About the game
Guild Wars launched in April 2005 on a premise that sounded like heresy at the time: an online world with no monthly fee. You bought the box and you played, full stop. ArenaNet also built the rest of the game against the grain of its era: the level cap is 20 and you hit it fast, so nothing here is decided by how many months you've ground. It's decided by your build. Since December 2025 the original lives on under the name Guild Wars Reforged, with the same servers and the same characters as always.
The heart of the system is two professions out of ten — a primary and a secondary — and eight skills picked from over a thousand to take into a fight. Eight. There's no long hotbar and no memorized rotation: your build is a design decision you make before leaving town, and rebuilding it is the intended way to break through a wall. That's why the game aged so well: it rewards reading the encounter instead of repeating it.
A world made of instances
Outside towns and outposts, every map is a private instance for your party. Nobody tags your objective, nobody queues for a boss, nobody fights you over a spawn. And when there's no one around, you fill the slots yourself: hired henchmen and, from Nightfall onward, heroes — companions whose eight skills you set and whose targets you call. Guild Wars is co-op from end to end, yet it never makes you wait for anybody, a virtue that shows more twenty years on than it did back then.
The other half was always PvP, and never as an afterthought: guild battles, Heroes' Ascent, arenas and seasonal formats, with tournaments and cash prizes back when nobody was saying the word esports yet. You can roll PvP-only characters that start fully kitted, so the edge comes from your build and your execution rather than from farming hours.
Three campaigns, one expansion, one purchase
The game shipped as three standalone campaigns, each a complete entry point: Prophecies (2005), the longest and most classic, with the mid-game turn — the Searing — that splits the world in two; Factions (2006), set in Cantha, faster-paced and built around a war between factions; and Nightfall (2006), set in Elona, which introduced heroes and is usually the best place to start. None requires the others. On top of them sits Eye of the North (2007), the only true expansion: content aimed at established characters that closes the arc and lays the narrative bridge to Guild Wars 2. Separate from all that is the small Bonus Mission Pack, a handful of missions covering historical episodes of the setting.
In 2005 each box was sold separately; today the purchase is unified. The current package bundles all three campaigns for $19.99 on Steam and the official store, including 8 character slots, 4 storage panes and the M.O.X. hero. Eye of the North ($9.99, requires Prophecies) and the Bonus Mission Pack ($5.99) are sold separately, usually bundled at a discount. Anyone who owned any campaign before the relaunch got all three at no extra cost. There is no subscription, and the in-game store sells cosmetics and conveniences — slots, storage, name and appearance changes — never power. The exception is the mobile version: free with ads and Prophecies only, but if you already own it on PC you sign in with your ArenaNet account, the ads go away and your progress travels with you.
From maintenance mode to Reforged
For over a decade Guild Wars was the definition of a game on life support: servers up, seasonal events running, and little else — no new content since 2012, and officially in maintenance mode from May 2013. That ended on December 3, 2025, when ArenaNet released Guild Wars Reforged, co-developed with 2weeks, a studio founded by former ArenaNet developers who had spent years inside this very codebase. It's not a remake and not a fresh server: same accounts, same characters, same world. What changed is the shell around it — controller support and a Steam Deck Verified badge, a rebuilt interface with HD icons and readable text, high-DPI support, ambient occlusion, bloom and antialiasing, rebuilt audio with positional sound, and quest tracking that finally tells you where to go.
What matters is that the updates kept coming after the relaunch: Reforged Mode and Dhuum's Covenant at Wintersday, the Melandru's Accord Ironman mode, a skill rebalance and The Bastion Update, the Forsaken Tunnels dungeons in pre- and post-Searing Ascalon, and even the single-word character names the community had been asking about for years. In June 2026 it also landed on iOS and Android with crossplay and cross-progression. The population is still small next to Guild Wars 2's, and the old competitive formats — GvG, Heroes' Ascent — are far from their golden age, but co-op PvE fills groups without trouble, and launch week multiplied the previous player base several times over. On Steam the relaunch sits at mostly positive reviews.
Who it's for (and who it isn't)
Guild Wars is for people who enjoy the puzzle: assembling builds, cracking hard missions with a small party or a well-configured hero team, moving at your own pace with no season calendar breathing down your neck. It's also the clearest way to understand where Guild Wars 2 came from and why buy to play stopped being an oddity in this genre. What it is not: a persistent open-world MMORPG — if you want to bump into strangers on the road, this isn't your game — nor a sandbox, nor a title with modern animation and feel, however much Reforged polished the shell. The competitive PvP modes today are more for the curious than for the climbers, and new content, though it genuinely came back, arrives in small doses. With that understood, twenty dollars for three twenty-year-old campaigns that are still getting patches is one of the most honest purchases the genre offers.