Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

The Return to Guild Wars

There really is not that much more for me to do in WoW at the moment. It only takes one to two days to clear out all the raid content for the week, and while I could spend all my time gaining every little achievement out there, I cannot really find the drive to. Some days, I get the ache to farm achievements, but those days are few and far between. Once patch 3.1 comes out, I expect to be entertained a little bit more. Between raiding ramping up for Ulduar, farming out things in the Argent Tournament and the ability to spec retribution whenever I want via dual spec, I can see my options opening a little.

Either way, Rynala and I decided to leap back into Guild Wars. I first played Guild Wars when it first launched. I did not even get into WoW until about September 2005, almost a full year after that game had launched. Before then, I had played Guild Wars. I tried a variety of different characters, but I played a ranger all the way to level 20. This was back when Prophecies was the only campaign and Elona Reach was still the bane of all players. When her and I first moved in together, she tried the game and played a Necromancer all the way through Prophecies before she started playing WoW with me.

I spent the better part of yesterday going around to different stores to buy a second copy of Guild Wars (to see if I could get it cheaper than buying it directly from NC Soft). Of course the PC sections of Gamestop, Walmart and Best Buy are all lacking and aside from only finding the Prophecies campaign in most stores, I was able to pick up the Prophecies/Faction combined box for $30 (the same price as each one separately usually). When I got home, I bought Nightfall for both of us, so each account now has all three campaigns. I figure we will pick up Eye of the North sometime in the future after we finish the 3 campaigns together.

We decided to start with the Nightfall campaign since Rynala was interested in playing a Dervish and I was just going to play a Monk in whatever campaign she picked.

I have somewhat of a love/hate relationship with the character creation for Guild Wars. One of the nice things is that Nightfall has a great deal more options for hair color and other aesthetic options than the other campaigns, but I always find myself wanting to go with a hair style of another profession. On the other hand, I appreciate how each class has its own theme and the character models, hair styles and colors reflect that. Plus, Guild Wars still has a great deal more options to its character creation than games like WoW or WAR, even if WoW and WAR have more aesthetic options if you include all the different types of armor you could wear.

Either way, by the end of the afternoon, Mordiceius Isagirl and Rynala Raelynne were born.

We only got to level 4, but it was a fantastic return to the game. I have always enjoyed the experience Guild Wars has to offer and Nightfall does not disappoint. We are more taking the game as a co-op single player game than an MMO and that has made the experience great. While there may be an overwhelming number of minor quests at times, we do not let that bother us as the main storyline quests are what excite us. I have always loved being able to see my character walk around in the game's cutscenes. Also, the game still looks fantastic after all these years.