Gamespot Nightfall review: 8,2. Lower than Factions. WTH?:/

A review is an opinion of a person's judgement on a game's quality. It's his or her opinion. In the end the only opinion that matters is your own and my opinion is that nightfall is awesome.

That being said, I do believe that Nightfall is better than Factions though but I still have sentimental feeling towards Prophecies and still think it is the best one in the series.

I think NF actually delivers TOO MUCH new content. I wont get it all done in six months. Feeling..tired..already...hands...shaking...

What a load of stuff to do for so little money.

I agree with the scores so far. Gamespy gave it 4 stars (out of 5) and IGN gave it 8.4. That sounds about right for a game that simply improves on it's previous releases and gives it's players more of what they like. However, it fails to address some of it's obvious shortcomings, as others have pointed out. Had they fixed those issues, I'd probably give it a 9 or close to.

Comparing Guild Wars to World of Warcraft is silly. Totally different games, even if they both share the words "online" and "RPG". Also, currently being in the closed beta for The Burning Crusade, I'll be incredibly surprised if it manages to score higher than 8. Actually, on a second thought, I won't. Since the game is incredibly over-hyped and popular, it's natural that it'll score above 9, but that doesn't mean it deserves it.

Elewyn.

Honestly speaking, I kinda agree with GameSpot's review. GWNF is by far the most captivating chapter I've played; I've also enjoyed Prophecies (but to a lesser degree for Factions). But then again, GWNF really is the same old thing, the only new addition is a subsystem, the hero system plus new items, interfaces, etc. When Factions was released, ANet introduced a new multiplayer experience created by the ongoing opposition between Kurzicks and Luxons; players can get together to work for whichever alliance they have chosen. While I'm for the new hero system, I must admit that it hasn't done much, multiplayer-wise. I wouldn't go so far to say that it isn't a good introduction though; it's always better to give players an option rather than to force them to play in a certain way; we can still go for PUGs if we wanted to, the option is still open. All I can say is that current trend of players going solo, goes to show that most would rather play solo if they don't have alot of time to start LFG or really just wanna go straight and get to the objectives. I do a mix, it's always more fun to play with PUGs but bad timings do force me to go with my heros to at least get something done (as a last resort).

I think WoW is a really good game, at least, a game that gives alot of breathing space other than just fighting mobs all the time; e.g. you could always focus on professions if you got bored of killing. However, I've chosen to go with GW becos of the absence of monthly fees, as well as more intense action which suits my taste. IMO, ANet should try to build a better baseline for GW and refrain from excessively releasing too much content, and I think this includes solving all the issues with LFG, trading, etc; to build a better foundation to encourage multiplayer gameplay instead of delivering new content as an emphasis. Of cos, there's alot of money at play here; ANet has chosen to market GW through the selling of expansions so it may not be entirely realistic for me to be looking forward to that. I think GW as a game that offers more and better things to do is better than being a game that has alot of new and frequent chapters. Honestly speaking, I'm pretty lost about the direction of GW, the gameplay is starting to get rusty. But I must admit (looking at how much GW hasn't offered), GW has alot of potential to become an even better game than WoW.

Suggested Improvements (abstract-level) for thought

More game improvements instead of weekend events
Don't mistake me, I like weekend events. But I'd rather ANet use those time to improve the game instead of providing such perks.

Quests/Missions
Making quests and missions more effeciently done with a human group while still doable by hencmen/hero strikes a good balance that may help to improve the situation with too many players going solo now.

PUG Score System (shouldn't be rank-based)
Most of us have prolly gone through alot frustration with PUGs. Admittedly, some groups are serious crap. I don't think having noobs in a group makes it a crappy group, rather, it's more of players not working with each other or the presence of one that just wants to spoil the fun. A PUG score system to help differentiate players that have successfully completed missions or quests (separate scores) while in a group made up by at least 50% human players. This could prolly act as a gauge as to how successful a player has done quests/missions in a group to raise PUG confidence. IMO, noobs don't get a team killed, it's players who refuse to work together.

'Real-life' Skill System
I'm sure this has been brought up before, jobs help to provide a sense of additional character development. These are just some examples that comes to mind: weaponsmithing, enchanting, material gathering.

'Real-life' Facilities for indulgence
An NPC stylist has been suggested. I think features like this add to the lifespan of GW. Perhaps as additional things like a gambling den, dance trainer, etc. I was thinking about an Inn where you can drink (to get yourself intoxicated with friends) and sleep (resting in an inn gives you a morale boost next time you step out of an outpost/town).

'Real-life' Job System
Take up a part time job to earn rewards at your own leisure. This could work like bounty, delivery, etc; except they provide more useful rewards such as gold or random items.

