boardwalk minigame, Rollerbeetle Racing, would be introduced in 2007. These events are only playable during the Canthan New Year and Dragon Festival events, in January-February and June-July each year.
I guess I either didn't take many screenshots or had waited a while before getting Factions, because these screenshots are the next ones I took after the 'I got Factions' Factions tutorial area batch from the last update. The Dragon Festival was pretty cool, though; I really liked the new minigame, and it would be a good sign of things to come as more minigames would be added to Guild Wars over the year following.
Heh… I'm clipped right on top of another character, so the two models are kind of merged together…
This is the Dragon Arena, or rather probably the lobby area for it. The Dragon Arena was a new limited-availability mode that, again, is only available in the January and July events. This arena is a random arena with some unique skills and rules which make for an amusing and unique challenge. Unfortunately, I don't have any shots of the skillbar, only interface-off shots like this. That's too bad because, as I said, the Dragon Arena uses its own exclusive skills, not your usual ones.
In the Dragon Arena everyone has these wand things which you shoot at eachother with. You don't use your usual weapon. As the Guild Wars Wiki says, gameplay was inspired by dodgeball — you need to avoid enemy shots, while hitting them with your own.
The festival grounds are all decorated for the event, with lanterns and everything. It's a nice looking area.
Here we have another shot from an ongoing match in the Dragon Arena. Yes, everyone has those wands.
I also spent some time doing regular missions during this festival, though. Here I am exploring Shing Jea Island. As this is a Prophecies character you don't have to do that, but I wanted to because it's a pretty nice area with some beautiful sights to see.
Shing Jea Island feels quite Japanese and pastoral, and it's a great contrast from the big city and ruined landscapes of the rest of Factions. This is a beautiful area.
Back to the town, which is all decorated for the festival.
Those lanterns all over are nice and definitely add to the atmosphere. You know a special event is on when you go to a place you've seen in its normal state hundreds of times, except this time it looks different… after this the Dragon Festival might have ended, but I'll break the article where I started a new images folder, instead of after this screenshot.
I'm not sure why I took this one, but I do like those snowy Guild Wars trees.
From this point you have an overlook which allows you to see the town, far below in the distance. You're above the fog, which looks like it's actually a flat layer. It works though, so sure, why not. Today this scene would look better, as the 'full detail to the horizon' patch from 2018 does wonders for vistas like this one! Not that I would ever enable that option on a computer running a GeForce 2 like the one I took all these shots on has, though.. you'd be lucky to see a frame per second, probably…
I think we might all be poisoned here? That's what the green auras emitting from the characters means, I believe… it makes for a pretty nice shot though, with the green glow and light rays lighting this dark area.
And without that light you get this, very dark areas. I took three screenshots of this character (or player?) running back and forth in the distance for some reason. I don't know why, now… but here's one of them.
Back in the city, we have a well-dressed NPC official in a not too nice looking part of the city center.
Arena.net's artists and graphical designers made some truly impressive things in Guild Wars, and this area is definitely among them! This shot is another one of my favorites from this update. The sickly red-yellow light, in this dark area, looks great… ominous, but great.
Oops, the ground textures broke again! At least we can finally see a skillbar here… but yeah, with broken ground textures the chat is unreadable because lines do not disappear so long as you're looking at the ground, everything just overlaps.
B. Guild Wars Nightfall PvP Preview Event: July 28-30, 2006
Only two months after Guild Wars Factions released, Arena.net was already starting to preview their next expansion, Nightfall. For an expansion as large as it is, as I said at the top in this post I kind of think that Nightfall might have released too soon. I know Factions is a short campaign and many people surely were ready for something new, but I was taking my time with it and definitely wasn't done yet! But no, here's a huge new campaign to play, and it's a pretty hard one too. Well, at least all this content has given me something to do with the game over the years since, and that's a very good thing considering that ANet started abandoning this game in 2008…
Anyway, following Asian-themed Factions, Nightfall is African-themed. It has a North African theme specifically, with a mostly desert and sahel environment. As with Factions, two new classes were added, one melee and one ranged. Nightfall is a great campaign, but I have never liked these classes as much as the original ones, and the campaign took me a very long time to finish as well. The first beta, as the name suggests, was PvP only, so it served to test the two new classes but did not show off any of Elona, the new continent where the campaign was set. There would later be a second beta with PvE content in it, much like Factions had.
As a note, I don't seem to have played this beta much at all. In fact, of the dozen or so screenshots from it I took, only two are from out of the character creator, and only one of those two is worth posting! So yeah, enjoy like ten pictures from the character creator, I guess… yay? It is at least a little interesting, though, as where else will you see the two new Nightfall classes, the Dervish and Paragon, existing in front of the Factions select screen / character creation background? Only in this beta, that's where!
So as I said, almost all of my pictures from this beta are from character creation. It is pretty interesting to see a Dervish in the Factions login-screen environment, though…
Rear shot of this outfit.
This shows some of your options for new characters in this test. You had more options than a regular new character since they gave everyone some stuff to play with for the beta.
Side view of this second, less skimpy outfit.
And here's a third one, with hanging blades that match the scythe weapons Dervishes favor.
This is the one I went with for my character. I changed the colors to green though, of course! It only colors the highlights and not the main dress, but that's better than nothing.
Starting a battle. This is a very interesting environment indeed… it's definitely something new, this isn't from Prophecies or Factions.
This area was the main little taste of Elona you could see in the beta. It's a small area where your new characters go through before you fight in PvP.
