Adam Wolf

IGN

Guild Wars: Nightfall Hands-On
NPC Heroes, new classes, and ridable wurms.
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US, October 18, 2006 - The third campaign in the ever-growing Guild Wars universe, Nightfall is set to deliver plenty of new content for spell-flinging, scythe-slashing gamers. New to this release are NPC Heroes, two professions, a bunch of missions and cinematics that follow an all new story, PvP Hero Battles, and around 350 new skills. On top of that, players can expect plenty of tweaks to item customization, more enemy types, and even a rideable sand wurm (called a junundu) with its own unique skill set. We recently got a chance to head over to developer Arenanet's offices to see how things were going and get some hands-on time with a near final build.


Though in both Prophecies (the original Guild Wars, also known as campaign one) and Factions players could enlist the help of henchman NPCs, they never distinguished themselves with any character or backstory. In Nightfall 14 Heroes can be recruited, all with their own backgrounds and motivations that actually play a part in the game's overarching narrative. As players journey across the desert lands of Elona they'll be forced to make choices as to who they want to bring along. In other words, at specific story points players will have to make a decision between recruiting one Hero or the other. To offer solace to obsessive collectors out there, we were told all 14 can eventually be recruited once the narrative has been completed.


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From your hero pool only three can be in your party at any time. This was implemented for two reasons. First, to encourage players to seek out other humans online to fill out the rest of their available party slots. Second, because more than three heroes in a party can get confusing to control. Hero customization is a much more involving process than manipulating the henchmen of previous Guild Wars games. In Nightfall players can give their Heroes new weapons, assign all their attribute points, customize their skill hotkeys, switch around their secondary professions, and drop runes onto their armor pieces for added statistical benefits. Heroes can also be told where to go on the field of battle by selecting them and issuing move orders to the lot of them or individually. Which skills a Hero employs during battle can also be customized. Clicking on their name in the right hand party bar opens up a menu where skills on their hotbar can be instantly triggered, behavioral patterns like attack, guard, or avoid combat can be assigned, and skills can be deactivated should the situation demand it. One aspect of Heroes that can't be customized is their armor, which auto-levels with them.

When a Hero joins your party they become available in PvP, and you'll want to use them for the new Hero Battle mode. Arenanet felt straight up one on one PvP fights would be too unbalanced, so they implemented a mode where two players square off against each other with three of their heroes in tow. Properly assigning skills to the eight slot hotbar becomes even more crucial here, since instead of just worrying about your own you have to be concerned with 24 others. Add in the ability to control Hero movement during a fight and being able to customize their aggression levels, and things just got a lot more complicated.


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Joining the much more robust NPC allies are two new professions, the Dervish and the Paragon. With a name like Paragon you may get the impression this profession is some kind of all-powerful ultra-killer. Not so. The Paragon's main benefit is party buffs, meaning it's a support class. From playing around with the skills a bit, Paragons seemed weaker than others with their attacks. Mostly, that's because it's how they were designed. They can toss spears at foes with all sorts of skills that add in bleeding and deep wounds on opponents that can thereafter be exploited by complementary follow up strikes. Paragons will have a number of shout skills that buff up nearby party members, as well as echoes that buff single allies. On top of that they'll have chants, which are a new kind of buff that lay dormant on characters until special circumstances activate them. When certain chants called refrains are active on a character, it functions to automatically refresh specific beneficial buffs once their timer runs out.

The Dervish profession is geared more toward close up combat, clearly evident from the giant scythe they wield. Capable of smacking multiple targets with one swing, Dervishes can augment their damage with a number of self-enchantments. Even more interesting are some of this profession's high level abilities. Eventually Dervishes can obtain elite forms that grant brief periods of great power along with aesthetic alterations to underscore the transformation. The Avatar of Balthazar form, for instance, nets you 40 armor, a 33 percent speed boost, and your strikes dish out holy damage on top of your attacks. By engaging the Avatar of Grenth players can with an attack skill use deal additional cold damage and remove one enchantment from a target.

When starting up a game of Nightfall with any of the game's classes, you'll find yourself playing the role of a Sunspear, one of Elona's protectors. Your character just so happens to be chosen for a leadership track. To gain Sunspear rank, players can talk to Sunspear scouts at any resurrection point. Doing so will give you bonus experience and promotion points for taking out specific creature types. As your Sunspear rank increases you'll receive Hero skill points that can be doled out regardless of class. While murdering monsters and completing quests, you'll also want to keep an eye out for recruitable NPCs. Once found these special characters can be sent back to a private quarters where you can put their skills to use. For instance, perhaps the only way to get a certain weapon is to recruit the right smith hidden out in the fields.


When we finally got to sit down and play the game, we smashed around a few lumbering mesas (giant stone enemies) with the new sand wurms in a mission called Gates of Desolation. These things can only be used in specific areas of the desert, but are extremely powerful. Their skills include a heal, a projectile attack, and something called a wurm thump whereby the creature lifts itself out of the sand and drops on foes for big damage. Players don't actually ride on the back of these things, but in their mouths. As a result, your own character model isn't visible while controlling a wurm. Instead, you just see the things head bobbing around in the sand and it speeds along. We also discovered wurms in Nighfall can dance. It's not much, just a sleepy shifting of weight from side to side, but it's there.


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In an effort to increase the game's user-friendliness, Arenanet is including the ability to save your skill loadouts. This way you can store a number of hotkey configurations for easy access later on, instead of having to completely switch everything in and out when you want to change things up. An equipment builder for PvP will allow further customization, and those settings can be saved for later use as well. What kind of benefits powerful items bestow on players can now be fiddled around with to a greater degree. Item inscription allows for highly customizable damage effects on weapons and armor. From random mobs will drop something called armor insignias which can be applied to items for even more bonuses. Arenanet also mentioned they were decoupling stats from armor's visual appearance, which they believe should please hardcore fans.


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Since many believed (including members of the development team) that Factions' leveling rate was much too high, Nightfall will offer players smaller chunks of xp. It'll still be more than in Prophecies, however. In case anyone was wondering, Arenanet has no plans to bump the number of hotkey slots over eight. It should also be noted that when the question was raised as to whether the appearance of rideable wurms in Nightfall signified some kind of mounts in a future campaign, the members of the development team we were talking to chuckled, smiled, and said they couldn't talk about it. Nightfall hits shelves in about a week, so look for our review soon.