GUILD Wars?

Not sure the first answerer has played Guild Wars. His answer is a bit off base.

Nightfall is not an expansion, it's a stand alone campaign. You can buy any of the 3 campaigns and start playing immediately. They are all stand-alone and do not require each other. Of course if you have all 3 then you have more content and more places for your characters to explore.

Eye of the North is an expansion. It requires one of the 3 campaigns to already be installed to play.

You don't have to keep buying expansions to continue playing, but it's worth it to buy all 4 games if you enjoy the game. Each campaign has it's own set of skills and some of the builds that your teammates will want you to run can require skills from different campaigns. Bottom line: No they aren't required but worth the money.

Guild Wars 2 will be released as well sometime in late 2008 or 2009. That will be a separate game.

1) Factions and Nightfall are call standalone expansions. You can buy either and play just it, with just the content it provides, or you can attach them to an existing account and have your characters have access to multiple sections of the game. Eye to the North is a true expansion, and requires the original Guild Wars (sometimes now called Prophesies to help avoid confusion) in order to play.

2) If you want to stay competative in high-caliber PvP, you'll pretty much have to buy every expansion. But otherwise no.

No to number 1.

No to number 2.

Guild wars is all good.

yes to question one

no to question 2

the expansions only give you the updated and new content. if there was something that you HAD to get it would be a patch and would automatically download onto your game file