28th August 2018, 9:36 PM
So, 12 2/3rds years after buying the game, at probably somewhere over the 1100 hour mark from when I first played the original base game, I finally did it...
PC
--
Guild Wars: Nightfall - Yes, I finally, at last, beat the Guild Wars campaign I had never finished before! Nightfall is the third Guild Wars campaign, and released in late 2006. I bought this game digitally day one, since they gave you some ingame reward for doing so (I forget what it was, offhand). But by this point I guess I was starting to get burned out on GW, since I had spent so many hundreds of hours playing the game from 2004 to 2006, and after buying this stopped playing not too far in. I don't know, as great as this game is somehow I just didn't like it as much as Prophecies or Factions, and I'd still stick with saying that it's my least favorite of the four main campaigns. Nightfall is set in an Africa-inspired part of the world, and the idea of a fantasy RPG with an African setting is a great one and it is executed fairly well here, or at least as okay as the East Asian setting from Factions is... so it's a mishmash of things tossed in together, but at least they tried. That isn't the issue. Nor is the length or challenge; given the number of years involved I have no idea how long Nightfall took me, but even with the extended playtime, and with how I'd play it in bits here and there over the years instead of all at once as I did with the previous campaigns (Prophecies and Factions) in '04-'06, Nightfall felt long and pretty difficult. I believe it's longer than the maybe-too-short Factions (which took me 60 hours at most...), but shorter in hours than Prophecies, which is a solid hundred-hour campaign. There are some pretty hard missions in this game even in Normal difficulty, though. The Realm of Torment particularly had me stuck for a long, long time; it's a tough realm full of hard missions and constant punishment from negative status effects. It was frustrating at the time, but in retrospect it works, as it all comes together to a pretty interesting and unique chapter of Guild Wars. For the most part I can't really point to any specific things Nightfall does "wrong" that explain why it's my least favorite chapter, but it's also great so that kind of makes sense; Guild Wars IS in my top 10 best PC games ever list for a reason, after all! It's an incredible game.
I am also sure that had I played Nightfall through in 2006-2007 I'd have liked it a bit more, because with more humans around to party with things would be easier. However, that brings me to the one concrete issue I have with Nightfall. I'll need to back up, though. So, before Nightfall, there were two kinds of characters in active parties: human players, or Henchmen allies. Henchmen, or henchies as they were often called, are AI-controlled allies who use preset skill sets to fill out your party. This is necessary since Guild Wars is an extremely grouping-focused game which really requires a party to function in unless you are VERY good. However, henchmen have limitations, as they'd just follow you around pretty much; you had very limited control over them. With Nightfall, developer ArenaNet changed things. Henchmen still exist, but a new category of AI ally was added, Heroes. Heroes are characters you unlock who you can then add to your party. These differ from Henchmen since you can customize their skill bars yourself, filling out their skillsets from anything you have unlocked on your character or account. This is pretty great. Additionally, more control over AI movement was added, as you can set flags which tell your AI party members to move to specific points on the map. With Heroes you can even divide your AI allies into multiple groups each with their own separate flags, which is a degree of control impossible with Henchmen.
The result is that the Heroes system made Guild Wars a much more soloable game. Where previously people would often want to get in all-random-player groups for missions or quests or such, with Heroes people usually would just do them on their own. Playing missions or quests in random groups was something I loved about GW, since it allowed player grouping without me needing to go out there and join some higher-end guild that I never had any interest in being in, and after Nightfall's release that element of the game started to go away. This has always been a core part of why I dislike Nightfall.
However, of course, player counts are going to go down over time, and the Heroes system is important in that respect because once not enough people were playing any one campaign to always be able to rely on other humans being there to attempt something with, saying "just deal with it and try to beat that hard mission with just Henchmen" would get real frustrating real fast. Heroes are a great solution here and make playing the game today a lot better. I still do miss hte old, often random-human-group-focused Guild Wars, though... ah well, at least I was there for it.
But anyway, I was thinking about Guild Wars again recently, probably partially because of a patch they released a few months ago that added an infinite-draw-distance option that improves GW's graphics even more, as if the game even needed it given how amazing i still looks. I played a little because of that some weeks ago. Then I tried Guild Wars 2 for a few hours, but as usual I quickly dropped that massive disappointment in favor of the first one, because there's never a wrong time to go back to playing one of the best games ever! And I'm glad I did. I didn't stop after finishing Factions either, there's a huge amount of stuff in this game I've never done -- lots of quests, the three Guild Wars Beyond mini-campaigns they released between 2010 and 2013 that I never have done much of, whole explorable areas I'd never been to, and more... and it's still an incredibly, incredibly fun game, one of the best ever.
(Despite not expecting to like it, I preordered GW2 and bought it soon after release. But where I know have over 1100 hours played in the first GW, prerelease beta time estimates included, with GW2 my total playtime is... probably about 20 hours. It's an amazingly beautiful game with flawed gameplay that totally fails to appeal to fans of the original.)
