Monday, August 13, 2007

Guild Wars: Nightfall... should I?

Good Monday to you all. I trust your weekends were as fun and relaxing as my own. Had some friends over on Saturday, played some EQ2 and betas on Sunday, and watched Hot Fuzz (HILARIOUS!). In all it was a good weekend.

Of note though, and I come to you all for advice, is that I tried to play Guild Wars: Prophecies once more. When I say tried, I mean that I've had the original campaign now for over a year, and never once played a character past level 11. I was, when I originally got the game, still addicted to WoW. And each time I've tried playing it through since I've been too busy with some other game, most recently LotRO. I just haven't had the desire to actually ever see it through to the end.

But now, in my waiting for Pirates of the Burning Sea, I'm playing EQ2 but still find myself wanting something else aside from Norrath to game with. No MMOs out there right now really excite me enough to put the time in playing them just to have it negated by PotBS when it hits. But Guild Wars is always free. It's always there and waiting to be played. So what am I waiting for?

Well, I don't like Prophecies that much. I've played bits of Nightfall from the 10 day trial that was given to existing GW players, and I enjoyed it a great deal more. It seemed much more open to solo-play, and in general like the developers had done a lot of things better with that campaign than they had with Prophecies: their 1st go-round.

But is it really worth it? It's still $50 in most stores, and I'm worried it'll just get shelved along with Prophecies due to lack of true interest. I want to enjoy it, but I'm not sure I will. Is it solo-friendly? Do the Heroes matter more than the annoying minions? Because I want to like it. I want to get into it and get some stuff to carry over to Guild Wars 2 eventually, and pick up Eye of the North and enjoy that this winter as well. But I've yet to really get hooked by Guild Wars: Prophecies... is Nightfall all that different?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I only got to 13 or so, but I seem to remember the Heroes kicking ass (more than the minions). I don't think you need a party if you don't want one and your goal is solo play.

Melmoth said...

I've always found Guild Wars to be a dip-in game. I've bought all the expansions and find each one to be refreshingly different enough that I can change between them to keep things interesting, but it's never been a must play, life devourer of a game. If anything, I think I preferred Factions out of all the expansions, but that's just down to personal preference for the look and feel of the thing.

Anyway, I'll tend to play it when I've got an hour to kill and no other game takes my fancy. If nothing else, it beats twiddling your thumbs. Unless you're one of those professional thumb wrestlers with thumbs the size of aubergines, then thumb twiddling is probably the preferable pastime.

Anonymous said...

Honestly, Guild Wars isn't worth it if you are a PvEer at heart. PvE is solely there to unlock PvP content. It's half decent, but I don't think you'll find what you're looking for in Guild Wars. It's all about the guild ladder, and knowing which flavor of the week skill decks. I could be wrong, and they could have improved PvE since the original, but I don't think so.

Bildo said...

I do like PvP, but Guild Wars' never did it for me. It was a bit too much like Battlegrounds, and seemed to have little real meaning. I'm more of an RvR kind of guy, or soon NvN in PotBS. But I've heard pretty good things about the storyline in GW.

Bah, maybe I'll just let go and play the hell out of the betas I'm in. Really rip into them and make sure they're as rich as I hope they are, and squash some bugs in the process.

Anonymous said...

I'm very much a PvEer at heart, and have to say I did bog down a bit in Prophecies early on. Got as far as the Crystal Desert, largely solo, and ended up getting stuck and shelving it for about a year.

Nightfall is a much tighter kind of thing though, I've found, with far more side-questing available and a much more smoothly connected story - very few parts of it where you have great long hauls across an entire kingdom to get to the next instalment.

The Heroes, while perhaps not much more smart than the henchmen, are a lot more powerful and flexible, mostly because you can sort their skills out yourself, give them runes and looted gold weapons, and they have their own xp-based level, not the level of the outpost you pick them up in.

I'm not sure how it plays totally solo, but we managed to get all the way through with a regular group of two (plus Heroes) mostly. I think it'd be technically doable solo, but probably wouldn't be quite as much fun.

One thing that helped me a lot was being able to pick up Heroes for my stuck Prophecies character, which helped get that one through it all to the end too!

I don't know enough Factions yet, but would definitely say that Nightfall is far superior to Prophecies, but then you'd expect that, it being more than a year newer.

Bildo said...

Thanks for the words, Van Hemlock. It's actually your constant updates on your progress in GW that made me want to try it once more.

I tried Prophecies again, couldn't get into it, but then borrowed my friends hardly ever played Nightfall account. He's sense just given me free reign to it, because I am loving Nightfall.

Made a Dervish (of course) and have been progressing nicely in a the couple hours I've got in. It's a lot less "rough" in the beginning than Prophecies was for me.

So hopefully I can play through it all and be done when Pirates hits.