Just some thoughts from a returning player.
- Unskippable Cutscenes and Dialoque. Both are good, but if i do the story on a toon, it would be nice to be able to jump ahead a bit. I mean, i already saw all of it.
This is the major thing keeping me from replaying the story with my alts. I don’t want to have to sit through all that again…
- As a minor point, the party setup – Not only is our group missing a Sylvari to get all the races into it, but except for Braham and potentially the player-character, everyone’s female.
If the setup were the opposite (all males with one female, i.e. the standard setup for everything, see Avengers/Guardians of Galaxy etc…) would you even notice/care? Just saying.
And now Season 2 brought me back – in fact, i enjoyed the story so much, i bought the 3 parts i missed so far, i bought the game for a friend to bring her into it as well and i’m actually disappointed that i missed the first season because while i get the gist of all the characters, it feels like i missed a lot of nice moments with them.
This is something ANet needs to work on (if only to provide a better overall experience for new players). The format of S1 doesn’t fit well into the format of S2, so clearly a lot of work needs to go into it. With the focus currently being on producing S2 content it’s unknown when or if they’ll have time (afterall when S2 is done they’ll move on to S3 and so on so when they’ll get time for S1 no one knows).
Even just reintroducing some of the more story focused instances (and listing the rest at TBA) would be a nice touch, since for example the instance we meet Rox and Braham (during Flame and Frost) are all fairly self contained and would relatively easily fit into the current living world format.
Things i don’t really like:
- Tying the story-progression into area-events is a bit off-putting. Especially if your timing is BAD enough to miss the event for it, but triggering the next story-step. For instance, one of my characters destroyed the dragon-totem without getting involved in the eventchain before it and that just felt insanely anticlimactic.
It was a nice idea, but the implementation was iffy. My big problem was (like yours) that in an instance you have control over when events fire off while in the open world you don’t. Also these open world events don’t have the same narrative or lore focus (or far less so than the instances). I think it’s not completely nonredeemable as a concept, but some tweaks and experiments could be done to further refine it.
- Unskippable Cutscenes and Dialoque. Both are good, but if i do the story on a toon, it would be nice to be able to jump ahead a bit. I mean, i already saw all of it.
This is a problem. I think the issue came about when they moved from the old dialogue system (which had skipping ability built into it) to the new in-game dialogue system. Well a lot of players didn’t like the old system so moving away from it was an okay idea, although the moved to a new system which wasn’t as functional (no skipping and no player character dialogue). They said they’re working on it.
However I think the easiest solution would probably to implement an achievement instance (no dialogue and what not, just the combat) so that players can more easily replay and retry. Challenge is fine afterall, having to be punished for failure (having to sit around and wait i.e. living world dialogue or Pavilion-esque queue system) is a bit frustrating, because any good challenge will involve plenty of failure. Ideally it would be fail-instant retry-fail-instant retry.
- The pale Tree being knocked out for everyone. It doesn’t make sense from a story-viewpoint, since players just starting out will not even know why the weird glowy person is lying on the ground there; they’re not at that part of the story yet. From their POV, the Pale Tree Avatar should be just dandy.
Well the story windows clearly states that the LW S2 takes place 2 or so years after the start of the personal story, and since players can only access the LW content once they’ve reached level 80 I don’t think this is such a big issue. Or at least it’s an issue that all MMOs need to deal with. In other MMOs each time a new expansion is released (and usually a new area or content) then players are in effect time traveling when moving from the new content to the old content.
- As a minor point, the party setup – Not only is our group missing a Sylvari to get all the races into it, but except for Braham and potentially the player-character, everyone’s female.
Canach!
This is the major thing keeping me from replaying the story with my alts. I don’t want to have to sit through all that again…
The question is why do you want to replay? If it’s to experience the story then skipping the dialog is odd. If it’s for the achievements then being able to skip dialogue is a perfectly logical and desirable ability to have.
If the setup were the opposite (all males with one female, i.e. the standard setup for everything, see Avengers/Guardians of Galaxy etc…) would you even notice/care? Just saying.
Was thinking about this the other day and it’s a rather wonderful inversion of the usual trope. Would be even better of an inversion if Braham wasn’t the bulky-heat-head sort but more a Faren-esque characters (the pretty and pretty useless sort).
If the setup were the opposite (all males with one female, i.e. the standard setup for everything, see Avengers/Guardians of Galaxy etc…) would you even notice/care? Just saying.
Yeah, i most certainly would care, since it’s the exact same (albeit minor) problem.