Nightfall and no CG intro??

With only days left to nightfall going live it leaves me wondering if there will ever be a CG intro. The one from factions and prophesies blew me away. I expected something similar. Few people from the forums in the past have stated that it will release more closer to the release date, but no word so close to the release date. Maybe im missing something, but i just want to know if there will ever be a CG intro.

I'd say there probablly will be; but we likely wont see it til we pop in our Nightfall discs.

This question has been on my mind as well since the WPE. It would be the first in the series not to have a CG intro before release if it happens and would be rather funny/against release tradition.

But if the devs are still working on the last minutes refinements to server side patches/debugging/server upgrading, then i would rather have them do that than to spend all their time into making a great CG intro and a poor game ie Factions.

My guess would be that the CG is probably WIP and should be released anytime soon or the week just before its release.

yeah, the Factions CG was released a week beforehand, so we shouldn't be worrying at this time anyway.

I cant wait to see what the CG will look like (if there is one). Theres a good chance we will get to see Abbadon in action. Or maybe they will show a clip from the Battle of Jahai, just to lay a little back story about Elona.

It might not be the case. Arenanet could just be giving the CG development to third party company. Which i think would be a better idea because then they dont have to spend their time creating the CG.

As in they pay $XXXXX.XX of dollars to get the CG done. It would be more efficient but i have lost some hope as to having a CG in this one....

I think we may see it after the release party next week. Thats just me though.

Ever the pessimist, I'll say the same thing I've been saying:

We couldn't test all class/gender combinations during the PvP preview.
We didn't get an "end of beta" event during the PvE preview.
We haven't seen a CG animation.

The reasoning for at least one of these - lack of an "end of beta" event - has been that the Nightfall team is too busy. My understanding is this: ANet has underestimated the production time necessary to turn out a good game because it based the new, "shortened production time" model on the experience of Factions design - which had probably been in development longer than we've assumed because we're told Factions release was delayed because of Sorrow's Furnace and the Factions team's need to take time off to work on that. The fact that they were nearly ready implies they had been working for a while, which was why we saw Kuunavang killing players at the end of Factions "open beta" weekend.

Factions, however, did the job of being short enough to let people blow through it and get them hungry for the new chapter a bit too well. When Nightfall release was announced three months into Factions, people welcomed it, because they were mostly done/bored/not engaged with Factions. Creating a longer and more engaging chapter than Factions would take more time, and as time isn't something the Nightfall developer team has (what with the new-and-improved six-month release schedule), more work must be done in the time they do have. As a result, "necessities" take precedence over "features," and things like "end of beta" event and CG graphic get pushed back to make room for essential parts of the game.

Would you really prefer a pretty CG movie and missing elite skills the way Factions came out?

"Would you really prefer a pretty CG movie and missing elite skills the way Factions came out?"

I'd be surprised if ArenaNet even touched the CG cinematics, it's usually better to outsource those sorts of things.

I read somewhere that the renderings are made by NCSoft Korea and not ANet.

Yeah I highly doubt that Anet itself makes the CG animations. There are companies out there where thats all they do for game companies.

Stop assuming everone hates Factions. Please. This is getting really, really anoying.

Oh, and to the OP, there is still a little more than two weeks untill Nightfalls release. If there is still no CG a few days before Nightfalls release, then I'd be concerned about this.

Concerning the CG, an interview in Joystick (French Magazine) had as answer that ANet had focused on in game cinematics and story supporting movies a lot more and as such wouldn't be releasing one for Nightfall.

CG movies are nice and all... but if ANet had the choice id rather have them spend the resources on the game instead.

CG movies blew me away as well, it reminded me of how in Diablo2 I kept playing for the first time because I wanted to see what the next movie would show..then I got addicted to the rare item finding =p...I'd rather have CG cutscenes in the gw ones today but guessing it could be bad computer resourcewise etc....CG Rurik....hm, no thanks! :P

Seconded. It's going from "meh, I can ignore him" to genuinely angering.

The Wii is an overclocked Gamecube is the other one grinding my gears at the moment.

To be honest, I don't think I even noticed the CG intro for the other two. Were they any good?

As others have mentioned, there's no way the CG would be made by the same team that's currently in Nightfall crunch mode. That sort of thing is pretty much invariably outsourced via the publisher unless you're a developer who specialises in that sort of thing and has an in-house group that looks after it (e.g. Square, Blizzard).

I wish game companies would spend more time and money writing games, and less time making CG trailers that people only look at once or twice. I'm buying a game, not a movie.

Ummm... Shouldn't Nightfall's code have long gone gold by now, making that whole "the devs are working to get the game shipped" argument moot? It takes time to press disks and ship them to stores. Or is everyone just (probably rightly) figuring that what's on the currently-being-pressed disks is little more than beta (or, if Factions is any indicator, alpha) code and the devs are desperately working to get things fixed before it goes live?

if you think GW is buggy
try playing other online games like Everquest or WOW

those games are much buggier (and have been since release)

If it's anything like the previous one, it will have another chick flying trough the air with juggling bobies

are you complaining???

this time atleast it would be the 6th god vs a slow motion chick in the air with a scythe....

Normally you'd be correct - primarily because it takes two months to distribute the game by sea. But in this case we know from past experience that they'll be streaming a lot of suplementary content to our clients in the next couple of weeks.

So yeah, the disks have obviously been pressed and packed, but they're almost certainly working on version 2.0 as we speak.
Whether you liked the content or not, Factions' launch was one of the least problematic in the history of online gaming. They were missing... What, a couple of bosses to cap some skills from? The faction rewards for ABs and Fort Aspenwood were too low, and the repeatables too easy to farm? The double damage from bosses hadn't been implemented and so Boreas Seabed was too easy?

...Seriously, as launches go that's a drop in the Anarchy Online bucket.

Each chapter gets 1 year in development. Factions was in development for 1 year, and Nightfall will have been in development for 1 year when it comes out.

As others have said, read the credits on the Guild Wars web site, the cg trailer are outsourced. It would be a shame if there wasn't a cg trailer this time, as the past two have been good (apart from the over used slow mo bits).

I'm referring to the release schedule. The switch from the original 1 year release schedule to the current 6 month one implies that chapters now take less time to produce. Even so, we know that Guild Wars (Prophecies if you must) was in development for much longer than a year, and we've been told that Factions was nearly ready for release 6 months after Prophecies, but got pushed back due to Sorrow's Furnace. This would imply that Factions development started before Prophecies release, and therefore Factions was in development for longer than a year.

^ 1 year release wasn't the "original" release schedule; they had intended to release a campaign every six months before Prophecies even went live. Understandably; Factions couldn't meet the six month schedule being the first expansion. The reason Prophecies took like five years in developement was cause they had to write the entire game engine from the ground up; the expansions take significantly less time as they just add new content for the existing game engine and maybe a few minor upgrades to the engine itself.

i say they hire them people from Blizzard that made the Diablo 2 CG, and then work on the game themselves.....then we get a pwnage CG and a pwnage game into one fantastic combo!