Disappointed with Zaitain?
Really there is no excuse for the fight being so poor…
I agree that fighting him toe to toe and killing him manually with tiny weapons would have been a little bizarre. But I figured out a middle ground that would have made the end boss battle just as epic.
So everything proceeds as it does now and rather than fall from the tower, the dragon of undeath leaps onto the glory of tyria’s hull and starts to drag it down with him. His last defiance against his would be slayers. What begins now is the final fight to hack away at his arms, which are weakened from the endless barrage to cut him from the side of the ship before he successfully drags you down with him.
There’s really no justification why this couldn’t be in game and it would immensely increase the value and feeling of the final boss.
<b>A writer should be especially aware of how awkward the ending was.</b> If this were a book, rather than a game, I would certainly be just as disappointed with it, if not more so. At least a writer isn’t constrained by game code and mechanics. And on top of it, regarding the part of your post I bolded, Zhaitan was unfortunately the easiest part of Arah to deal with, and I played it before it was nerfed, too.
But even with the constraints they have, with skilled writing and game design innovation, they could have made that ending far better than it was. I played the original Guild Wars, too. They pulled the endings off well in the original in three campaigns and an expansion, where they were even more limited by their medium.
Also, your post unfortunately comes across as a bit condescending. You do not need to be a writer to be able to realize that, from a game and a story-telling perspective both, the death(?) of Zhaitan is stunningly anticlimactic.
At the end of the day, when all is said and done, they really dropped the ball with Zhaitan in the eyes of a great many players. If you like it, great for you, but implying that others “just don’t get it” because they’re not writers/younger than you/whatever is a little obnoxious and people will not react well to it. As I’m sure you can now see.
So you want to talk about condescending. How would you know what a writer would or wouldn’t think, particularly because not every writer is going to think the same…and this is my point.
I’m expressing an opinion and people are telling me I have no right to have this opinion and when I respond someone calls ME condescending.
See, I just stated an opinion on why I “personally” wasn’t disappointed with the ending. I saw it as part of something larger. And yes, I am a writer. I’ve been published. I’ve made money writing. I look at this as a story, and I play games for the story.
Do you know how certain games like Mass Effect have different difficulty levels. Some people jack those levels all the way up, because they want a challenge. Some people use the easy setting because they want the story. I don’t care about the arcade aspect of games as much as some of you. From a story perspective, the ending was fine.
Now, could it have been done better? Undoubtedly. But that’s not what people are saying. They’re asking if you were disappointed. I wasn’t. Saying that I have to be because I’m a writer is about as condescneding as you can get.
It’s far more condescending to say that my opinion has been formed strictly because I’m giving Anet a free pass, rather than admitting that someone can have a subjectively different opinion.
Maybe I come off as condescending because people are telling me I can’t possibly like the end because they don’t. It’s a silly proposition.
I never said the end couldn’t have been stronger. I did say I felt the whole dungeon felt epic. That’s because to me, the feeling I get from playing a game is never derived from a boss fight. Nor do I see why it would necessarily have to be.
1 out of 3. Great visuals, but poor storytelling and poor gameplay. Hope the next one is better, because the Zhaitan fight felt like it was phoned in.
The boss fight was epic…………………..FAIL.
I would have prefered if the battle continued on the ground after he lost his wings.
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I found it to be a fun dungeon except for the very last part where you spam 2 to win.
I still found it enjoyable though that’s probably because I Just wanted to get it over with since arah story was all I needed for dungeon master.
you know something? I enjoyed it. simple as that. I can’t tell you why, I just remember that I enjoyed it. in fact, I’ve been wanting to do it again.
To make it worse, at last step of YOUR personal story, you get stuck watching dialogue sessions where another player (the first to enter in the dungeon) replaces you in your greatest last act of glory.
Given how disappointing the story missions as a whole are, is it really a surprise the ending will prove disappointing as well? As our glorious general of blandness prophesied constantly, “This won’t end well.”
…and it didn’t.
