I know that its nearly pointless to, 1 month before release, let them know what would make me buy their sequel, since they would have little time to implement what I was going to suggest, but its not the first time I make these suggestions, and its more of a rant anyway. I'd like to start by saying, October will be an awesome month for the hardcore rpg player. Several awesome games coming out, 2 of which will take most of my attention, being Dark Messiah MM and NWN 2. With that said, GW simply needed to innovate gameplay enough so that people like me would have enough reasons to buy Nightfall and not those games I mentioned, but it doesnt seem to be the case. Alex Weekes once said "we will improve gameplay rather than thinkering with arbitrary numbers" regarding factions and level cap, and factions still was what it was :S.
What im trying to say is, anet is so stuck with its core basic mechanics that it cannot see beyond them to improve the game. They could add 20 different classes, yet they will never add the char customization that made me spend about 5 hours modelling my character's face in Oblivion to look exactly like me. The majority of players will continue to make female chars only, and anet will simply never question as to why and how to improve the looks and animations of male chars so people will start picking them. They may add over 150 new skills with every expansion yet they will never go back and realize "hey, there are tons of skills nobody ever uses under any circumstances,why is that". Ill tell u why. Because we just have 7 skills and 1 res, or 8 skills if you're either brave or questing with henchmen, those skills will never be good enough to find their way into a bar no matter how much they tweak em. And even if they do realize that, they wont ever give us more skills slots cus "it will ruin pvp" They will also never put in prestige classes for the very same reason. Or allow for more atr points which would allow for more diversified builds.
So basically, they may make henches smarter, neat looking numbers pop up when u hit things, add 2 classes each expansion, but they wont ever make a game with a solid replay value.
One thing that by itself would make me buy nightfall would be if you could choose your char's appearance in terms of body. If i wasnt forced to make a warrior that looks like a gym rat tree stump on steroids, or a fat balding monk, I might have given those classes more attention. I wanna make chars that look like me, and those do not.
The fact that expansion classes are not supported on the following expansion only makes matters worse.
Id add in some pics to some graphical glitches that show when a ranger shoots the bow, or how cool it would be if warriors could look like luxon merchants, etc etc but ive done all of that on the past and it proved fruitless (even tho when a female armor glitch was posted it was fixed right away, curious).
Anyway, to sum it all up, I wont be buying nightfall because its not a huge improvement over the previous games IMO because anet doesnt know how to go beyond what they have now, or does not want to, or doesnt have the resources to, or all of the above. Id pay 50 bucks if they didnt add a single new map but did the changes i mentioned, but i doubt it will happen,so yeah...
k
