Another small patch, is this the norm?
If they are going to take 3 months or so to unveil Dry Top, around the time Elona is completely explorable the game will be more than outdated and no one will care about it. This Living Story prioritization is really killing this game.
It’s gating content by staggering the release of it; it keeps players coming back for longer. If they released it all at once then they’ll have people completing it the week of and having nothing left to look forward too other than the option grind for cosmetic gear and achievements.
Mind you, this is how it is now, but it is much less extreme this way when those feelings of having nothing to do but do optional achievement and grind content only last 2 weeks.
This content is planned and thought through. It hasn’t been made in 2 weeks time. Future patches may have new dungeons and such relevant to the story at the time, we don’t know, but Anet know already what content is coming out.
Here’s the thing about releasing something all at once vs in snippets like they’re doing.
On the one hand, you buy yourself some time to fill out the area and you can release smaller snippets earlier on.
On the other hand, because they’re updating areas to look like they’re evolving and we’re pushing through as the weeks go on [a difficult and resource intensive task] we end up getting less content for more work in the end because so much effort is put into the gradual evolution that players experience for that brief time the update is active.
Once the events of that update are done, the area normalizes and the work that went into making it different or have different events then gets thrown away.
So which would you rather have, more content a little later down the road, designed to be long lasting and keep you busy…
Or
Smaller time gated updates that give you the fleeting illusion that the world is active and changing…
BTW we now we get to wait at least 6 weeks for the next update because the next chapter won’t be released until fall…
So… um… see you in six weeks I guess for the next 2 hour story update!
Enjoy the sun y’all.
I think players are slowly realizing how small the patches actually are. Its because of the fact that they have no replayability. They would if the rewards from the achievements were good but they are absolutely awful, again a fail from the rewards editor.
They could be unique reward, especially this patch in the last instance that is pretty difficult if you are going for the achievement to not get hit. That is probably the first actual difficult achievement ive seen, and its rewards are terrible.
Anet’s idea for the living story season 2 has failed in my opinion, beacuse a replayable living story instance doesn’t have the same longevity as open world content does. They will realize this before the end.