Guild Wars takes the best elements of today's massively multiplayer online games and combines them with a new mission-based design that eliminates some of the more tedious aspects of those games. You can meet new friends in towns or outposts, form a party, and then go tackle a quest together. Your party always has its own unique copy of the quest map, so camping, kill-stealing, and long lines to complete quests are all things of the past. Within a Guild Wars quest you have unprecedented freedom and power to manipulate the world around you; with the dynamic quest system, your accomplishments have a unique influence on your future.

You don't have to spend countless hours on a leveling treadmill to get to the interesting parts of the game, because combat is designed to be strategically interesting and challenging right from the beginning. You don't have to spend hours running around the world to prepare for a quest, because Guild Wars allows you to instantly travel to the beginning of any quest that you've previously unlocked. You'll never spend days playing, only to discover that the choices you made early have left you with a permanently uncompetitive character. The unique skill system in Guild Wars encourages infinite experimentation but doesn't allow early choices to limit a character. And you'll never meet new players only to discover that you can't play with them or compete against them because their characters are on a different server than yours or they have a different chapter of the game; in Guild Wars, all characters live in one seamless world.

Guild Wars characters come in all types: male and female, large and small, and in any of 90 combinations of the ten professions: Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer, Ritualist, Assassin, Dervish, and Paragon. With hundreds of unique skills per character, which can be combined for any number of effects, the possibilities are mind-boggling.

In addition, you can create up to four characters per unique Guild Wars account, gain two additional character slots each for Factions and Nightfall, and purchase extra slots if needed. New characters can be deleted and created at any time, allowing you to specialize or to have fun experimenting with profession combinations, skills, and attributes until you create the character who best suits you.

The game includes integrated support for guilds and guild alliances, with the ability to create unique guild emblems, to acquire guild halls, and to keep in touch through in-game guild messaging. Guilds can challenge other guilds to battle, compete for control of key parts of the world in alliance battles, and be ranked on a worldwide ladder.

ArenaNet's unique streaming technology forever eliminates the concept of patching a game. You don't have to wait a month for the next big patch to experience new content. Instead, the game constantly and intelligently streams new content to your computer in the background while you play. The world can and will change continually. This allows you to experience a much more dynamic game world than any that has existed before.