Articles Reviews Nightfall World Preview Event in Review | Nightfall World Preview Event in Review |
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The weekend of 23 September 2006 will always be remembered as the day millions of people from around the world got to take part in what is arguably going to be the greatest release of a Guild Wars Chapter yet. That's right boys and girls I'm talking about Guild Wars Nightfall.  I've been playing Guild Wars for the past 13 months and consider myself an above average player. My preferred area of play is in the PvE (Player vs. Environment) world. I've started to brave the world of PvP (Player vs. Player) over the last couple of months but my favourite will always be PvE. This I believe is why I am looking so forward to the release of Guild Wars Nightfall. Nightfall will be a PvE-centric chapter, much like Guild Wars Prophecies, the first chapter released in the series. This doesn't mean that it won't have its PvP aspects included as well, but I feel it will appeal more to the PvE players out there. Nightfall is confirmed to have 20 main co-op missions as well as 250 side quests which should keep us busy for many, many hours. Nightfall will also introduce us to two new professions, the Dervish and the Paragon. Dervishes are scythe wielding holy warriors with the ability to temporarily change form to that of their Gods. You can find more information about these holy warriors on our Dervish profession page. Paragons are spear wielding warriors tasked with the responsibility of being the guardian angels of the Elonian people. You can find more information about these guardians of the Elonian people on our Paragon profession page. This weekend was my first chance to experience a "beta" weekend in its entirety and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I must admit that I was more than a little upset with the way the weekend ended, but after some serious thought I can see where ArenaNet are coming from and fully understand their decision. Anyway, enough ramblings, let's get back to the World Preview Event Weekend. We got to explore a province of Elona called Istan and meet some of the main characters as well as learn a little bit more about the storyline for this chapter. Much to my surprise we also got the opportunity to test out the new hero system which I think is going to be an awesome new feature of the game. How the hero system is going to work still needs to be clarified with lots of confusion about whether or not we will be able to use our heroes in the other chapters, but I'm sure as the release date approaches more information will be made available to us. Heroes? I've heard of henchman but what are heroes?  As this was a beta weekend a lot of information still has to be confirmed but what I did manage to figure out over the weekend can be found on our forums, here. With our heroes in tow we set off on our journey around Istan. Without giving away too much there were a couple of novel new features that we had yet to see in a Guild Wars release. First was the way we now gained our extra 30 attribute points. In previous chapters we had to complete quests in order to gain those essential extra points but with Nightfall they are now linked to a title. As we traveled through the continent of Istan we came across Sunspear Scouts who appeared to almost be guarding the resurrect shrines. Upon closer inspection and after talking to one of these Sunspears we discovered that they offer you promotion points towards your Sunspear Title. The scout will tell you what type of creature he wants you to kill and for 30 minutes after speaking to him you will receive 1 promotion point and double experience from every creature of that type that you kill. You can also speak to multiple Sunspear Scouts to receive orders to kill a multitude of creatures in a given area. It's a novel idea to finally get rewarded with more than just experience for slaying everything one comes across. We also saw the introduction of non linear quests. Decisions that you make in these quests affect the reward you might receive and it's great to no longer have a set path for certain missions and quests. Dancing Heroes! It might not seem like much but to have your heroes play the drums while you dance between battles is an interaction that we might overlook but I found very engaging. One of my favourite things to come out of this weekend was the fact that the cut scenes now included moving lips. The cut scenes looked cheap in the past and I feel that this adds that little bit extra that they have always been missing. The improved voice talents also go a long way to giving them more of a professional feel. You can view a series of screenshots that I took over the weekend in the Nightfall World Preview Event album in our gallery. Until next time, see you on the battlefields. If you enjoyed this article please share it!           |
