PC Gamer Gives GW:EN a 68%

Anything below 80% is a poc in my book. All this average stuff lmao. 68% means total craptastic and only fanboys and people who don't have a life would buy it.

So what? You're not going to get jaw-dropping loot every time. You may not ever even get the weapon you want, even after months of playing. That is how RPGs are. That's a really stupid reason to give EoTN a bad name when a matter of luck comes into play in loot received in just about every single RPG game ever created.

If you want to hate on EoTN for that, you might as well give up green farming too. I mean, why should anyone have to actually work for their gear?

Again, I consult the nature of regular, seamless environment MMOs like WoW and FFXI. You really have it easy when it comes to getting loot in Guild Wars compared to WoW and FFXI. Hell, you're lucky if you can even afford upgrading your armor to the mediocre standard in FFXI at the rate you level. It's really unfortunate how poor you are the entire time you play that game.

And WoW? Lol. If you think running a dungeon once and getting a diamond is lame, try running the same dungeons for months on end and get absolutely nothing -- while costing you thousands in gold in the process.

Really, in GW they literally hand you your armor compared to other games. I can't believe people are saying it's "so hard" to get stuff. You can deck out a character in a matter of hours if you know what weapons to farm. And the grind is no fun. Really. It isn't. But they even gave you a weekend with double reputation. Couple that with HM farming and getting rank 5 takes a matter of hours.

If they made it any easier farming in GW, they'd be handing stuff to you.

That's not being casual. That's hardly playing at all.

You really can't cater to that without destroying any sense of challenge for the rest of us. At least not when it comes to PvE.

68% yep that's about right......

I'm glad that GW:EN was made for level 20 players - it was so boring having to go through the low-level areas with full-kitted out and levelled-up peeps.

But I would agree it was a disappointment. I think they relied too much on the dungeons and didn't have enough "above ground-level" - the number of explorable areas was woefully small. Yes it was an expansion, but it was a small expansion.

I hope they really, really get their act together for Guild Wars 2. However, as sad as I am to say this, I will not be pre-ordering GW2. Because of my disappointment with GW:EN.

Exaggeration ain't helping here. You should try WoW first and see how it goes over there...it is bit more rewarding than you think.

your post is wasted man I was makeing a refrense to the poster I quoted as a joke, now plz calm down.

and for the WoW refrence thats the 1 thing I love about old school GW was it was nothing like WOW in the sense that 1 raid would take HOURS to do, GW:EN came out and succeded in being a WOW copy in the sense of that now clearing a dungeon in HM takes hours

If playing an hour of Guild Wars a day isn't "casual", what is?


Casual: Plays Guild Wars a few hours a week.

Moderate: Plays Guild Wars for about an hour a day.

Hardcore: Plays Guild Wars 4+ hours a day.

It actually started during Prophecies with the never ending nerfing of the bloody game.

Or they could even play the game and get points. Remember the hero's handbook and whatever the called the one for dungeons? If you play just the quests and never even fill in the dungeon book, that's 20,000 reputation points when you cash the book in. It's a shame it took them a few weeks post-release to fix those values - the initial 2,500 points was far too low.

I play maybe an hour a day, two hours tops if I lose track of the time. Just from dungeon and hero books alone, I've got rank 7 in all of the titles. Grind? Not really - I wanted to do those dungeons anyway. It wasn't hard at all to get the armor sets.

I agree wholeheartedly on the reskin content and the reuse of older rare weapons being disappointing, though. I was hoping for far better than that. So far, the only really nice new skins I've seen are the embersteel blade and the destroyer warrior weapons. (Don't get me started on that crappy bow they left the poor rangers with...)

Unfortunately, Anet is dead set on rubbing salt into that wound...

Hell, the GW2 article basically comes out and says "no, you're never going to restore Ascalon, shut up about it"...

It started with titles. That is when it became less about playing the game and more about boosting the e-peen.

I think the review is accurate. If you think about it, they rushed the game and didn't put much into the game. Every armor set is almost a re-skin, same with most of the weapons. GW:EN also crashed the market...

GW:EN could have been a LOT better.

