And so back to Guild Wars, and a whole new adventure! This time, we're having a go at Guild Wars: Factions, an earlier offering than Nightfall, which I'd completely missed at the time. I'm rubbish at keeping up with what's new, in general, and tend to end up banging on about all manner of interesting thing that everyone else has already played to death. I don't mind though; on the plus side, by the time I get there, these games are usually quite comprehensively balanced, fixed, patched and smooth.
I went and bought the thing at a real shop this time, forewarned by my experiences buying Nightfall at their online shop. Real Media! How quaint! Found a non-collectors edition on sale for less than the price NCSoft are asking, and for my money, I even got a glossy double-sided poster of the Assassin and Ritualist (the two Factions exclusive classes), and a thick user manual, stuffed full of outstanding concept art, neither of which I'd have got if I'd gone online for it all. I always thought that digital download meant you could bypass the publisher entirely, and perhaps pass on some savings to the end user. At the very least, I'd expect the download edition to cost the same, if not less, than the shop shelf version. It's possible I'm being hopelessly naive in this regard though, and Digital Download is still a good idea for those folks who don't find it easy to get to a well stocked game shop, or, err, Amazon.com. Again though, that whole No Monthly Subscription Thing makes it difficult to be terribly cross about box prices, I suppose.
There's just the two of us for this go at it all, but since we're both Nightfall owners, we'll be able to go and get the various Hero type 'super-henchmen' before getting too far into the campaign, and in general, three of these each makes for a well-rounded and potent party or eight, capable of almost anything the campaign is likely to throw at us. We had a big old argument beforehand, which I lost, and so I get to be the Towel-Headed* Ritualist, and my friend is now a Cool and Mysterious Ninjalike Assassin. These are our Primary Professions, and are not going to change for duration.
Of course there's nothing stopping us from bringing any other maxed-out characters across to the new stuff, but in doing so, we'd miss a fair bit of the newbie levels and lands, and those are always worth a look. Also, our two new classes are completely unfamiliar. My friend has a lot of Ritualist experience, but none with the Assassin, and I have no clue what either is about. This is what swung the argument in the end; if our roles had been reversed, I'd have still been just as clueless, but my friend would be embarrassingly competent and show me up in front of the Henchmen. At least this way, we both get to flail about incompetently!
We start life at the Shing Jea Monastery, on Shing Jea Island. The Monastery is a place of enlightenment, learning, teaching and peace, (with Local Chat turned off anyway), and exists for the somewhat dubious purpose of training young adventurers to better cave in monster's heads. There was probably some enlightenment going on that was too subtle for me, but I was in a bit of a hurry to get started. "Consider the crane..." "Yes Master", and so forth. In addition to another refresher course on how2play, (which one should never be too proud to dismiss out of hand), we got to meet Master Togo, Cantha's greatest hero, wizened sensai and all round living legend. He runs the monastery, and had us waxing cars, painting fences and balancing on beach posts in very short order. The temple is a little cliched, but excellently done, which sums up Guild Wars in general, I find.
We were soon sent out into the countryside to test our skills and this proved to be a bit of an education. Being a Ritualist is a huge change of style for me. It's a support caster, and seems largely to revolve around the deployment and management of Spirits; summoned, static creatures of the netherworld, with various different effects, ranging from simple deployable turrets, to localised AoE party buffs and enemy debuffs. Naturally, this means that our previous Minion-driven rampaging has to change to a more considered and somewhat slower style of play. The spirits do seem powerful though, provided you dictate where the fighting happens, rather than letting the monsters do it, as is usually the case.
Almost immediately, we hit what I suspect is likely to be a recurring difficulty in the months ahead, in that the Assassin, by contrast, seems to be a very mobile type of melee DPS assist fighter, and seems to get a number of 'Shadow Step to the target and...' skills, which all serve to teleport our rather fragile ninja right into the heart of the enemy cluster, and often out of range of my spirit based fortifications. The Assassin's life seems further complicated by an intricate system of combo attacks; lead attacks, off-hand attacks, dual attacks, etc, which need to be carried out in the right order to be effective.
