Alright, so Anet has decided to grace us with yet ANOTHER expansion for Guild Wars: the competitive online MMO game with those pretty people models. Haven't we seen enough of these? Must I put yet ANOTHER 50 bucks into ANOTHER Guild Wars product? Do I like Guild Wars enough to give a damn? Have no fear, because I am going to allay all your fears and doubts and give you a comprehensive review of the newest lineup in Arena Net's power attack on the MMO market.
You have a deep hatred for Guild Wars you say? You don't really give a damn about this expansion, you say? Well then read no further, friend! Because this review is for the new Nightfall expansion, and if you disliked Guild Wars, you won't like this, because it still runs on the same engine, with the same mechanics, the same gameplay, and the same divisive focus on PvP and PvE. I guess what I'm saying is: don't expect anything groundbreaking in Nightfall that will suddenly make you love Guild Wars, if you hated it before.
That said, for those of you that ENJOYED Guild Wars, or at least liked it enough to appreciate what it's trying to do, you will absolutely love Nightfall, because it takes nearly every aspect in Guild Wars, and makes it better - a whole lot better.
Guild Wars has always tried to divide its focus evenly between PvE - cooperative gauntlet running through lands filled with all sorts of monsters - and PvP - head to head player vs. player competitive teamplay. Though in the past incarnations of Guild Wars, the PvP side has been generally the more successful one, the design philosophy of an equal focus between the two is apparent. Nightfall adheres to the same design rules, and so I feel it's only fair to review Nightfall in two separate parts: PvE and PvP.
Part 1: Nightfall PvE: Turai Ossa, a big ass desert, a bunch of spear-carrying AI, and a really, really, really pissed off god.
Nightfall is a MAJOR improvement in terms of writing quality and plot consistency in its story-driven cooperative campaign. I know I've always made fun of the quality of writing in Guild Wars, saying the Prophecy campaign was written by a 7 year old and the Factions campaign was written by an 8 year old, well, I'm going to go out o a limb and say: the Nightfall campaign was written by at least a 14 year old. In short: with respect to the previous campaigns, this one's not bad - not bad at all.
The premise of the campaign is pretty simple: a zealous and insane war marshal, one in a long line of hereditary rulers of the continent of Elona, decides to conjure up her patron god of darkness - Abbadon - and rule the world after devestating it with the wholesome demonic fury of darkness. Hey man, no dark god ever took over the world by running for elections. Clearly, you, a nascent recruit in the self-appointed legio protectiva of all Elonia - the elite order of Sunspears - wouldn't like that to happen. And so, armed with your spear, scythe, fireball, or whatever, you and your fellow sunspears fight through gruelling missions and quests to stop the darkness from engulfing your homeland. In short: THE REALLY DARK GOD OF UTTER DARKNESS COMES TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD; ARE YOU DUDE ENOUGH TO STOP HIM?!?!
Look, I never said the story was original, just better thought out than the previous campaigns. Of course, my little tongue in cheek introduction of the story hardly does it justice; there ARE a few creative twists in the storyline, a few likable characters here and there, a few epic moments, and a few satisfying villain-slayings. So all in all, the storyline should not dissappoint you, as long as you're not expecting Planescape: Torment quality writing here. You might even end up liking it; I did.
The progression of your character through the storyline is well thought out, and you're even given DIALOGUE CHOICES during certain parts of a campaign. In fact, there's even one mission mostly without combat (!!) that has to be completed by dialogue and thought. Sure, the dialogue choices are often inconsequential, like either killing someone to take what you need or doing a little dance for them to get it as a reward, they do add significantly to the gameplay and roleplaying (GASP! ROLEPLAYING IN GUILD WARS?!) experience.
The length of the campaign is comparable to that of the original prophecies campaign - perhaps even longer - and can easily stretch out to ~40 hours of solid gameplay. There is significantly more "Grind" in Nightfall than in previous campaigns. Specifically, a few key story chokepoints require you to attain a certain "Rank" in the elite military cadre of Sunspears, and that's done by doing quests or killing monsters. It's somewhat tedious to grind monsters or complete a good chunk of the huge array of side quests, I think, but the enemies and quests are varied enough to keep boredom from seeping in.
Speaking of side quests - there are a lot of them. There are a WHOLE LOT of them. The majority of these quests are your standard go here, fetch me that fed-ex quests, or the go there kill something, have some experience quests, but there are a good number of creative gems as well. There are a few well done side quests that break the mold. Some even have multiple ways of completing them! The amount of side quests start dying off as you move towards completion, however, but by that time you shouldn't have much need for experience points.