He *did* say that he had about 3-4 70's in his earlier post. But yeah that was a very "wow" exaggeration. WoW is not the grindfest most people make it out to be (it's actually going to be less with the repgrinds and leveling in the next patch to come).

And bear in mind how personal the term "grind" is.

I actually did not want that to happen, thanks.

But besides that, this post reminds me of the one thing I *really* hated about GWEN: Forced character personality. It's annoying enough that I have to hear my warrior make and say lame jokes, but there was one incident with Jora (I think the Blood Washes Blood quest) where you had to go and kill an encampment of Charr.

When I reached the main center of the encampment, I said this: "There's the Charr! Kill them all!" My warrior is not some bloodthirsty, vengeful lunatic. I guess ANet doesn't want you to have a say over who your character is and how he acts. Not much of a "roleplaying game" if you can't even have a say in how your avatar acts. I hope they don't do this with GW2.

All the GW:EN disappointment is actually a real surprise for me. I'm still playing through it and I think it's a great expansion. I've enjoyed it all so far and thought it was a bargain for the money, considering how much playing time I'm getting out of it.

It's a thousand times better than Factions, which I believe scored much higher.

Video game ratings are all relative to other games of the same genre. That's why sequels tend to get worse ratings than originals.

Needless to say, there was less competition for the Guild Wars franchise back in April 2006. However, a year and one Burning Crusade later, and you begin to notice some flaws.

True, true. Just a shame, I think. In its own right, I think GW:EN is excellent. Not perfect, but it's instilled some renewed life in GW for me after I was honestly fighting to find interest in it, post-Nightfall completion.

So Burning Crusade was a perfect expansion, even though it made much of the orginal WoW content relatively obsolete?

68% is probably about right,but some of the stick Anet has been getting is a little unfair.
However from a personal point of view i am not into the new armour sets so the ranking issues do not bother me, neither am i interested in the title race that Anet seems to have sponsored since NF, the dungeons i find pretty boring to be honest after completing them once i will struggle to do it again anytime soon with another character.
After two years of playing this game everyday i am not surprised that GW has started to feel jaded for me, what is surprising is the fact the game has kept me entertained for that amount of time, without a break, in fact no other game has kept me that interested for such a length of time, and for that Anet deserve credit.
EoTN is what i thought it would be, a closing of the first GW series, i did not think for one minute it would magically transport me back two years to when everything was fresh and new.
I just hope GW2 will see a return to what made the first series so good, and not the more dubious additions we have had to endure.

I'm not a certified video game reviewer (which is what the topic is about), but Burning Crusade did score better than all the Guild Wars games except the original at IGN (8.8 BC to GW's 9.0), and tied at Gamespot (9.2).

Of course, Guild Wars was revolutionary at the time it was released. That was April 2005, two years ago. Things have drastically changed since then in the MMO genre, which is reflected in the typical scores for GW:EN.

(And yes, Burning Crusade was revolutionary in the sense that it was catered more to the casual, albeit slightly.)

Meh, this is why I don't use reviews to decide to buy games or not.

WoW could score 100%, and I'd never buy it, because it's just not a game I'm interested in.

I think 68% is perfectly fair for GW:EN and echoes my own sentiments well. The thing is, it's more or less just the same as the previous chapters without new innovations. Yes, I know it's supposed to be just an expansion and not a new campaign, but still, reskinned armors, short campaign and dungeons which borrow parts from each other don't scream value for money in my opinion.

O/T about game scoring: it was a trend in gaming magazines a few years back that people only thought games that scored way over 90 (on a 100 scale) were worth getting. A game that got 90-92 - very good score - might not be seen as a good purchase. A big local gaming magazine Pelit wanted to broaden the scale and started to branch out, basically saying that a game which gets 80, even 70-75 points is well worth buying if you're a fan of the genre and only the top games of all fields get the high scores.

So, in EoTN's case, 68% is fair for an expansion of this sort. If you're a GW fan, you will probably get it, and you probably have by now. With a full 100 scale, I myself would've probably rated Prophecies 92, Factions 80, Nightfall 84 and EoTN 70.

