Factions or Nightfall?

Hello everyone, My GW Complete Collection arrived today. My wife and I will be playing characters together (prophecies) and I am going to make atleast one more solo character right away aswell, Which campaign is funner for PVE play? I am assuming Nightfall but i do not know enough to be sure.

I was thinking about doing ritualist/necro (or necro/ritualist) so i suppose my mind may already be made up for me. But what would you all recommend?

Nightfall. Heroes. For PvE they are perfect especially if its just you and the wife playing. Factions has no heroes really. Character creation in NF is better too. you get heroes from the start and it offers a learning curve for using them properly.

Thanks!

well, I thought by physically buying the games that i would get the games on disc and just have to download updates, but it looks like despite having a disc i will have to download everything still. Kind of lame since I have the slowest internet (my wife and I split 160KB/s Download speeds..) so i guess it will be a couple days before i can play, oh well... Really its going pretty quick, still annoying though.

Seems to me that nightfall will be the way to go though.

Nightfall wins by hands down better. Good story and quests. Get heroes and learn to use them, fit them out, equip them, configure them; and the rest of the game is pie.

I got a free hero i can access from any campaign with my complete collection (golem names M.O.X.) I will do nightfall, sucks though because i really wanted to play ritualist/necro, Guess i will just have to do necro/ritualist.

Factions is my favorite campagain (although the Kaineng part is a bit boring), but with the current state of the game (way less players) i have to agree that NF would be better to get heroes.

But when you start in NF you cant create a ritualist, because ritualists can only be created in Factions (for NF a N/Rt is an option).

Another option: create a Rt in Factions... as soon you reach the main land, goto Kaineng Center, take the quest that brings you to NF, get some early heroes and do whatever you want to do (continue Factions or NF).

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That depends on how old the content on that DVD is... but i think even the newest DVD is kind of old nowadays

Tip: if you know someone with up-to-date GW installed you can copy GW.DAT to an USB stick or so... and then copy that file over your own GW.DAT.

And dont download the game twice... if you cant copy that file from a friend, install 1 pc and copy the gw.dat from you to your wife's pc (i assume that speeds up the process of having to install GW on 2 pc's with a slow interconnection).

Thanks for the info guys, still going to be a tough decisions, I know i want to play through them all eventually but cant figure out where to start, seem like my wife and I may do our mains in nightfall and then another set of characters somewhere else and a couple solo characters each to fill in (going to make 4 chars total so I can get the pre-searing title)

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It actually did not take to long to get them installed, guess the games are a lot smaller than i thought they were.

As for the download: if you are not limited when it comes to bandwidth consumption, I would suggest running Guild Wars with the -image parameter. This will allow to load all the most recent data on one computer. Once it's done, copy the game's folder to the other PC. Enjoy! This should avoid the need of downloading everything twice.

Yes that -image parameter is important (but you cant play the game when -image is enabled, so i suggest a 2nd shortcut). Otherwise you may end up having to download a lot more when you try to play, mapmove, etc.

My guild wars file is about 3.8 gigs. Not too big, but still a huge game. As others have said I recommend after the games are installed to right click on your shortcut, select properties and put -image in the target box so it looks like this: "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -image then just run GW.

This will download all the maps etc. so you don't have to wait forever for the downloads. A lot of the information is streamed or something I've never really understood how guild wars works when it comes to that stuff but yeah. This will save you hassle when you are loading into new area's and what not.

After it's completed you just remove -image and play. You don't have to do this of course it's merely for your convenience.

In terms of storyline and fun, Nightfall is a better choice. Factions feels very rushed.

For Nightfall, you get a more better paced story as well as get access to heroes which are very useful if you do not do random PUGing.

Factions feels very rushed and has a shorter storyline. An upside to this is that you reach level 20 quite quickly.



EDIT: Regarding the install... you can just download/image the whole thing on one pc then copy the whole folder over to the second pc without having to go through the install/update process.

EDIT2: Forgot to also mention that Proophecies is also the slowest campaign of the three. It will seem very boring for a while, but keep at it and it picks up later on (in short, don't get discouraged). While I say that it is the most boring, it is also the best campaign in learning the gameplay/tactics basics.

you just changed my life.

