Guild Wars Nightfall

"Some novel improvements, but still some setbacks"

In this, the third of the Guild Wars saga, Guild Wars: Nightfall, our heroes travel to the Egyptians-ish (those that say the flavor is African is not quite right, it is clearly has an Ancient Egyptian tone) lands of Elona where a feminine villain wishes to raise her evil god and subdue the good gods that rule all of the lands in the Guild Wars World. Ah, but it's up to the heroes to save the day against a possible civil war and bitter enemies that would dare to over take Elona.

Allow me to be blunt: I wonder if the Arena Net people are getting stale with this game. It's not quite as good as Factions. The plot is so obvious that a newbie could figure out what happens next. It's not entertaining at all. The changes to the game play are a mixed bag ranging from interesting to mediocre at best.

The most notable change is that in Nightfall you can customize and select your "heroes" which are essentially henchmen with a brain. They actually work much better, and if you select their skills carefully can really make soloing or playing a relatively small groups very easy to do. You alter these heroes just as you can your own character, but their selection is much broader than your own, actually. They come with their own preselected main class, you fill in their secondary class and everything else you want him or her to do. You can have up to three heroes at any time.

Another minor change is that they've expanded the capacity of your storage account, so that for a small price, you can store up to 250 of any basic or finer materials that you might need to make a particular kind of armor or weapon.

The other noticeable change is that Nightfall added some new runes that essentially changed some of the minor characteristics of your gear. For example, one such rune could boost your energy capacity by up to three points if selecting a certain spot, or increase how fast your recharge your mana points. It's not that bad. The flaw is that like every other add-on, weapon or armor you can buy, the economic "supply and demand" system becomes out of whack really easy, forcing characters to accumulate insane amounts of gold pieces and/or materials needed to pay for the needed armor and weapons for the game. Maybe if they could have done something as simple as take a 200 moving day average (like they do on at the New York Stock Exchange) as a better estimate at a item's actual price, it would not be as bad.

Another minor flaw that I've found is that main quests have become less emphasized as actually exploration of the areas is emphasized in the Player versus Environment part of the game. Continuing on a trend started in factions, commendation medals and title accumulation has become more important as part of the quests requires you to gain a certain rank before you can continue on the plot-line. While I don't mind "grinding" it to achieve a certain level (probably brought on by two unofficial aspects of the game that has probably had to be curtailed somehow: farming (where you go out just to get the loot off of monsters to make money off of) and running people off to different locations regardless if they could survive along the way or not), I don't like how it seemed to have taken over. Now with Nightfall, certain areas are off-limits until the main characters meet a certain level. I understand that they had to do that, but I wonder if it would have been easier mandating that unless players finished a particular mission, they would not be able to get to certain areas.

Eyecandy (graphics and sound) are just as good as before, although the novelty of seeing cut-scenes with the character's mouths moving is a little disturbing to my eye. The monsters are really interesting, even though some look really strange, like some of the moving plant monsters which are just plain weird and almost do not fit in with the scenery.

Gameplay is pretty good. The new spells and skills they've added for the existing classes work fairly well, and they haven't changed too much what wasn't working before. There are two new classes for Nightfall, a spear wielding Paragon class built around religious motivation and a scythe twirling dervish which seems to have bits and pieces of aspects of elementalists and warrior's mentality and skills. I should warn you, if you do not have Factions, these two additions will only compliment the basic six from the original Guild Wars game.

As far as I can tell, there isn't that much change in the PvP part of the game, and I suspect it's probably good that they didn't change what was considered the best part of Guild Wars. They've also expanded (again) the variety of your guild's island headquarters.

On the whole, this version of Guild Wars has done quite a few little things to make the game play a little better. But as good as it is, I wish they could have done more to make the plot more palatable and tried to fix the problems of the game without what worked well not as good. It just seems to me that perhaps Arena Net is running out of ideas of what to do to make this game better. I just hope the fourth installment (maybe they should start calling these expansions "chapters") is worth for me to buy. It's an okay game to buy. But just barely.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/18/06