Kaschen, Engi, Nerfed Spec
Devona’s Refugee, recently arrived to F.Aspenwood
(ideally each player would have separate cut scenes btw but im using the system as it is now)
That was the other thing I abhorred. Why oh why didn’t they implement it so that we each got our own seperate cut scene? I don’t want to watch someone else’s ugly mug during a cutscene where I wanted and rightfully expected to see my character as always. And since this wasn’t an ingame cutscene there was zero reason why they didn’t make it so everyone sees their own seperate cutscene. If you want to talk about amateur hour this was it.
Plus at the end, you don’t actually kill him, he just falls into the abyss, waiting for the day to rise up and once again corrupt the heart of Orr,
The first time that I completed the dungeon was waayyyy back when story modes provided dungeon tokens. I thought something similar to the above too, until I looked at the flavor text on the token…
“A small piece of Zhaitan, forever dead.”
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shard_of_zhaitan
My first reaction on vent was: “We just got trooollled!”
To make it worse, at last step of YOUR personal story, you get stuck watching dialogue sessions where another player (the first to enter in the dungeon) replaces you in your greatest last act of glory.
This I can get behind. I hated this. It should be changed. It’s supposed to be this is my story, not the story of some guy I’m pugging with.
To make it worse, at last step of YOUR personal story, you get stuck watching dialogue sessions where another player (the first to enter in the dungeon) replaces you in your greatest last act of glory.
This I can get behind. I hated this. It should be changed. It’s supposed to be this is my story, not the story of some guy I’m pugging with.
Well in Anet’s defense they had already changed it to Trahearne’s story by then.
zaitan was epic kitten the worst boss in enitre gw franchise
I am a writer. I understand WHY people think the end is unwhelming, but I didn’t find it underwhelming. Other people in my guild didn’t either. That’s because you’re playing a game, and I’m reading a book. It’s a completely different approach to the game.
Okay, take the game out of it. Assume what you see on screen is the mental imagery inspired by the words you’re reading from a book. In what well-written book does a dragon the size of Zhaitan with the powers to raise armies from the dead and reshape the planet lose in such a meek fashion?
he wasnt nearly as big as they said he would be. he was tiny, and the entire fight was a 2-2-2-2-2-2-2 spam fest. boring and falsely advertised.
Not sure what people expects from Zaithan.
It’s a big dragon, you kill him with cannons.
You expected to stick a pointy thing in his mouth or something?
It’s just a boss of the story, it plays a role, it’s not created for “ubermegaminmax progamerz to have the largest difficulty ever attainable in the gaming industry”, it’s for everyone including poor shout healing wammos and frontal crossfire rangers.
To make it worse, at last step of YOUR personal story, you get stuck watching dialogue sessions where another player (the first to enter in the dungeon) replaces you in your greatest last act of glory.
Yeah, that’s unforgivable. You spend all this time going through YOUR personal story, revolving around the choices YOU made, and at the climax, some frickin’ day player shows up and steals your kittening thunder. Hard to imagine that ANet let such an obvious design fail into the game. Sure, the final fight was pretty lame mechanically, but that’s a minor misjudgement compared to allowing someone’s epic story to finish up, with them watching as a passive bystander.
Not sure what people expects from Zaithan.
It’s a big dragon, you kill him with cannons.
You expected to stick a pointy thing in his mouth or something?
It’s just a boss of the story, it plays a role, it’s not created for “ubermegaminmax progamerz to have the largest difficulty ever attainable in the gaming industry”, it’s for everyone including poor shout healing wammos and frontal crossfire rangers.
maybe they shouldnt have said it would be that then. they shouldve said it would be a boring terrible mechanic spam kitten fight.
The dungeon was fine, but taking out Zhaitan with a gun seemed…silly.
Wish we had climbed on his back or at least knocked him down and faced him on the ground.
The lead up was good, the climax was meh.
“A release is 7 days or less away or has just happened within the last 7 days…
These are the only two states you’ll find the world of Tyria.”
Even the Abaddon fight required that we at least move around. And dying was quite possible.
Well of course you could (and needed to) change your skill load-out once you crossed over in Nightfall.
I still find that mechanically GW1 is a superior design. I like a few of the tweaks in GW2, but they are minor “prettying up” changes.
Wish we had climbed on his back
No thanks. I’ll take boring over ridiculous every day of the week.
