If this is your first experience with Guild Wars, the learning curve can greatly affect your opinion of the overall game. The original release, Prophecies, is widely considered to have the smoothest learning curve. Due to factors discussed a bit lower on the screen, Prophecies eases players into new aspects of the game much more slowly than the later chapters about Guild Wars Gold.

Factions is widely considered to have the sharpest learning curve, oriented more towards experienced players who played Prophecies than to new players. Nightfall falls somewhere in between the two, but is much closer to the slower pace of Prophecies than to Factions haste.

Like many video games, the oldest in the series is the cheapest. While the newest Guild Wars release is always sold at the same price level as new releases of other PC and console games, the older games can be found at lower prices. Prophecies are easiest to get cheaply about Guild Wars Gold, but recently many stores sold Nightfall at roughly half the usual market price. Members of the GuildWarsGuru.com forums often post a thread in the Riverside forum when a significant price drop occurs, so a would-be player who is tight on cash would do well to shop around and wait for a sale about Guild Wars Gold.

By the admission of the Guild Wars developers, Arena Net (ANet), Factions was designed to be much more PvP-oriented than either Prophecies or Nightfall. If your ultimate goal is to play through traditional questing and saving the world from crime and the forces of evil, Factions is probably an inferior choice to the other two chapters about Guild Wars Gold.