Guild Wars 2

Archdevil.1748:

It is not fun. A lot of people hate it like me. It does not give the same feeling as Core Tyria. A greater challenge they said. Better rewards they said. All I get is the same junk. I don’t have any incentive to go there. I am better off farming Silverwastes. It is more fun. And all the timer madness is broken and casual unfriendly!

Calling it a failure because YOU and some people you know don’t like it isn’t calling it a failure. Why? Because me and a lot of people I know really like it, a lot.

The only thing that determines if it’s a failure or not is sales numbers. If/when they release those numbers we will know better. But don’t go around making factual declarations of what is clearly nothing more than opinion.

Mitch.4781:

Archdevil.1748:

I will just leave that video here. It pretty much says everything about HoT and why it is a huge failure, obviously not only for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gItzcaBIOKk

YOu honestly expect people to sit through over an hour of some northern English bloke whining? I literally stopped the video after he said " I won’t be making any constructive criticism"

lol

No joke. If you don’t like the expansion, fine, but it is dishonest to say the expansion offers NOTHING whatsoever.

Its like seeing the metacritic reviews, where almost everyone was rating it either a 10 or a 0 or 1. The expansion clearly has some flaws and isn’t perfect, so I couldn’t in good conscience rate it a 10, but rating it at the very bottom of the scale is basically saying its utterly unplayable, which is just as dishonest. Don’t like it, fine, but these people need to understand that the game is neither perfect nor utterly horrible.

Frankly, I rated it somewhere around a 7-8. I like it, I enjoy it, I think it’s fun, but it isn’t perfect.

Torque.2948:

I bet if we took a toll to see if HoT failed there are less fan boys than the people that actually know it failed. Which means it failed basically! Now you guys do the math and figure out how many free to play people it takes to keep 1 server running then tell me that the fan boys alone can keep the servers going. Fewer players equals less money equals more server merges and eventually a game of all fan boys saying nothings wrong. Five years later the fan boys are dancing in Lions Arch with barely anyone else playing but they look good LOL. Go to GW1 the fan boys are still dancing in the towns in that game LMAO.

I remember reading someone else saying the same thing. Then I went and read reviews, both from game review publications and from players on places like metacritic. The people who liked it outweighed those who didn’t.

And stop calling people who disagree with you a fanboy just because they disagree with you. The only determination of its success or failure is sales numbers. Since neither of us know those numbers, all you can do is say YOU don’t like it. I don’t go around saying its a success, I just say I like it – albeit with a few elements I’m not too fond of.

After all, everyone is entitled to their opinion… as are you, no matter how wrong you are

See what I did there? Calling people fanboys is doing the exact same thing. Respect other people’s opinions as you would have yours respected.

HoT failed in terms of PvP that’s for sure no other game out there has its viewers on Twitch and forum users actively trash the devs/game lol.
I love this game but HoT ruined PvP with the elite specs :/

Archdevil.1748:

Gaaroth.2567:

Archdevil.1748:

Ayrilana.1396:

This is for those that dislike the events on timers. I’m not trying to make an argument for or against at this point but get some insight as to why it specifically bothers you.

What is it about the timers that you do not like?
What is it that you cannot do but want to do?
Have you tried using the LFG to hop to an active map or bring people to yours?

I have a very good answer for these questions.
I have 2-3 hours a night after work and may be 4-6 hours on weekend days. The timers on world bosses don’t bother me. If I want to kill a world boss I track the timers. Otherwise I am not forced to do world bosses. Free will Vinewrath in Silverwastes is a player driven meta event and is the final result of the collective Free will of a big group of players. Went to Dry Top several times. Timed map? No thank you. I don’t have free will. The game tells me what to do at certain times. Not my cup of coffee thank you again. Timing all the map events in all the expansion is just INSANE. I want to do on those maps whatever I want not whatever the game tells me to. NO free will
We are limited by too much things in real life. Being limited in the game you love and play for fun and relaxation is killing the joy of the game.
I want to explore and help progress meta events but not on a timer, but on my free will.
About the LFG – tried the DS meta. Watched the clocks. This is …. I don’t like it! The DS starts. First map 2-3 ppl around me. Transfer to another one. 2-3 ppl around me. Finally get to an organised map. Most players and all 4 commanders are German. Don’t understand anything in map chat. We start running and killing stuff. Yay! This is great! And then comes poison. Ppl try to revive me. I drop dead. Rez again. Drop dead immediatly. Poison lore says someone. Waypointed and for the first time in my life Allt+F4 the game!!! Never to come back to DS TD and AB. Now when I am in the mood (once in 2 weeks) go to VB, try to learn the event chains and GRIND some more xp to level up some stupid mastery and to be able some day to go to AB. TD and DS are such a long term goals as in may be 2-3 years if I still play the game

You cannot be serious… please tell me you are joking

No, I am not joking. Which part is not serius according to you?

Just ignore the troll. Gaaroth has always been completely unable to even to understand opinions which don’t conform to his narrow-minded vision. Instead he tries to belittle those disagreeing with him. He does a miserable job as a “white knight” as he simply refuses to acknowledge other opinions, similar to “It’s fine for me, so it has to be fine for everyone”

Story cleared in less than 5 hours. Expansion was kind of over for me in 4 days after the launch. WvW was kind of a ghost town… leaving you with what? A bunch of meta events for things I do not need…. my ascended gear I got from not crafting at all and simply doing fractals back when I cared about fractals is more than enough gear. So I feel I got like maybe $25 out of the $49.99 I spent on this expansion. Maybe Living Story season 3 will fill in that void for the rest of it but until then I rank this piece of software as still a beta.

I really disliked the story. Which is interesting- considering i never paid much attention to the lore or story in other games.

I guess what makes this game different is the overall lack of story, and the overall lack of dialogue.

I’ve noticed myself doing events without knowing how these events or bosses are even relevant to anything.

Nothing is connected, nothing is expanded on. You just sort of feel dropped somewhere with one objective- Kill the dragon! There is no depth, no structure…nothing..

Open world, and instanced lore- just- stunk.

Dahmerkitten.1385:

I really disliked the story. Which is interesting- considering i never paid much attention to the lore or story in other games.

I guess what makes this game different is the overall lack of story, and the overall lack of dialogue.

I’ve noticed myself doing events without knowing how these events or bosses are even relevant to anything.

Nothing is connected, nothing is expanded on. You just sort of feel dropped somewhere with one objective- Kill the dragon! There is no depth, no structure…nothing..

Open world, and instanced lore- just- stunk.

I think you missed quite a lot of the story as well as the dialogues on the maps.

Harper.4173:

Vayne – he has a point – everything that people like/dislike can be broken down to quantifiable bits of why they have a positive or negative view regarding said thing.

Have a look here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny
That right there explains why humans have certain responses towards certain features – which are quantifiable.

What I’m trying to get at is this – you liked the character – that’s fine – your opinion is your own.
Manthas asked you to identify those features that you find yourself attracted to – he asked you to objectively break down your idea of “I like X” and point out what features X has that make you like it or not.

You mentioned in a post something along the lines of “you either like the cheese or you don’t” – and while that is true – there are always real, objective quantifiable reasons for you reacting positively or negatively to said cheese (or any stimuli).

Now you may not realize what the reasons for your “liking” of said character might be or you might be unable to quantify and verbalize them- and that’s fine – but simply refusing the question because “it has no basis” is wrong.

All biological organisms react based on input – you can’t just like something without there being an objective reason or reasons for that.

I also don’t feel he is “raising the bar” – it’s a next question in a logical flow.
What do you like – why do you like it?

But his entire premise is based on a logical fallacy anyway, which he himself never answered.

His premise is in the middle of a story, there are no memorable characters being introduced. That happens in a lot of fiction. The main characters are the people we’re supposed to know anyway, not walk ins that further the plot.

This isn’t War and Peace. It’s a video game. You meet people early. they become the main characters, and then you move onto the end of the story with those characters. The idea that the writing is good or bad, really has nothing to do with whether characters introduced later are memorable or whether you can describe them.

I can think of a dozen famous books off hand where the important characters are all introduced up front and no new characters were introduced at all. So the whole conversation is a moot point anyway.

Not to mention the character we’re talking about isn’t a main character that’s around for seventeen chapters of a story. He said none of them were memorable and I thought one was…because I remembered him. Sort of the definition.

Since the entire premise is flawed, I’m not even sure why we’re having this conversation. Red herring is a red herring.

Randulf.7614:

I can see that point of view, but their idea was to move the events in semi-real time and keep it going as a “living map”. In that respect it works. It’s an idea which is divisive. Some players absolutely love the idea and some people don’t, but it has achieved their design goal for this expac. People wanted less static maps so they came up with this as a solution. One which may or may not stick.