And here we see my account, with my five regular characters and one empty slot that I was using for a test character in the beta. (I thought about keeping this character, but ultimately did not and made a different Dervish eventually instead, after Nightfall released.)
Rear view.
This shot is from after the end of the beta, but as you see, after that I deleted that character and created a Paragon, to also try out the other new class. Male Paragons have Roman legionnaire-styled outfits which are kind of cool. I never have played much Paragon at all, though… I should try it sometime.
C. August 22 to September 23, 2006: Between the Nightfall Betas
The first Nightfall beta ran in late July, and the second in late September. This first shot is from mid August, though, so either I didn't play for a month or the file date is wrong, but I don't think the file date is wrong in this case, so perhaps I just hadn't taken any screenshots in a month, if I played any. In the interim, as expected I went back to playing more of the great game that is Guild Wars Factions.
Before Nightfall released and I decided to do with the character slot, I decided to take another screenshot of this Paragon character.
Rear shot of him.
I was slowly progressing through Prophecies with my Ranger, here and there.
The Canthan official outfits are good designs.
This is just a lobby area in Cantha. It looks pretty nice from a distance like this though, like it could be from a cutscene… but it isn't. The environment is somewhat low-poly of course, but the art design is impeccable.
At this point, I decided to abandon following my college friends from guild to guild as they made new ones, and just stayed in this one ever since, despite its very dumb name that I've never liked. I did make one big change, though…
Yes, I brought back my Lego Black Falcon shield-inspired guild cape! I tried a few designs before settling on the final one. I love this design, it looks great…
This solid-color pattern looks nice, but ultimately I stuck with the cross-hatched one.
And here we see the results, my guild cape. I still really like the look of it.
This is a street in the city in Cantha. The polygon count doesn't come even close to what games can do today, but back then this looked very nice… though of course in art design it still does!
She's got a quest now, apparently. The background's more interesting though, with those nice trees in front of a wall of shack-like houses.
D. Guild Wars Nightfall World Preview Event: September 22-24, 2006
As I previously mentioned, similar to Guild Wars Factions, Nightfall had a second, PvE-focused beta several months after its first one. This beta occurred in late September and I participated. And again, just like Factions, this beta is, for some strange reason, not mentioned at all in the official Guild Wars Wiki! As before this confused me while putting these articles together, and I had this mislabeled previously. I should have figured this all out correctly before posting these screenshots instead of a month later… oh well, at least the record is correct now. I will post another small update mentioning the corrections. Here is another Guild Wars wiki that mentions this event: https://guildwiki.gamepedia.com/Guild_Wars_Nightfall_World_Preview_Event.
For the event, I decided to make a new character, another Dervish this time. This isn't my character though, just a henchman.
Here we see the beginning of the Nightfall intro mission, before you reach the main town.
Here we see my new character. This character was made in my main account, and I still have it, though barely played… I've just never liked melee classes in Guild Wars nearly as much as ranged ones.
Elona is a nice-looking area, as always for Guild Wars, but with a unique look to it you don't see elsewhere in the game or, as I said, all that often in games in general. You see some hints of that here.
When you pull the camera overhead, the way the grass textures are attached in the ground here and there to look like a field becomes exposed…
After playing this beta I was looking forwards to Nightfall, but given how much of Factions I still had left, I definitely wasn't as excited for it was I had been for Factions. I know I've said it already, but the timing for these campaigns was perhaps not the best. Oh well, at least it meant that we got lots of content to play in this game, enough to last for many years!
And here's my character in the select screen. I also took a couple of shots of my Paragon in the second account, showing that I did load that account up again for this beta, but none of the shots are worth sharing. That may have been the last time I was able to play those characters though, unless the Eye of the North beta also unlocked accounts without a key and I actually loaded up the second account. My guess is I probably didn't, though.
E. Guild Wars Factions Screenshots: September – October 2006
With the Nightfall beta over, I continued on my way through Guild Wars Factions, only occasionally taking shots from the other campaigns. There are a few Prophecies screens in this set at the start, but it's mostly Factions. As I just said I was kind of looking forward to Nightfall, but was much more interested in playing more of Factions. So, I did.
I kept trying every so often to finish Prophecies with my Prophecies Elementalist.
Unfortunately, while the cape is great, not so great is that I'd pretty seriously stalled out with this Elementalist by this point. I'm late in Kryta here and have probably barely made any progress with the character since I took these screenshots back in 2006…
My six characters as of fall 2006, all together. Nightfall was not released yet at this point, of course, so I'll need to wait before playing this character again.
But instead of continuing with the elementalist, I went back to the new campaign, Factions, with my main Talindra. Yeah, the clipping in Guild Wars is kind of weird. Most games don't just let you clip through everything like this one, or at least offline games don't; maybe it's common in online games for technical reasons? Anyway, this is the big city in Cantha, the continent in Factions. This woman NPC in front of me may be a bureaucrat, that looks like one of their outfits. East Asian-inspired Cantha has a very large bureaucracy.
And here we have some players, albeit in a screenshot that's not so great, with all of the close characters being on one side of the image and all.
Running along in this game is so much fun! I really like this kind of shot, it accurately represents a substantial part of the game. Factions has some pretty cool environments, and this one is definitely one of those.
Tahnakai Temple has statues of several of Cantha's legendary heroes of the past. I took screenshots of a few, starting with this one. I forget who this is offhand… the shrine, including candles and statue, is nicely done though.
This female warrior hero gets a large podium as well.
Deity statues, such as this one in Tahnakai Temple, look the same in Cantha as they do in Tyria. There are fewer of them, but the ones there are are the same. The environment doesn't look the same at all, though! The city in Cantha is incredibly dense and built up, so you often have ceilings like this which appear to be made of buildings. That ring of cloth sunshades up ahead isn't normal, though; this is a special area.
