Town

Cities, Outposts and Mission Locations In GuildWars Cities, Outposts and Mission Locations&mdash;as opposed to explorable areas&mdash;are enclosed locations that serve as a starting point for quests, missions or for exploring open areas.

Inside these enclosed locations you can meet other human players to team up as a party. Whenever you leave these enclosed locations, the GW server starts a new instance of the zone outside, this means only you and your party will be there, along with server-controlled foes and NPCs. Any other human party entering the same zone will be playing in a separate, parallel zone.

You can quickly return to a City, Outpost or Mission Location by using map travel.

For a complete list of all Cities, Outposts and Mission Locations see the location list.

Cities
<-- You can tell if a location is a City by the city icon on your World Map (key "M").

Cities, unlike Outposts or Mission Locations usually provide the full set of infrastructure:
 * Henchmen
 * Xunlai Agent (Storage)
 * an Arena
 * various Traders and Crafters:
 * Merchant
 * Armorcrafter
 * Weaponsmith
 * Rune Trader
 * Material trader
 * Rare material trader
 * Artisan
 * Scroll trader
 * Guild registrar
 * Skill trainer
 * Priest of Balthazar (Faction Points)
 * Collectors

Outposts
<-- You can tell if a location is an outpost by the outpost icon on your World Map (key "M").

An Outpost is smaller than a city, and does not offer the full set of infrastructure. Usually you'll only find a merchant, a Xunlai Agent, often a skill trainer and sometimes a Trader or Collector. And henchmen of course.

Mission Location
<-- You can tell if a location is an Mission Location by the Mission icon on your World Map (key "M"). ''

(Note that depending on whether you have completed the mission and/or mission bonus the shield will show up with 2, 1 or no swords.'')

A Mission Location is an Outpost that serves as a starting point for a mission. It offers some, but not all of the a.m. infrastructure.