500,000 players spend three million hours previewing Guild Wars Factions

More than half a million gamers spent the past weekend trying out NCsoft’s Guild Wars Factions. The invitation-only event was a prelude to the game’s April 28th launch. NCsoft estimates that the players spent more than three million hours online, which averages out to be around six hours of play for each player.

Guild Wars Factions is a sequel to NCsoft’s popular Guild Wars online role-playing game. There are a couple very notable differences between Guild Wars and other online role-playing games like World of Warcraft (WoW). Guild Wars and its sequel centers around group combat and have little solo questing. WoW combines both player combat and solo questing, but players can choose to do the entire game without any player versus player combat. Another notable difference is that Guild Wars has no monthly fee.

The original Guild Wars is very popular in Asia because of its Asian-themed monsters, characters and weapons. In addition, NCsoft has a strong foothold in Asia with Lineage and other multiplayer games. Guild Wars has been less popular in the USA where WoW has an immense following.

Guild Wars Factions will be available on April 28 for around $50.