O_o

How is running on a fixed schedule less static?

Vayne.8563:

This isn’t War and Peace. It’s a video game. You meet people early. they become the main characters, and then you move onto the end of the story with those characters. The idea that the writing is good or bad, really has nothing to do with whether characters introduced later are memorable or whether you can describe them.

Not entirely wrong, but not right on the mark, either.
First of all you can introduce well fleshed out characters pretty much whenever you want for the first two thirds of your plot. It becomes increasingly difficult to do so, but you can make it work if you’re good at writing stories.
Second: If you don’t want to waste screen time on new and not that important NPC, then don’t. Let one of the other characters handle it, let’s say Roxx somehow knows how to get along with the Itzel and deals with them in your name. You cannot communicate with them yourself and therefore cannot really relate to them and leave the development of the Itzel entirely to the open world.
Third: If you don’t use the method mentioned before, you have to develop characters because you want the player to relate to them. They’re allies, they’re important, therefore you cannot afford them to be boring or the players won’t care and that aspect of the plot fails to connect with them.
An NPC like this doesn’t need the depth of the protagonists as the story is not really about her, but zero personality doesn’t count as getting the job done.

Vayne.8563:

I can think of a dozen famous books off hand where the important characters are all introduced up front and no new characters were introduced at all. So the whole conversation is a moot point anyway.

No, it isn’t, because the story introduces new characters and goes pretty much nowhere with them, but even that’s only part of the problem, because the one single character with at least some kind of development in the HoT story is Canach. They even failed at developing Braham or doing anything interesting with Rytlock.
That poor meanie kittencat is hanging around since the start and has gotten no development at all, he is only used to be a gruffy charr, because being gruff is what charr are all about… oh, wait, no.

Vayne.8563:

Not to mention the character we’re talking about isn’t a main character that’s around for seventeen chapters of a story. He said none of them were memorable and I thought one was…because I remembered him. Sort of the definition.

Sort of, but not really. In the end, you cannot describe him because there is nothing to describe and that was the point. There were times when ArenaNet had better writers even for characters like Ibli.
When you were first introduced to the culture of the Norn, you had Jora and the struggle with her brother Svanir and when you first learned more about the charr, you had Pyre Fierceshot who’s rubble with Gwen taught you way more about the charr and their worldview than any expository dialogue option in Guild Wars 2. Heck, even Nightfall’s Zhed Shadowhoof had a lot more going on than any HoT NPC.

Seera.5916:

Maybe they didn’t want players just staying on one map doing the event over and over and over again like they do in Silverwastes.

You have to stay till the end to get the end reward. So that means having to stay for the full cycle.

But they didn’t want to turn the maps into a once a day and then done thing like the core maps’ world bosses.

So they tried putting the events on timers with the events far enough away in time that they hoped most players would get bored and do other events on other maps during the wait.

Do other events on other maps and lose all participation credit?

Alicornus.7095:

Vayne.8563:

This isn’t War and Peace. It’s a video game. You meet people early. they become the main characters, and then you move onto the end of the story with those characters. The idea that the writing is good or bad, really has nothing to do with whether characters introduced later are memorable or whether you can describe them.

Not entirely wrong, but not right on the mark, either.
First of all you can introduce well fleshed out characters pretty much whenever you want for the first two thirds of your plot. It becomes increasingly difficult to do so, but you can make it work if you’re good at writing stories.
Second: If you don’t want to waste screen time on new and not that important NPC, then don’t. Let one of the other characters handle it, let’s say Roxx somehow knows how to get along with the Itzel and deals with them in your name. You cannot communicate with them yourself and therefore cannot really relate to them and leave the development of the Itzel entirely to the open world.
Third: If you don’t use the method mentioned before, you have to develop characters because you want the player to relate to them. They’re allies, they’re important, therefore you cannot afford them to be boring or the players won’t care and that aspect of the plot fails to connect with them.
An NPC like this doesn’t need the depth of the protagonists as the story is not really about her, but zero personality doesn’t count as getting the job done.

Vayne.8563:

I can think of a dozen famous books off hand where the important characters are all introduced up front and no new characters were introduced at all. So the whole conversation is a moot point anyway.

No, it isn’t, because the story introduces new characters and goes pretty much nowhere with them, but even that’s only part of the problem, because the one single character with at least some kind of development in the HoT story is Canach. They even failed at developing Braham or doing anything interesting with Rytlock.
That poor meanie kittencat is hanging around since the start and has gotten no development at all, he is only used to be a gruffy charr, because being gruff is what charr are all about… oh, wait, no.

Vayne.8563:

Not to mention the character we’re talking about isn’t a main character that’s around for seventeen chapters of a story. He said none of them were memorable and I thought one was…because I remembered him. Sort of the definition.

Sort of, but not really. In the end, you cannot describe him because there is nothing to describe and that was the point. There were times when ArenaNet had better writers even for characters like Ibli.
When you were first introduced to the culture of the Norn, you had Jora and the struggle with her brother Svanir and when you first learned more about the charr, you had Pyre Fierceshot who’s rubble with Gwen taught you way more about the charr and their worldview than any expository dialogue option in Guild Wars 2. Heck, even Nightfall’s Zhed Shadowhoof had a lot more going on than any HoT NPC.

Okay let’s review what I said.

The original postulate was the storytelling was bad because no memorable characters have been introduced.

I didn’t say, and have NEVER said, memorable characters can’t be introduced. I’ve never even implied it. My statement is that there are some pretty good works out there that never introduce a character.

Ever see the Alfred Hitchock film Lifeboat? All the characters are introduced right away. There’s one environment, which is the lifeboat. The writing is good. Therefore you don’t need to introduce new characters in a story for the writing to be good. It’s not necessary. Of course it can be done. Nothing to do with my point at all.

I can’t describe him because he’s a relatively minor character that I happen to like. He’s a tree frog. That’s what he is. You want me to describe a tree frog? Even if he were visually different from the other tree frogs, the description would look basically the same. Big eyes, green, thin limbs. He looks like a tree frog hylek.

But he’s friendly and he’s got a cool voice. He wants to protect his village. He mother is the leader of that village. And while the jungle provides is pretty much a cliche it’s also based on the reality of cultures that live in jungles.

Hell I’m not even sure what this discussion is about. I bought into the whole tree frog jungle thing and that’s ALL the writing was supposed to make me do.

Writing in games drives your character forward. So we have slight spoilers ahead….a village of hylek with a common enemy who can perhaps help us. That’s all that chapter of the living story needs to do. Doing more, making that character more important than he’s meant to be would be bad writing, not good writing.

The whole conversation is ridiculous. It’s a terrible criteria to try to base writing on. Most professional writing has a purpose. The writing in that chapter is adequate to the purpose and I found it to be fine. Again it’s not Shakespeare, but it wasn’t supposed to be.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure it is a failure at all. HoT added a lot of things that are pretty decent.

#1: Harder enemies. I’ve been wanting that for awhile.
#2: Elaborate maps and more involved maps. Always a good thing.
#3: A metroid style of progression where you gain the ability to explore new areas.
#4: The elite specializations are awesome (if a bit power-creepy), and I like playing as most of them.
#5: A large series of collections and achievements for completionists.
#6: Some pretty cool looking skins.
#7: Events that are actually fun to do.

So, I like the xpac, and from what I’ve heard it has sold really well, so I wonder what your standard of failure is.

I would consider at least half of the HoT masteries to be failures.

It starts well enough in the gliding line but then we get low effort fillers like <whatever> language/proving/assistance. Look! You can now click on this other vendor tab. So exciting. You can also fight these champions once a day. The fights aren’t really different from anything else and the loot is mostly junk but it is there …

Fun events … I can think of two, the patriarch in VB and Mouth of Modremoth in DS.

Khisanth.2948:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure it is a failure at all. HoT added a lot of things that are pretty decent.

#1: Harder enemies. I’ve been wanting that for awhile.
#2: Elaborate maps and more involved maps. Always a good thing.
#3: A metroid style of progression where you gain the ability to explore new areas.
#4: The elite specializations are awesome (if a bit power-creepy), and I like playing as most of them.
#5: A large series of collections and achievements for completionists.
#6: Some pretty cool looking skins.
#7: Events that are actually fun to do.

So, I like the xpac, and from what I’ve heard it has sold really well, so I wonder what your standard of failure is.

I would consider at least half of the HoT masteries to be failures.

It starts well enough in the gliding line but then we get low effort fillers like <whatever> language/proving/assistance. Look! You can now click on this other vendor tab. So exciting. You can also fight these champions once a day. The fights aren’t really different from anything else and the loot is mostly junk but it is there …

Fun events … I can think of two, the patriarch in VB and Mouth of Modremoth in DS.

