My Review of the Southsun Living Story

My Review of the Southsun Living Story

in Last Stand at Southsun

Posted by: Johnson.3874

Johnson.3874

Hello everyone, players and members of the Anet team.

Now that all the steps of the Southsun Living Story have been revealed, I thought I would submit a review about the events we’ve been through. Let’s just say it’s both a way to give some feedback to the dev’ team, and also a way to discuss it with other players. I’ll try to be as thorough as possible, and as brief as possible.

/!\ Disclaimer /!\ As usual in this kind of topic, this is a personal opinion, and I don’t pretend to have “the truth” about anything. This is just my feeling on how things went, want I liked and what I disliked, along with some suggestion on how things could have been better. If your opinion is different, feel free to express it, as long as you stay polite and respectful. Humor is also a good thing, but only to the point where it doesn’t become mockery or trolling. Thank you.

Let’s just lay out how I intend to do this thing. First, I think it would be a good thing to talk about general things, like environment, story and achievements. Then, I will go over the events and the local wildlife (yeah, the mobs). Finally, I will talk about the Dungeons, and the general feeling of this living story, how implicated I felt in all of this.
I will make three different posts, each about one point, so it’s more readable (and also because I have a lot to write, and the message length must be less than 5001 !)
If you intend to go through all of it, please take your time to read, so you don’t get sick by the end of it

1) General stuff, story & achievements
2) Events and local wildlife
3) Dungeons and General Feeling

(edited by Johnson.3874)

My Review of the Southsun Living Story

in Last Stand at Southsun

Posted by: Johnson.3874

Johnson.3874

1) General stuff, story & achievements

Here we are again, Southsun Cove round 2. I think it’s a good thing we’re back in this part of the World, because this area always left me with a feeling of unfinished business. It was just another place were some events took place, but not like a real part of Tyria.
I could say it was kind of lazy from Anet to use some previous content like that but :
a. It feels like they did not forgot about it, which is a good thing,
b. The changes that were made were a lot more consequent that some annoying sonic radars and dead PNJs all over the place, with a hint a solo instances here and then (Yeah, I’m talking about the Flame and Frost stuff).

The island is the same, with the same environment, which is pretty good looking. Really different atmosphere depending on which part of the island you’re on. I like the way it looks, this dangerous paradise feeling, so great job here.

The story in itself was not the most interesting thing I’ve seen, but I reckon it’s hard to feel implicated without having intrusive story-telling mechanics that interfere too much with the player progression in Tyria.
My only regret is that we weren’t able to choose a “side” a bit more. The boons you get from talking to the consortium/settler representative were just used for achievements that you could do in less than 30 minutes (and after that, it’s not a choice, 300% MF ? Yeah count me in!) and I think it would have been better if we could choose between two options (like for the personal story, when you have two possibilities to move forward in your story) leading to different exclusive titles, for example, “Consortium supporter” or “Settler Protector”, and you could only get one, with the general outcome of the story being the same.

The achievements were okay, not too hard to get, and the fact that you had 11 samples where only 10 were required was a good thing for people who didn’t want to bother with the jumping puzzle. I would really like to see more of that in the future, where you have one objective, but different way to complete it, that’s really good thinking.
Aside from that, I really felt that this sample thing was a bit lame. The “detection” skill was near useless, and didn’t help at all to locate where the samples were. I would have hoped for something a bit more like the Mad King events, where you had hints on where to find the next pages of the book, and you could find them through logic and your knowledge of Tyria. In Southsun it was more like “Let’s spam that skill…. 1… nothing… 1 nothing… 1… still nothing. How do they want me to find that stuff ? What am I supposed to do ? Does it do anything anyway ? Meh, let’s go on Dulfy”.

The crab toss activity was pretty good, but in the future you should think a bit more of a matchmaking thingy, so people new or bad at the game could still have a good time without being run over by more experienced players. I had no trouble with that, and I got my CrabToss achievements pretty quickly, but my wife gave up really fast because she felt like she would not get a grasp on that game ever (and trust me, in other parts of the game such as WvW, she is wayyyy better than me, so skill has little to do with this).

