Guild Wars: Nightfall |
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Let's start off with a little bit about how Guild Wars works. A traditional MMO like Ultima Online or World of Warcraft charges you a monthly fee and then releases low-priced expansions to be added to your account every year or two or more. Guild Wars charges no monthly fees, and instead releases large expansions once or twice a year. The difference between these expansions and traditional ones is that these are actually full-priced, stand-alone games. You don't have to already have a Guild Wars account to play Nightfall, but if you do, you can add Nightfall to your account, and have the option of creating new characters and playing the story from start to finish, or bringing your existing characters in at the middle of the story and just playing the high-level content. I'm pretty happy with this business model. Fee-based games have the problem of needing to be paid every month (ok, some offer 3 and 6 month plans, but you get the idea). If money is tight, you cancel your subscription and can't play anymore. With Guild Wars, if money is tight, you just don't buy the new game, and you can keep playing the old game. And since you can purchase access codes for the new games from the official on-line store, you don't even have to worry about it being off the shelves by the time you decide to shell out the cash. Each new chapter of Guild Wars offers a slightly different game play style. All 3 have various PvP battles which I'm unfamiliar with, being one of the worst PvP players on the face of this earth. My Mom is better at PvP than I am (in UO at least, she hasn't played Guild Wars yet). In the original Prophecies campaign, you had a pretty standard fantasy game. Factions added replayable quests and missions and two competing factions which you could join, to battle for control over the continent. Nightfall introduces heroes. Heroes are kind of like the henchman from the first two games (NPCs who you can invite into your party, they fight for you and take a share of the loot and experience) but better. In fact, they fall somewhere between henchman and player characters. You level them up, you can improve their gear, buy new skills for them, and if you want, you can even control how they fight. There's a little panel you can bring up with all of their skills and some options such as fight and guard. You can set them to stick to fighting a certain enemy (henchmen fight whoever you're fighting, which is annoying if you're playing a healer, because you usually don't have time to fight!). Or you can leave them to their own devices, and they fight more like normal henchmen. These new heroes came in very handy in one of the missions I did last night. It was just me and my 3 heroes, no other players. There was this NPC whom I had to keep alive to succeed at the quest. Normally, since I was playing a completely offensive character, I would just have to hope that the healer would pay attention to the quest NPC and keep her alive. With the new hero system, I was able to bring up the control panel for my healer and make him heal the NPC, thus ensuring my success. Another thing included in each new campaign is new character classes. Nightfall introduces the Dervish and the Paragon. Dervishes are scythe-wielding holy warriors who happen to look an awful lot like Zasalamel from SoulCalibur 3. That's what I've been playing so far, and I have to say, they're pretty blasted awesome. Whereas the Warrior class is a straight-up fighter, the Dervish has a lot of magical abilities to enhance their combat. They have a lot of Enchantments, and then attacks that are more powerful depending on how many active Enchantments they have up. They even have some minor healing abilities. The Paragon is a motivational support character with ranged capabilities (they throw spears). I haven't played one in the actual release, but during September's preview event, I spent several hours supporting the other three members of my party. Paragons seem to be a little more versatile than Monks (the primary healing class), without being as good at healing or buffing. They're also much easier to play than the Factions support class, Ritualists. Maybe I'm just impaired (I never claimed to be a great gamer), but my Ritualist died all the time. My test Paragon did pretty good, however. At the same time that Nightfall was released, ArenaNet made some game-wide changes. These included skill balance, some changes to the dye system (including adding two new colors, yay!), and best of all, improved henchman AI. Previously henchmen were about as smart as a box of particularly stupid rocks. Now they actually show a little intelligence in how they use their skills and behave in combat. While I was waiting for my copy of Nightfall, I played my ranger. I went out with groups of NPCs only and I blazed through quests. Previously, doing these with just henchmen would have involved a lot of death and frustration. They also changed monster AI, and while this was mostly fine, monsters now have a bad habit of running a lot more than they used to. They chase you farther, and they really run if they don't want to fight. The problem is that your NPCs automatically give chase (and you do, too, but you can stop yourself). My NPCs chased a wounded naga right into a big group of fresh nagas, who then beat us all up. Anyway, as far as game play goes, Nightfall offers you a storyline about some bad lady who wants to summon a dark god. Actually, I haven't gotten too far into the story, so I don't know exactly what's going on. In addition to the quests and missions that take you straight through the story, there are a lot of side quests that you can do. Because I love EXP, money, and exploration, I've been doing all the side quests. These range anywhere from the usual "go kill some monsters" to finding missing items to running errands for a bureaucrat to even collecting seashells. Nightfall is set in a continent called Elonia. Where Prophecies' Tyria was mainly European and Factions' Cantha is Asian, Elonia is an Egyptian/African/Arabic sort of place. This is reflected not just in the terrain and city design, but in the armor styles and character models. The hair is heavy on the Egyptian and African influences, with a lot of beaded cornrows, Tut-style haircuts, and yes, male Elementalists can even have a 'fro. So far, the game has been pretty easy. I'm only now reaching the point where I'm a little overwhelmed by some large groups of monsters about 3-5 levels higher than I am. If Nightfall follows the same formula as Prophecies and Factions, things will get much harder in a few levels. I think they make the beginning easy so that you can learn the game mechanics and enjoy the story and beautiful graphics before you start fearing for your life. If I had to complain about anything in the game, it would be that you can't create a character from the Factions professions (Assassin and Ritualist) in the Nightfall campaign, even if you have Factions on your account. I wanted to give Ritualists another try, and I figured I'd make one in Nightfall, since I've already played a lot of Factions. No such luck. I also can't make Nightfall characters in Factions, or Nightfall or Factions characters in Prophecies. To play any of these characters in the other campaign, I'd have to make them in their campaign and then play through to the part where you can travel to the other continent and thus, the other storyline. On a side note, I decided to treat myself to the "Collector's Edition" of Nightfall. Normally I wouldn't be willing to pay an extra $20, but I decided to try it out just this once. The extras range from cheezy to cool. The little cardboard cut-out of the main villain doesn't do much for me (I already have a ton of junk on my desk, after all), but the in-game mini-pet of her is pretty cute, it's like a "We girls can do anything, even take over the world!" Barbie doll. The game came with two posters; one is just Dervish and Paragon artwork, nice but nothing special, the other is a big map of the continent, which is pretty cool. I haven't checked out the making-of DVD or the soundtrack CD yet (hey, I was playing the game!). And I haven't figured out how to do the special dances or unlock my extra music, but that's OK, because I've seen the dances and they're pretty bad, and I usually have my volume down low (otherwise my sound would blend with my husband's WoW sounds and just get annoying). The best bonus is the art book, which has many pages of full-color concept art. Some of it is beautiful, some of it is downright creepy, the vast majority of it is just plain cool. I only wish that the book had some captions, so I knew what it was concepts of, that way when I see the same thing in game, I can see how close it is to the original concept. In closing, Nightfall is proving to be a good game so far. I'd recommend it to anyone who has already played Prophecies and/or Factions, and I'd also recommend it as a good place for a new Guild Wars player to start. The hero system makes it a lot easier to play by yourself, for those times when you can't or don't want to join up with other players. And now, if you'll excuse me, I must resist the urge to log in and finish a few more quests . . .
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E-mail AJ at: ErtheFae@aol.com Visit AJ at: www.erthefae.com
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