I'm not sure why this statue is there, other than to have yet another scantily clad female figure in an MMO, as if there aren't enough of those already… the environment's pretty nice though, and well modeled.
This is the important hero from the past, the assassin who killed Factions big bad Shiro Tagachi. You talk to her ghost at one point.
The giant city is such a cool environment, it's definitely one of my favorites in Guild Wars. This scene is just one example of why! This is a pretty interesting area, with those buildings on one side, rocks on the other side, and buildings in the background…
Yes, Danika is in the city as well, for a while at least, with her pets/fellow henchmen. This area with the exposed rock pillars is on an edge of the city.
This one is definitely one of my favorites from this update. It shows off the city well, and this mostly still looks pretty good. Sure, the ground textures aren't the most detailed, but it mostly looks really nice. The beam of light is well placed as well, breaking through the gloom of the layers of buildings…
It would be hard to see the sun much in some parts of this city, with how many things are built on top of other things. On another note though, shots like this showing me exploring with just henchies is a nostalgic thing, with how ever since Nightfall I've mostly explored with Heroes. Talindra's skillbar is familar, however; it hasn't changed much since.
And here we see the party, or rather, me (not visible due to using first person view) and a bunch of AI helpers. This city's crazy stuff, with how huge the spaces are and how overgrown with buildings everything is… it might be my overall favorite Guild Wars environment, I'm not sure.
I've gotten out of the city now though, as were we meet some Luxons and one of their giant turtles. The green open space between the city and the Luxon and Kurzick areas stands alone in Factions, there are other green places in the campaign but none quite like this one. … oh, and yeah, that's obviously a player there with that chat window in the background…
Here's another Luxon woman NPC, at this camp.
And here is my first shot of the Jade Sea, the bright green frozen ocean. The same disaster that petrified Echovald Forest turned this former inland sea into jade. Green is my favorite color so I do really like the look of the Jade Sea, but despite that I've always preferred the Kurzicks so there won't be too many Jade Sea screenshots here for quite some time. Still, it's a great area which, like much of Factions, makes me kind of wish that the game had the kind of scale of Prophecies. Its relative denseness, with many fewer zones in the game compared to the first campaign and how Factions mission areas that can also be explored as regular explorable areas instead of separating the two, makes for a strong contrast when you compare Factions to Prophecies. The result is that if you take a regular, straight path through the game, this game is half the length of Prophecies, 50 hours for a new character instead of over a hundred. Nightfall kind of splits the difference, with more areas than Factions, but fewer than Prophecies. I know I just said I wish Factions was larger, and I do, but it is kind of nice that the game has this variety; you can play a shorter or longer, harder or easier, campaign depending on your preference.
Moving the camera overhead is rarely a good idea in gameplay, but it does at least make for a slightly different-looking screenshot. Otherwise, this text is just henchman chatter, not humans saying things.
Now I'm in Echovald Forest, which I posted a bunch more shots of in the beta set in the last update. What's going on here…
A lot of exploration, apparently, is what was going on, going by how many dots are on that map! And I've completed several quests as well, and gotten a new elite skill — you can only have one at a time, so the only way to have two as you see here is to capture it and not go back to a town yet, as once you do one will be unequipped.
Ahh, snow… I love snow, winter is great. I've got something else to celebrate, too — I've finally finished my elite scar pattern armor set! If you look at the screenshots above in this set, I still didn't have the glove piece yet, but now I do. Getting all of the materials to build this set took quite some time, and many trips to the specific area of the South Shiverpeaks you had to go to to make it, but it was worth it. … Well, honestly I have always thought that I should have an armor set that includes actual clothing, instead of this thing which obviously does not, but still haven't bought another elite armor set for either this or any other character. I really should do something about that…
Yes, it's another shot of the very cool tree-sky of Echovald Forest. It'd be pretty awesome to see a high-def version of this done with modern graphics tech…
It's the Jade Sea! But continuing from my last comment, looking at this shot makes me think that yes, some things about this game have aged graphically. It still looks very impressive, for a game that hasn't had much work done to it since 2007, but that creature in the background here sure doesn't look great.
These really giant turtles don't move, only the smaller ones do.
And that's all for this update. At least a few of these screenshots were nice, so I guess I'm glad to share them. Next time, the 2006 Halloween event, and more Factions gameplay. The next article will be the last one for a long time entirely taken on the by-this-point-aged computer from 2001 I took all of these screenshots so far on, so look forward to a significant increase in screenshot image quality starting in two Guild Wars Memories updates from now.
GW1 is probably my favorite game ever. Seeing all these screen shots makes me all nostalgic. Glad to see it get some love! :)
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... Thanks for bumping the thread, I see that I forgot to make a forum version of the last part of my 'screenshots from the old computer' series that I wrote back in March or so on my site. I still have not started on the next part, covering my better-looking but less historically interesting screenshots from '07 and on, but I'll do that at some point. First though, I will make a forum version of that last one, sorry about that...
Those '03 screenshots are crazy, the graphical difference between this and the final game is amazing! I mean, the environment here looks quite Guild Wars styled, but the enemies have a cartoony look to them that they would abandon in the final game, going for something different from the more Blizzard-esque style you see here. I think the change was definitely a good one, GW is one of the best-looking games I have ever seen.Poking around with Wayback Machine and found this artwork from 2003: fell-dwarfparchment.jpg
I don't think these enemies are in the final game:
No problem, I think it's a great historical thread.
