Guild Wars Nightfall

"ArenaNet's latest chapter yet again fails to create any sense of enjoyment in players."

After months of terrific hype, players of ArenaNet's Guild Wars series, including me, were happily and eagerly awaiting the newest installment in the series, especially after the news that this would in fact be the Guild Wars game for Player vs. Environment. But as players finally were able to play, the horror of this half-baked, terribly done game became apparent.

Gameplay: 3/10

This is where the game fails the most. Heroes, the long-awaited customizable henchman for players, long thought to be a godsend, were a complete and total waste of time. If ANet had decided to put in a system where players could tell their Heroes, "If X occurs, use skill 6, but if Y happens, spam skill 4 until B happens", this would have worked. But players are left with a depressing AI character who's only logic, it seems, is "If the skill is use-able, use it". Heroes also manage to completely destroy Guild Wars' social aspect, effectively turning Guild Wars into a single player rpg.

And then comes quests, which are for some players a large and important part of MMORPGs. Virtually every single quest in Nightfall is a collection quest, or a "Kill 10 Monsters" quest. And that's it. You talk to a quest giver. You go into the wilderness. You kill the monster, pick up his drop, and give it to someone. That's it.

Players are also given a new and exciting "Sunspear Points" system! This system goes against what ANet has supposedly been trying to do with Guild Wars: it adds grind to this game. If you actually want to progress through the game, you're forced to go outside and kill all the creatures in an area to get points. You could do some quests to gain points, but when you need a couple hundred, and every quest available to you only gives 50 points, you're forced to grind. This for me was one of the biggest disappointments of Guild Wars. Also, very similar to this is the "Lightbringer" title system, which is basically the same thing, it just has a different name.

Missions in this game are ok, an improvement over Factions and some Prophecies missions, but save for one or two, as still basically the same.

Sound: 3/10

The music in this game is nice, but still sounds very much like that of Prophecies, except for a few tunes that have traditional "Arabic/Egyptian" sounds to them. The sound of the game is very meh. Creatures let out a funny roar when they attack, and all weapons have the same "crash" sound, which gets old after a while. The voices are also very meh-ish, and the acting is terrible and very monotonous.

Graphics: 5/10

Once again, we have no improvement over the other games. The only thing "new and exciting" is that the mouth's of characters now move when speaking in cutscenes. Of course, a much needed and terrific update that have brought this game into that select few which deserve a place in heaven!1!!11
The environments in this game are also unoriginal. You have either a) the Crystal Desert from Prophecies, b) the Maguuma Jungle from Prophecies, or c) a mixture of both.

Overall: 2/10

While it does bring some new content to the Guild Wars universe, all of it happens to be the same or just a re-hash of something from the other games. I'd recommend first-time Guild Wars players to skip this and Factions, and buy Prophecies which is by far the best of the series, and Guild Wars veterans to just skip this, unless they really want to have this completely unoriginal content on their account.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 12/05/06