So far I’m enjoying Nightfall more than factions. I’ve only got a level 8 p/w so I haven’t seen much of the game yet.
I like paragon/warrior since both of these classes have adrenalin and shouts. I’m thinking the echos might combo well with some warrior shouts. Anyways, early on using frenzy is pretty nice since you are a ranged fighter.
Quoted for massive truth. The group I play the main storyline with wanted to kill him within minutes of meeting him. We cheered when he was killed, and hated having to eventually kill the guy that did us such a huge favor.
Nightfall really has changed the game in a big way. If you played Guild Wars at the start, but quit when you finished Prophecies or because Factions just seemed like more of the same, you’ll be amazed at the difference now.
To echo what a lot of other people are saying, it’s the best one yet, for all the reasons they list.
KG
On a different note, I have found several Bugs (“Features”) in the quests below Blacktide Den.
So folks don’t get frustrated like I did:
If you take the Ghost Quest do NOT try to take the Master Difficulty Quest available at the same time. Wait until you finish the Ghost Quest. The problem will be that you cannot do both without dropping the Guiding Light Wand and then if you die and restart finding it again is a pain in the ass.
The other problem is that the Necro that you need to take with you seems to have an extremely WIDE area that she blocks and once you add a few ghosts navigating with them becomes difficult because they body block you. While this is fine for the Ghost Quest, if you’re trying to free the 8 Drunks the ghosts and necro will make kiting impossible, get in the way of your Heroes and body block you from attacking\running. She has literally blocked the portal for the 8 to enter Blacktide so I had to do the quest 2X and hold her back so they could get around her Fat Ass…
There’s also a tremendous amount of lag in the Bog so be patient while doing anything down there.
That being said, so far the rest of the game is running silk smooth and I haven’t seen any problems like this in anyplace other than the bog. Since it’s the starter Island and you only really need to do the mission there to get off, you can pretty much ignore all the quests down there except for the one for War Preparations that gets you to the Mainland if you don’t want to deal with any of the above stated issues.
After taking the ghost quest in the bog I started rubberbanding like crazy. I didn’t think the two were related but maybe they were. First time I’ve ever seen that in Guild Wars.
I was running about 5 quests down in the bog, and after I took the ghost quest, I reached a state where people simply stopped following me, and all items became unusable.
That really sucked because I had 2-3 quests which were basically done, but that I had to restart because of this.
Something is definitely buggy about it, since you guys are seeing it too.
On a slightly different note, now that I’m a bit further into the game, I can say that the mission design is better and more engaging in most cases than either of the previous games. Some of them set up genuine moral dilemmas that can be completed in various ways, with there being no one ‘right’ answer. I’m finding that very interesting and engaging. Some examples:
***** SPOILER WARNING *****
ONLY READ FURTHER IF YOU WON’T PLAY THE GAME, OR NEED SELLING ON IT. OTHERWISE, I ENCOURAGE YOU TO DISCOVER THESE QUESTS YOURSELF.
-There’s a quest where you have to decide who gets a dead man’s large inheritance. You have to run a quest with each of the man’s 3 children. 1 of them is a douchebag, but the other two would both do good things with the money. You have to decide which one gets rich and who gets totally stiffed. There’s even a popup declaring that your choice is ‘binding’, which makes it carry even more weight.
-A guy pleads with you to talk to his girlfriend’s father, who objects to their relationship. So you talk to the father, who agrees to meet with them on the edge of some cliffs to ‘talk’. You go escort the boyfriend there, and the father insists on a battle to the death, with the winner ‘owning’ his daughter. By default, the father will kill the boyfriend, though you can intervene in the fight to help the boyfriend (or even kill all three of them). Man, that was a tough call, having to decide what to do as I watched the father kill the boyfriend…
-(Bigger spoiler) At one point, you end up killing a fairly major personality in the game. Problem is, they were a VIP of the country next door, and you murdered this person on your country’s soil. This sparks escallating tensions. You are held to a trial in front of a council of 22 jurists, which is a whole mission where you call witnesses and recount what you saw. I think the trial may have open ended results, or at least gives a convinving appearance that it does, with bars showing how the jury is leaning.