The number of achievements to unlock was reasonable, the only remark that I could make is that it’s too bad that all of them were integrated at once. I don’t know how hard it is to add them, but to make them invisible, or to add only the ones that we could complete would have been a bit better. This way, you don’t have to wonder which one you can do now, and which one is for later on. And also, you don’t get spoiled

(second point in next post)

My Review of the Southsun Living Story

in Last Stand at Southsun

Posted by: Johnson.3874

Johnson.3874

2) Events and local wildlife

This is where things get a little uglier. The events themselves are quite okay. Defend stuff, kill things, collect eggs… that’s the regular events we know. But two things are really, really bad in my eyes : The way events repeat themselves, and the way they scale.

Event repetition : There’s not much logic in it. I will not go over the fact that in every part of Tyria, the “world is constantly changing and adapting to what you do” tend to lose its charm once you understand how it works, and how chain-events are constructed.
In Southsun, it’s just random events happening all over the island, and you running back and forth, hoping to be there on time, or not being able to get away for the screen for more than 5 minutes if you don’t want to go back to your character being dead because some consortium guys decided to pop out of nowhere to beat up some settler. Nothing is really connected, and you don’t have the same sense of progression that you get in Arathi Highlands for example, where you help your allies by slowly conquering camps from West to East, making your way toward the final boss.
Like I said, here it’s just a game of running back and forth, mostly staying in the center/North East of the island. You never get to progress toward the Karka’s Nest in the western part of the island, giving the feeling that half of the island is useless, or just a part where you go once a day to check if there’s some ori/ancient sapling nodes, and never step foot here again for the rest of the day.

Events scaling : This is another major downside, and it’s also true for all of Tyria. The way the events scale is too often : “more players = more monsters”. Sometimes one or two Veterans. And that’s it. So, if you happen to get there in mid event, and you make your way toward a camp coming from the wrong direction, you just get steamrolled by 30 mobs attacking the camp. No chance to survive, even though you could easily kill every last one of them by taking 4 or 5 at a time. I feel like it’s a really bad game mechanic, because mobs don’t get any stronger, they don’t have more HP, they’re just more numerous. Moreover, this tend to create a lot of lag or huge frame drop rate, and the fights become a huge mayhem where you just try to tag as many mobs as possible, without really doing anything that could help your teammates. And if you’re a melee class (such as warrior or thief), you will tag a lot less mobs than if you are an AoE class.
I think it would be way better to have less mobs, with a lot more HP. This way, the fights would be clearer, longer, and so it would give more time to players to tag the enemies, and you could have a chance to regroup with the players already doing the events, without getting rolled over by a sudden pop.

About the local wildlife, even though most of the mobs are a bit annoying (nasty Reef Rider stealing my boons !!), they are okay… except for the Reef drakes. Geez, those ones. Anet nerfed the confusion condition in PvP, but kept it the same in PvE. And these guys… they stack WAY TO MUCH confusion. And it lasts for FIFTEEN BLOODY SECONDS. What the heck ? I can easily solo every veteran Karka on this island, but 4 or 5 of these drakes kill me in a matter of seconds, even though I have 3 different ways to clear my conditions. This is completely broken. And even if you try to be patient, time your attacks, stun and interrupt as much as possible, and wait when you have to much condition… this confusion lasts for 15 seconds, so you can’t do anything ! And by the time it’s almost over, you get more stacks, renewing the duration of the condition. That’s plain silly.

On another subject, I was a bit frustrated with most of the Veteran Karkas attacks. Most of their attacks require you to dodge two times in a row. That means to used up all of your endurance at once. If you dodged something else earlier, or if there’s another enemy involved that forced you to dodge, you’re done, and you’re gonna get hit by the next attack. I’m talking about those annoying shockwaves, the one they send by 2 when they jump – which is really weird, 1 jump = 2 separate successive shockwaves – and the ones that come by 5 when they hit the ground with their legs.
Also, their “roll thing” is a bit bad, especially when they get stuck in a tiny coral, which makes them stay in the same place. Their roll should stop as soon as they hit something. This is as logical as the fact that they can evade your attacks by “carapacing”. I would understand if they block my attack, but the evades just make no sense at all.

(Third and last point in next post).