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

Vayne.8563:

Khisanth.2948:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure it is a failure at all. HoT added a lot of things that are pretty decent.

#1: Harder enemies. I’ve been wanting that for awhile.
#2: Elaborate maps and more involved maps. Always a good thing.
#3: A metroid style of progression where you gain the ability to explore new areas.
#4: The elite specializations are awesome (if a bit power-creepy), and I like playing as most of them.
#5: A large series of collections and achievements for completionists.
#6: Some pretty cool looking skins.
#7: Events that are actually fun to do.

So, I like the xpac, and from what I’ve heard it has sold really well, so I wonder what your standard of failure is.

I would consider at least half of the HoT masteries to be failures.

It starts well enough in the gliding line but then we get low effort fillers like <whatever> language/proving/assistance. Look! You can now click on this other vendor tab. So exciting. You can also fight these champions once a day. The fights aren’t really different from anything else and the loot is mostly junk but it is there …

Fun events … I can think of two, the patriarch in VB and Mouth of Modremoth in DS.

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

I’m still confused why you can talk to the frog tribes during the story but you can’t understand their vendors until you master the language. Are the frogs speaking some common Tyrian language (Tenglish?) in the story that the vendors aren’t familiar with?

Vayne.8563:

Okay let’s review what I said.

The original postulate was the storytelling was bad because no memorable characters have been introduced.

I didn’t say, and have NEVER said, memorable characters can’t be introduced. I’ve never even implied it. My statement is that there are some pretty good works out there that never introduce a character.

Ever see the Alfred Hitchock film Lifeboat? All the characters are introduced right away. There’s one environment, which is the lifeboat. The writing is good. Therefore you don’t need to introduce new characters in a story for the writing to be good. It’s not necessary. Of course it can be done. Nothing to do with my point at all.

I can’t describe him because he’s a relatively minor character that I happen to like. He’s a tree frog. That’s what he is. You want me to describe a tree frog? Even if he were visually different from the other tree frogs, the description would look basically the same. Big eyes, green, thin limbs. He looks like a tree frog hylek.

But he’s friendly and he’s got a cool voice. He wants to protect his village. He mother is the leader of that village. And while the jungle provides is pretty much a cliche it’s also based on the reality of cultures that live in jungles.

Hell I’m not even sure what this discussion is about. I bought into the whole tree frog jungle thing and that’s ALL the writing was supposed to make me do.

Writing in games drives your character forward. So we have slight spoilers ahead….a village of hylek with a common enemy who can perhaps help us. That’s all that chapter of the living story needs to do. Doing more, making that character more important than he’s meant to be would be bad writing, not good writing.

The whole conversation is ridiculous. It’s a terrible criteria to try to base writing on. Most professional writing has a purpose. The writing in that chapter is adequate to the purpose and I found it to be fine. Again it’s not Shakespeare, but it wasn’t supposed to be.

There are some works which requires more new characters and some which do not. My main reason why a few new characters are a must in this expansion is, because developers introduce new races. I believe Hitchock never introduced new cultures in that movie. I don’t know, haven’t seen it. My point is, there are reasons why some fiction works require new characters and some do not.

As I said, if you introduce new races, you better introduce characters to represent them. Without them, you don’t care about the struggles of that race, reasons why we should help them, etc. For example, I’m a terrible person and I don’t care about a famine in Africa unless you show me a starving kid and tell his story. That’s a good, impactful storytelling and medias use it.

Let’s get back to original personal story. Chapter V. Do you think we really need to ally ourselves with quaggans? No, it’s all about introducing a selected minor race. How do you do that? You get to know new characters, share their struggle and help them overcome it. Yes, some introductions were better than the others, but in HoTs case, it’s a huge step backwards. Ok, let’s say Ibli is a good character and he represents Itzel well, what about the other races? Nothing, and that’s my point. They introduce a new world I don’t care about. It’s not personal to me, it just goes by. Even more, I’m being constructive and present the reasons why storytelling is bad and what could improve it.

Yes, this whole conversation is ridiculous, but that’s only because you fail to see reason and continue your struggle defending something, that does not deserve defence.

Khisanth.2948:

Seera.5916:

Maybe they didn’t want players just staying on one map doing the event over and over and over again like they do in Silverwastes.

You have to stay till the end to get the end reward. So that means having to stay for the full cycle.

But they didn’t want to turn the maps into a once a day and then done thing like the core maps’ world bosses.

So they tried putting the events on timers with the events far enough away in time that they hoped most players would get bored and do other events on other maps during the wait.

Do other events on other maps and lose all participation credit?

I thought there was time BETWEEN when the meta event ends and when it starts up again.

And maybe you missed the word want in my post. What someone wants and what actually happens can be entirely different.

I can easily see how their desire to get players to play more than one map backfired given how they decide who gets what credit for events and how organized a map has to be to succeed. Especially combined with the megaserver. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t want players to go to other maps during that break and get pulled into the events on those other maps.

MAN.9046:

HoT failed in terms of PvP that’s for sure no other game out there has its viewers on Twitch and forum users actively trash the devs/game lol.
I love this game but HoT ruined PvP with the elite specs :/

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA sorry, you must not watch many streamers… Twitch streamers will trash every game for views, they will complain about game mechanics, bugs, ELO in pvp, and so on. Guys in LoL would trash on Riot after every patch, every time a new season started and each time an item was changed that they didn’t like just because it was either new, broken, or not what they thought it should be (the last was the most common).

Vayne.8563:

Ghostwind.4380:

Vayne.8563:

Ghostwind.4380:

Vayne.8563:

Ghostwind.4380:

I watched his whole video. I think he was a bit too dramatic in some of his complaints, and his incredulity and exasperation was kind of annoying. However, he did actually give a lot of specifics in his critique, and I have to agree with most of it. Particularly about the story. Then again, I’m not sure what he was expecting for the story.

Anet has never been good at the story mechanics. It’s something I’ve always felt they really are lacking in. They don’t seem to really want to put any serious effort into it either. I can understand of course, creating a good, compelling story requires a lot of thought, story boarding, cut scene generation, and cost.

Still, when you see a scene like this from MA3 (nearly 4 years ago), with a different commander, you can really see what a compelling scene with the proper music, camera work, and story boarding can accomplish. Watching it still brings a tear to my eye…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6RHg-BCk0g

If only Anet would try a bit harder with story and learn from other game companies. I might be willing to overlook it’s other flaws.

Comparing a single player game story to an MMO story though is probably not the best thing to do. I haven’t really found stories in MMOs generally to compare to games that focus on stories like single player RPGs. Those entire games are designed around stories. MMOs are designed around other things like progression.

The Guild Wars 2 story compares with the story of most, but not all, MMOs I’ve tried. The exception would be SWToR, which was created by a single player company known for their stories. But single player games in general are better at story. It’s the heart of most single player games.

It’s funny I knew somebody would rush to the defense of Anet with the “don’t use a single player example” argument by linking that vid. Saying single player games solely focus on story while mmo’s only focus on progression is a bit of a falacy. They do both have progression. In fact, single player games generally have even more progression, it’s just usually localized to your machine. Yes, mmo’s are a totally different game design and the money spent on the story part is not going to be as heavy. But there are indeed mmo’s out there able to weave good story telling and mechanics into the design. For other mmo’s story telling is a focus, not an afterthought. You mentioned swtor as some kind of exception, it’s really not. Here’s another one, The Secret World…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gewzp9x_3rY

The point is (and the point of linking that vid), is that good story telling CAN rely on a big budget, but what’s more important is understanding what skills are involved in good story telling (story boarding, camera work, pacing, dialog, drawing out emotion, immersion, etc), as WELL as how your story mechanics work. It’s not just science, it’s also art. If you don’t know how to craft a good story and make it compelling then it’s just going to fall flat. Not only that, if you do it BADLY you will turn off your audience.

Here’s a perfect example of how to quickly turn off your audience: throughout the story in HoT, there were multiple times when I would enter a story checkpoint where a dialog scene was to occur. Depending on how I entered the scene, my character would sometimes be locked facing the WRONG direction. So there I am, looking the opposite direction, talking to nobody. Meanwhile the npc I’m supposed to being having this meaningful dialog with is ALSO facing the wrong way. So not only are they behind me, they are facing a spot I supposedly am supposed to be. Or sometimes, depending on entry, the person I am supposed to be talking to is not in the clip at all because of the entry and camera locking. Not only does this speak to poor quality and testing, it’s just plan sloppy. It’s a consequence of bolting on story aspects onto the existing game engine, instead of taking the time to craft a scene for that dialog that is compelling. The end result of this wonky design is that I am left asking the question “If Anet doesn’t really care about story, why should I?”.

