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Guild Wars: Eye of the North™, the first expansion to the Guild Wars® franchise of subscription-free, online role-playing games. Guild Wars players who purchase the expansion can access Eye of the North content through the multi-million-selling Guild Wars campaigns-Guild Wars, Guild Wars: Factions™, or Guild Wars: Nightfall™. The expansion also includes an innovative feature that allows players to take achievements they have earned over the years with them into the forthcoming Guild Wars 2™.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North, continues the subscription-free business model pioneered by ArenaNet. The expansion is available at www.GuildWars.ph, as well as from retailers nationwide.

Eye of the North advances the story told in the original Guild Wars campaign, and is set in the unexplored area of the continent of Tyria. One of the highlights of the expansion is the Hall of Monuments, which allows players to preserve armour sets, pets, Heroes, and titles earned while playing Guild Wars, Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North, and take those accomplishments with them into Guild Wars 2.

The expansion also contains a host of new features that will appeal directly to veteran Guild Wars players, including 18 multi-level dungeons, 150 new skills across all 10 Guild Wars professions, 10 new Heroes to aid them in their adventures, 40 new armour sets, and more items, weapons, and titles.

“We think fans will find a lot to love in Guild Wars: Eye of the North,” said Mike O’Brien, co-founder of ArenaNet. “Not only do we go back to the original Guild Wars lands and stories to wrap up plots and themes fans have clamoured to learn more about, but we’ve also built a bridge to the future through the Hall of Monuments. This will give loyal players a way to preserve what they’ve accomplished in Guild Wars over the past two years, and reclaim the legacy of their favourite characters in Guild Wars 2.”

The Guild Wars franchise recently surpassed four million units sold and is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed online role-playing game series of all time. Guild Wars 2 is expected to go into public beta in the second half of 2008.

For more information, visit the Guild Wars website at www.GuildWars.ph or www.GuildWars.com.

The Story

New Guild Wars: Eye Of The North Fiction Piece - Rata Sum and the Tarnished Coast

Here is a new fiction piece that delves into the background of the Asura race – with their magical abilities, challenging games and devastating war Golems

The Asura of the Tarnished Coast are a brilliant, if diminutive, people who dwelled, until recently, within the Depths of Tyria, where they regularly dealt with Dwarves, Dredge, and other underground races. However, a dangerous race from even deeper within the world—the Destroyers—overran their subterranean homes, forcing them to the surface. Now, the Asura must learn to survive in a hostile, strange, and all-too-brightly-lit world. Still, the surviving population is of two minds—half of them long for a return to their underground empires, while the other half believe their former lands are lost forever, that their future lies among the strange races of the surface world.

The Asura fled from the encroaching Destroyer hordes through magical gates that link the caverns of the Depths throughout Tyria. While these refugees reached the surface in a variety of locations, the bulk of the exodus came up along the Tarnished Coast, across the Sea of Sorrows from the sunken remnants of Orr. Here they found abandoned ruins high in inherent magical energy—the perfect location for a race of magical researchers to settle and continue practicing their craft. Rata Sum, the largest of these settlements, sits at the western end of the massive canyon known as Riven Earth. Many Asura meet in these magical ruins to exchange ideas and plan for the future.

The Asura brought their culture, heritage, and architectural styles with them to the surface, renovating the ruins by magical means to more closely resemble their subterranean homes. In addition to pyramids and great gates, the Asura erected geomystic generators to focus the magical energies brimming in the Tarnished Coast to further aid in their research. They also built large forges and kilns to produce prototypes and finished magical devices. This is no collection of lore-gathering scholars—the Asura are inventors and builders. And their creations tend to work more often than not.

In addition to architecture and magical devices, the Asura brought another important piece of their culture with them to Rata Sum: the game of Polymock, which they have begun spreading among the other races of the surface world with varying degrees of success. The Polymock master, an Asura named Hoff who lives in Rata Sum, is willing to instruct interested individuals in the basics of the game.

Rata Sum is also home to Mamp, the closest thing to a leader among the Asura. Mamp is a genius, like many Asura, but his genius lies in an innate ability to get other Asura to work together, putting aside rivalries and personal conflicts for the common good. Mamp's gestalt outlook allows him to pull together diverse individuals, make critical connections, and find combinations that are truly greater than the sum of their individual parts. He is less a leader than a herder of cats, which is the way most Asura like it.

The Asura are nothing if not adaptable, however, and take pride in their ability to conquer new challenges through the strength of their prodigious intellect; a pride they display exuberantly to all around them. Faced with the impending destruction of their race at the hands of the Destroyers, they have instead found new lands to tame, new races to ally with and/or manipulate, and new opportunities to seize and profit from. The Asura are, of course, confident of their inevitable success

Product Features

JIVE MAGAZINE RATING: 3.5 OUT OF 5

PLAYER EDITIORIAL

By C. Merryman

I have enjoyed the Eye of the North expansion pack so far. Here are some positive and negatives I've seen about the expansion from playing it since the release.

Positive:
- More content for the seasoned players
- More spells
- Reputation gains
- Hall of monuments (achievements transferred to Guild Wars 2 when released)
- New Armor set for each class
- Expanding questline, elite boss fighting (Notorious Monster kills)

Negative:
- Heavily populated areas in Expansion parts (large server ping)
- Short quest line than actual campaign (casual players don't worry, it still is pretty lengthy when you take your time)
- No changes in PvP beyond new spells
- Confusing Hall of Monuments and Dungeon Exploration / Explanation
- Traveling to other towns is extremely hard, and lengthy.

The biggest pet peeve I found is that it's easy to get lost in the content of the game. The main story line follows a linear pattern but early on, then splits into several different quests which then don't have markers to run to. It doesn't help that the explanation given in the quest log is difficult to understand, and sends you "South" or "North" to a city you have no idea where it is at. I want to follow the main story and do the quests later, but I feel like I'm being forced to do other things instead which I don't care about doing.

The reputation grinds are a scary memento of how World of Warcraft handles "content" for the hardcore players. I don't enjoy grinding reputation. I don't have time to kill 10,000 enemies for someone to like me. I would suggest NCSoft to not go the way of their Lineage II folks or Blizzard entertainment and stray away from it. You're not fooling anyone when you call it reputation. Its just another way of leveling a character that is already level 20.

Beyond those two big sticklers, I have enjoyed the content overall. The expansion dungeons are vast and very well done graphically. It felt like an epic adventure at times, and the difficulty bar was raised significanlty. Just crossing to a new area is a challenge in itself. I recommend this expansion to anyone with the original Guild Wars campaign. It wont knock your socks off with content, but it is a good addition to people looking for something fresh in this already vast game.

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