PC
--
Guild Wars: Nightfall - Yes, I finally, at last, beat the Guild Wars campaign I had never finished before! Nightfall is the third Guild Wars campaign, and released in late 2006. I bought this game digitally day one, since they gave you some ingame reward for doing so (I forget what it was, offhand). But by this point I guess I was starting to get burned out on GW, since I had spent so many hundreds of hours playing the game from 2004 to 2006, and after buying this stopped playing not too far in. I don't know, as great as this game is somehow I just didn't like it as much as Prophecies or Factions, and I'd still stick with saying that it's my least favorite of the four main campaigns. Nightfall is set in an Africa-inspired part of the world, and the idea of a fantasy RPG with an African setting is a great one and it is executed fairly well here, or at least as okay as the East Asian setting from Factions is... so it's a mishmash of things tossed in together, but at least they tried. That isn't the issue. Nor is the length or challenge; given the number of years involved I have no idea how long Nightfall took me, but even with the extended playtime, and with how I'd play it in bits here and there over the years instead of all at once as I did with the previous campaigns (Prophecies and Factions) in '04-'06, Nightfall felt long and pretty difficult. I believe it's longer than the maybe-too-short Factions (which took me 60 hours at most...), but shorter in hours than Prophecies, which is a solid hundred-hour campaign. There are some pretty hard missions in this game even in Normal difficulty, though. The Realm of Torment particularly had me stuck for a long, long time; it's a tough realm full of hard missions and constant punishment from negative status effects. It was frustrating at the time, but in retrospect it works, as it all comes together to a pretty interesting and unique chapter of Guild Wars. For the most part I can't really point to any specific things Nightfall does "wrong" that explain why it's my least favorite chapter, but it's also great so that kind of makes sense; Guild Wars IS in my top 10 best PC games ever list for a reason, after all! It's an incredible game.
I am also sure that had I played Nightfall through in 2006-2007 I'd have liked it a bit more, because with more humans around to party with things would be easier. However, that brings me to the one concrete issue I have with Nightfall. I'll need to back up, though. So, before Nightfall, there were two kinds of characters in active parties: human players, or Henchmen allies. Henchmen, or henchies as they were often called, are AI-controlled allies who use preset skill sets to fill out your party. This is necessary since Guild Wars is an extremely grouping-focused game which really requires a party to function in unless you are VERY good. However, henchmen have limitations, as they'd just follow you around pretty much; you had very limited control over them. With Nightfall, developer ArenaNet changed things. Henchmen still exist, but a new category of AI ally was added, Heroes. Heroes are characters you unlock who you can then add to your party. These differ from Henchmen since you can customize their skill bars yourself, filling out their skillsets from anything you have unlocked on your character or account. This is pretty great. Additionally, more control over AI movement was added, as you can set flags which tell your AI party members to move to specific points on the map. With Heroes you can even divide your AI allies into multiple groups each with their own separate flags, which is a degree of control impossible with Henchmen.
The result is that the Heroes system made Guild Wars a much more soloable game. Where previously people would often want to get in all-random-player groups for missions or quests or such, with Heroes people usually would just do them on their own. Playing missions or quests in random groups was something I loved about GW, since it allowed player grouping without me needing to go out there and join some higher-end guild that I never had any interest in being in, and after Nightfall's release that element of the game started to go away. This has always been a core part of why I dislike Nightfall.
However, of course, player counts are going to go down over time, and the Heroes system is important in that respect because once not enough people were playing any one campaign to always be able to rely on other humans being there to attempt something with, saying "just deal with it and try to beat that hard mission with just Henchmen" would get real frustrating real fast. Heroes are a great solution here and make playing the game today a lot better. I still do miss hte old, often random-human-group-focused Guild Wars, though... ah well, at least I was there for it.
But anyway, I was thinking about Guild Wars again recently, probably partially because of a patch they released a few months ago that added an infinite-draw-distance option that improves GW's graphics even more, as if the game even needed it given how amazing i still looks. I played a little because of that some weeks ago. Then I tried Guild Wars 2 for a few hours, but as usual I quickly dropped that massive disappointment in favor of the first one, because there's never a wrong time to go back to playing one of the best games ever! And I'm glad I did. I didn't stop after finishing Factions either, there's a huge amount of stuff in this game I've never done -- lots of quests, the three Guild Wars Beyond mini-campaigns they released between 2010 and 2013 that I never have done much of, whole explorable areas I'd never been to, and more... and it's still an incredibly, incredibly fun game, one of the best ever.
(Despite not expecting to like it, I preordered GW2 and bought it soon after release. But where I know have over 1100 hours played in the first GW, prerelease beta time estimates included, with GW2 my total playtime is... probably about 20 hours. It's an amazingly beautiful game with flawed gameplay that totally fails to appeal to fans of the original.)
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