The Mehtani Keys area of GuildWars: Nightfall is quite possibly one of the best looking zones in an MMO I've seen in a very long time. The Tuesday N00b Club spent a fair amount of time there this week, what with our ongoing mission to root out and destroy a sudden appearance of mystery undead in the lands of the Istani.
It's a large area of very shallow seas, knee-deep in most places, studded with gloriously sun-drenched sandy atolls, topped with light tropical vegetation. Rope bridges connect some of the isles together, and simple fishemen occupy a idyllic village on tall poles to the north-east, while in the south an ancient ruined sea-fort of some kind molders in the gentle lapping of the tranquil seas, and out to sea, in the far south out in the deeper straights, huge enigmatic sphinx-like statues gaze impenetrably out to sea, perhaps at distant and unknown lands. On the whole, the place is a nice departure from the scrublands and swamps of the other Istan regions, and is the sort of zone one wouldn't mind spending a number of levels in.
Of course, as everywhere else in GuildWars, there's trouble in paradise, and the place is pretty much overrun by pirates, lizardthings, angry tree-creatures, and a particularly nasty variety of underground tunnelling reptile thing, which tends to explode out of the ground in packs, as you approach a seemingly peaceful and deserted beach, like some kind of hungry landmine in the sands. All this is a bit of a shame really. Certainly GW's strength can be the constant availability of hectic action, but in this particular case, so much lavish attention to detail has gone into the background, that it would be nice to spend a little less time there fighting for one's life. Still, Guildwars has no respawning, in the traditional sense, so once you've cleared the place out on the first sweep-through, there is plenty of time for beachcombing and sightseeing in more detail.
As well as our main mission, to seek out and wallop the undead interlopers, we also had a few other jobs in the Keys, including a task to locate 20 shells. Apparently, the Vabbi like then, so the chief of the nearby outpost, Kodlonu Hamlet, wanted help gathering some for trade. Clearly a job for Adventurers, and the three of us went crashing off through the lagoons, somewhat recklessly, I might add, in search of these sparkley ground-spawn objects, generally disrupting the peace and pretty much angering, (and then having to exterminate), every monster in the place. Adventurers are not only bad for economies, but ecologies too, it seems!
One particular island was home to a Corsair shipwreck, who were also not pleased to see us, but on the plus side they did have a Treasure Chest, which worked like the Buried Treasure loot spawn we'd found previously. I ended up with a fairly powerful Elemetalist Staff, which was a shame. Ended up giving it to our Necro/Ele, but I'm not too worried.
Continual jiggery-pokery with the Skills and Attributes window is seeing me drifting into Spear Mastery somewhat, because complex support-based reactive debuff work is all very well, but sometimes, throwing a very sharp stick at someone, very hard, is very satisfying in and of itself. One thing I am a little thrown by, is that unlike Prophecies, it doesn't give you any free skills for doing quests - you need to buy them all yourself, which leads me to my usual Specialisation Angst, and I tend to end up saving my Skill Points, 'just in case'.
As a group though, we certainly seem powerful enough to cope with the challenges that are being thrown at us, and our pool of available heroes seems to be growing nicely, and will probably be at the point were regular Henchmen become unnecessary quite soon, with a Ranger and another Monk signing up to work for me, that session alone.
All holidays come to an end sooner or later though, so it's goodbye Mehtani Keys, and back on with the main plot. Something I'm noticing in the design of Nightfall, is that there seems to be much more scripted reuse of normal Explorable Areas for plots and Missions, and much less in the way of huge tracts of the map accessible only via one specific mission, as in Prophecies, so the plot seems to make us revisit existing areas now and then, as the story unfolds. An example of this was us returning to the main city, to find it overrun by monsters, instead of the usual throng of bored players spamming out trade gibberish. I think I preferred the monsters to be honest. Mind you, from the look of the world-map, we're still on the little island on the lower left, and in Nightfall's equivalent of 'Pre-Searing' still, I think. No idea what it's like on the much larger mainland yet.
A bit of political development and plot later, we're now heading out to some kind of bog, just having discovered evidence of some kind of shocking conspiracy. Probably involving Viziers who turn out to be Evil, I shouldn't wonder. We're all about Level 15 now, but Level 20, the max, comes very early in Guildwars, and it becomes more about skills and teamwork from there on.
The plot thickens...