-(Bigger spoiler) Once war is immenent, you begin preperations for an assault on an enemy’s city. Your country then launches a pre-emptive assault, based on evidence that you and you alone have witnessed. Obviously this has really interesting morally-ambigous ties to what’s going on in the world now.
Nightfall has really caught me off guard with how engaging the quests have been. There’s something pretty special about being caught in positions without black and white This-is-right-and-that-is-wrong choices. And you actually get to make choices, which was largely absent from the games before. I haven’t even checked out PVP yet because PVE is so engaging this time around…
Correct, there have been three Guild Wars products now with the release of Nightfall, one is not required to play the other two. You do get certain perks for having multiple products, however.
— Alan
And what are does? (I’ve got the first one but not the second).
Basically, you’d just just miss access to that “expansion’s” campaign-specific classes, skills, and campaign. I think that’s it though.
If you don’t care about pve for the older expansions, and plan on playing pvp to any meaningful degree, it may be worth checking out the pvp unlock packs for the older versions in the online store. For about the cost of a given expansion, you get all pvp skills in that version, all already unlocked(!) so you don’t have to spend your pvp points unlocking them – the only drawback that I know of compared to buying that expansion itself is that you don’t get the pve campaign content.
Two extra character slots.
And the drawback of this when looking at factions is…?
Okay, I’ll answer that myself. No more using the first two zones to powerlevel yourself with amazingly easy (as in you can do it without fighting) high experience (2x to 4x the rewards in the other campaigns). Which would suck, but isn’t really a reason to buy it pve.
If you thought the game was fun in the beginning, prepare for the awesomeness that is the endgame stuff. I don’t want to spoil it in any way, but I was entirely caught off guard by how they did it. And in a good way. This is definitely the “twistiest” gw yet.
There have definitely been some cinematics that made me want to kill myself because they were so awful, but thats just Anet, and this one has far fewer than the other ones. I’m trying to minimize spoilers, but I will say that the game does offer a number of really cool ways to advance your character beyond just levelling, which I like a ton.
The boyfriend quest really got me down. I put pacifism on the father, hoping something would change, but ended up killing him. Not a good way to go, really.
The story line PVE most certainly is far more engaging than the last two. It’s deeper than “Curing the Plague” in factions. I’m really enjoying their efforts so far.
Also (and I know Aeon will disagree with me here) their Halloween event was awesome. Mad King Says is just a great game - and the entertaining part was watching people without a clue die over and over and over again, in town. No deaths here, just pumpkin helms and wicked hats for my characters. Woohoo!
Has anyone done the “Sunspears in Cantha” mission to allow your Factions character to travel to Nightfall? I’ve tried it 5 or 6 times (solo with henchies) now, and I’m pretty frustrated. It’s filled with hordes of level 28 monsters that leech all my energy so that I can’t use skills, and that are capable of killing me in 2-3 shots. What am I supposed to do with that? I’m a W/A so I can try respeccing to all adrenaline based skills, but I don’t usually last long enough to generate much adrenaline.
You mean the one with the portals? Yeah, I plowed through it no problem with my level 17 E/N and a few crap level 10 henches. The enemies weren’t a problem, so long as they were focused on the disposable fodder, but if they’re proving too tough for you, just focus on the portals. You close them, you’re done. It’s kind of ironic, though - after Aeon and I wiped on that stupid mission, because I forgot my rez signet, I went back and soloed it easy.
Could someone list succinctly what Nightfall does better than the other two? I mean something more concrete than vague opinions.
Did they improve the chat windows and interface? I hated that in the first two.
The biggest difference is the addition of heroes. These are NPCs that can join your party, switch weapons and armor, unlock and use skills, level up, reallocate skill points, etc. There’s also options for directing heroes (and henchmen) in battle, setting their aggressiveness, and directly activating skills. It sort of makes GW into a party-based game in singleplayer. You can also use them in PVP.
The new classes seem pretty cool too.
Chat windows are the same I think. The game interface is improved by associating the spells names/icons with their effects.
Yes, I have the game and I know that :)
I’m asking more about the new content (which I still have to see).