Guild Wars 2

I wanted to post this because it is not readily apparent in the game. ArenaNet has provided a convenient way to see the ending of the Scarlet storyline without needing to defeat the bosses in LA and the holograms on the ship. You won’t get the rewards from those fights, of course, but I imagine there are players out there who would like to know about this.

I want to thank Monadproxy.3489 for being the one to first point this out to me. Get a Spinal Back item and go to the unmarked portal by the diving goggles in LA. Wearing the back item will allow you to use the portal and go to the ending instance of the story, Scarlet’s End.

I think this was a brilliant idea to give players the option to see the story conclusion without requiring them to do the group events. If a player wants all the rewards and achievements from the LA fights and hologram group encounter, they can go ahead and do it. But if you just want to see the story and don’t care about getting all the loot, then this option allows those people to see it.

What’s more, the design of the final Scarlet encounter is clearly more about the presentation of the story, not providing a challenging, face-planting encounter. And that is what it should be in order to make the story presentation more dramatic. Dying multiple times when trying to see the end of a story always dilutes the drama of it and turns it into a grind but that it what most MMOs do.

ArenaNet has found an excellent balance IMO. They offer the challenging group content for those who want the rewards and the feel of ‘earning’ the story. But the actual finale of the story is a straightfoward instance that is really more of an interactive cutscene rather than a grind-inducing fight. And they offer a method to access just the instance as a straightforward way for even the most casual player to share in the lore and story so every GW2 player can be part of the shared community experience.

This is also very helpful if you’ve done all the LA fights, the hologram fights and beaten Scarlet and your client crashes in the middle of cinematic ending lol

My biggest complaint is that the existence of this portal is not made at all clear in the game. I only discovered it because I saw it mentioned on the forums. There is an achievement that is supposed to direct people to the portal but that is a horrible way to inform players about this useful option. I can’t understand how ArenaNet can have the foresight to include something this useful and then decide to hide it behind vague hints rather than just telling players about it.

Nonetheless is it very nice to see. I very much liked the ending instance and how ArenaNet has found a way to combine challenging gameplay encounters (for those who want them) while still being able to present a dramatic story. I hope we see more of this in the future.

The portal is literally and figuratively a backdoor that is designed to skip a portion of the event that has been proven to be buggy. Of course its existence is better than nonexistence, but it’s quite unfortunate such mechanism is necessary. The flawed (and shifting) paradigm of the Knights and the Hologram fight compromises what would otherwise be a truly epic and satisfying final installment of Scarlet’s madness. I hope in the future ANet can design and implement content without the necessity of such backdoor for us players to experience what they want us to experience.

That would possible have had some merit, if not for the fact that the backdoor have been there since the update went live. Not something they added in order to bypass “bugged content”.

The thing is some people want to be able to experience the story, but would be unable to do so due to having lag/too bad computers/whatever, and now ArenaNet decided that they should still be able to see the end without having to move/upgrade/whatever.

People have been complaining about story being locked behind group-encounters since the start of the LS more or less, so I really don’t see the issue with ArenaNet adding an alternate route.

But then again, if there is something that can be complained about, people will complain.

I am aware that the backdoor was there since the start. I used it when “the current bug of the day” was attunement not spawning correctly after defeating all 3 knights. Let’s take a look at the list of following iterations of kittens that prevent people from experiencing the whole LS.

• The bug where Prime Hologram becomes invulnerable and refuse to split.
• The bug where Knights stopped dropping loots altogether, and people loses incentive to kill the Knights, in turn causes less chance of fighting the hologram.
• The design flaw where people on Breachmaker may not wanting to contribute to the hologram fight for achievement.
• The current situation with Knights being significantly harder to defeat, in turn causes less chance of fighting the hologram.
• The bug(?) where blue Knight can be healed to full health by Mender mobs, in turn causes less chance of fighting the hologram.

… all which makes me wonder if the backdoor’s existence has become an excuse from ArenaNet properly tuning their content. I’m all good for giving people choice on different things, include the choice of skipping bugged/badly design content such as in this case. But it looks like ANet is not doing enough for those who wants to experience their LS in full glory, “as intended”.