Guild Wars 2

Ok, came in this thread to write about the new cutscene… holy kitten!!! It completely blew me away. I love Jory, she is so slick and cool. Her model is totally sick. The cutscene was very noir-like and I absolutely loved it. MORE PLEASE.

Oh, and the effigy ceremony was also excellent – Kiel shouting orders at everyone and lots of things moving, very energetic and alive. MORE!

I don’t mind the story is human-centric at the moment because previous stories were so Charr and Norn-filled, it made me cough up a hairball. Meanwhile Asura dominate virtually every other event out there (Halloween, Wintersday, Lost Shores, etc…)

I wouldn’t mind a future living story dealing more with Sylvari though. They were built up so much per-release, and then in the personal story they were used as bland, disposable tools to fight Risen. And Trahearne.

I don’t really count Canach to represent Sylvari since he is just a crazy hipster.

Face it… We Sylvari really need more love at the moment!

Kain Francois.4328:

Face it… We Sylvari really need more love at the moment!

Well you did have the personal story and Trahea—- oh come on now don’t start crying like that!

The Film Noir style in the cutscene was hilarious and fitting. +1 to anet for that

hell, +5

I could almost imagine Marjory going Tracer Bullet on people at the scene

Shiren.9532:

what happened to all the males in Tyria?

I’ll tell you what happened. They got killed.
R.I.P. Theo Ashford.
R.I.P. Garrot Ambercowl

We didn’t get a well written villain with a real personality. I mean, this one was all “I’m not evil, I helped” and then “Of course I’m evil because kitten ”. Maybe we could still see more and better writing come next part, but I’m not holding breath.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I’m excited to finally see interesting characters that have some attitude. Finally a story with a bit of an edge. Assassinations, people dying. I love it! Where was this writing throughout the personal story? We need more of this, this is good stuff.

Let me start by saying that the entire effigy ceremony was excellent. I loved the quick transition between cut scene and playable, where the dialogue continued straight into the game. And the chaos that erupted really had a lot of energy to it. Npc’s running all over the place, orders being yelled, it was great. The timing was good too. No weird pauses in between dialogues, or dialogues overlapping. It all ran smooth and felt fast paced. I totally got into the experience.

This only improved with the new cut scene where we meet Marjory. I love the style of the cut scene, and it feels a lot like the old cut scenes from Thief the dark project. It is great to see this style again. I also noticed how no 3d models were used, which always was an odd mix in the personal story. By making the entire cut scene 2d, including characters, it just looks way better. The dialogues also have a lot more humor to them, and I really enjoyed the film-noir feel of it all.

Kasmeer to me is a bit of an enjoyable airhead. I wonder if perhaps that is just on the surface. Maybe she is really a lot more clever than people assume. But it is just funny when ever she shows up. She is a character I enjoy, maybe for all the wrong reasons.

I never liked Logan, because he just has no personality what so ever. But surround him with characters that ARE interesting, and he becomes tolerable.

But then comes the investigation, and again this is such a strong plot-driven experience. This is what I wanted to see with the living story. Twists and turns, murder and mystery. Keep it up. I’m looking forward to seeing more. Now hopefully it won’t get predictable with Mai Trin being the villain. Because that would be way too easy. I hope it is a distraction, and in a twist it turns out she isn’t a villain at all.

Let me also say that it is great to get some more use out of Divinity’s Reach. That city needs more adventures, and it is great to see the story take us into the darker corners of it. I’m hoping the next installment of the investigation takes us further around the city, to many new places we haven’t been before.

I don’t know what problems you people have, but I have enjoyed my personal story and don’t see anything wrong with the writing and plenty of people die.

Eladriel.7295:

I don’t know what problems you people have, but I have enjoyed my personal story and don’t see anything wrong with the writing and plenty of people die.

Experiences may differ depending on what race you picked. I did the human personal story, and it was really bland. Just to give an example, there’s a point in the human personal storyline where the involvement of the White Mantle is suspected. So Logan suggests setting a trap, a really obvious trap. And then you wait for them, with Logan being the bait… and the White Mantle show up… and they fall for it…. YAWN. It was as if no attempt had been made to do anything exciting. No twists or turns, no characters with enjoyable character flaws or a mean streak. Just villains and good guys.

And you’d think when writers clearly borrow from Game of Thrones (Trial by combat, seriously?) they would also learn from that example, by not making everything so black and white. Villains should sometimes be gray, you shouldn’t always be sure if they ARE villains. And good guys should make mistakes, and fall from their pedestal every now and then (Trahearne anyone?).

