Nightfall has ended...

...let us welcome the new dawn.

Thanks to an off-site meeting yesterday, I got home early enough to take on the last two Nightfall story missions with a will to power through them.

(Warning: Spoilers abound in the following paragraphs, but I must be one of the last people on Earth to not have experienced the Nightfall campaign by now.)

I'd previously ran afoul of the The Gate of Madness twice. The first time was simply trying to play through fairly and cap altars by physically going there. After Shiro decimated both my party's monks into 60% DP, I gave up and tried the exploit route of flagging heroes and henchies to cap the altar bonuses first. The second time around went rather smoothly, and Shiro went down after a 5 minute battle, thanks to the god buffs and precision abuse of his aggro radius. Except that I had been so on edge to get my Shiro battle done and over with, I didn't leave enough time for the conversation to play and aggro'ed Shiro so fast that the Lich Lord bugged out and remained a friendly green. That made me throw in the towel for the night, after making raspberry faces at the Lich and getting no response.

Third time lucky. By now, my NPC force and me knew how to dodge all the unnecessary battles and arrowed straight in, killing only where needed. Shiro took longer to go down, maybe 10 minutes, not sure why. Lousy placement of my heroes, perhaps. Having given enough time for the Lich Lord to turn a happy angry red, he went down shortly after.

Truly, after that battle, the Abaddon fight was just the cherry on top of dessert. Plunging into Abaddon's Gate felt great. If there's any company that knows how to tell a good dramatic story, I think ArenaNet's GW takes the cake. It's just all that buildup of 15+ storyline missions and cutscenes that add up to the final climatic moment. Approaching Abaddon feels almost cathartic. This is it. You're going to save the world. And the length of the map is such that just before you get bored walking, you see Him. The big ugly kahuna and his chains.

The battle was quite methodical, but not without some difficulty, so I'd have to peg it as just right. I could have died if I slackened, but it wasn't omgwtfbbqShiro type of unfair. Repeated the cycle about 5-6 times, left hand, right hand, head, and boom... the god dies, mission complete, in 13:48, which netted me a Masters. Very nice.

The epilogue after was the cream on top of the cherry. I liked that Kormir became the new God of Secrets. It felt...world-changing.

I had been all prepared for either Kormir or Morgahn to do some type of over-the-top heroic sacrifice and give up their lives to take down Abaddon, but the ending was very good, with the new Kormir god statue. See, throughout the entire GW game, it's been established in a million different immersive ways - statues, skills, etc - that there are these Five Gods. Lyssa, Melandru, Dwayna, Grenth and Balthazar. To learn about the secret Sixth God Abaddon that they bound was neat in terms of lore development. And then, you CONTRIBUTE to the making of a NEW god, which is seven kinds of awesome.

I believe that is the power of the GW storyline. The set up and pay off is spread out so far, it feels like the scope of the Babylon 5 universe.

Gwen, of course, is one of those common threads. You meet her pre-searing Ascalon in what appears to be an innocent tutorial quest to get her flute back. Post-searing Ascalon and Factions and Nightfall, you find bits and pieces of her belongings, tapestry shards and what-not. In Eye of the North, you see her "all growed up." And in various bonus missions and side quests, you can explore more of the background and lore surrounding her story.

Having read further along into Guild Wars 2 hype, I admit to shivers of pure awesome dread as I played through Nightfall, knowing that my freeing of Palawa Joko (neatly foreshadowed by a little play at the princes' party you attended) and helping him build up his undead army in order to defeat Varesh, is merely replacing one tyrant for another. In GW2, Palawa Joko rules the lands of Elona with an iron undead grip - how much do you want to bet that eventually, in a GW2 expansion, our characters will be able to visit and fight him? That would exceed seventeen kinds of awesome.

And I must end here, for fear of running out of numbers for the kinds of awesome Guild Wars is.