More interactivity
To be able to interact more with the world. To be able to sit on chairs in an inn, sheath/unsheathe weapons, walk, etc gives better immersion into the world. I must compliment the wurm riding thingy in GWNF, it felt so much better and refreshing to do something different for a change.

Citizenship and availability of different items in towns of different regions
This is to provide some affinity between a character and a certain region. It comes in 2 parts:
- First, a different region's town/outpost should have its own specialty item. For e.g. Kurzick region have amber chunk, Ascalon have Fur Square, Vabbi have the jewels. Any region will sell all types of rare materials but those that are not specialty items will come at a slightly higher price becos they are considered imports.
- Second, a character can obtain a citizenship of a certain region by paying a fee. Citizenship can be changed, however, each region should have a quota which once reached, will not allow additional submissions.

Random Events
Forgot to put this in. I've always remembered the Diablo II World Events. Events like this really help to add additional excitement to the game.

I know this kinda post is always easily flamed; of cos, you are free to do so. However, do take note that I have simply brainstormed some abstract-level ideas (not trying to be constrained by technical limitations) and as such, may be deemed as 'impossible' suggestions posed by GW's system. Lastly, I feel that GameSpot's review is more or less there (taking away my personal bias as I love GWNF) and have some basis.

I can't see why people would be so negative about what is essentially a fairly good score and review.

Being a vetern of reading GS I can say without a doubt that an 8 score from them means they didn't really play the game. Specially from Greg.

He hands out 8's when he just doesn't care. Plus he's a WoW fanboy.

I love this quote though "the underlying game hasn't changed much and is starting to show signs of aging. " then this one " it also seems to have updated their artificial intelligence to make them even more ruthless "

My guess is WoW: Buring Crusade gets a 9.2 when it ever comes out. Talk about an aging game...

Didn't see it listed but ... how about more storage space. Considering they will never get an auction house going at least give us room to store it.

One of the things that kind of kills me is that everyone is predicting the death of the pick up group, yet I really haven't seen that in practice. In reality, I actually see a great many people PUG'ing, and having heroes simply means that it's now feasible for two people to join forces when eight were required before. This has happened to me several times already.

As far as the overall reviews of Nightfall - you have to understand that no matter how good Nightfall is, it is fundamentally the same game as Prophecies and Factions. And frankly, I think it's own innovativeness sometimes hurts it. Much of what reviewers are looking for is large technological or gameplay leaps in a new, standalone game (because that's the traditional model), and these games don't really do that - it's only been six months, for crying out lout. And, it's not really an MMO - it's not really an expansion, but not an entirely new game either. And, to be perfectly honest, the lack of an auction/trade system and effective group matchmaking system really is a bit of a black eye for guild wars (those two would have easily bumped the reviews up another point IMO).

Don't get me wrong - I absolutely love NF, but I can see how it can get between 8/10 or 9/10 in reviews (7/10 is insanely low for this game IMO).

Thank You someone else has been around Gamespot long enough to know there is a biased opinion from Gamespot. I believe some of these people should at least be separated when they do their reviews like they do for counsel systems. I mean a WoW reviewer doing a GW review is like having a PS3 reviewer doing a Wii review. In the fact that these people will always compare the most popular game by majority by means of their own standard.

I doubt the reviewers have taken both of the new characters completely through the game.

I don't take reviews like this seriously because there can't be a definitive review for an MMORPG. Everyone's experiences will be different.

There is no harm to copy some features from WoW or any other MMORPG game that most of GW players would like to be implemented in game. I'm not talking about mounts, jump features, swimming feature and all this crap that doesn't do any good fro GW but i'm talking about auction houses, reconnect feature, meeting stone, link items stats in chat channel..etc.

All these stuff are good to implement, not me or you or any GW player will say "zomg Anet is ran out of new ideas and it started to copy from other games !!111". Anet doesn't have to start from scratch every expansion for new ideas. Anet can import used ideas and modificate it to match GW pattern and also for best interest of GW community.

Looking at Nightfall from another angle there are several issues that have been discussed and not acted upon that has continue to frustrate players, some more than others. This perhaps is one of the key reasons other than it being more of the same, why NF was rated so poorly even though it is an expansion with so much content to cheer about as well.

Game reviewers typically only have so much time to review. This means they probably:
A. got run through = boring
B. didn't do anything but missions, skipping all the dialog boxes, cinematics= boring
C. played only for a short time and were too noob to play so they gave it a bad rating

Ok Now I really don't see what you are bitching about. That rating is dead on. Nightfall is the same game, just repackaged. We are still missing, guild hall emblems, guild storage, auction house, etc.) And for a new person having never played Chapter 1 or 2, yes the heros will be confusing. I'm betting he didn't write this article for the fanboys or the "omgz new gws is out creamz" people. I'm betting he wrote it for people who have never played GW.