What am i then i play like 6/8 hours a day every day in the weekends almost 16 hours did GW:EN in 14 hours first 2 days it whas released.
I do not consider myself hardcore i hate grind i dislike dungeon crawling and i have 4 titels maxed on my main char after 17 months of play
course i hate to max it out

But i get your point

For me Eye of the North scores much higher than 68%... The story may be short, but the new areas look much better than the areas in the previous games. More challenging monsters, especially in Hard Mode. Lots of dungeons. Cool sidequests, with decent rewards. Some funny and useful new PvE skills.
In my opinion not bad for an expansion.

I listen to the reviews, just never to the hype.

It's really been working so far. Fable's still one of my favorite games : )

I don't think so. A lot of the dungeons are pretty swift if you assemble a strong team. Of course there are a few dungeons out there that take a few hours to do, but that has always been the case. You'll find high-end dungeons from every single campaign.

I didn't mean to say it like that. What I meant was, if you're not even playing long enough to have time to complete missions, that's not really offering you a chance to play the game, let alone casually.

Ok, now the difficult and existentialist question that probably tormented the PC Gamer reviewers for a week or so:

Why 68% and not 67% or 69%?

(apart from that, it's a good multi-game thread!)

Erm, what? I could've sworn I mentioned that I played for two years. Two years of farming herbs for hours every other day, farming gold for the cost of repair bills, etc.

Raiding dungeons is a breeze in this game compared to that.

And that's definitely a good thing.


Burning Crusade was far from perfect. The leveling process from 60-70 was amazing. It really was. But at 70, you were once again plagued with two options: grind Arena points or raid 4-6 hours a day, 6 days a week. And the PvE grind in Burning Crusade was almost a complete repeat of the level 60 grind, which, let me tell you -- I for one don't feel like wiping on boss fights for days when I already went through them a year ago.

The fact that Blizzard tweaked boss fights to the point where it was necessary to use elixers and potions was absolutely ridiculous. Everything in the expansion was a grind, which let to another one, and so on.

Blizzard really knows how to keep you occupied and hold a firm grip on your pocket. But that's enough about WoW, at least from me.


I'd wager they average out the scores given by the reviewers.

I agree there is lots of new content and more already planned and coming (hence the title that cannot be accomplished yet). It is the best written of the releases to date. Elona has a terribly westernized feel for being an African based scenario, but excellent plotting. Cantha more accurately reflects Oriental themes (story wise) than Elona does the African tales I have read, but the plot is not as fleshed out. And Prophecies was a fantastic start, for its purpose.

The HoM is disappointing. I understand adjusting the armor to reflect the players expression of the Character - I don't understand making them cartoon reliefs instead of maintaining the statuesque beauty that was there. Having to grind to make weapons I don't want, don't like, and won't use just so they can fill up my excessively limited storage (or am I supposed to buy several more character slots for more than the three mules I have already). (Afterall GW has only gotten $290.00 out of me in 2 years - why should they give a damn about what I think?)

I also agree that the expansion is too difficult for the casual player, and that it was not that difficult during preview weekend. (Sucker 'em in and shut 'em down?) Last time I entered Frostmaw half the party was dead before we were loaded. There were close to 20 monsters right in the landing zone (I think 12 of them were Chromatic Dragons). I recently went to walk to Gadds from Rata Sum with some friends, we were TPKd all the way across the map by creatures I never encountered on my way there. And I went there initially in AL45 and henchies, but couldnt walk back in AL60 plus live players who have been playing for more than 2 years?

But I understand, we have to cater to that wopping majority of l33tness who spammed through it in 3 hours on webcrack, then bitched it wasn't hard enough.

I looked forward to eotn. Was dissapointed. In the beginning, Guild Wars was supposed to be different. Less grind, more emphasis on skill, etc. Now, grind all you want! Cry about how hard it is, and get it made easier! Eotn was the final blow in making GW the same. Before it, about the only thing separating us from the endless grind of Wow was multi-level dungeons. thank goodnes we didn't get that. Oh, wait a minute...

GWEN is probably the only game that makes me want to go outside after 5 minutes of playing (having already progressed through the story).