Nightfall introduces a new mechanic that lets you retain a retinue of "heroes", which are basically henchmen you can customize and control during battle. Yes, that's right, you heard me; you can pick your heroes' skill bars and even give them optimal equipment. You can also control them during battle by opening up mini-skill bars and choosing the skill you want your heroes to use and when. These heroes also play an important part in the story, and sometimes offer their input during quests or missions. Nightfall also does a good job of fleshing out the histories and personalities of your heroes, and you'll find yourself attached to that favorite someone whom you end up taking with you everywhere. For example, the hero "Master of Whispers" is the leader of an elite demon hunting secret organization deeply rooted in tradition, and some missions require him to be in your party so he can play his role in the overall story. The heroes play reasonably well, better than most players, even. Hero monks will kite like pros, and hero mesmers will interrupt 1/4 second spells. With a little micromanagement, you can easily kit out your team of heroes to take on any challenge.
Speaking of challenge - there is none. PvE is still easy - incredibly more so now that you have less reliance on actual players and more on your heroes - which you KNOW won't do stupid crap like go afk, rage quit, or aggro every red dot in the game and whine at the monks when they die. There is no excuse for failing a mission - or hell, even DYING, in Nightfall PvE. In short, PvE is easy. Very easy. Meet a tough and intimidating boss? Have your warrior hero hold his adren until a spike, your monk hero on word of healing, and your necro hero on debuff and de-enchant, and boom, it's dead. What did you say? That was an extremely powerful demon? Huh. Okay.
Last, but not least, the graphics are breathtaking. The scenery is absolutely beautiful. Everything looks epic and enticing. The artists did a fantastic job bringing the middle-eastern Aladdin meets Prince of Persia fantasy setting alive onto the screen... but this shouldn't come as news to seasoned Guild Wars players. The artistic direction for the Guild Wars games has always been top-notch.
Now, onto the PvP:
Nightfall PvP: ANET: WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY BUILD?!?!
First of all, the newest PvP mode: Hero battles, is totally worthless on a competitive level. It's mostly for people who just want to hit enter button and go nuts with their heroes, kinda like Random Arena, except even more pointless. So I won't go into that.
The two new classes, the Dervish and Paragon, are interesting and versatile enough to warrant them a spot on most team lineups, though the Paragon seems to be more popular by far. The new skill changes and additions do a good job of kicking the long ingrained metagame straight in the crotch, and to me, that's a good thing.
In terms of competitive GVG, the state of the game seem to be shifting towards gimmick pressure builds. To those of you not familiar with the terminology, gimmick pressure builds are team builds that rely heavily on one particular "gimmick", such as spreading degen under Toxicity, spamming area-of-effect fire spells, or running 4 warriors and adren spiking every 5 seconds. I'm not sure if I like this direction, as this rewards players who can play a particular build well, instead of rewarding players who can play everything well.
Nonetheless, the new skills and new classes bring a lot more variety into the game. Guilds are relying less and less on tried and true methods and going into more inventive strategies. As to how long this will persist before the metagame goes into stagnance again, I don't know, but with such a wide array of skills in play, it should be a while. Most of the skills, balancewise, are fairly well designed. The metagame seems to revolve heavily around a few specific skills, however, like "Searing Flames". Whether or not this can be considered an "imbalance" is yet to be seen. The variety of monks and flagrunners out there being run to a semi-successful degree convinces me that at least for the moment, people are experimenting with new builds and new ideas, and aside from the occasional THUMPWAY SEARING FLAMES FTW LOL!! guilds (mostly when you hit rank 700-300), there are significantly more variety of builds than before. Some are geuninely interesting, while others are just brutally effective.
I'll stop myself before I go into a long rant about the current state of the metagame, and tell you all about the wonderful new interface improvements of Nightfall. You can now have as many weapon sets as you want on your PvP character, and armor swapping has been disabled when in a match. This gives PvE characters ZERO advantage over PvP characters inside the Arena, and that's the way it should be. The interface also allows you to save a particular skill and equipment set into a template so you can load it up later without having to adjust all those attributes and runes all over again. This means re-rolling is as easy as clicking two buttons. This is a completely surprising feature. Apparently, Anet actually listened to community suggestions on how to streamline the interface - and implemented it! Fantastic.
The new guild halls, apart from being gorgeous, also offer some new gameplay elements, like healing shrines and weird flag stands. This puts some extra environmental variety in GvG and actually forces the team to think about specific strategies for specific guild halls.
Overall, Nightfall makes some remarkable changes to the tried and true formula of Guild Wars. It takes what made Guild Wars good, and expanded on them, enhancing them, and making them better - much better. If you enjoyed the style of MMO gameplay that the other Guild Wars incarnations offered, you'll most certainly enjoy this one.
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