Apparently the guildwars.com domain goes all the way back to 2001, redirecting to the corporate arena.net page until 2003. Unfortunately most of the image links don't work.
12 - October 2006 - February 2007
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I was on vacation last week so my long-delayed forum version of the last old-computer Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots article, and currently the last update in this series though I think I will start it up again soon so that probably won't last long took a while to finish, but it's finally done now and here it is. Yes, this is the last update of screenshots from the circa-2001, WinME, 32MB GeForce2-graphics computer that I had been using up until February 2007. I think that I'm just about past the part where my screenshots are historically interesting -- the beta screenshots are the most important for sure! -- and after the time covered in this update I started playing the game a lot less frequently, but I want to keep posting these and there is interest, so here's the next update.
Or read this article on my site with better formatting here: http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?p=1171
In late October 2006, Arena.net started up the second annual Halloween event. This builds on 2005's event, but with some new stuff added to give players more to do. At the same time, Guild Wars Nightfall released. Yes, Nightfall released right when the Halloween event began. I once again took a whole bunch of screenshots... and once again took almost none of the Christmas event, even though that is my favorite holiday. Actually, this time there are none at all from Christmas; as far as holidays go it skips from Halloween to the second Dragon Festival in early 2007. Oh well. In between, I play more Factions, and finish it with my main. So yeah, this is a pretty decent image set which covers a lot of ground. It includes 52 screenshots.
A. Guild Wars Halloween 2006: late October-early November
While I had always played Guild Wars with a download, for Prophecies and Factions, I bought a retail box and entered the key from that box in order to unlock those campaigns in the game. This time, however, with Nightfall, I did something new for me: I bought a game digitally. Getting computer games digitally, without a box or disc/disk at all, was still a somewhat uncommon thing in 2006, though it was becoming a lot less uncommon. There are positives and negatives to digital-only game purchases, but Arena.net encouraged digital purchases by offering some Halloween rewards you could only get by visiting Kamadan, the main city of the new campaign, during this short 5-day Halloween event. This was enough to convince me to buy the game digitally, and so I did. Much later I would get a box for the game for a few dollars from Goodwill, just to have one, but a digital-only game purchase still felt new and interesting at the time. Today I see more of the negatives of digital-only game playing than the positives, for example because it allows companies to control what games you are allowed to play with far less to no recourse for people to play shut down or delisted games they may be interested in, but fortunately Arena.net is still around and running Guild Wars' servers, so in this case at least so far that is not a problem yet.
These first two shots are from before Halloween. It looks like I'm playing at least a little bit on the Luxon side here, that's Luxon clothing.
This field would look a LOT nicer on a video card with post-processing and better antialiasing, that's for sure.
And here we go, Halloween '06 has started. Here we are in the center of Lion's Arch by the great kettle.
Mad King Thorn is here again, so it's Halloween day! The visits worked similarly to '05's. There are a lot of people here for the event, that's nice.
Yup, He's as capriciously evil as usual. Dance or die!
I'm not certain, but that disco ball is probably a party item someone set off and not part of the event.
Do what he wants now...
Everyone there to see Mad King Thorn got a new pumpkin crown. At the time the only way to get these was to be at this specific event, the ability to get old hats you missed wasn't added until many years later.
Yup, rock-paper-scissors-with a name change returns. It's as random as it sounds.
This cardboard cutout haunted house standee has always reminded me of the haunted house in the classic early '90s PC adventure game Hugo's House of Horrors... it doesn't look the same as that one, but it's close enough to be somewhat similar.
Yeah, the green water, sinking ship, and transformed Krytans return from last year.
Here's something new, though: Halloween in Kamadan, the main city in Nightfall! I bought Nightfall day one, digitally, in part so that I could experience the Halloween '07 event, and here it is. Here are a bunch of candy corn guards.
And here's Mad King Thorn in Kamadan. This crowd looks smaller than the one in Lion's Arch, which makes sense; surely many people hadn't bought Nightfall yet.
There are still a good number of people here to "enjoy" Mad King Thorn's games, though.
Kamadan has been decorated for Halloween as well. This thing is interesting... and the way the moon is just in the background's kind of cool too.
Hah, is that a cardboard cutout of a monster to take photos with your face in? Silly...
Looks like Talindra has a witch hat now, one of the new things for this event. You could only get this hat by being in Kamadan during the '07 Halloween event.
B. Guild Wars Gameplay, November 2006 - mid February 2007
After the seasonal event ended, I went back to mostly not playing Nightfall, as this next image set will show. There are a couple of Nightfall shots here, but that's it. Instead, I kept going towards the end of Factions with my main, and used one of my new character slots for something else...
Here I logged in to my other account for a moment to look at the three remaining characters there, and decide if I wanted to remake any of them in my main account, since the new campaign gave me two new character slots... so who should it be? A second Elementalist perhaps?
Second, another Assassin.
Last, a Paragon. I really should actually play this class at some point. Yes, I still haven't really, for no good reason.
First, though, my Ranger has gotten to the Fire Islands now, so I'm closing in on the end of the Prophecies campaign with my original GW character...
And here we see what I chose: Yup, I made a second Elementalist, this time a Factions one, in one of the two Nightfall character slots. The other one still has that Nightfall Dervish in it. I like the start of Factions, it's a very quick starting island -- a quite dramatic difference from the long, slow trip to level 20 Prophecies brings you through -- but it looks beautiful and is fun to explore, so that's alright. It's nice to have options, either the slow 20 of Prophecies, the mid-speed one of Nightfall, and the quick one of Factions. This area of the starter island has the only snow in the Factions campaign, so of course I took some screenshots there.
