Guild Wars Lands In Europe This Week

Exciting new gameplay movie celebrates launch
Monday 25 April 2005/... ArenaNet®, creators of the highly anticipated online role-playing game Guild Wars®, and NCsoft® Europe, the world's leading developer and publisher of online computer games, have launched a brand new gameplay movie to celebrate the fact that Guild Wars will be available in both Europe and North America this week – a worldwide first for an MMO game.

"All of our hard work and effort that has gone into this simultaneous release finally feels justified," says Max Brown, Sales and Operations Director, NCsoft Europe. "Guild Wars, with its unique server technology, will allow people from all over the globe to play together. In light of that, we felt it was important to have both sides of the ocean starting at the same time, and we're pleased to say we have made that possible."

NCsoft has confirmed that Guild Wars has topped the pre-order charts across Europe and, according to EB GamesTM, Guild Wars is one of the best-selling preorder PC games year-to-date in North America. More than 500,000 players have participated in public preview events in the US and Europe. In Korea, Guild Wars was named the number one most anticipated game of 2005 by The Electronic Times.

Guild Wars is a online role-playing game that rewards player skill. Players explore a rich fantasy game world, acquire skills, build personalised characters and compete in head-to-head guild battles with friends around the world. It is the first title from ArenaNet, which was founded by some of the key members of the creative teams behind the hit games Warcraft®, StarCraft® and Diablo®.

ArenaNet has created a unique, global game world that invites players from around the world to play together seamlessly. There are no sharded servers, no language-specific versions of the game and nothing to keep players from exploring the game world with friends from other countries.

More information about Guild Wars can be found at: www.guildwars.com