GW2 does combat and environments extremely well in my opinion, it’s still an amazing game to me that I play nearly every day, but your argument that their story mechanics should get a pass “because they are an mmo” is wrong. They simply aren’t doing enough in that part of the game, at least compared to what they could be doing.

I’m comparing MMOs to other MMOs and single player games, generally to single player games. As a general rule, MMOs don’t have great stories and there’s a reason for it. Because everything is takes so much time and is so hard to implement. It’s much easy to balance things in a single player game.

Take Skyrim. Good story. But more, everything is geared around you as one guy. You can be the head of every guild all at the same time, making you feel more heroic. That stuff can’t really be done in an MMO because a million people are all the hero. The entire process for writing MMOs is stories is very different.

You can say it doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t make it not matter. It’s not giving someone a free pass to recognize that MMOs have a plethora of things to deal with that no single player game has. That’s fact.

It’s also fact that MMOs cost more to produce as a whole. It’s more expensive to create and maintain an MMO. So the budget can’t go for voice actors and cinematics, unless you have very VERY deep pockets. SWToR did it and become the most expensive MMO ever made. After which they had to fire a third of their staff.

Yes, MMOs aren’t single player games, they have different problems and different business sensibilities.

That’s a fact.

You totally ignored my mention of The Secret World (on purpose?), which was just one example I used to show compelling story can be applied to mmo’s – if story is made a focus. So that is an mmo to mmo comparison like you say you are trying to use. TSW is not a big budget game like swtor. Sure, even it’s story elements are not to the level of a single player game with a strong story focus like nearly every bioware game. But it’s story crafting and cut scenes do use in game character assets and are done fairly well. It’s not about quantity after all, but quality.

Bottom line, compelling story can be done in an mmo if it’s made a focus, with the right skill set, and the right people involved. As games like TSW show, it is NOT totally about budget.

That’s a fact.

The secret world has a decent story. It’s not a great story, but it is also more centered on story. Unfortunately because it’s centered on story, other aspects of the game fail to capture masses and the game is pretty much up for sale. The CEO of the company walked. The staff was cut in half and now they’re looking for a buyer.

I didn’t ignore your mention of it. You ignored my mention that there are very few MMOs that can afford to focus on story because it’s very expensive to focus on story. TSW focused on story and failed. Failed as in it’s not one of the TOP MMOs, it did not meet expectations, and it’s failed financially.

People say Heart of Thorns failed and I say we have to wait six months to a year to see if that happened.

So let’s recap. Games choose a focus. The focus of this game is obviously the dynamic event system and for some silly reason, esports, which I don’t think is a great move, but maybe it makes them money…I have no idea how. I don’t see that as one of the strengths of this game.

So Anet doesn’t focus on story. The story in this game is a reason to do things. A motivation for world events to move forward. That’s how it was designed. It’s not the focus of the game.

TSW did focus on story, but because everyone has limited resources, they focused on story and failed.

Now we’ve discussed TSW. It’s an MMO who tried to focus on story, didn’t go over well, because they had limited resources and spent them wrong.

I would have loved the story in TSW personally but I ended up being annoyed by the presentation because even though they focused on the story, they saved money by not voicing the main character, so every time I went up to an NPC, it felt like they were talking at me and I wasn’t there at all.

Completely killed the story for me. They should have voiced the main actor, because I don’t really want to listen to a bunch of monologues when I’m questing.

So you’ve shifted the focus from your mmo to mmo story comparison now to an mmo to mmo success or not argument? If you want to keep moving the goal posts to win an argument about if GW2 story has good story or not, fine – I don’t want to argue with someone who is obviously trying to find any excuse to give GW2 a pass on that score. Based on others peoples responses to you also on this thread, it’s pretty obvious there’s a bit too much GW2 fanboy to overcome.

And I’ll repeat from my previous post, I do love a lot of things about GW2, particularly the combat and environments, but still believe story is still their weakest link and they could absolutely do much better.

For me Anet failed at balancing. Look at the ranger class. It’ s always the same, with the same problems with the same limits for 3 years now.

Mahou.3924:

Archdevil.1748:

Gaaroth.2567:

Archdevil.1748:

Ayrilana.1396:

This is for those that dislike the events on timers. I’m not trying to make an argument for or against at this point but get some insight as to why it specifically bothers you.

What is it about the timers that you do not like?
What is it that you cannot do but want to do?
Have you tried using the LFG to hop to an active map or bring people to yours?

I have a very good answer for these questions.
I have 2-3 hours a night after work and may be 4-6 hours on weekend days. The timers on world bosses don’t bother me. If I want to kill a world boss I track the timers. Otherwise I am not forced to do world bosses. Free will Vinewrath in Silverwastes is a player driven meta event and is the final result of the collective Free will of a big group of players. Went to Dry Top several times. Timed map? No thank you. I don’t have free will. The game tells me what to do at certain times. Not my cup of coffee thank you again. Timing all the map events in all the expansion is just INSANE. I want to do on those maps whatever I want not whatever the game tells me to. NO free will
We are limited by too much things in real life. Being limited in the game you love and play for fun and relaxation is killing the joy of the game.
I want to explore and help progress meta events but not on a timer, but on my free will.
About the LFG – tried the DS meta. Watched the clocks. This is …. I don’t like it! The DS starts. First map 2-3 ppl around me. Transfer to another one. 2-3 ppl around me. Finally get to an organised map. Most players and all 4 commanders are German. Don’t understand anything in map chat. We start running and killing stuff. Yay! This is great! And then comes poison. Ppl try to revive me. I drop dead. Rez again. Drop dead immediatly. Poison lore says someone. Waypointed and for the first time in my life Allt+F4 the game!!! Never to come back to DS TD and AB. Now when I am in the mood (once in 2 weeks) go to VB, try to learn the event chains and GRIND some more xp to level up some stupid mastery and to be able some day to go to AB. TD and DS are such a long term goals as in may be 2-3 years if I still play the game

You cannot be serious… please tell me you are joking

No, I am not joking. Which part is not serius according to you?

Just ignore the troll. Gaaroth has always been completely unable to even to understand opinions which don’t conform to his narrow-minded vision. Instead he tries to belittle those disagreeing with him. He does a miserable job as a “white knight” as he simply refuses to acknowledge other opinions, similar to “It’s fine for me, so it has to be fine for everyone”

Wait, what? Maybe I can have some bitter reply that’s for sure (when I see some “kind” of posts) but i often gave honest reasoning. Also, I never “whiteknighted” and I repeat it again: I’m having a good time with HoT but is FAR from perfect, there are many flaws that even if not “gamebreaking” are seriously annoying, mainly the map/instances/taxis that we need to “play”, balancing in various forms (costs for stuff, skills) and bug. What I really don’t stand are posts that says “omg hot is failure, nothing added, 50€ ripoff” with close to 0 real argument or with reasons so flawed that I cannot shut up. I’d be against a “hot masterrace 11/10” posts too, but you don’t see them around. ;-)

Vayne.8563:

Harper.4173:

Vayne – he has a point – everything that people like/dislike can be broken down to quantifiable bits of why they have a positive or negative view regarding said thing.

Have a look here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny
That right there explains why humans have certain responses towards certain features – which are quantifiable.

What I’m trying to get at is this – you liked the character – that’s fine – your opinion is your own.
Manthas asked you to identify those features that you find yourself attracted to – he asked you to objectively break down your idea of “I like X” and point out what features X has that make you like it or not.

You mentioned in a post something along the lines of “you either like the cheese or you don’t” – and while that is true – there are always real, objective quantifiable reasons for you reacting positively or negatively to said cheese (or any stimuli).

Now you may not realize what the reasons for your “liking” of said character might be or you might be unable to quantify and verbalize them- and that’s fine – but simply refusing the question because “it has no basis” is wrong.

All biological organisms react based on input – you can’t just like something without there being an objective reason or reasons for that.

I also don’t feel he is “raising the bar” – it’s a next question in a logical flow.
What do you like – why do you like it?

But his entire premise is based on a logical fallacy anyway, which he himself never answered.

His premise is in the middle of a story, there are no memorable characters being introduced. That happens in a lot of fiction. The main characters are the people we’re supposed to know anyway, not walk ins that further the plot.

This isn’t War and Peace. It’s a video game. You meet people early. they become the main characters, and then you move onto the end of the story with those characters. The idea that the writing is good or bad, really has nothing to do with whether characters introduced later are memorable or whether you can describe them.

I can think of a dozen famous books off hand where the important characters are all introduced up front and no new characters were introduced at all. So the whole conversation is a moot point anyway.

Not to mention the character we’re talking about isn’t a main character that’s around for seventeen chapters of a story. He said none of them were memorable and I thought one was…because I remembered him. Sort of the definition.

Since the entire premise is flawed, I’m not even sure why we’re having this conversation. Red herring is a red herring.

