Guild Wars 2

I’ve been offline for a week, wondering what I was missing with this living story. I played through the mystery today, and I enjoyed it. What impressed me most was the film noir style cut scene with the detective and Thackery. Where did this come from!? It was totally unexpected, and very fun. I love how playful it was, a different kind of creativity in the game.

I was sure there’d be another thread about it but I couldn’t find one except the “Finally good writing” one. I can’t say “finally” because I haven’t been playing long enough, but I loved this bit of the story and the detective character.

I loved the cutscene also, but it did seem so very stereotypical of film noir — the first person terse yet witty narration, the stranger who walks through the door, the other stranger who emerges from the shadows, the closeups, the exchange of money… everything was rote.

Don’t get me wrong, the addition of GW2’s paint style animatics made this one something special, and I took the stereotype presentation as part of the humor. But I don’t think this would work well anywhere else in the game. It’s just too … ordinary.

Regardless, I still wish I could watch it again. It was fun and made me smile.

It’s true, it wasn’t particularly revolutionary within the film noir genre. I guess it was just fun within the GW2 genre, and unusual to find in a fantasy rpg.

It kind of reminded me of the Buffy musical episode, not because of music etc but because I thought, ‘What the heck!? Huh… It works!’

Please Anet do future content with such style as this one. And I do not necessarily mean film noir just something more interesting than the boring stiff talking head stuff you did for the personal story.