Thursday 21 December 2006

Pic of the day: Character creation. Isn't she cute? No, I don't flirt with the male characters. Rather I went into the character screen again to get close-ups of the pretty girls in the game. ^^

Guild Wars: Nightfall

Guild Wars is a massively multiplayer online RPG, but it is different from the rest of them in a couple ways. First off, there is no monthly fee for playing. This may look too good to be true, since the competition usually siphons off $15 a month for similar games. Well, roughly similar. Don't expect large amounts of new features and new areas to be added to the game every few months, like in for instance City of Heroes, which launches several big, free expansions each year. Others, like EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and to some extent World of Warcraft rely on a mix of separate expansion packs and online added content. Guild Wars, instead, bets that people will buy the next stand-alone game once a year or more.

Nightfall is the third game in the series, and is refreshingly set in an African culture, seemingly based on the upper Nile mostly but with some lower Nile (Egyptian) features. Ironically the first enemy you meet is an invasion fleet of Corsairs, a historically much later enemy. (The corsairs were basically privateers, pirates with a more or less tacit government sanction. It may be more correct to see them as terrorists than the more greed-driven pirates and European privateers, though.)

The previous game was set in a pseudo-Chinese culture, and the first seems to be loosely based on the inner Mediterranean of ancient times. The player characters are all human (and gorgeous). It is certainly a breath of fresh airs after the stereotype of a magical medieval Europe with elves and dwarves, though less different in atmosphere than City of Heroes or Star Wars Galaxies, not to mention the darkly futuristic Anarchy Online.

Another difference is that the game is not distributed on several servers or shards, each a self-contained world. Rather every player – including those from all three titles in the series – play in one continuum. Except not really. They mingle in cities and towns that are common, but these are more like giant chat rooms. All actual battle takes place either in instanced arenas or in wilderness instances.

Instancing is not new. City of Heroes was fairly groundbreaking in its use of instanced missions, though the game also had missions that took placed in the shared city. An instanced mission generates a pocket universe for the team that enters it. Only they and their enemies are there; other players can neither come nor go. Technically this is a streak of genius, as the instance can be put on a sub-server without anybody noticing, and there will be much less need to keep the client updated than if you also must inform it of where a thousand other heroes are at any given time. By ruthlessly enforcing instancing in all battles, whether player vs player or "roleplay" battles against computer-generated monsters, the game manages to run an enormous game world on one single server. Even the cities are instanced, in that you may for instance find yourself in "European district 9" of a particular city. But you can contact people you know and team up with them anyway.

The game is not simply, as its name might imply, a war between guilds. In fact, this is not at all what its storyline is about. The guilds are supposedly fighting for the same goal, in a kind of more or less friendly competition, unlike the outright war-based games such as Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft. But it is true that a lot of the game is centered on the arena battles of one team against another. I, of course, have taken no interest in this part of the game at all, but the results of the official tournaments are announced on-screen as each is completed. Incongruently to the actual game story, the actual competition seems to be among Asia, Europe and America.

While it is possible to create a character at level 20 (the maximum level), and start fighting in the player arena, this is probably not the best move. The so-called "role playing" in the instanced wilderness does not only give the rich background story and a lot of beautiful landscape. It also teaches you how to use the various skills of your chosen classes from the bottom up. And even if you have played through it before and know how to play, rumor has it that the wilderness contains skills to learn and loot to find that will make you better at whatever you do.

As in other such games, there are different classes. Not everyone is a warrior. The monks are primary healers, for instance, although they may specialize in magical attacks and give their opponents a nasty surprise. Usually you will want someone with some healing power on your team, though. And someone with ranged attacks. And someone to weaken the enemy... you want, in short, a full team if possible.

The team of 8 is the basic fighting unit. "You never fight alone" is the official slogan for the third game in the series, Nightfall, but it was true even from the start. Nobody will stop you from walking off into the wilderness alone, but you are likely to come back in disgrace soon enough. Unlike CoH, the number and strength of your opponents will not adjust itself to the size of your team. Or so I am led to believe, I haven't played it enough to say for sure. In the beginning, you run in with small teams and do fine. But you are told in no uncertain terms that you should never fight alone, and the game has a couple inventive features to ensure you need not, even if you didn't yet belong to a guild or simply were a lone wolf.

In the towns, you can hire henchmen. These come in the same races as you yourself could choose from. They draw a proportion of the gold and experience like any team member, but aren't as competent as a good player. They are however a lot better than nothing, and they don't suddenly drop in the middle of a mission because their dog puked, or just stand around doing nothing for a quarter of an hour because their boyfriend called. On the contrary, they will not mind at all if you take some time off to deal with pressing matters. And they still fight better than a newbie. I know, because I am a newbie, and they are definitely better than me, especially in more supportive roles.

With the newest game in the series, Nightfall, you get a new type of non- player followers: Heroes. These are individuals, more competent than the generic henchmen, and you have more control over them. You can even give them items from your inventory, such as weapons or wands. (They keep their own armor.) They level up much like you, although they cannot gain a higher level than you, but they will gain more experience points if they are lower level than you, so they tend to catch up. You can get these through quests, and some of them are mutually exclusive. You can have several of them, but only three can join your party at any time. This means that two players with their heroes could make up a full party, and with the greater control of them should be able to have a fairly well functioning team. Or if you go it alone, you can still add henchmen to the max of the party.

In addition to the new heroes and the new geography and culture background, there are also two new classes. This time they are Dervish, who is actually quite an aggressive character wielding a scythe and destructive magic (not the world-forsaking philosophers of our timeline, obviously) and Paragon, a support character vaguely reminiscent of paladin in that he has continuous improvements that affect the whole group, in addition to temporary buffs and heals. But unlike the armored and very resilient paladin that fights up close, the Paragon is lightly armored and fights from a distance using spears.

The previous game in the series also had two special classes. In addition to your first chosen class, you can chose a secondary class at level five. I don't know if you can combine the special classes from two of the games if you own them both. Probably not, since you have to choose one game world to start in. But even so, having two classes makes for great flexibility. There may be only 8 basic classes (Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Necromancer, Mesmer and Elementalist plus your two game-specific classes) but you can mix any two of them in any proportion. You could have a warrior with a lot of healing powers as well, although it would probably be kind of tricky to pull off those heals while you were fighting for your life. Or you could be a paragon strengthening your comrades while at the same time weakening your enemies, perhaps a more natural combination.

There is one more thing you need to know about this game. It is gorgeous, and not least the characters. You don't have the same enormous diversity of options as in City of Heroes, and you are restricted to human characters (although some may transform into demigods at higher levels). But they are all quite well built exemplars of their gender. One reviewer claimed this was the most homoerotic game ever. Speak for yourself, Mr Reviewer, but for those who swing that way I am sure there is stuff to fill your dreams. Personally I found the female characters excessively cute, some of them more than others. The game does not have any spray-on tights like City of Heroes, nor short anime-style skirts where some good positioning lets you peek at their panties. But in all their decency, they can look pretty, spunky and cute. There are also elaborate dances, but I haven't tried those.

The game does not have the friendly atmosphere I am used to in CoH. Maturity is generally in short supply and tempers seem shorter. On the other hand, comradery in the guilds is reported to be good (if you find a good guild, that is). And you don't really need to team up if you don't want to, and you really can if you do want to. The game is beautiful, the characters are beautiful, the tutorial is good and the learning curve is not too steep. And you literally can't beat the subscription price, at least until you find a game that pays you to play! I am not going to forsake my favorite online game, City of Heroes, but I am glad I got the 14-day free trial from NCSoft. It was not a bad way to spend a few hours.