I wasn’t addressing your whole conversation or judging whether it has a point or not – simply felt I should add that to make things clear.

My personal opinion is that the HoT story is bad – not because it lacks memorable characters but because it’s rushed, short and uses too many deus ex machina moments to feel believable.

My discussion with you in my previous post has nothing to do with your previous discussion – it was a point that I made regarding something I felt should have been addressed.

Morfedel.4165:

Archdevil.1748:

It is not fun. A lot of people hate it like me. It does not give the same feeling as Core Tyria. A greater challenge they said. Better rewards they said. All I get is the same junk. I don’t have any incentive to go there. I am better off farming Silverwastes. It is more fun. And all the timer madness is broken and casual unfriendly!

Calling it a failure because YOU and some people you know don’t like it isn’t calling it a failure. Why? Because me and a lot of people I know really like it, a lot.

The only thing that determines if it’s a failure or not is sales numbers. If/when they release those numbers we will know better. But don’t go around making factual declarations of what is clearly nothing more than opinion.

Doubt we’ll see sales numbers.

They like to deal in Monthly Actives, so that one login you make counts as an active account.

Sold 5m world-wide.

1.5m monthly paid actives (“Historically”).

Doubled player base, becoming 3.1m players after going F2P (2m F2P accounts).

Even with the numbers, we will never know who is actively playing and how many accounts are owned by the same players (due to being able to have cheap alts and F2P alts)

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Vayne.8563:

Khisanth.2948:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure it is a failure at all. HoT added a lot of things that are pretty decent.

#1: Harder enemies. I’ve been wanting that for awhile.
#2: Elaborate maps and more involved maps. Always a good thing.
#3: A metroid style of progression where you gain the ability to explore new areas.
#4: The elite specializations are awesome (if a bit power-creepy), and I like playing as most of them.
#5: A large series of collections and achievements for completionists.
#6: Some pretty cool looking skins.
#7: Events that are actually fun to do.

So, I like the xpac, and from what I’ve heard it has sold really well, so I wonder what your standard of failure is.

I would consider at least half of the HoT masteries to be failures.

It starts well enough in the gliding line but then we get low effort fillers like <whatever> language/proving/assistance. Look! You can now click on this other vendor tab. So exciting. You can also fight these champions once a day. The fights aren’t really different from anything else and the loot is mostly junk but it is there …

Fun events … I can think of two, the patriarch in VB and Mouth of Modremoth in DS.

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

I’m still confused why you can talk to the frog tribes during the story but you can’t understand their vendors until you master the language. Are the frogs speaking some common Tyrian language (Tenglish?) in the story that the vendors aren’t familiar with?

It’s a cultural thing. Playability always comes before logic in games. Why do you heal 10 times faster when something gets six feet away? Why do deer carry swords? Gameplay is always going to be greater than logic. That’s how it is.

In this case, it’s fairly easy to under that it’s more like rep. You get to know the customs and the merchants will start to trust you and share their wares with you.

I’ll give up on the story discussion. I gave enough examples on how to do it right – from Guild Wars: Eye of the North, by the way – I gave enough input on how to do it, but all I get is some Texas Sharpshooting, because accepting anything beyond that would result in seeing a flaw in GW2 and that is obviously not allowed to happen.

As you’ve stated yourself, the postulate was the storytelling was bad because no memorable characters have been introduced and this is still relevant because there are no memorable characters which have been introduced in HoT, although they introduce new characters which are important for the plot and the setting they tried to build up with the Maguuma Jungle.

I got the message. You love HoT, probably more than anything on this earth since you roam the forums for months now each and every day to defend it. There is no point in discussing love. I somewhat envy you because I will never be able to appreciate this expansion the way you did, but on the other hand… after decades of experiencing, playing and – quite of lot of – writing interactive stories, I cannot overlook such basic flaws and I’ll never allow professionals to get away with such shlock, because I know firsthand how lazy it is, even though I give the author of HoT that he was at least partially a victim of the circumstances.

Alicornus.7095:

I’ll give up on the story discussion. I gave enough examples on how to do it right – from Guild Wars: Eye of the North, by the way – I gave enough input on how to do it, but all I get is some Texas Sharpshooting, because accepting anything beyond that would result in seeing a flaw in GW2 and that is obviously not allowed to happen.

As you’ve stated yourself, the postulate was the storytelling was bad because no memorable characters have been introduced and this is still relevant because there are no memorable characters which have been introduced in HoT, although they introduce new characters which are important for the plot and the setting they tried to build up with the Maguuma Jungle.

I got the message. You love HoT, probably more than anything on this earth since you roam the forums for months now each and every day to defend it. There is no point in discussing love. I somewhat envy you because I will never be able to appreciate this expansion the way you did, but on the other hand… after decades of experiencing, playing and – quite of lot of – writing interactive stories, I cannot overlook such basic flaws and I’ll never allow professionals to get away with such shlock, because I know firsthand how lazy it is, even though I give the author of HoT that he was at least partially a victim of the circumstances.

You have an opinion. Other people have other opinions. I don’t judge stories in games the way I judge stories in books. I don’t judge stories in MMOs the way I judge stories in single player games.

It’s really nice that you have an opinion. Me having a different one changes nothing about that. But it doesn’t make you right. I wish people would stop trying to express opinions as objective truth.

Yeah, whatever.

Not to mention the words you attributed to me, that I love HoT more than anything on this Earth is just plain wrong. I never even implied that. I’ve said, many times now, that the expansion isn’t without it’s problems. That doesn’t mean I’m not having fun.

I’ve talked about some of those problems in other threads. Me not agreeing with you, isn’t down to some fan boy response. It’s down to me thinking that you are wrong in what you are saying.

Writing can always be better. I’ve been in enough critique groups to know that. But writing on spec or writing on a deadline is very different than looking at writing after it’s done. It’s all very easy when you don’t have to be on that schedule, or no one is telling you what to write.

In most games, writing isn’t the center of the game, it servers a purpose in game. You want a story read a book. But writing in games is made to supplement game play for most types of games, and certainly most MMOs.

Vayne.8563:

You have an opinion. Other people have other opinions. I don’t judge stories in games the way I judge stories in books. I don’t judge stories in MMOs the way I judge stories in single player games.

It’s really nice that you have an opinion. Me having a different one changes nothing about that. But it doesn’t make you right. I wish people would stop trying to express opinions as objective truth.

When people argue, they present their opinions and bring arguments on which their opinions are based. Some opinions are much more based when the others.

Hearing different opinions actually changes your own. You hear all sorts of points of view, which broadens your own view. This way, you can see the points you didn’t even thought about or see why some of your arguments are wrong.

On the other hand, discussion let’s you verify your own arguments and if your points can’t be broken, you trust your opinion on that topic even more.

Take the best out of every discussion you are in.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

You have an opinion. Other people have other opinions. I don’t judge stories in games the way I judge stories in books. I don’t judge stories in MMOs the way I judge stories in single player games.

It’s really nice that you have an opinion. Me having a different one changes nothing about that. But it doesn’t make you right. I wish people would stop trying to express opinions as objective truth.

When people argue, they present their opinions and bring arguments on which their opinions are based. Some opinions are much more based when the others.

Hearing different opinions actually changes your own. You hear all sorts of points of view, which broadens your own view. This way, you can see the points you didn’t even thought about or see why some of your arguments are wrong.

On the other hand, discussion let’s you verify your own arguments and if your points can’t be broken, you trust your opinion on that topic even more.

Take the best out of every discussion you are in.

My opinion is based on industry experience, not just this is good or this is bad. It’s based on the target for the writing, not just the writing outside of it.

I could go into a very long discussion on writing, but talking with people who haven’t written professionally to spec for specific markets doesn’t really help issues. Everyone is going to think they’re right.

Take the personal story. It’s at best uneven writing. But the unevenness most likely comes less from the writing itself and more from the demands of the game.

Once the developers decided that everything had to finish in exactly 5 episodes and start over, that took something away from what the writers could do.

You can look and see that the writers didn’t write a story that the game wrapped around. The game had mechanics and story that the writing wrapped around. It’s a design choice.

Saying the personal story writing could have been better is absolutely true. Of course it would have also required a different game.

You don’t get to, as a game writer, write what you want. The writing serves the needs of the game. This game is clearly not centered on that. There’s too much else going on.

The game designers design mechanics and the writing has to wrap around it. And often, there are deadlines and other projects in the way.

This is why most single player games have it easier than MMOs. It’s also why most MMOs dont’ have great stories. There are obviously exceptions.

But most of the MMOs that have great stories suffer in other ways. TSW is just a clunky game with a good story that saved money by not voicing the protagonist, which I found far more annoying than anything in this story. That’s why it’s a matter of taste.