Don't worry, Wulf Cragfist is a friendly giant, not an enemy. He'll help you out here.
A Kurzick in Luxon territories? Either this is an enemy, which is possible but seems unlikely from the pose, or a guard near an outpost in the Jade Sea side of the map owned by a Kurzick guild. Factions has a faction-war element where player guild align with either the Kurzicks or the Luxons and can fight eachother in two PvP combat areas and buy outposts for their guild. When a guild owns an outpost their name is listed on the map, and the territory around that outpost is shown as belonging to the Luxons or Kurzicks on the map, depending. Neither side can actually win this war, because the home bases of both sides can only be controlled by their side, but it gives players something to do. Kurzick-aligned guilds have been fairly dominant a lot of the time.
Here in this outpost, the ground has loaded in but the player models have not yet. So, you can see the names where players are, but not their characters... it's kind of amusing stuff.
Hey, it's Nightfall! As you can see I've gotten really far in it with my main Talindra here, all the way to the first outpost in the starter island...
And here's another shot of some of the people in that outpost. Nightfall does have a pretty cool aesthetic to it, you don't see African-themed videogames very often at all.
Now though, back to Factions. This definitely does not look like a good part of town. Those white boxes in the background are interesting, though -- I've mentioned them before, but those are another way that characters who hadn't loaded properly would appear on this computer, as a large white box instead of a person.
I got new clothes for this character I guess, I haven't dyed them green yet like I usually do. This is a pretty generic screenshot, but I'll post it anyway. Even average Guild Wars environments like this looks good.
The Canthan New Year Festival and the Ending to Factions (And This PC) - mid to late February, 2007
This final image set is 23 screenshots. I must not have played for a little while, busy with school perhaps, but I came back to Guild Wars in February for the Canthan New Year seasonal special event. I had ordered a new computer in February, finally, after having used my GeForce2-powered WinME machine for 5 1/2 years, but it hadn't arrived yet so I was still playing on this machine. This, then, excepting a few screenshots from late '09 I took on the machine, will be the last batch of screenshots on the computer I used for the first two and a half years of Guild Wars' life since the first public test in May 2004. I'm sure I spent more time playing GW in that 2 1/2 years than I have in the more than twelve years since then, but that's alright, I love the game regardless. It may seem kind of strange that I'd play the game less once I finally got a computer able to run it at a stable framerate, as opposed to the often very low framerates the performance monitor shows I was getting on the WinME PC, but I'd gotten used to the sometimes-low framerates so it wasn't as bad as it may seem.
Some time has passed, I didn't take any screenshots around Christmas (Wintersday) apparently, and it's now early 2007, time for the 2007 Canthan New Year festival. This was the first Canthan New Year festival, and it ran from Feb. 16 to 19 2007 according to the Wiki. Today Canthan New Year festivals run from Jan. 31 to Feb. 7 each year. The Canthan New Year festival centers on Shing Jea Island, so that is where I have gone. You can tell that the Canthan New Year is on because of the decorative lanterns in the background. The Shing Jea Boardwalk from the Dragon Festival that started in summer 2006 also re-opens during this event, which is great because the two minigames there, Rollerbeetle Racing and the Dragon Arena, are pretty good.
This game still looks great, even with grass as pixelated as this is...
Here is one of the festival NPCs, offering a limited-time quest only available during the Canthan New Year. Each year, starting in 2007 of course, a miniature pet was offered to players who were there. I have the one from 2007, the Miniature Pig, since 2007 was the year of the pig in the Chinese Zodiac that this goes by. Guild Wars added more miniature pet gifts from other holidays as well as time went on, and as with festival hats, eventually you could get ones you previously missed, instead of only people who were at the initial event having them. You could also get a Lion Mask during this event for doing certain things, but I don't believe I got that.
Those three are all I've got for the Canthan New Year for a while... kind of. This shot is from after it ended, after all; yes, the datestamps on screenshots are accurate again, thankfully, in this folder. I will get to that "kind of" near the end of this article, and I'm not sure what to make of it, but as for this screenshot, I'm exploring a nice, though ruined, environment. I like teh design of the area.
Hey, it's a human player group in a mission! By this point that was becoming a somewhat less common thing, as Nightfall added more options for solo players and the userbase scattered across three campaigns, but this is a hard mission near the end of the Factions campaign, and human help is very welcome.
And here we are, Raisu Pavilion at the end of the Factions campaign... near several people in Obsidian Shard armor. Crazy expensive stuff, that is!
Another view of the Obsidian Shard armor.
Hmm, what's happening here... oh right, I know where this is!
That's right, I've finished Factions, with a player group too so it probably was a lot easier than when I did it solo with heroes with other characters later on. The Factions campaign only takes about 50 hours to complete, half the length of Prophecies, but it's a very fun 50 hours so that's okay. I did not take any screenshots of the ending to the story, so there are no spoilers here really; these shots are just of the celebration at the end, and of some of the people you can talk to in the ending corridor. Everyone else has left, but I'm taking my time here since I hadn't beaten this campaign before. These end-of-campaign areas are ones you can only be in after beating the final mission, after all; you can't just warp into these zones from the map.
Some nice fireworks celebrate my victory over Shiro Tagachi. Pretty!
They look better in motion to be sure, but you can get the sense of it from the screenshots.
In addition to fireworks, the games' credits roll on the screen during a part of in these end-of-campaign zones, if you wait around long enough. I don't think I have any shots of the credits here though, for whatever reason.
