And if all of this were not enough, Guild Wars, being a skills based system, allows you to take on secondary professions and really get creative with your skills. Assassin and Dervish, Dervish and Monk, Warrior and Paragon, Elementalist and Necromancer, the options are virtually unlimited.
To further facilitate your character building and customizing, Guild Wars allows the player to redistribute attribute points without penalty and to save the current character configuration as a template in case you want to rapidly reconfigure or merely revisit one of your creations.
The big news in Nightfall, and the premise for the “Never fight alone” slogan is the Hero system. Players can now recruit other players, henchmen and now heroic figures from the mythos into your party. Each hero is branded against a profession much the same as a henchmen or player character, however, just like player characters and unlike henchmen, heroes can and will stay with the player indefinitely and progress as the player progresses. Heroes gain levels and attribute points just as a player character would. In keeping with that theme, a hero can also take on a secondary profession and have their skills and attributes fully customized. Aside from the henchmen and heroes, a player will occasionally be tasked with commanding a number of supplement characters to achieve a specific goal.
Commanding your lackeys is a very straight forward and ultimately disappointing process. You commands really consist of setting a waypoint for either an individual hero or your group as a whole (excluding your). This works well for setting up a defense or creating a flank attack, but I was unable to affect for complex tasks like instructing a hero to pick up a stone tablet and carry it to a pedestal.
There are a couple of oddities when dealing with heroes. Your party of immediate members (heroes and henchmen) cannot exceed four, including yourself. Through completion of quests you will be able to recruit additional heroes to your cause and replace henchmen which are inferior in almost every way. Some quests will require that a particular hero be part of your party, which obviously changes the party dynamic, but these mandatory heroes can usually be replaced at the completion of said mission. Equipment is another matter. Without your intervention, your heroes will automatically improve their armor. This improvement seems to be commensurate with currently available items from vendors. This does not apply to weapons or shields. If you do not replace their base armaments, they will not do so either. You may have a level ten warrior with the equivalent of a starter weapon. Hero equipment does benefit from runes and inscriptions just as a player character does.
And just in case you may have thought I had lost all objectivity we now come to the whining portion of this dissertation. Two particular facets of Guild Wars: Nightfall left me cold. The first was the quest system, or more specifically, the quests themselves. No matter which profession I choose or how many characters I started, the quests were always the same. They start in the same place, have the same payout and end exactly the same. For this article six characters were created including, of course, both a Paragon and a Dervish with each character played through level eight excepting the later two which were played through level ten. In each instance, absolutely nothing changed with regards to quests and objectives. By the time the sixth character reached level eight I was quite bored.
Additionally, the intelligence of my opponents left a lot to be desired. Each individual foe was actually pretty intelligent, casting hexes and enchantments appropriately and making full use of their special abilities and the ability to flee or call for re-enforcements. However, when it came to group attacks, coordinated maneuvers and pack hunting it appears that the game follow the old axiom of “pile on!” We see it all too often that a game will resort to simply adding larger and larger numbers of foes rather than make a set of foes more coordinated. There were many instances, especially among humanoids, where a support type would run almost all the way into melee and hex the party or a party member and then try to run away, only to run right up to the artillery and casting members. As soon as that support unit comes near combat I target them, of course, and their flight now drags the entire enemy unit into melee. Fight and flight might be good tactics for a lone unit but makes no sense when grouped. The real downside to this is that combat often degenerates into a frenzied conflagration of flailing limbs and weapons as the units just pile on.
Bearing the final two comments in mind, Guild Wars: Nightfall is a worthwhile download for any role-playing fan and an absolute must have for Guild Wars fans.
