As the original installment of the Guild Wars series, its campaign was retroactively titled Prophecies to differentiate it from the content of subsequent releases.

Each profession has an array of attributes and skills that help narrow a class's proficiency in order to perform a customized role that is determined by the player.

Enchantments that include giving players extra health points or Hexes that drain the enemy's life and add it to your own make up part of the skill selection in Guild Wars.

[2] While in a town or staging area, a character's skill and attribute selection can be freely modified to construct a "build".

Players explore the game-world, kill monsters, perform quests and complete missions to earn rewards and advance the story.

In each campaign the player is involved in a linear story with which they interact by performing a series of primary quests and replayable missions.

Missions allow the player character to participate in the major events of the storyline, such as significant battles against the main antagonist.

Both quests and missions can feature in-game cut scenes which advance the story and provide context to the actions which follow.

Players can accumulate faction (reputation) with either the Kurzicks or the Luxons, which can either be "donated" to the alliance or redeemed for certain in-game rewards.

New characters are introduced to the main protagonists of the multi-campaign Guild Wars story: the monk Mhenlo, the warrior Devona, the elementalist Cynn and the ranger Aidan.

This in-game event, referred to as the Searing, transports the characters into a post-apocalyptic world of constant strife, with no way of returning to the pre-Searing areas.

[citation needed] In the post-Searing world, the initial portion of the non-tutorial plot sees the protagonists and player characters try to recover their footing against the Charr in the ruined kingdom of Ascalon.

During a sequence of missions, the players help the Mantle hold back the undead, for which they are rewarded by being allowed to participate in a Choosing ceremony.

During the ceremony, it is revealed that the Mantle are actually murderers who worship obscure beings and use the souls of the slain Chosen villagers to power arcane magical devices.

She aids them in a sequence of missions against the Mantle and the Mursaat, leading eventually to the volcano where "the power to destroy Good and Evil" is kept sealed.

Khilbron then reveals himself as the evil Lich Lord who was leading the undead in Kryta and who has been manipulating the player since they arrived from Ascalon.

The Lich's life energy is enough to keep the Titans imprisoned for millennia, removing the need to sacrifice Chosen to maintain the seal.

Prophecies introduced, half a year after the campaign, the free Sorrow's Furnace expansion returned players to the Shiverpeak mountains, specifically to the caverns underneath it.

There, they participate in a sequence of quests with the final goal of defeating the Iron Forgeman, an immense automaton used by the Stone Summit dwarves to drive their war effort.

Prophecies introduced two high-end dungeons that have been present in every subsequent Guild Wars release: the Fissure of Woe and the Underworld.

These areas are accessible by the avatars of the in-game gods (for a small game-currency fee), and contain some of the most prestigious weapons and armor in the game series.

For the first public appearance of Guild Wars in April 2004, that occurred in conjunction with E3 2004, people were encouraged to download the client and play an online demo of the game to test its networking capabilities.

This new content was designed to help bridge the 250-year story gap between the end of first game and the start of Guild Wars 2.

All of them contain the basic Account Creation Code and Manuscript Book, as well as other added features listed below, Guild Wars debuted on The NPD Group's computer game sales charts at #1 for the month of April 2005.

At the time, this led Edge to declare Guild Wars the country's 23rd-highest computer game seller released since January 2000.

They wrote, "With almost every element of the design, ArenaNet carefully thumbs its nose at the model introduced by Ultima Online, codified by EverQuest, and perfected by World of WarCraft.

The magazine's Chuck Osborn wrote, "It's too early to say whether fee-less online gaming is the wave of the future, but Guild Wars is definitely a trendsetter.

"[36] During the 9th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, Guild Wars tied with City of Villains for "Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year".

"[32] Similarly, Eurogamer's Kieron Gillen praised the flexibility of Guild Wars its profession and skill-swap systems for "turn[ing] the single-player game into something where you're experimenting, thinking and re-evaluating constantly (since it's easy to rejig your abilities).

[39] Second, both players and published reviews have commented on the unnatural coupling of cooperative and competitive matches, which require very different playing styles.