As you should all know, last weekend the GuildWars Nightfall preview event began and hundreds of thousands of people joined in to play. For you to get a small idea of how many people joined the event, in GuildWars when you go to a town or outpost, they are organized in “districts”, much like the lobbies in Phantasy Star Online, or in other words, it groups around 50 players or so, and when that number goes over 50, another lobby is created.

In Nightfall, when I clicked to see how many districts there were, in the German section there were over 30 districts. So you can see, the overall event was a major success.

The game is set on an “African” stage, or at least in the beginning areas. So if you’ve ever seen videos of BBC or from the Discovery Channel, you’ll certainly know what I’m talking about. Deep jungles, deserted plains, deserts, marshes. If you have ever played the first campaign of GuildWars: Prophecies, you’ll quickly recognize this as a mix between the Meguma and Crystal Desert areas.

Unlike the previous chapter of Guild Wars (Factions), Nightfall brings many changes to the game interface and adds new features that will help improve the overall experience and put you in charge of not only your character, but also recruited hero characters that you can control and equip to your liking.

You can 3 types of behavior to your character, by default they are all aggressive, however, if you put, for example, a Healer as a defensive unit she will prove to be much more valuable than in the previous expansions. Besides defining each Heroes’ behavior you can also define which skills they use and weapons they’ll have equipped by equipping some of your own weapons from your backpack.

So I guess that there will finally be a better use for all those rare weapons you collected but are unable to use with your main character.

And if that still wasn’t enough control over your Heroes, you can make them use their skills by selecting them during combat.

Although managing all those heroes might be confusing at first, due to the improved behaviors they have you won’t have to interfere many times with their actions and just concentrate on your own.

The bottom line is basically that every Guild Wars player is eagerly waiting for this game, not much for it’s new continent and items, but mostly due to it’s new interface and the Hero system. So if you’re interested in a good, massive multiplayer RPG where you don’t just interact with players or dumb NPCs, Guild Wars Nightfall might be right up your alley. And of course, one of the best features of the game is that you don’t pay to play it.

Personally, I’ll hold out a bit more until the price drops, and then I’ll consider purchasing it if I still play the game, but for right now, I’m anxious about getting Guild Wars Factions which should be arriving at my doorstep in few days.