Guild Wars is a massively multiplayer online action role-playing game developed by ArenaNet , a subsidiary of South Korean game publisher NCSOFT . As the original installment of theGuild Wars series , its campaign has been retroactively titled Prophecies to differentiate it from the content of subsequent releases. The game contains a co-operative role-playing portion and a competitive Player versus Player (PvP) portion. In PvP, players may use their co-operative characters or PvP-exclusive characters that are inherently maximum level and have access to content.