The story was fine, except everything in every mission was a monologue and you never said anything. Not really very good from my point of view. You liked it. It’s your opinion.

Why should I argue with your opinion?

Vayne.8563:

My opinion is based on industry experience, not just this is good or this is bad. It’s based on the target for the writing, not just the writing outside of it.

I could go into a very long discussion on writing, but talking with people who haven’t written professionally to spec for specific markets doesn’t really help issues. Everyone is going to think they’re right.

Take the personal story. It’s at best uneven writing. But the unevenness most likely comes less from the writing itself and more from the demands of the game.

Once the developers decided that everything had to finish in exactly 5 episodes and start over, that took something away from what the writers could do.

You can look and see that the writers didn’t write a story that the game wrapped around. The game had mechanics and story that the writing wrapped around. It’s a design choice.

Saying the personal story writing could have been better is absolutely true. Of course it would have also required a different game.

You don’t get to, as a game writer, write what you want. The writing serves the needs of the game. This game is clearly not centered on that. There’s too much else going on.

The game designers design mechanics and the writing has to wrap around it. And often, there are deadlines and other projects in the way.

This is why most single player games have it easier than MMOs. It’s also why most MMOs dont’ have great stories. There are obviously exceptions.

But most of the MMOs that have great stories suffer in other ways. TSW is just a clunky game with a good story that saved money by not voicing the protagonist, which I found far more annoying than anything in this story. That’s why it’s a matter of taste.

The story was fine, except everything in every mission was a monologue and you never said anything. Not really very good from my point of view. You liked it. It’s your opinion.

Why should I argue with your opinion?

I never mentioned TSW, I’m that other guy

I’m not a fiction writer I admit it, but I know when I see bad writing. You give a lot of reasons why writing for video games is more challenging. I agree with every single one of them.
And yet, I don’t really care about them. I don’t blame the writers. It’s a teams job to produce a good video game. And that team FAILED to deliver. I don’t care if they have internal problems or something, if you get into industry, you better be good or you WILL get negative feedback.

My main gripe with HoT open world pve is how everything is on rails, we must follow the timestamps or dont enjoy the content. It forced me to literarly plan parts of my daily schedule based on these sites that shows timers for meta events so I could partake and progress in game. Even the gift of craftsmanship requires you to be there at specific times during the day, meanwhile getting to the right map is mainly done through taxis/lfg, which is a bad system.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

My opinion is based on industry experience, not just this is good or this is bad. It’s based on the target for the writing, not just the writing outside of it.

I could go into a very long discussion on writing, but talking with people who haven’t written professionally to spec for specific markets doesn’t really help issues. Everyone is going to think they’re right.

Take the personal story. It’s at best uneven writing. But the unevenness most likely comes less from the writing itself and more from the demands of the game.

Once the developers decided that everything had to finish in exactly 5 episodes and start over, that took something away from what the writers could do.

You can look and see that the writers didn’t write a story that the game wrapped around. The game had mechanics and story that the writing wrapped around. It’s a design choice.

Saying the personal story writing could have been better is absolutely true. Of course it would have also required a different game.

You don’t get to, as a game writer, write what you want. The writing serves the needs of the game. This game is clearly not centered on that. There’s too much else going on.

The game designers design mechanics and the writing has to wrap around it. And often, there are deadlines and other projects in the way.

This is why most single player games have it easier than MMOs. It’s also why most MMOs dont’ have great stories. There are obviously exceptions.

But most of the MMOs that have great stories suffer in other ways. TSW is just a clunky game with a good story that saved money by not voicing the protagonist, which I found far more annoying than anything in this story. That’s why it’s a matter of taste.

The story was fine, except everything in every mission was a monologue and you never said anything. Not really very good from my point of view. You liked it. It’s your opinion.

Why should I argue with your opinion?

I never mentioned TSW, I’m that other guy

I’m not a fiction writer I admit it, but I know when I see bad writing. You give a lot of reasons why writing for video games is more challenging. I agree with every single one of them.
And yet, I don’t really care about them. I don’t blame the writers. It’s a teams job to produce a good video game. And that team FAILED to deliver. I don’t care if they have internal problems or something, if you get into industry, you better be good or you WILL get negative feedback.

It’s not bad writing if you’re doing what you’re supposed to. There is one instance in the HOT story that I do think is bad writing. Really bad. Beyond that, people overuse the word bad.

It’s like watching the movie Tombraider. It’s an action movie based on a game. It wasn’t a great movie. It wasn’t even really a good movie. That said, it was exactly what it was supposed to be, no more no less.

In order to judge anything… a movie, a book, a piece of writing, you have to take into account what it’s supposed to do/be. Let’s take the Ibli scenario from early on. Spoilers ahead for those of you who don’t want to know what happens.

The writing team is told we have this outpost to defend. So you have to characters, Ibli and Tizlak the two characters you meet in the story. They’re being chased by modrem, and you save them. This gives them some reason to trust you. We know the rest of their party has been killed and taken, making them sympathetic.

They’re a great contrast the two of them. Ibli is small and thin. His friend Tizlak is huge and carries a big hammer. There’s an entertaining bit of dialogue when your friends are talking about him and Tizlak overhears your suspicious of him, and says something. It’s cute and funny. This is on the escort back to their village.

The chapter is called the Jungle Provides and Ibli’s mother is the head of the hylek village. She believes that you’ve been provided to help them at a time of need, a time when the mordrem are about to attack their village. You’re given a choice. Defend the village as Ibli suggests, or go on the offensive as Tizlak suggests. Both of them have clear logical reasons for choosing their course of action.

Tizlak more the warrior, is more aggressive and believes a good offense is better than being on the back foot defending all the time. Ibli, on the other hand, wants to protect his home, because it is his home. Neither of them are wrong.

The game requires a choice to be made by the player. Why the player? Because they’ve been sent by the jungle to help. like an omen. The leader of the hylek is reading something into that, which isn’t that unlikely really. After all, you just saved her son.

The whole thing is well done. You have a sympathetic character, who happens to be adorable and voiced well,. giving you one motivation. Tizlak is another character I like btw. He’s big and strong, but he’s not overtly violent. I think he’s voiced well as well.

If you look at what is required from the story and what needs to be done and said, the writing for that particular story is spot on. Not Shakespeare. Not brilliant. It simply does exactly what’s required of it for the game.

You can complain all you want about the writing, but I don’t believe it’s as bad as you think it is.

As for the character situation, I’m pretty sure there are too many characters now, without throwing more main characters into the mix. You’ve got Destiny’s Edge characters, Pact Characters, and the Braham/Rox, Marjorie, Kasmeer, Canach, Taimi… its’ a lot of characters for anyone to keep track of.

Also keep in mind how little most MMO players actually follow story. It’s not like everyone is story driven. So you have to hit people over the head with some stuff to get them to understand it, which is another problem for writers in stuff like MMOs. All subtlety gets lost.

The same is true of professional wrestling. Everything has to be exaagerated, because live people in the top row need to understand what’s going on. Wrestling has some pretty good writing too, but you’d never know if if you didn’t understand the industry and how it works.

Vayne.8563:

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

I disagree. First nobody talk about putting gliding at the end, this is just nonsense. The whole Glinding line was just rightly done and my guess is that this is what started their idea of mastery line. This was the first one done, and it’s by far the best. It doesn’t take long before you get your Glider which allow you to do most of the new stuff, but over time you upgrade it, allowing you to access some more advanced place and the last few line are basically quality of life with I think just 3-4 PoI and HP blocked by line-ley glinding. That’s just perfect, over time you gain tool to advance and you use them as a mechanics and that’s the big difference. The mushroom are also something nice. You get boucing shroom early and it open big door for the expansion, but then you gain quality of life with speed and adrenal, which are nice. They are mechanics.

Same with auto loot, mentor tag, Forsaken Thickets, Nuhoch Wallows. They add something to your experience. They add mechanics.

But other masteries?

Some are just plane gating. You unlock them, remove a gate and you forget about it. They are not just, they don’t add anything to the game and can be weird.

The language things just doesn’t work since we talk to them from the beginning in the story. It just feel deconnected. They could had at least change a bit the story if you do it with or without the language. You could have a branching quest if you don’t have Itzel and Nohuch langague for exemple to go find an Hylek from core tyria which could half translate since those language are similar, but not exactly the same. Then if you do the story again but with the languge, you don’t need the translater.

Some other like Itzel poison and stealth detection could be nice, but they just don’t have any mechanics to it. You just forget about them as more and more people have them. It was nice for maybe the first few weeks, but after that, not really. They should add a mechanics. Why not use the special action key from raids. You need to press the key to send a wave that detect the stealthed foes, a bit like with guild rush do with trap. They could add a cooldown longer than the detect timer, so you need more than one people to keep the foe detected. Same with Itzel poison. No mechanics. It’s xp farm and forget. It could allow you to get some plants that protect you from the poison when you eat it, so you need to keep some in your inventory or maybe you get a new special action ability that allow you to survive the poison. Something.

