Guild Wars 2

WoodenPotatoes pretty much has it right.
I’m 100% in agreement with him up until about 7 minutes in, thereafter I’m 50/50 on his views. He has a way of articulating the views of many players.

I can sum up the video for the impatient (like me):

Scarlet herself isn’t the problem, she’s just the latest failure of the GW2 writing staff – and at this point players just can’t take it anymore.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to say.

Personally, I fully agree.

To me, one of the most memorable moments of Personal Story was the gathering of all three “Orders of Tyria” on the docks of Lion’s Arch whereupon the veteran captains and masterful leaders of huge armies of exceptionally skillful people willing to selflessly sacrifice their lives for the good of the world proceeded to bicker like little children about pitiful garbage.

“Idiot balls for sale! Fresh idiot balls for sale! Get them while they’re still hot! You, sir, would you like an idiot ball? No? Too bad!”

Not even Scarlet has ever flushed so much of the story down the drain in a single roll of the DIE DIE DIE!

I think he’s on the right idea, but taking it too far. Yes, the story is still in its infancy and it’s not going to be great since ANet are still experimenting with this and learning through trial and error, but he’s saying Scarlet is fine, great even, it’s just the writing not doing her justice, which I disagree with.

Scarlet isn’t helping. The plot, even if done right, would still be repetitive and boring. I’m not that interested in the Joker, Harley Quinn, or any of those “clones” and Scarlet feels like the worst yet. Also, people bought this game for the Dragons, and while it could be debated they didn’t buy the game for the living story at launch, they expected dragon-based plot. Maybe it will turn to dragons soon, but so far it’s been a bit of a let down.

In summary, Scarlet is copping a lot of hate, but it’s not entirely undeserved. People don’t like her, and do not like her story, but he’s right, if they did Elder Dragons right off the bat (in the manner that the story has been so far), even MORE people would get annoyed and quit.

I saw this video and I don’t really agree. The Living Story doesn’t make much sense right now, yeah. We got the idea that something was building up with the Flame and Frost storyline and that just sort of petered out into what we have today, true. But Scarlet Briar is a terrible excuse for story and many people would be embarrassed to put something like that forward for public consumption.

I agree that a lot of the problem’s in the LS stem from the delivery system as opposed to the individual characters, particularly in that it’s supposed to be about the story but really does feel like the gameplay content gets designed first and the story gets shoehorned in later on. Scarlet does get a lot of blame for things that are really systematic. However, that doesn’t mean that Scarlet isn’t a bad character. The thing is, even a very well written character in the Joker archetype still doesn’t work well in a vacuum. They need a nemesis in the protagonist and, given the fact that we are essentially nameless and faceless by near requirement of the genre, we simply can’t be the sort of strong nemesis that the Joker type character requires to be successful.

He’s right about the general issues regarding the living story as a whole, but Scarlet is as bad a character as she’s been made out to be. It’s two problems that compound on each other to make things worse. If Scarlet’s backstory was believable and better thought out, it would absolutely be more tolerable than it’s been. Conversely, if the delivery of the living story was better, Scarlet still would make the plot offensively bad based purely on her backstory alone.

It’s not a one or the other issue like he makes it out to be.

I completely agree with the notion that the biggest fault in the “Scarlet Arc” lies in the delivery, not in the character herself.
However, regardless of her potential as a character, that doesn’t change the fact that she’s currently not fulfilling that potential and is bad.
I’m also not buying the whole “it’s better that they screw up this new stuff then the old stuff we’re all waiting for” because they have not screwed up everything and have showed that they are capable of putting out good stuff.
Flame and Frost (leaving aside the release pace being too slow), Dragonbash→aetherblades, Cutthroat Politics, and even the first part of Queen’s Jubilee were all good stories. They were then cheapened by receiving “Scarlet did it” as their tie up instead of getting a good ending.

He brings up the personal story too, but I feel that he made an unjust brush over of it as “bad”. The racial components of the PS were widely enjoyed, and the Order missions were quiet good. They even had good characters.
It was their poorly timed introduction of Traheran (seriously? right when our BFF dies?) who then takes the spotlight, and subsequent “let’s kill off any character that starts to look interesting” during the Pact portion of the story that was bad.

Arewn.2368:

subsequent “let’s kill off any character that starts to look interesting” during the Pact portion of the story that was bad.

I half agree. Trahearne had a couple of not-entirely-boring moments, but the peripheral cast were much more interesting. It was annoying to have them killed off, but even so their deaths had a strong emotional impact on me. I couldn’t care less about Tybalt for example, but when relatively minor characterTegwen died I was gutted. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly goes to show that Anet can do great writing.

Scarlet is poorly constructed and delivered.

The voice-actor should be tickled hard. I wanna hear her when she is tickled. “Die die die…. no more tickles!”

The writers did a shoddy job in developing her.

ANET Living Story team did even worse job in presenting her thru all the hype of 1 year anniversary.

Overall, it was a bad decision on ANET’s part that keeps lingering like Tequatl.

The only thing that i don’t like regarding Scarlet and LS is that it moves at a too slow of a pace.
By this time we should be more informed about Scarlet and the whole LS progress.
That way we can get behind it or leave it forever.
So increasing the pace of the story would greatly increase the anticipation for future releases.