After we level up some characters can we go back and play through the other campaigns with our level 20 chars? (minus pre-searing of coarse)?

thanks for the -image info

Opinions a plenty when it comes to asking which is funner...

Factions: Want to be max level faster than anything else so you can be considered "on par" with the majority of those currently multi-year players? Do you enjoy Asian style artwork and/or scenery to view, including thick forests and wide open oceanic atmosphere? Want to learn a very basic style of PvP (Player vs. Player) while traversing through your normal gameplay?

Nightfall: Want to take your time leveling while learning how to control heroes, who are much like henchmen, but can have their skill sets customized at your approval? Do you enjoy northern African scenery that also includes a stone fortress, sulfur covered wastelands and majestic palaces? Do you enjoy side quests that veer off the normal campaign?

Personally, if you want a crash course in the current state of the game, start with Nightfall. If you want to play the game the way it was intended, start with the other campaign called Prophecies. Fair warning, you can't get most Ritualist skills if starting in Prophecies.

You can switch campaigns (jump from your staring game to another one and play there) fairly early so factions <-> nightfall isn't quite so important a question as you might think.

That means you can get the nf heroes with a factions character very soon as well. So that's not a strong argument. Especially if you'd like to play a Rit.

Nf for me is by far the worst starting campaign. There are half a dozen roadblocks in it (only for nf native characters) like "reach a certain level before you may continue the main story line" or "get a certain amount of points in a certain title before going on". Now for a brand spankin' new player this is less of a problem since there is a good chance that you wanna do a lot of the quests in the beginner's levels anyways. And then you pass those roadblocks without even noticing them. Just don't be surprised that if you started skipping annoying quests that you might be forced to do some anyways. [Luckily this "problem" is only relevant for the first fifth of the game].

If the story interests you even remotely I'd keep nf for last (and just remember that you can get half a dozen heroes from nf w/o doing much and another three from EotN).

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Yes!
A character can do anything in all three campaigns. The only thing that's a tad bit different: some quests (mainly in staring areas) are only available for native chars.
And missions you do which "happened in the past" will not give a reward in "Normal Mode" (which you're playing):
http://www.guildwiki.org/Cooperative..._foreign_lands

Oh, and there are three important wikis:
1) see above
2) http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page
3) http://www.gwpvx.com/PvX_wiki

Enjoy!

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Something else about heroes (since people think so strongly about them ): When you first get them they are poorly equipped and have cr4ppy skill bars (pardon my French). With resources (which you might lack in the beginning) and access to the important skills (which you might also lack unless you buy skill unlock packs for real money) and knowledge about decent skill bars (that's where wiki #3 comes into play) henchmen might very well be a better choice in the beginning over heroes.

For me in order of fun it was Prophecies (excluding bonuses) - Nightfall - EotN - Factions (the slums, ugh, the slums).

EotN would be higher than Nightfall but had to get my heroes in shape first which NF helped with

As with many you can hop back and forth as often as you like once you get to the port city

Now I did see you wanted a Rit once you get to Kiang city take the following quests go to lions arch first then once there obtain the quest for nightfallits a lot easir that way.

On arrival at kamadden in NFALL you will be given 5 heros all at level 15 as you speak to Komir. then just take the eye of north quest when there for entry and obtain another 3 if u take quest at boreal stationto get to eye.

another little thing is . since you have spare slots create a pvp char then just do zashin challange and obtain faction then trade that for skills that your hero can use once obtained.. so you can make your heros have a good skill bar by doing this then once done if you dont wish to PVP just delete it and do pve

I'm a little late to the party, but I'd add this to the discussion.

For me, the class and 'look' of a character is very important. So, I tend(ed) to start a character in whatever campaign gave me the character 'look' I wanted, except of course when it comes to campaign specific classes such as Ritualist.
I then took the character through the opening parts of whatever campaign they started in and switched campaigns (if desired) when I got to a port.

Barring the 'look' of the character, I would most often recommend starting in Nightfall overall. Nightfall, being the latest campaign, and having things like Heroes, Inscriptions, etc, is most like the current overall 'meta' of the PvE game.

I also recommend that everyone should take at least one character through pre-searing (Prophecies).