Other are good, but just not worth using. Like the exalted assistance, the ability to fight champions, the mistlock singularity. The champion are usually not worth doing, the only do on a regular basis is because the zerg pass by him after Tarir Meta end so why not. Most people just don’t bother with the singularity even when they pass next to it and the who ask for exalted assistance?

There is just too much filler mastery just to gate, useless or boring in between the good mastery that work well in the world, bring new mechanics and that you don’t forget you have over time.

Thaddeus.4891:

Vayne.8563:

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

I disagree. First nobody talk about putting gliding at the end, this is just nonsense. The whole Glinding line was just rightly done and my guess is that this is what started their idea of mastery line. This was the first one done, and it’s by far the best. It doesn’t take long before you get your Glider which allow you to do most of the new stuff, but over time you upgrade it, allowing you to access some more advanced place and the last few line are basically quality of life with I think just 3-4 PoI and HP blocked by line-ley glinding. That’s just perfect, over time you gain tool to advance and you use them as a mechanics and that’s the big difference. The mushroom are also something nice. You get boucing shroom early and it open big door for the expansion, but then you gain quality of life with speed and adrenal, which are nice. They are mechanics.

Same with auto loot, mentor tag, Forsaken Thickets, Nuhoch Wallows. They add something to your experience. They add mechanics.

But other masteries?

Some are just plane gating. You unlock them, remove a gate and you forget about it. They are not just, they don’t add anything to the game and can be weird.

The language things just doesn’t work since we talk to them from the beginning in the story. It just feel deconnected. They could had at least change a bit the story if you do it with or without the language. You could have a branching quest if you don’t have Itzel and Nohuch langague for exemple to go find an Hylek from core tyria which could half translate since those language are similar, but not exactly the same. Then if you do the story again but with the languge, you don’t need the translater.

Some other like Itzel poison and stealth detection could be nice, but they just don’t have any mechanics to it. You just forget about them as more and more people have them. It was nice for maybe the first few weeks, but after that, not really. They should add a mechanics. Why not use the special action key from raids. You need to press the key to send a wave that detect the stealthed foes, a bit like with guild rush do with trap. They could add a cooldown longer than the detect timer, so you need more than one people to keep the foe detected. Same with Itzel poison. No mechanics. It’s xp farm and forget. It could allow you to get some plants that protect you from the poison when you eat it, so you need to keep some in your inventory or maybe you get a new special action ability that allow you to survive the poison. Something.

Other are good, but just not worth using. Like the exalted assistance, the ability to fight champions, the mistlock singularity. The champion are usually not worth doing, the only do on a regular basis is because the zerg pass by him after Tarir Meta end so why not. Most people just don’t bother with the singularity even when they pass next to it and the who ask for exalted assistance?

There is just too much filler mastery just to gate, useless or boring in between the good mastery that work well in the world, bring new mechanics and that you don’t forget you have over time.

Funny I run fractals all the time, and I have very rarely seen people not bother with singularities. Why wouldn’t you? It’s like a get out of jail free card.

Vayne.8563:

Funny I run fractals all the time, and I have very rarely seen people not bother with singularities. Why wouldn’t you? It’s like a get out of jail free card.

It’s not a fun mechanics. That doesn’t bring anything to the fractal experience. It fill like a filler because they didn’t have any good idea.

Vayne.8563:

It’s not bad writing if you’re doing what you’re supposed to. There is one instance in the HOT story that I do think is bad writing. Really bad. Beyond that, people overuse the word bad.

It’s like watching the movie Tombraider. It’s an action movie based on a game. It wasn’t a great movie. It wasn’t even really a good movie. That said, it was exactly what it was supposed to be, no more no less.

In order to judge anything… a movie, a book, a piece of writing, you have to take into account what it’s supposed to do/be. Let’s take the Ibli scenario from early on. Spoilers ahead for those of you who don’t want to know what happens.

The writing team is told we have this outpost to defend. So you have to characters, Ibli and Tizlak the two characters you meet in the story. They’re being chased by modrem, and you save them. This gives them some reason to trust you. We know the rest of their party has been killed and taken, making them sympathetic.

They’re a great contrast the two of them. Ibli is small and thin. His friend Tizlak is huge and carries a big hammer. There’s an entertaining bit of dialogue when your friends are talking about him and Tizlak overhears your suspicious of him, and says something. It’s cute and funny. This is on the escort back to their village.

The chapter is called the Jungle Provides and Ibli’s mother is the head of the hylek village. She believes that you’ve been provided to help them at a time of need, a time when the mordrem are about to attack their village. You’re given a choice. Defend the village as Ibli suggests, or go on the offensive as Tizlak suggests. Both of them have clear logical reasons for choosing their course of action.

Tizlak more the warrior, is more aggressive and believes a good offense is better than being on the back foot defending all the time. Ibli, on the other hand, wants to protect his home, because it is his home. Neither of them are wrong.

The game requires a choice to be made by the player. Why the player? Because they’ve been sent by the jungle to help. like an omen. The leader of the hylek is reading something into that, which isn’t that unlikely really. After all, you just saved her son.

The whole thing is well done. You have a sympathetic character, who happens to be adorable and voiced well,. giving you one motivation. Tizlak is another character I like btw. He’s big and strong, but he’s not overtly violent. I think he’s voiced well as well.

If you look at what is required from the story and what needs to be done and said, the writing for that particular story is spot on. Not Shakespeare. Not brilliant. It simply does exactly what’s required of it for the game.

You can complain all you want about the writing, but I don’t believe it’s as bad as you think it is.

As for the character situation, I’m pretty sure there are too many characters now, without throwing more main characters into the mix. You’ve got Destiny’s Edge characters, Pact Characters, and the Braham/Rox, Marjorie, Kasmeer, Canach, Taimi… its’ a lot of characters for anyone to keep track of.

Also keep in mind how little most MMO players actually follow story. It’s not like everyone is story driven. So you have to hit people over the head with some stuff to get them to understand it, which is another problem for writers in stuff like MMOs. All subtlety gets lost.

The same is true of professional wrestling. Everything has to be exaagerated, because live people in the top row need to understand what’s going on. Wrestling has some pretty good writing too, but you’d never know if if you didn’t understand the industry and how it works.

And here I give another example based on movies: Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Anhilation. Both are supposed to do the same thing, yet one is mediocre and other is terrible.

So what is GW2 story supposed to be? To me, it takes dark and mature themes like overpowering someones mind or losing a family member, uses them once or twice and throws them out. It wants me to take it seriously, but it doesn’t take itself seriously. It gives choices with absolutely no results, and even suffers from loopholes. Yes, loopholes. What kind of writing is supposed to have loopholes?

Thaddeus.4891:

Vayne.8563:

Funny I run fractals all the time, and I have very rarely seen people not bother with singularities. Why wouldn’t you? It’s like a get out of jail free card.

It’s not a fun mechanics. That doesn’t bring anything to the fractal experience. It fill like a filler because they didn’t have any good idea.

It brings something to my fractal experience. Instead of being downed, healing the next time you’re downed brings nothing? It’s filler? Okay then.

We’ll have to agree to disagree. Most people I talk to seem to like it.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

It’s not bad writing if you’re doing what you’re supposed to. There is one instance in the HOT story that I do think is bad writing. Really bad. Beyond that, people overuse the word bad.

It’s like watching the movie Tombraider. It’s an action movie based on a game. It wasn’t a great movie. It wasn’t even really a good movie. That said, it was exactly what it was supposed to be, no more no less.

In order to judge anything… a movie, a book, a piece of writing, you have to take into account what it’s supposed to do/be. Let’s take the Ibli scenario from early on. Spoilers ahead for those of you who don’t want to know what happens.

The writing team is told we have this outpost to defend. So you have to characters, Ibli and Tizlak the two characters you meet in the story. They’re being chased by modrem, and you save them. This gives them some reason to trust you. We know the rest of their party has been killed and taken, making them sympathetic.

They’re a great contrast the two of them. Ibli is small and thin. His friend Tizlak is huge and carries a big hammer. There’s an entertaining bit of dialogue when your friends are talking about him and Tizlak overhears your suspicious of him, and says something. It’s cute and funny. This is on the escort back to their village.

The chapter is called the Jungle Provides and Ibli’s mother is the head of the hylek village. She believes that you’ve been provided to help them at a time of need, a time when the mordrem are about to attack their village. You’re given a choice. Defend the village as Ibli suggests, or go on the offensive as Tizlak suggests. Both of them have clear logical reasons for choosing their course of action.