IMO, that rating is too high anyways. The game was unfinished when it was released, and should not have been put out until it was. I really don't remember any other games I've bought for the PC that were 90% done when I bought them. But of course, thats how they will keep the fanboys hooked until Chapter 4 comes out. Then they can shove the repackaged NF down your throats. But then, you seem to eat up anything Anerf throws at you with a silver spoon.

Flame away you big bunch of flamers. Flame away. lmao

...You're serious?

PC games are notorious for the "ship first, patch later" approach. Here's my personal favourite incidence - the racing game where they forgot to make the opposing cars move.

On the "buggy" end, there's other notorious examples like the Temple of Elemental Evil "we'll probably corrupt your Windows install" bug; and on the "missing features" end one has only to point to Knights of the Old Republic II, where the developers famously only got half way through the plot before being forced to ship the product, so they slapped on one last boss fight and called it a day.

Nightfall's short a few dungeons, sure, but (a) it's a long game already, (b) it's on a system that's well built to stream content to us, and (c) everything genuinely gamebreaking was fixed within hours of being noticed. On the broader scale of online game launches, that's positively virginal.

Personally, I don't look to much into what magazines and internet sites think. The people writing the reviews could favor PC platformers over an XBOX360 title, or rather play an RTS or FPS over an MMORPG. We all have different tastes in what we like, so weighing all this into context does more harm then good. Play the game if you like it, if not then move on.

although they said they played and rated the game.. how much do you think they actually know.

i bet they spent like 10 hours on the game and called it good... and that puts them on equal footing with those one guys you see in random arenas that fire frenzy and healsig at the same time.

hell it took me close to 50 hours to even decide if i was gonna toss my gw cd in the trash or not.

2k hours later... im still wonderin.

It's a fair score... I think the outrage is more about Factions getting a higher score, which is retarded, since (IMO) Factions was terrible.

Lol. Factions wasn't that terrible, was it? But then again, it definitely felt like it wasn't well thought out and delivered in a rush.

Anyway, there may be just as many folks who agreed with the review score as the ones who disagree. The review was just meant to serve as a guide or recommendation to consumers; and honestly, the score isn't low by any means. I think it's definitely fair to those who's not bought either of the earlier games. I personally like Nightfall as a new chapter, seeing more improvements to Guild Wars. While it's lower than Factions, I think Factions at least introduced more variety (whether we liked them or not is kinda subjective) that contributed to the multiplayer online experience while the introduction of the Hero System did little for multiplayer gaming from a less insider point of view (we know it helped some of us but we can't GameSpot to list down all the associated problems with PUGs right? Anyway, PUG problems occur in any multiplayer games; it's not the game but the players). I believe the review was summed up by taking both Prophecies and Factions into account. Lastly, I don't think it's wise to get an experienced Guild Wars player to review the game, it's like getting a person who was involved in developing a software application to do usability testing on it.

It is someone else's opinion, I take no one else
s seriously, as the only one that affects me is mine.


On an off topic, I would give NF lower than that.

Grag wrote all 3 reviews for Guild Wars, it's time to change.

Face it: GS is a bunch of WoW fanboys.

Sure, it's a decent game. But 2nd-best PC game of all time? I think we can all agree that, uh, NO.

I'd say the biggest problem is that GW doesn't come into it's own as a game until you hit level 20. Most MMORPGs are about the grind, about leveling up and building your character. Now, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it can be enjoyable and fun to progressivly build a character over many weeks of play time. In GW, however, it's just a means to an end, not the end as in most MMORPGs. This means that to truly experience what GW is as a game, you gotta get to level 20 and build up a good repritore of skills. Unfortunatly, this means you gotta invest a signifigant amount of time before it actually starts to pay off.
Time which reviewers don't just have.

To recap:

WoW (and most other MMORPGs) is about progressivley building up characters. You do this from level 1. So you can immediatly jump in and get to know what WoW is all about.

GW is about sandboxing different builds and skills once you hit level 20. It's pretty lackluster until you can start playing around with all those skills and develop exactly the sort of build you want.

Reviewers have a limited amount of time. Since they do, they can't get to level 20 and start sandboxing. They grade based on how the grind is from level 1-15. WoWs grind is more enjoyable becuase it's the point of the game. GWs less so becuase it's not.

Guild Wars requires more time invested before it starts to pay off as a game.

People actually care what GS has to say about gaming?

Meh, I'd have figured even the slowest among us would have figured out they're full of crap long ago.