All this means that the usual obsession with the 'Survivor' title was put to bed very early on, with a hectic run-in with a L14 Ranger boss and pals, up in a very Mt. Fuji-esque region of the first zone, wiping us out quite comprehensively. I'm saying nothing, but tend to be somewhat relieved that the 'The Tuesday N00b Club leaves no Survivors!' A lot of exploring and low-level questing followed, and I'm really quite in love with the Shing Jea island in general. Its a green and picturesque land of manicured groves, ornate pagodas, cherry blossom and gentle river falls, topped with dark, snow-topped mountains, all very obviously inspired by pre-industrial Feudal Japan. Nightfall's Istan serves a similar game purpose - a large newbie island, guiding the player up to L20, and the main game proper on the mainland, but always seemed a bit...scrubby to me, especially compared to the lush civility of the Shing Jea lands. For some reason, we also seem to be earning a huge amount of money compared to that found in the other two campaign newbie areas, which is nice too.
Various questing and adventure saw us reach level 10, get a basic handle on how our skills work, and also pick a secondary profession each. Always a tricky choice, but one that tends to become very academic for me quite early on, given my tendency to only use skills from the Primary class.
The Ritualist's unique attribute is 'Spawning Power', which increases the health of summoned spirits, and the duration of weapon spells - a kind of buffing ability. This can be useful for both Ranger Nature Spirits, which I have some familiarity with, and also for Necromancer Minions. I went with Ranger in the end, but mostly for the traps. Combined with a good deployment of spirits, the various Ranger's traps can make an very powerful defensive position to pull enemies onto, especially melee types - Warrior, Dervish, Assassin, and minions and pets. Well, that's the plan anyway, and I can always try a different Secondary later on. The Assassin went with Necromancer, probably out of force of habit, I suspect.
Skill of the night for me was 'Draw Spirit', which is quick, cheap, easy and lets me teleport any friendly spirit I target, to my location. If no target is selected, it'll just grab the nearest. Given that the spirits can't actually move otherwise, this one simple and un-attributed skill lets me move the 'fort' a fair distance, allowing me to recycle spirits from previous fights, or adjust placements during them. This allows my turrets to get a better shot at the ongoing Assassinations if the action moves too far out of range, all giving me a huge amount of extra flexibility, and limited mobility where needed, during the fray. For longer distances, beyond, say one mini-map's worth, setting up fresh spirits seems easier.
Just when things were in danger of becoming too tranquil, the story proper got underway, and saw us being taken by Master Togo, to be introduced personally to Minister Cho, Minster for Cultural Affairs of the Canthan Empire, up at his mountain estate. Turns out that we're Togo's most promising students, which frankly bodes ill for Cantha, if you ask me. We'd only just got to the gate when Things Went Wrong, and it turns out that there's a plague on the loose, which turns ordinarily very minor bit-part NPCs with green map dots, into ravening psychotic madmen, with red ones. Sounds like our cue!
The ensuing mission, #1: Minister Cho's Estate, was pretty easy, and seemed more a guided walkthrough of missions in general, rather than an actual mission proper, with Master Togo conducting a running commentary to his other student, Yijo Tahn, about all the usual things we know how to do in missions; how to lure, how to draw on the minimap, how to deal with bosses, aggro radiuses, etc. Still, just because we've done similar before, doesn't mean everyone has, and for the main, the Master's Teachings seemed sound advice all the way through.
Mind you, I was somewhat relieved to receive the Master's Completion, saying all that. Factions seems to have pioneered many things that I only saw for the first time in Nightfall, including the triple-rank mission objectives. In this case, it's simply an extra timed objective, which we seemed to qualify for. Then followed a heart-wrenching cut-scene with a small child who saw the carnage before it happened, in his miiiiiiind! Some kind of prophet, I shouldn't wonder. Either that or some kind of flashbacks bought on by licking one frog too many. Does Cantha have Hekets?
Anyway, Master Togo (who would be so much cooler if voiced by the real Mr Miyagi) is giving the matter his Weighty Consideration, while we've been sent off to the more dangerous half of Shing Jea Island to complete our training. I suspect we'll be needed again quite soon...
(* Not some asinine vague racial slur - they really do wear towels wrapped around their heads. I guess the idea is that Ritualists see the Spirit Realm instead, and have no use for ordinary sight. Not me though - it looks daft, and the first thing I did was toggle 'Always Hide The Tea-Cozy. I miss my Mesmer Masques, which were suave, sophisticated, and cool! My Assassin friend, by contrast, loves their 'Hannibal Lector' mask, and won't take the damn thing off now! Stops them biting PUG people, I guess...)