Before even listening to his video, I was glad that Anet is working on Scarlet instead of another Elder Dragon, or doing Elona/Cantha content, because, I was pretty much convinced that Anet would have screwed up the living story no matter who was at the center of it. But the fact that suddenly they are going back to the elder dragons (according to some people), and, of course Scarlet is involved somehow…..yeah, that just raises a big, giant red flag warning for me. I really would rather not see the Living Story go up in flames because they were careless and inserted Scarlet into everything for the sake of inserting her into everything. She finally became more interesting in the last few living world releases, and that’s on the edge of a cliff. The way Anet handles her and the rest of the story over the next six months is probably going to either make people finally like it, or just give up on it.

WP articulates it much better than I ever could though, However! …His incessant whining about a certain boss battle and assuming that everyone’s opinion on it is the same as his, is starting to get a little annoying.

I’ll tell you why Scarlet is a bad character. She doesn’t have a defining moment that explains why she is the way she is. At conception, she walked away from the Pale Tree and her destiny without even asking what it was. She wandered around learning things with not clear goal or reason. She doesn’t form any emotional ties with anyone. She already displayed sociopathic tendencies long before the asuran plot device tinkered with her head. How am I suppose to believe she’s been altered by it when she’s practically acting the exact same way?

And then there are the things she’s done after that. It’s never really explained how she keeps the Molten Alliance from imploding. Scientific intellect surely isn’t going to work against racial, religious and social bigotry so her control over them doesn’t make sense. I have yet to hear where the Aether Blades came from, nevermind why they take orders from a plant that’s getting them slaughtered by the thousands. Why weren’t the watchwork shutdown at the first sign of tinkering? How was Scarlet able to gain control over them? Why didn’t anyone think to install a failsafe on them in case they ever got out of control? There are just too many unexplained plot holes. If Anet is trying to build mystery, they’re doing it wrong. You’re suppose to give a few facts that have several logical conclusions, not a clustered mess of info that seems like it could have been taken from several different games.

That moves us into Scarlet’s current plans, which are…. what? The biggest problem is we don’t know what the hell she’s trying to do besides some vague statements about toying with the fate of the world. How does throwing all three of her armies at random maps help this goal? How does cooking Faren do so?

To me, nothing about Scarlet makes much sense. Add to that her Villain Sue nature of having a hand in most of the current conflicts while always being able to escape whenever we get within half a mile of killing her. Plus look at ANY version of the Joker and you will see that he has moods. Sure he’s all grins and giggles most of the time but sometimes he’s angry and sometimes he’s sad. He even has moments where he hides his pain behind a smile. He’s a complex character with a realistic field of emotions. Scarlet, on the other hand, has one emotion: psychotically jovial.

On a related note, what made me stop playing is how the story is shifting away from the elder dragons. The logo of the game has a dragon in it. I expected to learn more about them and possibly get some setup for taking on another one. I want more than the too often repeated, “they are forces of nature.” At least explain what kind of natural force they most resemble. Hurricanes? Volcanoes? Tsunamis? Inquiring minds want to know!

As for Scarlet, I say ditch her. While it is possible to rewrite her as a more balanced character, asking the playerbase to accept her as is is asking way too much.

I think scarlet would be more interesting if we could have seen some releases (or at least a very interesting video.) Detailing how she got to where she was before the molten alliance (WHICH BTW FLAME AND FROST WAS AMAZING!) I don’t get why Anet wanted to put her behind what seemed to have a relatively good ending.

If we could have seen more than just a story on the wiki about how Caera (i think is how it is spelled.) Went from inquisitive tinkerer to all out mad woman we could be a little more interested in her motives. Or if we got a little teaser about what she actually did see (IE We see it through her eyes.) We could sympathize with her insanity right a little more. If I could get one cutscene where she isn’t jubilantly laughing her leaves off I would be ecstatic. Bring her down a notch… Ret con her back into her own story instead of into all other stories.

I hope I speak for a lot of people when I say that the villain at least needs to sound menacing. The cutscene in the tower made me mute the game. It just is unbearable.

I don’t really like Scarlet, but because of the devs failing to develop and deliver a compelling character, i’m actually glad that she’s kinda like a scapegoat. For example, I wouldn’t have liked it if they touched interesting characters from the GW1 lore, and deliver it like they do it like now.

Crossplay.2067:

On a related note, what made me stop playing is how the story is shifting away from the elder dragons. The logo of the game has a dragon in it. I expected to learn more about them and possibly get some setup for taking on another one. I want more than the too often repeated, “they are forces of nature.” At least explain what kind of natural force they most resemble. Hurricanes? Volcanoes? Tsunamis? Inquiring minds want to know!

Thats not entirely true. The recent living story is moving more in the directions of Dragons, it “explains” what happened and what they were experimenting with in the Thaumanova Reactor. The Inquest was experimenting with an energy they called “Chaos Energy” which was later discovered as Dragon magic(from no one else than Scarlet herself), they also discovered that this energy flows thoughout the whole world and with the new “do not touch” towers we can expect a little bit more story concerning the dragons.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Thaumanova_Reactor_Fractal You can reread this in this article it includes all dialogues from the Thaumanova Fractal.

Nikku.3562:

Arewn.2368:

subsequent “let’s kill off any character that starts to look interesting” during the Pact portion of the story that was bad.

I half agree. Trahearne had a couple of not-entirely-boring moments, but the peripheral cast were much more interesting. It was annoying to have them killed off, but even so their deaths had a strong emotional impact on me. I couldn’t care less about Tybalt for example, but when relatively minor characterTegwen died I was gutted. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly goes to show that Anet can do great writing.

To be honest, I didn’t find Trahearn that bad in the first place. He just came in at a bad time and then, as you mentioned, was the focus while surrounded by more interesting characters.

Trahearne might be a buttmonkey, but I don’t necessarially hate him either. At least he was nice to the player.