Guild Wars Factions - Critical Response

Critical Response

Factions was not as well received critically as the earlier Prophecies campaign, although it did score well overall receiving a score of 85.45% on GameRankings and 84/100 on Metacritic. It was nominated for a BAFTA award in the best multiplayer game category and won the best multiplayer game award from DEMMX.

Reviewers were impressed by the addition of the new Kurzick and Luxon factions that players could ally with and claim territory on the game map for their alliance, but criticized its weak storyline (compared to Prophecies), poorer voice-acting, and its accelerated character level curve that let characters reach the maximum level before leaving the tutorial content. The continuing problem of the Guild Wars user interface lacking advanced team-forming and trading functions was also criticized, but the subsequent Nightfall release partially addressed these criticisms by adding a unified party-search utility with limited trading functions.

Factions helped boost the number of units sold in the Guild Wars franchise to over two million. This does not equate to two million players for each campaign release is counted separately, causing a single player account to be represented up to three times in the unit sales figures for full campaigns. This figure also does not indicate the number of "active" accounts; Guild Wars accounts never expire, so the account activity statistics are never publicly revealed, even though ArenaNet does collect them (players are able to access playtime statistics using the "/age" command in-game).