With a little over two years since the original Guild Wars shipped, ArenaNet has few reasons to complain. According to co-founder Jeff Strain, the series has sold more than 3.5 million copies since release, a figure that he attributes to the non-subscription nature of Guild Wars. Since you don't have to pay a monthly fee to play the game online, you can come and go into the game as you please. In addition to the original Guild Wars, ArenaNet has released additional "chapters" to the series, and these are stand-alone games that offer complete experiences on their own. Now ArenaNet has two Guild Wars games in production. One is Guild Wars 2, the full-blown successor to the franchise, and the other is Guild Wars: Eye of the North, which is being geared as both an expansion pack and a bridge to the upcoming sequel.

Eye of the North is the first true expansion pack for the series. The chapters, such as Guild Wars: Nightfall, were separate games unto themselves. Eye of the North will require you to have an existing Guild Wars character. If you do, you can explore the relatively high-level content in Eye of the North. It's set on the continent of Tyria, the continent featured in the inaugural Guild Wars, and in many ways it will bring that storyline to a close.

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Strain showed off several of the new environments in Eye of the North, and these are arguably the prettiest and most imaginative yet. We saw huge caverns adorned with glowing crystals, a fire raging in a massive forest, and the lost continent of Orr, a magical place where even rocks hang suspended in the air. Orr serves an important role in the game, as the presence of so much magic helps to introduce the Asura, one of the two new playable races. The Asura look a bit like gremlins or goblins; they're a short, gray-skinned race that hails from the underworld. However, the mysterious Destroyers are pushing the Asura out of their underground home, so they have come to Orr to harvest the magic to build an army of golems to fight back. The other new playable race is the Charr, which was the enemy race in the original Guild Wars. The Charr are tall, humanoid wolves.