My Review of the Southsun Living Story

in Last Stand at Southsun

Posted by: Johnson.3874

Johnson.3874

3) Dungeons and General Feeling :

Now for the last part, let’s discuss the instances, and the overall feeling of the living story.
I was a bit disappointed by the dungeon with Carnach. It was really small. So small. The mines idea were pretty good, and the fight with Carnach was okay. But once again, it felt underachieved. I finally get to meet the infamous Carnach, and I don’t get to talk to him for one bit. He just jump on me, and we have to fight. That was a bit disappointing.
Maybe I could have been trapped in that cave along with him, and we got attacked by some crazed Karka, and we would have had to help each other to escape. Meanwhile, he could have stated his motivations to me, and why he did what he did. And in the end, we would still have to fight because he wouldn’t change his mind. Right now, it feels like he is the great bad guy of the story, but I kick his butt in less than 5 minutes, and we never see him again.
I took the exploration mode with subdirector Null as some sort of “bonus event”, as I had absolutely no idea what the hell he was doing here, and why he would attack me.
Same goes for the Karka Queen. One second I’m doing an event in some part of the island, and out of nowhere she pops near the settler camp. I get there, get a lot of lag and a lousy frame rate, and down she goes and… that’s it. It felt a bit rushed. No pursuit like the previous event that took place on Southsun Cove. No use of all the space available. It’s a bit disappointing. We could have chased her along with the Lion’s Guard toward her nest, and killed her near the lava pool, as a reference to the previous event some of us did. This could have resulted in a decreased population of the nearby Karkas for instance, and thus, when they get back, you know that she will come again soon. I don’t know how much work that involve, but it would have felt better that just another event like the Champion Karka near the South Camp.

Let’s conclude with the overall feeling about this living story. I’ve been criticizing a lot of things, so you would think I hated it. Well that’s not the case. It’s still free content, and it’s still more content. So I liked the fact that there were new things to do. I liked the fact that I went back to someplace I had already visited, and had new things to do. I could have liked it a lot more if the events were better paced, and a bit more story driven.
The answer to that is “Yeah, but it takes time ! It costs money ! And it’s not THAT easy to do !”. I know. So my answer to that is “I’m not paying a monthly fee. If I have to wait one month between two episodes of the living story, so things are a bit more worked out, and better shaped, I don’t mind, I’ll still be there for it”. Also, I wouldn’t mind waiting a bit more between each phase of the events, so the dev team can take time to test everything they add. I think that you have to make a choice between the people that always want more and more content, and that will go through it in less than a day, whether it took you 1 week or 1 month to make it, and the people that want better content, well paced and without bug. I don’t want to create a war between those two different thinking people, but I know that I belong to the second group.

Anyway, my final conclusion is that I liked this living story better than the Frost and Fire. So if you keep it up like that, the next one will be even better. So, take your time, make it good, and I’ll be there to tell you all the things I liked.

Cheers everyone, thanks for reading and for your opinion if you want to share it !

My Review of the Southsun Living Story

in Last Stand at Southsun

Posted by: Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046

+1 [more letters]

54 infractions and counting because a moderator doesn’t understand a joke when he/she sees it.
E.A.D.

My Review of the Southsun Living Story

in Last Stand at Southsun

Posted by: ricky markham.8173

ricky markham.8173

there are points i agree with you and a few i dont. i totally agree with you about the achievements they werent too tough to get your prizes and there was multiple ways to get them you werent forced to do stuff you didnt care about. i agree with the confusion arguement. i felt there was way too much of that but the rest of the wildlife and events i thought were well done. i got steamrolled a few times by megamobs but that happens other places too so it doesnt bother me and im sure they wont be so nasty when they scale down. as for the karka attacks i say keep them like they are so you should know to save your dodges for the most important stuff now

null and canache left me feeling unimpressed for final event especially after f and f final dungeon and i dont care for using other things but my skills in big fight makes me feel really less important. so the bomb mechanic wasnt that great in my book. as for the karka queen leave her just like she is . she is a great world event just like the other with a nice chest at the end. too many people camp those so having another of these doesnt hurt no need to make it more a pian in the rear so no one ends up doing it like the others.

as for your feeling dont worry i loved it all but giving feedback is good helps if the devs know what we like and dislike so they make better content down the road