So that is why I’m pleasantly surprised by the latest Living Story developments. The writing is a big improvement from what we’ve seen before. That doesn’t mean there’s not more room for further improvement. Because like I said, Mai Trin being the villain was way too obvious. And I hope someone on the writing team reads this, because I seriously hope that there is a twist to Mai Trin. If she’s just a villain, that would be kind of lazy writing.

I’m somewhere in the middle of this latest Dragon Bash Living Story entry so I can’t speak for its entirety quite yet, but so far I’m having an absolute BLAST with it (particularly with the murder-mystery aspect)!

The murder mystery was a nice change of pace. The film noir NPC was amusing and it did give you a feeling of being an investigator.

Overall this was a nice content update and an interesting way to introduce the new faction of enemies.

The flow of the story is great and it feels that Anet somehow hired a professional movie director because the scenes are edited very well and the voice acting is light years better that the previous story — that’s for sure.

Kudos to the one who took charge of the director responsibility. Great job!

I enjoyed this “lead up” to the new content. It seemed more like WiK (GW1) to me where you got to experience lore through cut scenes and instances specifically for that story. It seems like it’s been harder to work in this type of personal feel into open world living story content.

I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate the new cut scenes, however. The personal story cut scenes with 2 NPCs talking to each other are pretty boring. We lost something between GW1 and GW2 when it came to cut scenes, IMO.

Kain Francois.4328:

I don’t mind the story is human-centric at the moment because previous stories were so Charr and Norn-filled, it made me cough up a hairball. Meanwhile Asura dominate virtually every other event out there (Halloween, Wintersday, Lost Shores, etc…)

That’s pretty much what I was thinking…

Going through personal story, after the 1-30 arcs (which are naturally going to be ‘your own race’ centric) humans get a bit of a show in the Whispers and Vigil 30-40 arcs, but after that they get completely overshadowed by charr, asura and sylvari. Even when you get to Orr, the ancient holy city of the human gods where humans should have a natural edge in knowing what’s going on and how to turn the powers in the city against Zhaitan – or at least deny them to Zhaitan – but no, it’s Trahearne that has all the knowledge and asura and charr that provide the solutions to all the cathedrals. This becomes particularly evident in the Cathedral of Silence step, where the story-writers couldn’t even let a priestess of Grenth invoke one of the Reapers without putting in an asura to steal all the credit!

Halloween went a bit into human history, but in the end it was an asura who saved the day.

Lost Shores had the Consortium, an organisation that, while multiracial, was founded by the asura.

Wintersday? Asura again.

Flame and Frost and the Southsun situation? Largely focused on the charr and norn. Yes, Kiel is human, but so far there’s been nothing in the story that makes it important that she’s a human – she could have played exactly the same role as any other race. Oh, and while it’s relatively minor, just to drive home a trend, don’t forget that the Consortium is asura-owned. Arguably some sylvari as well, since now it’s actually become significant, albeit tangentially, to the story that Canach is sylvari rather than simply being a(n ex-) Consortium employee.

From my perspective, it’s like the story writers have been so afraid of putting the spotlight on humans that they’ve overcompensated way too far in the other direction. There’s nothing left that’s special for humans – the things that should have made humans special and distinct have been ignored, deliberately removed, or even co-opted by other races.

Marjory’s investigation has essentially been the only time humanity has been more than a cameo since we hit level 40 or so. It’s their turn, cattit! And maybe some more sylvari after, hrrrmn?

But don’t worry, asura fans! Marjory couldn’t have done it without Tassi, and it’s been *SPOILER*ed that the Inquest are involved with the Aetherblades, so there’s still going to be your constant stream of Asura goodness!

Yup, can’t agree more with this post. Keep up the good work! =D

Are you kidding me? The writing is not that bad, but it definitely needs some improvement
First of all, stop with the lighthearted writing style. The story doesn’t feel serious when you put random humor and modern references in every single sentence of dialogue. I’m not saying the story should be serious busyness 100% of the time, but with this ironic dialogue everywhere i can’t understand which piece of information is actually important.
Also the writing team should understand how villains work. I’m sick of them introducing new kinds of enemies, only for us to squash them until the next update. Build an actual threat for once, and do it through storytelling and not frustrating dungeon mechanics.

Are people seriously complaining that a single cutscene in a game thats meant to be friendly to people of all walks of life and ages isn’t a ‘True’ hardboiled grim and gritty Noir Scene?

Of course its not.