Tizlak more the warrior, is more aggressive and believes a good offense is better than being on the back foot defending all the time. Ibli, on the other hand, wants to protect his home, because it is his home. Neither of them are wrong.

The game requires a choice to be made by the player. Why the player? Because they’ve been sent by the jungle to help. like an omen. The leader of the hylek is reading something into that, which isn’t that unlikely really. After all, you just saved her son.

The whole thing is well done. You have a sympathetic character, who happens to be adorable and voiced well,. giving you one motivation. Tizlak is another character I like btw. He’s big and strong, but he’s not overtly violent. I think he’s voiced well as well.

If you look at what is required from the story and what needs to be done and said, the writing for that particular story is spot on. Not Shakespeare. Not brilliant. It simply does exactly what’s required of it for the game.

You can complain all you want about the writing, but I don’t believe it’s as bad as you think it is.

As for the character situation, I’m pretty sure there are too many characters now, without throwing more main characters into the mix. You’ve got Destiny’s Edge characters, Pact Characters, and the Braham/Rox, Marjorie, Kasmeer, Canach, Taimi… its’ a lot of characters for anyone to keep track of.

Also keep in mind how little most MMO players actually follow story. It’s not like everyone is story driven. So you have to hit people over the head with some stuff to get them to understand it, which is another problem for writers in stuff like MMOs. All subtlety gets lost.

The same is true of professional wrestling. Everything has to be exaagerated, because live people in the top row need to understand what’s going on. Wrestling has some pretty good writing too, but you’d never know if if you didn’t understand the industry and how it works.

And here I give another example based on movies: Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Anhilation. Both are supposed to do the same thing, yet one is mediocre and other is terrible.

So what is GW2 story supposed to be? To me, it takes dark and mature themes like overpowering someones mind or losing a family member, uses them once or twice and throws them out. It wants me to take it seriously, but it doesn’t take itself seriously. It gives choices with absolutely no results, and even suffers from loopholes. Yes, loopholes. What kind of writing is supposed to have loopholes?

Give me some examples and I can talk about it. Saying what you’re saying now has about as much value as me saying it’s good.

From my personal perspective the writing in the Personal story was weaker than say most of the open world writing. The writing in Living Story Season 2 is a bit better, but the writing/delivery in HoT is probably the best it’s been. What I’ve seen is improvement in story telling.

Let’s not forget, for a whole lot of people the PS is unbearably slow.

This is funny because since start, I avoid like plague all the HoT pve content. I didn’t even finish HoT story. I’m like mastery rank 50ish, I don’t really know and care.
For me, HoT = elite specs. Elite specs are fun to play, but really need some balancing.
I’m still waiting for wvw changes, but I don’t hold my breath. What Anet have done to this game mode is irreversible imo. They will never balance it, because they would have to balance pve and probably nerf raids. They aren’t crazy enough to alienate their pve crowd for the few guys still playing wvw.

So what’s next? PvP? Leagues are frustrating most of times because of weird/abused matchmaking system and that pesky 50% w/l ratio. SoloQ can be a real pain.
But unranked is still “fun”. I still have to reach rank 80 because I only start pvp lately, with wvw downfall.

Overall, HoT pushed me towards pvp. My pve habits are still the same ( gathering nodes, doing tequatl and Orr’s temples). I don’t do wvw anymore ( I was spending 3 hours every evening before HoT). So for me HoT = elite specs. It’s a bit expensive but I still have fun so it worths the expense I guess.

Vayne.8563:

Give me some examples and I can talk about it. Saying what you’re saying now has about as much value as me saying it’s good.

From my personal perspective the writing in the Personal story was weaker than say most of the open world writing. The writing in Living Story Season 2 is a bit better, but the writing/delivery in HoT is probably the best it’s been. What I’ve seen is improvement in story telling.

Let’s not forget, for a whole lot of people the PS is unbearably slow.

SPOILER ALERT

A few examples of loopholes:
Caithe takes egg for no reason. Then we are told, that it was some sort of a new vyld hunt to protect the egg. And while protecting it she moves towards Mordremoth? Yeah, it lets plot advance, but other than that it doesn’t makes any sense.
Dragon’s weakness. At the last moment, PC somehow figures out what its weakness is. For some reason.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

Give me some examples and I can talk about it. Saying what you’re saying now has about as much value as me saying it’s good.

From my personal perspective the writing in the Personal story was weaker than say most of the open world writing. The writing in Living Story Season 2 is a bit better, but the writing/delivery in HoT is probably the best it’s been. What I’ve seen is improvement in story telling.

Let’s not forget, for a whole lot of people the PS is unbearably slow.

SPOILER ALERT

A few examples of loopholes:
Caithe takes egg for no reason. Then we are told, that it was some sort of a new vyld hunt to protect the egg. And while protecting it she moves towards Mordremoth? Yeah, it lets plot advance, but other than that it doesn’t makes any sense.
Dragon’s weakness. At the last moment, PC somehow figures out what its weakness is. For some reason.

Trying to keep it as spoiler free as possible

I totally agree on second point, it’s a deus ex machina and like any, it’s not the greatest way to resolve a situation, at least not in this case. A DEM can be interesting in a very bad situation to make those “surprise/relieve” moments, but in our case, without an imminent problem (yes, we still had a mission, but we were looking for a solution, not really in deadly danger) is not that great.

On first point Caithe was doing what we have done in Tarir, she just wasn’t the “choosen” one. Still weak argument, i agree, but at least decent.
Is just after Tarir, anyway, that the story feels to fall apart. Or better, it feels cut, like u clearly see 1 missing lane in Dragon Stand: I bet there was some more chapters at the end of Auric Basin and into Tangled Depths, for sure.

In my opinion, what fails is the duration. The idea is cool, a map that progress, the events are fun imo, etc. But it takes too long to comlete the meta of each map.

Pretending to have casual people in the same map playing for 2 hours to complete a meta event is just wrong. In this game at least. we are not dedicated players, we have jobs, families, other things to do. you play 1 hour or 2 and you leave. and you cant spent those 2 hours on DS or AB doing the meta. Is just wrong.

The metas (or raids, or fractals, or dungeongs, or whatever content they bring to us), should be of 30 min at maximum.

Raids, dungeons and fractals are ok on that department (for raids you need skill, but once you get it, the wing can be made pretty fast). But meta events are terribly wrong, cuase they took too long.
That foments either people leeching, or worst: people just not playing it.

apparently HOT is so successful they are planning to works towards next expansion in 2016:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/402r80/jan_8_guild_chat_livestream_notes/

General Notes
- Developer Matt Pennebaker have been working on lots of legendary precursor crafting bug fixes, some of which will go live next Tuesday.
- Colin: “I have seen some of the new legendaries, they are amazing”
- Blog post on skill balance next week, with Karl coming in the next Guild Chat on Friday to discuss them.
- Blog post on Jan 12 on 2016 Roadmap.

Development Balance
- In the previous years we did lots of biweeky/monthly updates. In 2015 our focus was on HoT with some updates. in 2016 we are trying to find a balance between frequent – game updates and working on the next expansion.
- We want to focus on all the game modes. We are working on polishing existing game modes instead of experimenting with new stuff.
- WvW overhaul has been in development for over a year now. There are lots of core things we still need to do including population balance etc. (LOL, call this bs)

Agree, clear the game is a success, it made money, it is good quality, compared to ANY othger AAA mmo the amount on content is comparable while not destroying the playabilit of old content.

For me the next area they should focus on is getting wvw improved while balancing and also working on the next expansion – thats moving the game on nicely.

Silicato.4603:

In my opinion, what fails is the duration. The idea is cool, a map that progress, the events are fun imo, etc. But it takes too long to comlete the meta of each map.

Pretending to have casual people in the same map playing for 2 hours to complete a meta event is just wrong. In this game at least. we are not dedicated players, we have jobs, families, other things to do. you play 1 hour or 2 and you leave. and you cant spent those 2 hours on DS or AB doing the meta. Is just wrong.

The metas (or raids, or fractals, or dungeongs, or whatever content they bring to us), should be of 30 min at maximum.

Raids, dungeons and fractals are ok on that department (for raids you need skill, but once you get it, the wing can be made pretty fast). But meta events are terribly wrong, cuase they took too long.
That foments either people leeching, or worst: people just not playing it.

Dude nailed it.

Game was such a huge failure that they’re already planning the next expansion, right OP ?

Raziel.4216:

Game was such a huge failure that they’re already planning the next expansion, right OP ?

Right, because people who make failed products and lose money keep throwing good money after bad. We all knew that. Right? Right?!

They can plan another xpac all they like. I wish them luck but they won’t get a sale from my household. I don’t even go into HoT maps.