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Eye of the North is many things. It's the most recent chapter of the Guild Wars saga. It's the first Guild Wars expansion, as opposed to a stand-alone game. It's the last Guild Wars product slated to be released before Guild Wars 2 comes out at the end of next year.
As a pre-order customer, I was able to play GW:EN (as it's officially abbreviated) in a preview event on the last weekend in August. The game hits the shelves on August 31st, which means that if you're reading this review, and you're not my editor, you can probably go out and buy a copy right now. For that matter, you can purchase it on-line in the PlayNC store, or the Guild Wars in-game store. This is the route I'm choosing for two reasons: I don't have to drive all over or call around town to see who has it in stock, there's no packaging materials, and NCSoft is running a special promotion where if you make enough purchases from their in-game store ($29, I think), you get a free "bonus mission pack" which will unlock special Guild Wars missions later this year. Good deal.
GW:EN consists solely of new content for max-level characters. There are no new classes, which is a bit of a bummer. I do enjoy making new characters. On the other hand, it's good to jump right into the game with one of my old standbys, and not have to learn a new skill set and strategy. For the preview weekend, I played my Dervish; she's fun, she does well on her own in a group of NPCs, and it's pretty easy to adapt her to different situations (undead, demons, small groups of monsters, large groups of monsters, etc etc).
As if to make up for the lack of new classes, GW:EN offers a lot of new game play opportunities, while incorporating and expanding upon favorite elements from past campaigns, especially Nightfall. Although I only had time to play for about 6-8 hours total over the three day event, I still managed to try out several aspects of the new game. These included:
-Epic, multi-part quests. Preview Guild Wars campaigns have featured a pretty straight forward "one quest leads to another" system. You had your missions, which contained cut scenes and moved the story forward. You had your primary quests, which helped you reach the missions. And you also had general quests in each area, which you could do for fun and extra rewards, or ignore in favor of progressing through the story faster.
GW:EN offers quests which have subquests that you have to complete to achieve the intended goal. Practically at the start of the game, you get a quest to make friends in the new area you're in. There are three groups that you need to buddy up to in able to complete the quest. For the preview weekend, they had two of those quest trees disabled, so I set off on the only active one. Before the representative of the group will do anything with me, she has to hunt down a monster. I helped her do so (which took a couple of quests), only to learn that it was her brother, who had been twisted by some mysterious magic. So then we had to go find a storyteller, who told us that the only way she could make up for killing her brother was to chase the monsters out of her homestead. Before we could do that, we had to get the blessing of the bear spirit. That done, we killed a lot of monsters. Then we had to go talk to another guy, who would help us rally support, but first we were going to have to do a quest for him... By rushing through an entire board, dodging monsters, I reached his city just 5 minutes before the preview event was supposed to end. I'd only done a couple of side quests that I encountered along the way, and still hadn't completed one of the three legs of the first quest in the game.
Like I said, epic.
-Brawling! There's now a special subset of quests that involve putting on brass knuckles and punching opponents out with a special set of brawling skills, which include "Right Hook" and "Brawling Headbutt." They're pretty awesome. It's an optional part of the game, not necessary for the storyline as far as I can tell, more like a fun distraction, a mini-game of sorts. As you complete the quests, you unlock new skills to use in your brawling matches. I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a PvP version of it at some point in the game.
-Special Skills. If you played the first GW campaign, you'll remember that many quests rewarded you with skills for your class. I never really liked that, because it was usually a skill I didn't want. GW:EN has a return to skills as quest rewards. However, they're special, non-class specific skills that you can only get by doing the quest. Their effectiveness is determined by your standing with the group that gave it to you. I received a couple of these skills, but didn't get a chance to test them out. GW's setup of only having a set of 8 skills at your disposal at any time generally means that I have a pretty specific set-up that works awesomely for me, and there's no one skill I'm willing to drop to try a new one out.
-New Class Skills. As all preview GW campaigns have done, this one introduces new skills for the existing classes. I purchased a couple of these, and tried them out. I was especially pleased by the one that gave my Dervish a health regeneration of 2 for every enchantment she had on her. My Dervish usually has between 3-5 enchantments up at a time, so it was very easy to reach the maximum 10 regen with that skill, and it made her even harder to kill than usual.
-Expanded Reputation System. Factions introduced a system where there were two, well, factions that you could earn reputation points from. Nightfall expanded this, having several groups with whom you could curry favor, in return for special skills, access special quests, and more. GW:EN takes this even farther, giving you at least four groups that you need to impress, and they won't sell you their cool armor or other toys unless they like you.
There are a few new elements that I didn't get to test out in my limited play time. One is a puzzle game called Polymock. Another is the dungeons. I went into a few small underground areas, but didn't yet reach the expansive dungeons that are one of GW:ENs big selling points. I may do another review next month covering those, depending on how much game time I get in. I also didn't get to try out any of the new armor, as you have to suck up a lot to get the various factions to give you the honor of giving them tons of money for spiffy new duds.
GW:EN introduces you to the races that you'll be able to play in GW2, and even lets you recruit some of them into your party. So far I've encountered Dwarves, Norn, and Asura. The Dwarves are just what you expect, and I like them just as much as I like them in any other game, which is to say that I make a lot of short jokes. The Norn are Viking-inspired giants who can turn into a half-bear; not sure I would play one, but they're fun to interact with. The Asura are funky little dudes with weird ears, big black eyes, and an attitude. I haven't done too much with them yet, so I'm reserving judgement.
I came across a couple of minor elements that I really enjoyed about the game. One was that you're no longer forced to have a certain hero in your party for certain quests. While that may make sense from a storyline point of view, it was still really annoying to have to totally rearrange my perfect party build to make room for some silly warrior that I didn't like that much anyway. The game seems to pretty much assume that any important storyline NPCs have been following along behind you, kicking back with a Dwarven Ale while you do all the hard work, just so they can show up and say a few lines in the cut scene. Works for me.
The big thing I liked though, was apparently you can finally resurrect NPC allies! It used to be you could only res your party members, and let me tell you, it was really annoying to have to start a quest all over again because some stupid important person decided to get themselves killed, and even though their body was right there at your feet, you couldn't bring them back from the dead. I don't know if this applies in missions or just quests, though the difference between those two is slightly blurred in this game.
My one complaint would have to be that so far, almost all the monsters that I fought had the same body types as monsters from previous games. I guess all the new exciting stuff is waiting down in the dungeons, but you'd think that after 8 hours of gameplay, I would have seen more than two new body types. I also had some lag and cut scene graphics glitches, but I suspect those were a problem on my end, and not the game's fault.
All in all, GW:EN seems to be a highly enjoyable new chapter to the Guild Wars saga, though whether it will be enough to tide fans over for more than a year until GW2 remains to be seen.
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