I'm glad ANet is doing their part to keep us fit and healthy

Let me refine my comment with a quick example: 2 reviewers, 1 gives 90% and the other one gives 10%. End result: review of 50%, which does not show the true result of the review.

It's just to highlight how subjective numbers are!

I entirely concur! I will take up your request:

Less Grind! Less Grind! Less Grind!
<stomping in progress with chants and ceremonial fire circling>

With the new rewards for hero handbooks, completing the game once pretty much gives you the points for one race to get up to rank 5. Well, that's if you did some of their quests as well instead of just rushing through the game.

If you are a very casual player the review was fine. That is, if you played through the storyline and then put the GW down and moved on to another game, I would probably not recommend EotN either. There is not enough content for the "one-shot" player.

If you are a hardcore GW player with multiple characters who maxing titles, vanquishing, etc., the score doesn't really matter. You already own the game, and have formed your own opinion. As we know from these forums, those opinions are decidedly mixed.

Sounds fair to me. I would call that rating a mediocre rating, and I would call GWEN a mediocre game.

As others have expressed, for the more demented among us it's a fine game. If you have the time to sit and play endlessly, and you enjoy doing that, you'll probably love it. For us casual folks, however, most of the game is inaccessible and frustrating. I've already come across 2 dungeons that I haven't been able to do because I can't get a decent team of people together and they're far too hard to do with NPCs.

Not to mention that it cost nearly the price of a full game yet was substantially smaller than one.

The only thing I agreed with in this review was that the loot drops were total crap. At least someone else besides us sees it.

Many game sequels get lower ratings because as time goes on, there's just not as much innovation, the graphics start looking dated, and the competition often has newer products with improved features.

However, I will say that Eye of the North is definitely disappointing, even to many of its diehard fans. I don't think that anybody can say that Hall of Monuments is anything what fans were thinking it would be.

=====

There's a few reasons why people like Prophecies so much. One of the big reasons why I liked it is that it's the only campaign where every profession could complete the missions (maybe not every bonus, but a lot of them) and complete the storyline with just ordinary henchmen, even without flagging. If anything, the game encouraged changing your secondaries to allow easier gameplay.

For instance, Aurora Glade's mission immediately ends if you attune the last three portals, regardless if you are in the middle of fighting a dozen mobs. As a result, if you really found it too difficult, you could just change your secondary to Warrior (for instance), bring a speed boost like Dodge, and just run like crazy with the crystals and attune the shrines and end the mission in only a few minutes.

Even Hell's Precipice seems intimidating with the huge number of monsters, but actually all of the monsters are arranged in small mobs which can be beaten with just smart pulling and whittling down their numbers. It's bad pulling that gets you killed more than anything else. For those that are truly frustrated, change your secondary to Monk and you can almost do the whole mission with just two skills, the Elite skill "Restore Condition" (found in the mission prior) and Rebirth (as henchmen will die frequently). With the two monk henchmen and yourself, you can just slowly grind your way through all the mobs and defeat the Lich.

Compare this with Eye of the North. I just did Shards of Orr last week. ANet claims that dungeons allow for "brains over brawn" gameplay, but I certainly didn't see it here. In the second level, there's a scene where you must light up all these braziers to get to the next area. When you do, a huge mob of enchanted weapons and undead spawn from thin air, and you must beat them to open the door. The monsters all move in a group and can't be individually pulled. As I was repeatedly getting killed, I sort of wondered just where the so-called fun was. I have read the player guides, and they all suggest the same thing... You got to run a specific set of builds in your heroes, or bring more human players.

Anyway, I am trying to figure out just how a game that initially touted itself as saying that you could do the entire game with just henchmen suddenly became a game focused around template builds and gimmicky strategy.

Sry, but I give it a 63%^^.

As an expansion for level 20 characters I'd expect it to be more difficult but 68% seems right. Your average player does seem to get creamed in Eye of the North. I also doubt most casual gamers could even handle or attempt Hard Mode in GW:EN either

For the truly Hard Core GW addict it's a challenge and a blast but for the casual gamer it would have to be very disappointing and a waste of time.

Great! One time through per race and character. So I only need to finish it 32 times.