Here we can see Raisu Pavilion from above, in an upper gallery you only get to as a part of the ending celebration area. Also, clipping two characters right on top of eachother, like I'm doing here, is always kind of amusing...
Here is one last shot of my victory. After that it's back to the game, to do more quests and such. Hard mode would not be added to the game until April 2007, and the postgame Canthan plague story arc until 2011, so for the moment that was all I could do in Factions, unless I wanted to go back and play the Luxon side of things that is, which I didn't really do then.
There are always more quests to do in this game, unless you spend a WHOLE lot of hours in it that is... but I haven't, so there's always more to do in a campaign, even after finishing it. The green arrow over her head here shows this person probably has a quest.
When a character is not selected, they're shadowed, matching the environment, as you can see here.
Click on the character, however, and they light up so you can see them clearly. It's not realistic but works well in a videogame.
I've started some mission in the city, probably one of the harder quests.
... Uh, this looks like it could have gone better... I hope those dead people are all enemies!
Ah, it's the Undercity, one of Factions' unmappable, dungeon-like areas. It's a tricky area which is pretty fun to explore.
Here is one of those screenshots I mentioned earlier which have me confused. So, this file is dated February 25, 2007. This is well after the stated ending of the Canthan New Year on Feb. 19, at which point the Dragon Arena should be rendered inaccessible again until the next Dragon Festival. However, as this shows, the Dragon Arena seems to still be open, because here I am in it! Perhaps it was open for the rest of the month, or something? I've done some searching online and haven't found anything yet that says so, so I'm not sure. That's pretty interesting, I wish I remembered why this is. I've been playing for quite a while, too, as the "you have played for 5 hours, please take a break" message says.
In this shot, we see the post0game scoring summary for a Rollerbeetle race, the other Shing Jea Boardwalk minigame you can only access during those two festivals. They must have been open for some time after the end of the festival. Rollerbeetle Racing is fun stuff. As with everything in GW it comes down to being about skill usage, but the skills are unique to this event and the racing theme is done well; you do need to race down the track, while using skills to get ahead.
And last, a random shot of my Ranger character, showing some stuff in my inventory including the Halloween pumpkin mask rewards from 2006 and 2007, some Halloween party items, and such.
And with that, my time playing Guild Wars on the computer I had used up to this point came to a close: my new PC arrived in early March. As I've said, I responded by playing this game a lot less, so when I next do an article in this series it will cover even more ground -- I've only got 45 screenshots for the rest of 2007 and all of 2008 combined. As I said at the top of this article, I will continue with these articles, though I'm almost past the most nostalgic part for me now.
After this article, I did a little side article, which covers my handful of screenshots from World of Warcraft and Phantasy Star Online. It really is only a few, mostly not at all interesting, screenshots from either game, so I don't know if it's worth posting on this forum (in this thread or elsewhere); I've generally leaned towards no. If anyone is interested, however, you can find the article here: http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?p=1189 I did spend a while writing that article and putting the screenshots in the correct order (not as simple as it may sound!), though, so maybe I should post it... hmm. But if I did, where?
Or read this article on my site with better formatting here: http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?p=1171
In late October 2006, Arena.net started up the second annual Halloween event. This builds on 2005's event, but with some new stuff added to give players more to do. At the same time, Guild Wars Nightfall released. Yes, Nightfall released right when the Halloween event began. I once again took a whole bunch of screenshots... and once again took almost none of the Christmas event, even though that is my favorite holiday. Actually, this time there are none at all from Christmas; as far as holidays go it skips from Halloween to the second Dragon Festival in early 2007. Oh well. In between, I play more Factions, and finish it with my main. So yeah, this is a pretty decent image set which covers a lot of ground. It includes 52 screenshots.
A. Guild Wars Halloween 2006: late October-early November
While I had always played Guild Wars with a download, for Prophecies and Factions, I bought a retail box and entered the key from that box in order to unlock those campaigns in the game. This time, however, with Nightfall, I did something new for me: I bought a game digitally. Getting computer games digitally, without a box or disc/disk at all, was still a somewhat uncommon thing in 2006, though it was becoming a lot less uncommon. There are positives and negatives to digital-only game purchases, but Arena.net encouraged digital purchases by offering some Halloween rewards you could only get by visiting Kamadan, the main city of the new campaign, during this short 5-day Halloween event. This was enough to convince me to buy the game digitally, and so I did. Much later I would get a box for the game for a few dollars from Goodwill, just to have one, but a digital-only game purchase still felt new and interesting at the time. Today I see more of the negatives of digital-only game playing than the positives, for example because it allows companies to control what games you are allowed to play with far less to no recourse for people to play shut down or delisted games they may be interested in, but fortunately Arena.net is still around and running Guild Wars' servers, so in this case at least so far that is not a problem yet.
These first two shots are from before Halloween. It looks like I'm playing at least a little bit on the Luxon side here, that's Luxon clothing.
This field would look a LOT nicer on a video card with post-processing and better antialiasing, that's for sure.
And here we go, Halloween '06 has started. Here we are in the center of Lion's Arch by the great kettle.
Mad King Thorn is here again, so it's Halloween day! The visits worked similarly to '05's. There are a lot of people here for the event, that's nice.
Yup, He's as capriciously evil as usual. Dance or die!
I'm not certain, but that disco ball is probably a party item someone set off and not part of the event.
Do what he wants now...
Everyone there to see Mad King Thorn got a new pumpkin crown. At the time the only way to get these was to be at this specific event, the ability to get old hats you missed wasn't added until many years later.
