Guild Wars 2

There was an issue with LW Season 2 and the Shadow of the Dragon Pt. 2 in that for players to attempt to do the mission and try to complete all of the achievements players had to sit though a long scene that could not be skipped.

Any person attempting to get any achieves naturally can and would make mistakes, thus forcing the player to try again. However that player would have to sit through the entire scene again.

The same issue comes up with many story missions in HoT. Particularly “Prized Possessions”. If a player makes a single mistake they have to go through the mobs, through the scenes and the NPC dialogue just to make another attempt.

Look at games like Super Meat Boy. The game requires a great deal of precision and dexterity. For many it takes a lot of muscle memory and practice to get through some of the most challenging of levels. However much of the frustration is taken out of playing as the moment a player makes a mistake they can go right back to it and try again.

Why is that not the case here? For a game asking for very specific things why is there no way for the player to simply try again? Why is there a continued lack of ease of use and play after all this time?

Look at Adventures. Each one while very different from the other and each one have a varying degree of difficulty they were all designed with the idea that they could be restarted easily in mind. They’re perfect in that way and allow players to make the most of their time to play.

If this is one of the core tenants to Heart of Thorns, then why is this not the case for story missions? Why do we offer it here but not there?

It was an issue back during LW Season 2 and continues to be one now.

Please Arenanet, offer players a way to just try again.

I recall there were technical issues involved in resetting more complex content like story achievements. Those need to be resolved, ANet.

OP is correct here, and good game design demands not punishing players for failing at challenging tasks. Especially when mastery points are tied behind them.

Adding my vote to this. There’s only so many times a person can attempt Seeds of Truth for the achievements and sit through the cutscenes without going as mad as… as… that mad asura in that fractal.

I want to be realistic and constructive about fixing this issue. Perhaps for some players it could easily be a non-issue and no one cares. This could be something that only applies to AP hunters or people wanting to complete as many things in game as they can.

I do not know what would be needed to go into making a fix for something like this on a technical stand point or how much time, resources and manpower would be necessary.

Would it be worth it to devote time to changing it? I think and hope so and would love to see the changes applied to future LW seasons and expansions. If people think not, by all means call me out on it and share why.

What I’m curious about is whether it takes an entire cutscene to reset the level to whatever state it needs to be in. I can’t see how it would, given that cutscenes are different lengths. (At least, they seem to be. Haven’t timed them.)

I’d be okay with a loading screen that lasts only as long as it needs to, rather than re-watching an over-long cutscene. Of course, there would be an option in the menu for this: “Show loading screen instead of cutscene on replay” or whatever.

Ideally, this could also be applied to all content that involves repeated unskippable cutscenes, like dungeons and fractals.

GW1 did allow players to skip cutscenes as I recall, but only if all players voted to skip it just in case there may have been a new player seeing what was going on for the first time.

I was thinking how some LW instances offer challenge motes that you could interact with to restart the boss in the event that the attempt was failed or something went wrong.

I feel if that is possible, then couldn’t that be applied to other parts of the game instead of having the solution be restart the entire instance and start at square 1 again?

As a part of a technical solution, after the first story run, use the challenge mote idea, but a little differently.

In this case, the challenge mote would recreate the instance to that specific challenge. If the challenge fails, player gets booted back to the beginning. If it succeeds, it ends the instance entirely, so that it doesn’t need to continue. Not ideal, but it reduces the impact of errors that could spawn by having that reset button.