In March 2000, three developers walked away from Blizzard to form their own company, Triforge. Their departure caused quite a stir at the time, due to the trio's expertise. The three founders of the company, Patrick Wyatt, Mike O'Brien, and Jeff Strain, played key roles in the development of Starcraft, Diablo, and the entire Warcraft series, including Warcraft III. Perhaps even more impressive is that Wyatt and O'Brien were the lead programmer and original architect, respectively, for Battle.net, Blizzard's popular and groundbreaking online matchmaking service. Triforge has since been renamed to ArenaNet, and the project the company has been working on since early 2000 remained shrouded in secrecy until now.

Two warriors take on a skeleton.

Today, ArenaNet has announced a new competitive online role-playing game, called Guild Wars. At its core, the game is a fantasy-themed, action role-playing game, which will let you hack and slash at monsters with medieval-era weapons and let you use special skills, which may include powerful weapon-based attacks, magic spell-like abilities, or miscellaneous options, to assist you in combat. Guild Wars will include all the features you've come to expect from a good action RPG, like killing monsters to gain experience, gathering up gold and loot, and outfitting your character with stronger and stronger equipment. Guild Wars' combat skills system is where the game sets itself apart from the competition, as it forces you to think carefully about tactics before and during combat and offers opportunities for powerful cooperative tactics when you're playing as part of a team. The world of Guild Wars consists of persistent and nonpersistent elements and is designed specifically for both cooperative and competitive play.

With Guild Wars, ArenaNet's developers hope to address what they feel is a big problem in today's online RPGs--specifically, that competitive play doesn't reward skill as much as it rewards the players who have put the most time into the game. ArenaNet intends to design Guild Wars so that characters will get more powerful with time and experience, but the pace at which players become stronger will trail off over time. The game's combat system is designed such that higher-level characters can use a wider range of tactics than lower-level characters, but they won't necessarily be more powerful in every situation. This places a greater emphasis on skillful, creative play. Guild Wars' combat skills system is also specifically designed to encourage you to cooperate with other players and figure out how to combine your unique skills in order to overcome nonplayer character (NPC) monsters and other teams of players.

Unlike standard massively multiplayer role-playing games, Guild Wars is not built around a large, persistent world where you are forced to travel over miles and miles of terrain. Instead, the developers at ArenaNet have designed a world system that uses both persistent and nonpersistent areas in order to facilitate an environment where friends can more easily meet up with one another. The developers plan to let you use the in-game buddy list to quickly transport yourself to the locations of your friends.

You can meet at outposts to form questing teams.

Upon loading the game, you will be presented with a world overview map that shows areas that are unlocked and ready for exploration. Clicking on one of the areas will immediately transport you to that territory, where you can explore the land in more detail. There are two basic types of persistent territories: towns and outposts. Towns are areas where you can buy supplies, chat with others, and conduct general character-management tasks. Outposts act as entrances to the game's missions. There, you can meet up with others who are interested in doing the quest and form parties to go into the missions together. Like in Anarchy Online, the missions in Guild Wars are not a persistent part of the world; essentially, each mission takes place within a "pocket dimension" that's separate from the rest of the game. This means that you don't have to worry about getting in line to do the same mission or entering a dungeon to find that all the monsters have already been killed and all the treasure has already been taken. Multiple parties of players can partake in the same quest simultaneously.

The developers at ArenaNet have also pointed out that nonpersistent missions allow them to create quests that are potentially more interesting, perhaps allowing you to deform the landscape or affect the world in a manner that wouldn't be possible if missions were part of a persistent world. The missions in Guild Wars also limit party size, so the problem of low-level players quickly advancing by tagging along with high-level characters on missions will be reduced.