Yup, rock-paper-scissors-with a name change returns. It's as random as it sounds.
This cardboard cutout haunted house standee has always reminded me of the haunted house in the classic early '90s PC adventure game Hugo's House of Horrors... it doesn't look the same as that one, but it's close enough to be somewhat similar.
Yeah, the green water, sinking ship, and transformed Krytans return from last year.
Here's something new, though: Halloween in Kamadan, the main city in Nightfall! I bought Nightfall day one, digitally, in part so that I could experience the Halloween '07 event, and here it is. Here are a bunch of candy corn guards.
And here's Mad King Thorn in Kamadan. This crowd looks smaller than the one in Lion's Arch, which makes sense; surely many people hadn't bought Nightfall yet.
There are still a good number of people here to "enjoy" Mad King Thorn's games, though.
Kamadan has been decorated for Halloween as well. This thing is interesting... and the way the moon is just in the background's kind of cool too.
Hah, is that a cardboard cutout of a monster to take photos with your face in? Silly...
Looks like Talindra has a witch hat now, one of the new things for this event. You could only get this hat by being in Kamadan during the '07 Halloween event.
B. Guild Wars Gameplay, November 2006 - mid February 2007
After the seasonal event ended, I went back to mostly not playing Nightfall, as this next image set will show. There are a couple of Nightfall shots here, but that's it. Instead, I kept going towards the end of Factions with my main, and used one of my new character slots for something else...
Here I logged in to my other account for a moment to look at the three remaining characters there, and decide if I wanted to remake any of them in my main account, since the new campaign gave me two new character slots... so who should it be? A second Elementalist perhaps?
Second, another Assassin.
Last, a Paragon. I really should actually play this class at some point. Yes, I still haven't really, for no good reason.
First, though, my Ranger has gotten to the Fire Islands now, so I'm closing in on the end of the Prophecies campaign with my original GW character...
And here we see what I chose: Yup, I made a second Elementalist, this time a Factions one, in one of the two Nightfall character slots. The other one still has that Nightfall Dervish in it. I like the start of Factions, it's a very quick starting island -- a quite dramatic difference from the long, slow trip to level 20 Prophecies brings you through -- but it looks beautiful and is fun to explore, so that's alright. It's nice to have options, either the slow 20 of Prophecies, the mid-speed one of Nightfall, and the quick one of Factions. This area of the starter island has the only snow in the Factions campaign, so of course I took some screenshots there.
Don't worry, Wulf Cragfist is a friendly giant, not an enemy. He'll help you out here.
A Kurzick in Luxon territories? Either this is an enemy, which is possible but seems unlikely from the pose, or a guard near an outpost in the Jade Sea side of the map owned by a Kurzick guild. Factions has a faction-war element where player guild align with either the Kurzicks or the Luxons and can fight eachother in two PvP combat areas and buy outposts for their guild. When a guild owns an outpost their name is listed on the map, and the territory around that outpost is shown as belonging to the Luxons or Kurzicks on the map, depending. Neither side can actually win this war, because the home bases of both sides can only be controlled by their side, but it gives players something to do. Kurzick-aligned guilds have been fairly dominant a lot of the time.
Here in this outpost, the ground has loaded in but the player models have not yet. So, you can see the names where players are, but not their characters... it's kind of amusing stuff.
Hey, it's Nightfall! As you can see I've gotten really far in it with my main Talindra here, all the way to the first outpost in the starter island...
And here's another shot of some of the people in that outpost. Nightfall does have a pretty cool aesthetic to it, you don't see African-themed videogames very often at all.
Now though, back to Factions. This definitely does not look like a good part of town. Those white boxes in the background are interesting, though -- I've mentioned them before, but those are another way that characters who hadn't loaded properly would appear on this computer, as a large white box instead of a person.
I got new clothes for this character I guess, I haven't dyed them green yet like I usually do. This is a pretty generic screenshot, but I'll post it anyway. Even average Guild Wars environments like this looks good.
The Canthan New Year Festival and the Ending to Factions (And This PC) - mid to late February, 2007
This final image set is 23 screenshots. I must not have played for a little while, busy with school perhaps, but I came back to Guild Wars in February for the Canthan New Year seasonal special event. I had ordered a new computer in February, finally, after having used my GeForce2-powered WinME machine for 5 1/2 years, but it hadn't arrived yet so I was still playing on this machine. This, then, excepting a few screenshots from late '09 I took on the machine, will be the last batch of screenshots on the computer I used for the first two and a half years of Guild Wars' life since the first public test in May 2004. I'm sure I spent more time playing GW in that 2 1/2 years than I have in the more than twelve years since then, but that's alright, I love the game regardless. It may seem kind of strange that I'd play the game less once I finally got a computer able to run it at a stable framerate, as opposed to the often very low framerates the performance monitor shows I was getting on the WinME PC, but I'd gotten used to the sometimes-low framerates so it wasn't as bad as it may seem.
Some time has passed, I didn't take any screenshots around Christmas (Wintersday) apparently, and it's now early 2007, time for the 2007 Canthan New Year festival. This was the first Canthan New Year festival, and it ran from Feb. 16 to 19 2007 according to the Wiki. Today Canthan New Year festivals run from Jan. 31 to Feb. 7 each year. The Canthan New Year festival centers on Shing Jea Island, so that is where I have gone. You can tell that the Canthan New Year is on because of the decorative lanterns in the background. The Shing Jea Boardwalk from the Dragon Festival that started in summer 2006 also re-opens during this event, which is great because the two minigames there, Rollerbeetle Racing and the Dragon Arena, are pretty good.
