Articles Reviews Guild Wars: Eye of the North Review | Guild Wars: Eye of the North Review |
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Guild Wars: Eye of the North, the first expansion released by ArenaNet for the popular Guild Wars franchise (Release date – 31st August 2007), will see explorable areas of the original campaign expanded. Players will be able to explore new areas of the Far Shiverpeaks, Charr Homelands, Tarnished Coast and never seen before multi-level dungeons. Guild Wars: Eye of the North will be the last release in what is now known as the Guild Wars 1 franchise. Guild Wars: Eye of the North is seen as a stepping stone between the first franchise and Guild Wars 2 with the introduction of a Hall of Monuments. The Hall of Monuments will allow players to carry over their achievements in to the next game. There is no official release date for Guild Wars 2; however, most people expect to see some kind of release by late 2008.  The weekend of the 24th August 2007 saw Guild Wars player’s young and old exploring new territories in the Far Shiverpeaks. Their mission is to try and save Tyria from the Destroyers. The much anticipated Guild Wars Eye of the North Sneak Peak Weekend was finally here and players were taking full advantage. As one has come to expect from ArenaNet the graphics were visually stunning and Jeremy Soule once again did an awesome job with the musical score. You can view screenshots of this weekend’s event in our Guild Wars: Eye of the North Gallery. I’ve been playing Guild Wars for a little bit over 2 years now and without a doubt my favourite chapter of all the currently available games is still the original, now known as Guild Wars: Prophecies. I think it’s because of this that I am so excited about the release of GW: EN. Guild Wars: Prophecies is arguably the majority of PvE (player vs. environment) players favourite. It was the first game released in the Guild Wars franchise and the one that we all fell in love with. GW: EN has a familiar look and feel to it and hearing the original music again as you put sword and spell to your enemies brought back some fond memories. This weekend saw us being introduced to 6 of the 10 new heroes. We got to meet Gwen, Jora, Kahmu, Ogden Stonehealer, Vekk and Xandra. You can see a more detailed description of each of the heroes on our Meet the Heroes page. There were also a couple of very subtle changes made to the game which in my opinion adds volumes to the games character. Henchmen now interact with each other in towns by using emotes. They also no longer stand together and can be seen in groups throughout the town or outpost interacting with each other. One of my favourite changes has got to be the fact that when you now interact with NPC’s they verbally acknowledge you. Their dialogue is limited but that’s not important. You now get the feeling that the NPC is actually engaging with you instead of just standing there.  All in all I think great fun was had by the majority of players and the preview event seemed to be a success. Problems were experienced, especially by players making use of integrated graphics drivers but that’s why preview events take place. I’m sure ArenaNet will be hard at work this week to iron out all the bugs picked up before the scheduled release this Friday, 31st August 2007. The only major disappointment that I experienced over the weekend was the amount of downloading that had to be done. ArenaNet are well known for their advanced streaming technology and the minimal impact it has on players and it was incredibly frustrating to play through the weekend at times. What they should have done was to start streaming content to players who had unlocked the preview weekend a couple of weeks before the event started to alleviate not only server load but players frustrations as well. Pros:
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