Even with subtle audio and visual improvements, Eye of the North suffers from a short story and unbalanced mechanics.
Subtle visual improvements make the game world stand out better; audio presentation has been greatly improved; cinematic presentation in cut scenes feels much more involved instead of scripted; new armor sets are good looking.
Bad
Expansion suffers from frustrating balance issues; difficulty needs some major tuning; many of the quests are trial and error affairs; dungeon mechanic is shallow and not very interesting; main storyline is short; new areas added to the map feel tacked on instead of part of the existing world; monster AI is greatly improved, but Hero AI has been left untouched; Hall of Monuments feature is lackluster and disappointing; the arrival of Gwen is uninteresting due to pre-release advertising; new features like the brawling mini-game feel unfinished and suffer from frustrating mechanics.
Story
Serving as a bridge between the storylines of the original Guild Wars campaigns and Guild Wars 2, which is due sometime in 2008, Eye of the North tells the story of the struggle between the Dwarves, Asurans, Humans, and Sylvari against the terror of the Destroyers – an ancients race that’s rising from the depths of the world to destroy all living life. In all honesty, this seems to be a recurring plot mechanism for the writers at ArenaNet because it’s used to some extent in every campaign the company has done – it’s a major mechanic in Nightfall – and by now the idea that there’s some terrible monsters chasing you through the underground has become a little dull.
Perhaps the main reason this is so is because by the time the main storyline in Eye of the North is over, you’ll get the feeling that none of it was really fleshed out as well as it could have been. This is because the storyline is actually stretched out over four different branches. Early on in your adventure, you come across a point where you have to choose which branch to do first. Each branch pertains to a different race and each one of them are incredibly short in their own right. They’re over before you know it and once you hit the end, you’ll be hard pressed not to say to yourself, “That’s it?” If this isn’t enough to make you wonder why ArenaNet didn’t spend more time on Eye of the North, the entire expansion can easily be finished in less than a single day for those dedicated enough to Guild Wars to do so and even those that aren’t can finish it in two.
To the game’s credit though, the guys over at ArenaNet have actually learned one good thing and that’s how to finally make good cinematic scenes. While the first three Guild Wars campaigns were laden with scenes that felt scripted and lifeless, Eye of the North makes use of many more camera angles and characters expressions to get the job done. All of the cinematic scenes are started with a name like an act in a play and none of them make use of that “Meanwhile…” business that used so heavily before Eye of the North. These cinematic scenes feel much more involved and exciting.
Gameplay
The core Guild Wars gameplay remains wholly intact in Eye of the North and there are very few additions to the formula. One of those very additions is the Hall of Monuments. Billed as a way for your character’s achievements in Guild Wars to be brought over to your future characters in Guild Wars 2, the system ultimately feels rushed and incomplete. It also feels frustrating. Over the course of the storyline in Eye of the North, you’ll be given tapestries that you must hang on one of the five areas of the hall. Hanging a tapestry unlocks that area for use; they allow you to do things like display your favorite heroes or all of the miniature pets you’ve collected over the course of your adventure. The problem is that many of these are extremely frustrated and hard to make use of. The hero area for instance requires the heroes you want to display to be fully decked out in upgraded hero armor, which is extremely rare in the Nightfall game and many of the people playing the game don’t have it as it’s a unique item. Or the miniature area for example which customizes the miniature to whatever character places the miniature in the area – which makes it impossible afterwards for any of your other characters to use it.
The other main new feature in Eye of the North is the inclusion of a brawling mini-game. In this mini-game, your character must leave their party and generally venture into an area teeming with deadly monsters with only a burly dwarf by its side. The catch is that you’re only allowed to use skills that are specially designed for this brawling mini-game and for these skills to actually work, you must have sort of knuckle weapon equipped. The majority of these mini-game quests are master quests, so you can expect to die at least a few times going through them, but there’s another catch. When you die during the mini-game, a countdown starts and you’re told to spam a certain skill that raises your energy. If you manage to fill your energy bar completely for the timer runs down, you’ll stand back up with full health and energy and go back into the fray. There’s only one small problem – the timer countdown starts before you actually have access to the skill so most of the time you’ll only have 7 or 6 seconds to actually fill up your energy bar. For players with an extremely large energy bar, this can be and probably will be extremely frustrating.
For those players looking for a casual experience, Eye of the North really isn’t the place to go looking for it. The expansion suffers from some pretty bleak balance issues due to the changes in enemy AI and the lack of changes in Hero AI. One of the new features in Eye of the North is that the enemy Ai is now more capable of choosing and using more complicated skill builds and knowing which skills to use against more complicated human and hero builds. The problem in this is that the same changes were not made to the Hero AI. All through Eye of the North, Heroes will have a tough time combating these new changes are their AI simply isn’t strong enough to keep track of all of the new things that enemy AI is capable of doing. The result is a large unbalance and a lot of frustration as it’s now all too common that your entire party will wipe a large number of times trying to fight a certain group of well built enemies.
Presentation
In terms of visual presentation, Eye of the North adds some subtle additions that make many of the new areas stand out a little better than the areas in the previous campaigns. Many of the new areas are more expansive and snowy areas seem to have a few shader tweaks which makes the textures look more life-like. The downside to expansive areas though is that Guild Wars method of blurring distant object and the short draw distance for things like shrubs and grass now stands out like a sore thumb. There are lots of instances of object “popping” into view, which is a little distracting. Other than these small changes, the visual presentation is largely unchanged from previous campaigns.
On the audio side of things, Eye of the North adds selection chatter to NPCs. While this feature isn’t a groundbreaking addition, it makes thing feel a little bit more immersing. The music in Eye of the North also warrants special merit as it’s much more complex and rousing than the music featured in the previous campaigns.