I just finished my first Scarlet attack on an overflow.
It was epic in every sense.
When the event first started, no one had any idea as to what was going on. Commanders were shouting on the map giving contradictory orders, and we were just all confused, and just tried to do my own thing. I picked a direction, saw the first event, and went along with it. It was me and just one other guard trying to fight off an entire portal’s worth of enemies. We were getting pulverized until the nearby NPCs from the town swarmed out to help us …
Only to be crushed by Scarlet’s minions (normal NPCs against vets and champions… they didn’t have much of a chance). There were so many downed Charr, it was almost cinematic. In hindsight, I don’t think your portals would have spawned so closely to a town, but it definitely added something to the moment to see the NPCs respond in a way I would expect them to do so: defending their “homes” from hostile invaders.
That’s when the story started coming alive. The whole thing felt H.G.Well-esque. There’s something about witnessing these events showing up that made it better. In one instance, the small zerg I had following suddenly had a huge shadow over us. I think half of us stopped to look up – saw the airship – and then literally got parachuted on by what felt like a bajillion Aetherblades. We ambushed NPC bosses, fought from event to event, and all the while, the clock WAS ticking – as we’re reminded by the little thing in the UI. I normally hated timers, but somehow, this one wasn’t that bad.
Close to the end, a particularly nasty spawn with AR and Scarlet minions overlapped with each other (yet another unintended thing?). We had like four minutes left on the timer. The big zerg was coming back, but there were too many for the ~10 of us to handle. Out of nowhere, I saw in /say something along the lines of “Warband, roll out!” and suddenly an entire legion of color-coordinated Charr PLAYERS (I’m guessing an RP warband guild – a lot of their characters had some kind of lock in their name) showed up blasting their way through the mob. At that moment I sort of understood why RPers enjoy RPing – that was probably a big kitten heroes moment – the sort of things that makes stories come alive.
And then as if on cue, the Ascalonian Ghosts in the zone swarmed in, too. It was one thing to see players fight swarm with swarm or adding to the immersion, but to see the ghosts of Ascalon rise up from the ground, “FOR ASCALON”, and start “helping” us – that, was something else.
Three minutes later we got Scarlet. /cheers erupted around the map. And, as suddenly as they had came, the zone was silent again. I haven’t even finished looting before I realized that it was all over. :P
I’ve done most of the “hard content” of the game – AR achievements, high-level fractals, Arah, whatever you might want to consider hard. But I think to date, this is my fondest memory of GW2.
I get that it was sheer coincidence that the event just happened to trigger, and I just happened to have landed in overflow with an RP guild who somehow managed to load in sizable numbers at the same time. I recognize that yes, mechanically, we’re still moving around and killing stuff, but something happened. Something made the story come alive. It wasn’t the writing. It was the game itself.
I guess what I’m trying to say, Anet, is that my sense of wonder have been rekindled by the random way in which your events have interacted. I don’t think I’ve changed much since last August, but I felt like that level 8 mesmer seeing Shadow Behemoth spawn for the first time in Queensdale again, and it’s a good feeling – one that I haven’t felt for quite some time playing any game, period.
Thank you.
