This is not all that negative a post.
Imagine for a moment you’re a company that has great employees, but is dysfunctional in command, communication, and implementation? Probably some real issues with gender equality too, internally if the rumor mill is true. Put all of these in a basket and set it aside for later.
Next, imagine you have that basket and you’re aware of it. You can’t resolve it so how do you survive with your business intact? Likely you will decide to get it through this season without the roof leaking.
World of Warcraft and now Black Desert have both been looming large on the horizon for Anet. How does a company with a lagging product slip through this financial year? Drop its dower seasonal releases of puppet theatre and make a product again. Thus, Heart of Thorns.
It wasn’t like we were getting a bad puppet theater. They’d mostly stopped the side-by-side thing by the end of last season, but the game’s future was looking pretty bleak. Scarlet had really gotten people back into the story as a serious thing, the world was looking great, then suddenly it was like someone walked in and shut off the lights. This drags on for awhile and people start thinking, “Yep. It’s finally happened. All those years of weird communications, contradictions, and now the game’s over.” Instead, we get word of an expansion coming.
The rest is history… sorta. We got the expansion, but it’s pretty much 180 degrees (on several many vectors) from what the game was before. Some calculus later lands us with a bit of a ‘boom’ and possibly a ‘bust’. The artistic talent that went into making the expansion was brilliant, but underhandedness of the boardroom panic in the design has really caught many in a bad way.
It’s somewhere around here that there seems to be the firm divide between loving Heart of Thorns and hating it. Just on the merits of Heart of Thorns. I’m not delving into anything else. And to go a step further I am not going into Open-World, WvW, or PvP all that much.
Along the way towards Heart of Thorns we got word there would be Guild Halls. And we could upgrade these things, customize them, etc. That all seemed pretty charming. In fact, it was probably the biggest selling point for the game. Why? Well, let’s face it. Dungeons were dead, Fractals were dead-ending, Super Adventure Box has just never come back, WvW kept getting ignored, and PvP really saw not that much to get happy over either. In short, it was pretty certain if anything at all came from this expansion that would be good it would be everything we saw and got to try out with the Guild Halls.
Necessarily this would include Scribing as we knew whatever was going to go into decorating our Guild Halls, it would come from that profession.
Skip ahead to release and… Hmm.
The biggest issue, single biggest issue, with Heart of Thorns all around seems to be the grind. Originally, especially first playing Heart of Thorns I was firmly on the fence, “You people complaining need to toughen up just a little bit. This is clearly meant to be the end game content we’ve been saying we’ve wanted. It’s very old school. What’s the complain about?” I frankly, couldn’t get it.
Then around level 41 in Masteries I was starting to notice I still had 120 Mastery’s to go and I couldn’t be asked to do them. I’m level 99 now and I really am not trying. I haven’t been for a long time. I’ve wondered why, but in the back of my mind it’s always there. “I couldn’t care less about these things. I got the mobility skills I wanted, may get one or two others when my experience bar gets there, but I’m far past caring any longer. Frankly, this is boring. Moving on from this junk.”
And I did… I went back to crafting Ascended Weapons. I’m not sure I have any reason to do this. In fact, I’m sure I don’t. Nevertheless, I’m a min-max freak, so this occupies my time when I’m trying to find something to do. I went to buy a Deldrimor Steel Dowel last night and found myself tilting my head at the price. I blinked a few times, put my crafting supplies back into my bank, and decided I could find more productive uses of my time.
This returned me to thoughts of the Guild Hall. I dumped a fair bit of mats into upgrading ours at the start of things. I’d been commanding Silverwastes quite a lot so I already had a good deal of stuff there we needed. I’m a hoarder so that worked out. Turning around and working on Scribing though…
There’s something to be said for a game that, in three weeks time, radically cuts down the size of my guild because someone thought making the only piece of content we were really looking forward to basically out of reach and out of sight.
If you’re a guild formed specifically because you are interesting in being social butterflies rather than min-maxers… it’s very likely you’re poor as dirt. Not just cumulatively, but member to member as well.
If you’re a guild formed specifically to get on with staying peak in your game, this is still a pretty considerable challenge, but one that’s reachable.
For most of this last week I’ve been mulling over my ideas on just how to get this Guild Hall thing started. Then further, to do scribing. It’s quite the chore. No big deal if there was any sort of content in Open-World to speak of, but is there?
I find myself answering quite firmly, “Absolutely not.” Heart of Thorns plateaus in content quite early and goes on demanding a grind far past having anything at all worth calling “gaming”.
Individually, as a single person climbing up in the acquisition of Mastery Points there’s something to do. Waiting for the experience bar to fill up is not. That’s really all it is as well. Just waiting for this yellow strip to get on with its life. We got on with ours about the same time the mobility skills ran dry.
It’s at this point the game itself is done.
From here on out Heart of Thorns becomes the quest for skins or stats.
This is why people are quite so angry with the game as they are. You really can’t tell people they are “gaming” if all they are doing is “farming”. And “raiding” isn’t exactly “gaming” either.
Why?
It comes down to what the game is. When we look at the things we have to do for the Guild Hall each and every one of those things is not an achievement accomplished by going off and doing something in the world it’s something we have go farm.
I love Silverwastes, but asking me to go live there? Um. No.
I love Dragon’s Stand, but asking me to go there for 2 hours a night? Um… NO.
So, no.
Just no, everything.
Heart of Thorns is about timers and time-gating. Plane and simple. It’s not an expansion, it’s a way to get Anet through this season without going belly up.
Unfortunately, by the sheer amount of negativity everything around this expansion has brought I’m starting to think I need to rethink my calling it “brilliant”. It really looks as though, first Anet or more probably NCsoft panicked with Warlords of Draenor on the horizon. WoW players were getting Garrisons, we got Guild Halls. Black Desert creeps into certainty for an NA release while Blade and Soul is releasing with outdated content… We get a full on expansion. Why? Cover your bases. North America and the EU’s going to get Blade and Soul and cry foul. So, after the big sails, it’s back to getting people back to the Gem Store.
Except… everyone sort of processed this around week 3 of Heart of Thorns launch. So instead of just upsetting the Blade and Soul people… it’s the Guild Wars people, too. This puts things in an awkward light because that Legion expansion is coming to WoW and Black Desert is basically here already. Whereas NCSoft is out of games.