This game still looks great, even with grass as pixelated as this is...
Here is one of the festival NPCs, offering a limited-time quest only available during the Canthan New Year. Each year, starting in 2007 of course, a miniature pet was offered to players who were there. I have the one from 2007, the Miniature Pig, since 2007 was the year of the pig in the Chinese Zodiac that this goes by. Guild Wars added more miniature pet gifts from other holidays as well as time went on, and as with festival hats, eventually you could get ones you previously missed, instead of only people who were at the initial event having them. You could also get a Lion Mask during this event for doing certain things, but I don't believe I got that.
Those three are all I've got for the Canthan New Year for a while... kind of. This shot is from after it ended, after all; yes, the datestamps on screenshots are accurate again, thankfully, in this folder. I will get to that "kind of" near the end of this article, and I'm not sure what to make of it, but as for this screenshot, I'm exploring a nice, though ruined, environment. I like teh design of the area.
Hey, it's a human player group in a mission! By this point that was becoming a somewhat less common thing, as Nightfall added more options for solo players and the userbase scattered across three campaigns, but this is a hard mission near the end of the Factions campaign, and human help is very welcome.
And here we are, Raisu Pavilion at the end of the Factions campaign... near several people in Obsidian Shard armor. Crazy expensive stuff, that is!
Another view of the Obsidian Shard armor.
Hmm, what's happening here... oh right, I know where this is!
That's right, I've finished Factions, with a player group too so it probably was a lot easier than when I did it solo with heroes with other characters later on. The Factions campaign only takes about 50 hours to complete, half the length of Prophecies, but it's a very fun 50 hours so that's okay. I did not take any screenshots of the ending to the story, so there are no spoilers here really; these shots are just of the celebration at the end, and of some of the people you can talk to in the ending corridor. Everyone else has left, but I'm taking my time here since I hadn't beaten this campaign before. These end-of-campaign areas are ones you can only be in after beating the final mission, after all; you can't just warp into these zones from the map.
Some nice fireworks celebrate my victory over Shiro Tagachi. Pretty!
They look better in motion to be sure, but you can get the sense of it from the screenshots.
In addition to fireworks, the games' credits roll on the screen during a part of in these end-of-campaign zones, if you wait around long enough. I don't think I have any shots of the credits here though, for whatever reason.
Here we can see Raisu Pavilion from above, in an upper gallery you only get to as a part of the ending celebration area. Also, clipping two characters right on top of eachother, like I'm doing here, is always kind of amusing...
Here is one last shot of my victory. After that it's back to the game, to do more quests and such. Hard mode would not be added to the game until April 2007, and the postgame Canthan plague story arc until 2011, so for the moment that was all I could do in Factions, unless I wanted to go back and play the Luxon side of things that is, which I didn't really do then.
There are always more quests to do in this game, unless you spend a WHOLE lot of hours in it that is... but I haven't, so there's always more to do in a campaign, even after finishing it. The green arrow over her head here shows this person probably has a quest.
When a character is not selected, they're shadowed, matching the environment, as you can see here.
Click on the character, however, and they light up so you can see them clearly. It's not realistic but works well in a videogame.
I've started some mission in the city, probably one of the harder quests.
... Uh, this looks like it could have gone better... I hope those dead people are all enemies!
Ah, it's the Undercity, one of Factions' unmappable, dungeon-like areas. It's a tricky area which is pretty fun to explore.
Here is one of those screenshots I mentioned earlier which have me confused. So, this file is dated February 25, 2007. This is well after the stated ending of the Canthan New Year on Feb. 19, at which point the Dragon Arena should be rendered inaccessible again until the next Dragon Festival. However, as this shows, the Dragon Arena seems to still be open, because here I am in it! Perhaps it was open for the rest of the month, or something? I've done some searching online and haven't found anything yet that says so, so I'm not sure. That's pretty interesting, I wish I remembered why this is. I've been playing for quite a while, too, as the "you have played for 5 hours, please take a break" message says.
In this shot, we see the post0game scoring summary for a Rollerbeetle race, the other Shing Jea Boardwalk minigame you can only access during those two festivals. They must have been open for some time after the end of the festival. Rollerbeetle Racing is fun stuff. As with everything in GW it comes down to being about skill usage, but the skills are unique to this event and the racing theme is done well; you do need to race down the track, while using skills to get ahead.
And last, a random shot of my Ranger character, showing some stuff in my inventory including the Halloween pumpkin mask rewards from 2006 and 2007, some Halloween party items, and such.
And with that, my time playing Guild Wars on the computer I had used up to this point came to a close: my new PC arrived in early March. As I've said, I responded by playing this game a lot less, so when I next do an article in this series it will cover even more ground -- I've only got 45 screenshots for the rest of 2007 and all of 2008 combined. As I said at the top of this article, I will continue with these articles, though I'm almost past the most nostalgic part for me now.
After this article, I did a little side article, which covers my handful of screenshots from World of Warcraft and Phantasy Star Online. It really is only a few, mostly not at all interesting, screenshots from either game, so I don't know if it's worth posting on this forum (in this thread or elsewhere); I've generally leaned towards no. If anyone is interested, however, you can find the article here: http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?p=1189 I did spend a while writing that article and putting the screenshots in the correct order (not as simple as it may sound!), though, so maybe I should post it... hmm. But if I did, where?
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I added about 250 hours of game time last year. I'm happy it's alive still but it breaks my heart seeing how kind of dead it was compared to it's prime. I miss it.
The early menu screenshots from op = tears ty
The early menu screenshots from op = tears ty
