Customer Reviews for Guild Wars Nightfall

Guild Wars Nightfall
by NCsoft

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Video Game Reviews of Guild Wars Nightfall

Customer Review: Free online game
Summary: 5 Stars

Great game. great story lines. and best of all.... free online gaming. Play when u want how much u want and pay notthing at the end of the month.

Customer Review: The key to success in Guild Wars...
Summary: 5 Stars

...is to find a good guild (association of players, of which there are thousands in the GW universe) and stick with it. I had the good fortune to be invited by a longtime friend to one of the best guilds around so that I was in a guild from the get-go when I started playing the game. The biggest benefits of a guild are that you always can find a "live" person to play with and can get the benefit of the wisdom of experienced players.

As to Nightfall itself, this is easily the best of the three full-length GW campaigns (I have all three campaigns plus the "Eye of the North" expansion, a combination which I recommend to all potential players as it opens up the entire universe of Tyria to you). In contrast to the somewhat slower-starting Prophecies (which requires all new characters to start off in a tutorial "Presearing" environment) and Factions, you get into the action at once in NF. You create your character as one of eight professions - warrior, monk, necromancer, ranger, mesmer, elementalist, paragon or dervish (the last two exclusive to NF) and start adventuring immediately; in fact, the first of the game's key quests, or missions, takes place right after you've created your character. The adventures on the "starter" island of Istan are fun and challenging, but easy enough that you can get into the game system with a minimal learning curve, and you can quite easily advance to the game's maximum character level of 20 before you proceed to the mainland of Elona, where things REALLY start to get challenging...

The big buzz in Nightfall concerned the "hero" system of customizable NPC's (non-player characters), which is also continued in Eye of the North. You get one hero NPC right away, a warrior, and others of various professions join your team as the game proceeds; in fact, adding most of these characters marks important wayposts in the progress of the game's storyline. The beauty of the hero system is that you get to set up your hero NPC's the exact way you want them, and you can change their skill "builds" and weaponry to fit any situation they'll encounter, just as you change your own skills and equipment.

I mentioned skill "builds". The core of Guild Wars' game system is in the hundreds and hundreds of skills that are made available to players; the key to building a successful character is to learn how to mix and match your skills according to the type of mission/quest you'll be undertaking. Some skills, called "elite" skills, confer superior benefits over those granted by regular skills; however, you can only obtain them by killing enemy "bosses" (or, if you're lucky, by getting ahold of a loot item called a "tome" which gives your current character a skill that has already been unlocked for other characters on your account.)

While the storyline of Guild Wars' three campaigns and expansion is, of course, linear, you get a great deal of freedom as to exactly how you play out the story. This is particularly true in Nightfall, where completing the game requires that you win at least 17 of 20 missions, but gives you a choice as to which of 3 different pairs of missions you wish to complete. (Again, the hero system comes into play here, as selecting certain heroes directly affects which missions you can pick - but even if you don't select a particular hero, you can still do the mission requiring that NPC with a player who does have that hero.)

Guild Wars is a perfect MMORPG for a player on a budget because it has no monthly fee; just buy the game, open an account when you install, and off you go. Because the quests, missions and "explorable areas" are especially "instanced" for you and your party, you never have to compete with other live players roaming through the same areas - just the enemies. (And some of those enemies are SO nasty that you might just end up wishing you were fighting a live player instead... :) And you can! GW has an extensive PvP (player vs. player) system in addition to its core PvE (player vs. environment) system.)

Before I picked up Guild Wars, I never thought I'd be seriously captivated by a MMORPG, much less one set in a fantasy environment. Ten months later, I have GW running on my other computer even as I type this review out, and as soon as I submit this, off I go again to build my new NF character (a ranger)...

Customer Review: Nightfall
Summary: 4 Stars

The game was a gift for my son. He has played the game and was very satisfied with the gameplay.

Customer Review: If you're going to play Guild Wars, start here
Summary: 4 Stars

Guild Wars surprised me. For a free MMORPG, it has a surprisingly deep story. There's a fairly large, vaguely Egypt/Middle East-inspired world, a selection of eight character classes to pick from, dozens of quests, and an extra-difficult end-game mission or two. There are secrets to find, NPC heroes to recruit and equip, and missions with some interesting goals and mechanics. The difficulty level is fairly challenging, and it ramps up pretty well as your character levels up -- in the main story, it never feels overwhelming (partly because of those NPC heroes, who first appeared in the Nightfall campaign). There's little or no need to "grind" to level up.

Oh, and there's no monthly fee to play.

Nightfall is a solid middle ground between the first campaign, Prophecies, which provides a lengthy, slow introduction to the game, and the second, Factions, which provides a quick but more-difficult route to the level cap of 20.

It's not without issues -- some areas are a bit repetitive, there's a place or two where you might not be sure where to go next, and pathfinding can be sketchy at times. But the solid story and hours of gameplay make up for the minor inconveniences.