Guild Wars takes the trational role of RPG'ing and gives it a little twist. If you are expecting high leveling for you character and endless amounts of "farming", well, you have found the wrong game. Guild Wars caps at level 20, which is quite easy to get to. Within a week of casual game play, you will reach the full potential of your characters abilities.
Guild Wars characters come in all types: male and female, large and small, and in any of 36 combinations of the six professions: Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Elementalist, Mesmer, and Necromancer. You have over 150 unique skills per character, which sets your character apart from the other classes of characters.
You can create up to four heroes per unique Guild Wars account. New heroes can be deleted and created at any time.
If you like Player-versus-Player competition, Guild Wars is your game. In addition to building up a character by undergoing missions and quests, you can choose to create a character from the beginning that starts out PvP'ing. Although that character can never enter into normal missions or towns and can never get the weapons like a full played character, you will be able to jump straight into PvP'ing if you don't like the grinding. The game is made to reward player skill and teamwork, not endless grinding, so you won't need to spend tons of hours leveling up your character to compete.
The game includes integrated support for guilds, with the ability to create special guild emblems, to play for sigils which give you guild halls, and to keep in touch through in-game guild messaging like Asherons Call had. Guilds can challenge other guilds to battle, compete for control of key parts of the world, and be ranked on a worldwide ladder while in PvP'ing zones. These zones are only for PvP'ing, there is no PvP outside of these zones anywhere else. And since it is "Guild" Wars, you play PvP in groups, not alone. This game doesn't have a one on one type of play to it like other rpg games. You get a choice of 8 skills to put in your gaming bar that defines what abilities your character will have. So two characters going head to head could possibly not be balanced even in the slightest. I really didn't like this part of the game. I love the aspect of being able to play solo sometimes and not having to wait for 5 others to log on just to start a match. You can randomly pick others you don't know and can even choose "henchmen" that are nothing more than bots that have ingame AI. But their AI goes only so far and in the end they are more a henderance sometimes more than help.