Guild Wars 2

Plus:

• The content – fairly much on relationships between charaters and loads about Charr/human hsistory – was really nice, and the ending was a really good cliffhanger. Beautiful cinematic.

• I noticed how these events were sneaked in and, in some places, fitted and linked together with other, already exsisteing events. Well done.

• This patch got a special Place in my heart, that beats for the Charr race espacially!!!

Minus:

• The zerg-fest-ish events that also were superbyggy (causing waiting/searching for servers for hours) to start with. Ruins the feeling espacially when u’re sent out “alone” to deal with some things. This could be solved with instances where up to 10 (call it raiding perhaps) ppl could go or something… if u want bigger and/or harder mobs to deal with. + 50 ppl just totally ruins the feeling. It will probably calm down in a couple of Days but still – its a first impression. And I guess the stalling due to thye buggy nature also helped to gather even more ppl to these events.

• The Crown search coule be more immersive. It’s an AMAZINGLY powerful artifact we’re searching for here. Perhaps make a short cinematic on how u find the third part and holds them, amazed over what it actually is that u hold in ur hands. Could have been so cool… Strange that these pievces were just scattered around… Not even guarded by or atracting any creature sensing its Power (got a slight LOTR feeling about these pieces). Also a bit strange that u pretty much knew pweferctly well where to find them… (got that feeling from “follow the green dot-way” it was designed"). Perhaps u could have spoken to ppl giving u clues on the way or something… to reveal one area at the time, getting closer as u go.

I think it was a decent patch content wise. Not the largest or even the most engaging, but the story was tight and there were fun moments.

It is extremely unfortunate that the fun was overshadowed by the crippling bugs and stalled events. Those are what people will remember from this patch – standing around forever in Iron Marches and Frostgorge waiting for short events to start.

It is like a good book that has been dropped in a puddle. You can read just enough to know its enjoyable, but not enough to actually enjoy it.

Hopefully, the developers learned some important lessons with this patch and we wont see this kind of thing again.

Actually, that crown bit was refered to by Rytlock before the mission. Sure, a bit tailored to being doable in an episode, but it was still there and properly explained! According to his dialogue, he found the first piece himself “after years of research for the proper elements to break the curse” and said that the pieces attracted each other, that’s how you knew the locations. Also he mentioned that they were made not to be noticed, as a safeguard to falling into the wrong hands. To me that sounds like an enchantment of sorts was placed on them.

I was lucky enough to get through the story in the 2 hours I had, without any progress-blocking bugs, but with a lot of confusion and zerg following to reduce the story impact. I actually liked them weaving in existing dynamic events, but then I didn’t have to wait ungodly amounts of time for the events to happen and I got credit for them all. Had that not been the case I would have been far more frustrated.

I was disappointed that as a human nobleman I didn’t get to go shmooze Anise and Jennah but instead was somehow the convincing factor for all the other races. And I was very disappointed by the ease of finding the crown pieces. When Rytlock set up the hunt for them I said in gchat, “Oh, this could be epic!” … and then it wasn’t.

However, I don’t think they should have included the summit itself in this chapter, primarily because I believe the summit is going to feature some sort of mayhem. So I’m hoping they saved it for next patch so we can get more epic action than perhaps would have flowed well in this part.

My biggest problem was that even next day, most of the events were either bugged and didn’t work or were already completed. For example, the ghost machine builder still didn’t work (which actually has been broken since before this update) and the quest did not advance, thus meaning the story could not advance. I had to just give up and log off. Later I logged back on and found all of the crown events complete so I could just grab everything I needed.