I’m not a plant by Anet. I am a writer. I understand WHY people think the end is unwhelming, but I didn’t find it underwhelming. Other people in my guild didn’t either. That’s because you’re playing a game, and I’m reading a book. It’s a completely different approach to the game.
But you aren’t reading a book, or even watching a movie. You’re playing a game no matter how you try and spin it. Therefore the gameplay really does need to match the dynamics and scope of the story or it falls flat.
Game bosses at the end of the game have to be the hardest thing in the entire process or it doesn’t make sense. I guess none of you remember Shiro from Guild Wars 1, the big bad at the end of Factions.
The next to last Factions mission was three or four times harder than the last one. You could be Shiro Tagachi solo in under a minute if you had an ele/mesmer hybrid, and clones the elite spell the Kunnevang gave you.
Sure, I was around for that too. And I remember when people were first getting their characters there that the vast majority hadn’t figured out a 1-min quick kill mode. In fact for months I struggled to find parties that were able to take out shiro consistantly. The existance of one farming build does not mean Shiro was an easy encounter for most.
Or Nightfall, when you fought the god Abaddon. That mission was far, far easier than the Gates of Madness before it. The company isn’t making a game, so much as writing a story.
I’ll agree there. But Gates of Madness was exceptionally hard and no small part due to the fact that it featured Shiro and the Lich, the bosses of the previous campaigns. They are a challenge. Abbadon himself may have paled in terms of difficulty but at least I felt more engaged in the fight, and heroic when I won. I didn’t feel that fighting Zhaitan. As for them not making a game but a story? They are writing a story for a game, that’s the fact of the matter. If the game and the story don’t work well together then one or both are at fault in my view.
So you’re looking at it from the perspective of WoW dungeon bosses, or games that think in that way, and I’m looking at it from the perspective if someone who played the hell out of the original Guild Wars. It doesn’t make me an Anet plant. It makes me a person with a different set of experiences than some of you.
A rash assumtion. You have no idea what our backgrounds are. I also played the hell out of the original and echo the dissapointment aired by the majority of posters in this thread. I’m also old and published, for all the difference that makes.
I really do believe the last dungeon was epic (at least before the recent nerf, it’s way too tame now), but not because of the last battle with the last boss. That wasn’t my focus. I got more of a thrill from the idea of curing Orr than the Zhaitan battle.
It really was easy before the nerf in my opinion. The change of a few mobs from silver to regular and the removal of spammy KD just eased some frustration rather than changing the epicness of the whole thing. Also I was under the impression that Orr was already cured in the previous mission Source of Orr. A mission which I may add is brilliant due to the fantastic musical score and engaging boss fight. For me Arah, from a story perspective, was all about Zhaitan. Bringing him down was meant to be the climax.
I also doesn’t see this as an end, but I see it as a beginning. And the lasers btw, was a special Asuran weapon designed to hurt Zhaitan. They didn’t just hit him with a sword.
Sure as a game, it was not what you were expecting. As a story, seeing the forest instead of the trees (which is how some of us see things) it was completely fine.
I think we have vastly differing opinions on what constitutes a decent story. I do agree from a narrative perspective that it was ‘fine’ and nothing more. Certainly not good and nowhere even close to brilliant.
(edited by Rhaps.8540)
Zaitan was a weak narrative at the end. Really, all this fearsome power and we could kill him by shooting him with giant lasers. Great.
This doesn’t demonstrate the strength of the player, the party, or the Pact. This displayed the power of Asuran laser cannons. Oh hey, let’s take down another dragon. All we have to do is hit it with this laser we got.
There should’ve been a ground fight. There should have been Zaitan’s Last Stand. The players should’ve been given a sense of scale as to how big Zaitan really is, and how puny they are, and how a colony of fire ants can kill an animal 1,000,000x their size.
Zaitan just fell into an abyss. We didn’t even check to see if he was actually dead.
(edited by Katai.6240)
Zaitan just fell into an abyss. We didn’t even check to see if he was actually dead.
What better way to suggest he will be back in expansions……
Finishing him off on ground while he is downed and weak would have been awesome. I wouldn’t mind if this game mechanic was similar to that of the other dragons we face in PvE.
Trahearne had that sword for a reason…in the end it wasn’t even used to slay the dragon…pitty.
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