Guild Wars Nightfall

Metachronos overall score = 8.6 / 10

Positive
# Features a great-looking new continent to explore, filled with countless quests
# Two interesting but complex new character professions add even more depth
# Gameplay still offers an excellent mix of action, role-playing, and strategy

Negative
# The core game hasn't changed much, and its shortcomings are still there
# New hero characters can be complicated to manage

Six months before was the release of Guild Wars Factions, the follow-up to ArenaNet's innovative online role-playing game, but here comes Guild Wars Nightfall--another massive game featuring plenty of solo, cooperative, and competitive questing and combat. Whereas Factions took place in an Asian-inspired setting, Nightfall has an ancient Egyptian look and feel, and unlike Factions, it's more focused on solo and cooperative questing than on a mix of that and high-level player-versus-player battles. The result is unmistakably similar to the other Guild Wars titles despite a few new features, though it can still be a good starting point for those who haven't given the series a chance yet. However, in spite of all the new content that's on offer in Nightfall's large new continent of Elona, the underlying game hasn't changed much and is starting to show signs of aging. Guild Wars Nightfall gives you even more to manage by introducing the concept of hero characters that join your own created character during the course of the campaign. While it's always been possible to take on computer-controlled henchmen as an alternative to questing or undertaking missions with other human players, the hero characters grow and improve much like your main character does. They'll gain experience levels, and they have their own sets of skills, as well as their own inventories--and it's up to you to decide what to do with all that. You can even give them basic move orders in battle, though they'll fight and follow automatically for the most part. The hero characters are an interesting way of exposing you to all of the different professions in Guild Wars firsthand, since now you get to choose skills for your computer-controlled allies that are complementary with the skills you want to use. However, managing just your own character is a challenge, so by making you think about how best to develop a growing list of hero characters as well, Nightfall gets a little top-heavy. And since hero characters occupy the same slots in a player's team that could normally go to other human players, it can be even tougher for a casual player to join a group this time around. Overall, the hero system in Nightfall feels like a mixed blessing.



There are some interesting elements at work in Nightfall's story, and the mission cutscenes feature some good voice-over work. But there's so much else going on in this game that it's hard to get swept up in the storyline or get particularly attached to any of its major characters, including all those heroes whose stats and inventories you'll be worrying about. The main storyline also sometimes forces you to go out of your way to build a stronger reputation with Elona's defenders before you can proceed to the next major mission, which is a contrived way of preventing you from just powering through the plot and forcing you to explore and undertake smaller quests. This probably won't seem that bad to newer Guild Wars players, but if you've already spent dozens of hours fighting hordes of monsters with your experience level capped at level 20 in previous Guild Wars games, having to grind your way up to the next story mission might seem a little much. Each of the Guild Wars games has offered dozens if not hundreds of hours of gameplay, between all that they have to offer. So, at worst, Nightfall might be a case of having too much of a good thing. Some of the missions and story content are better than what's been done in Guild Wars in the past, and offer different bonus objectives that can give you good reason to go back into them multiple times. But your decision about whether to delve into this latest chapter should ultimately come down to how much Guild Wars you've already played and how much more you want. Almost needless to say, legions of Guild Wars fans have already delved into Nightfall without a second thought. But if you've had your fill of Guild Wars and would prefer to see a bigger overhaul instead of an emphasis on more of what you're already used to, then you could live without this installment. Or if you haven't played any yet, Nightfall still offers unique and very deep gameplay that combines shades of massively multiplayer gaming, action RPGs, collectible card games, and competitive action games all in one. It's a formula that millions of players around the world are still actively engaged in with good reason.

looks awsome

this is 3rd of the series