Living World 3 maps aren't immersive
In some ways yes I agree – the LW3 maps do feel like small rides in a theme park – that have been artificially constructed for gameplay and not an organic part of the landscape.
On the other hand even maps like Southsun Cove feel more a natural part of Tyria than the new LW3 maps.
Maybe be it’s the leyline gliding paths or size and layout of the maps or the events themselves. I can’t pin it down exactly.
I would like maps with some new open world large group events (like SW, AB, or marionette).
thats why after Bloodstone and ember bay, i wont even bother with bitterfrost. waste of time. havent been there and aint going to go there.
Ember bay for me feels like a traditional gw2 map and of the three it is the one i most enjoyed. Bitter frost is beautiful but i feel ultimately shallow , bloodstone fen was like a bad acid trip. It sounds super negative but for the most part i am very happy with the game and you cannot complain about the rate we are getting new story chapters. That said i would totally be fine with a longer wait between story chapters if that means it came with a map that has more meat on it than the most recent ones.
Things i would like to see in the next map
Change up the harvest map currency buy ascended stuff formula.
Meta event/world boss that has some interesting loot and super rare stuff like preserved queen bee making it worthwhile to do repeatedly.
Ambrite weapon style collection.
A few low mob density exploration hang out sorta areas.
I would also like to add, that while these maps are indeed rewarding, some of us don’t play the game to grind or farm. A lot of us, in particular those of us that spend money for gems and gold play the game to have fun, the grinding and reward are secondary.
I couldn’t agree more with these criticisms of the new maps. Player behavior on those maps is enormously different than on other maps, and much of it is pretty bad behavior driven by both the drive to harvest map currency nodes and the ridiculous difficulty of the foes.
This is especially evident in Bitterfrost, where many are running around ignoring fights and hoping someone else has attracted all the aggro so they can dash in, harvest, and run away. If that unlucky soul gets overwhelmed and dies, tough. They can just wp and run back, because trying to rez them risks getting jumped by the rapid respawns and slows you up from getting to the next node. (Even those who participate in fights that someone is struggling with will often stop to harvest first before joining in. Priorities!) This is really annoying when the aggro consists of some pack of three or more regular foes plus a tough vet, with the possibility of several other foes spawning close by and joining the fight, with players running in with a train of aggro behind them that also piles on.
I find myself doing just enough events on one of these maps to satisfy the dailies plus unlock some hearts to buy more map currency, then harvesting all I can reach, and then bailing out of the map to rinse and repeat with the other two maps. Once I’ve achieved my goals for ascended trinkets for all of my characters, I don’t expect to go back to those maps ever again unless the future story requires my return for a bit.
I kind of agree – the maps have a story, but beyond that, it’s just zerg farming for ascended trinkets and the occasional bout of scenery porn. I’m kind of hoping they will be revisited in future LS episodes to maybe expand on what they already have.
I won’t argue about the fights though! They do tend to keep exploration… interesting.
I couldn’t agree more with these criticisms of the new maps. Player behavior on those maps is enormously different than on other maps, and much of it is pretty bad behavior driven by both the drive to harvest map currency nodes and the ridiculous difficulty of the foes.
This is especially evident in Bitterfrost, where many are running around ignoring fights and hoping someone else has attracted all the aggro so they can dash in, harvest, and run away. If that unlucky soul gets overwhelmed and dies, tough. They can just wp and run back, because trying to rez them risks getting jumped by the rapid respawns and slows you up from getting to the next node. (Even those who participate in fights that someone is struggling with will often stop to harvest first before joining in. Priorities!) This is really annoying when the aggro consists of some pack of three or more regular foes plus a tough vet, with the possibility of several other foes spawning close by and joining the fight, with players running in with a train of aggro behind them that also piles on.
I find myself doing just enough events on one of these maps to satisfy the dailies plus unlock some hearts to buy more map currency, then harvesting all I can reach, and then bailing out of the map to rinse and repeat with the other two maps. Once I’ve achieved my goals for ascended trinkets for all of my characters, I don’t expect to go back to those maps ever again unless the future story requires my return for a bit.
Where are those difficicult foes you speak of?
I honestly want to see those.
I just think some events could be downscaled a bit so ppl won’t have trouble doing them when it’s not so popular anymore, especially the Jade.
The LS3 maps are different than LS2 and HoT, yes.
I don’t agree that its a bad thing necessarily, though. While you may like grand meta events and map-wide events, not everyone does. I recall plenty of complaints from people specifically about how every new map was a big involved event chain that required long periods of time to feel like you’re making any significant progress, or at the very least you need to log on at very specific times just for the big meta finales.
Some people just want to log on whenever they have time, play for half an hour doing a few small events, harvesting, ect, and log out again. Either because they just don’t have time for longer sessions, or just prefer their games in small chunks. The LS3 maps seem to have been designed with those players in mind. Frequently repeating events, map-specific dailies, and smaller scale all make those maps more friendly to players who don’t want to spend long periods of time playing GW2.
And I think that’s fine. The last 5 maps prior to LS3 were all meta-event oriented, and so naturally a lot of those “small dose” players started to feel left out. Sure, they could always go and play older maps, but everyone wants to enjoy new things and not just repeat the old stuff. The fact that the devs are making some maps that move in the opposite direction for a change is a good thing.
I’m sure its not a permanent change to all new maps going forward. Especially when it comes to the next expansion, I’d be shocked if they didn’t go back to HoT’s method of incorporating the maps into the overall story, because its a pretty cool approach to storytelling. But they can’t JUST do that.
The last 5 maps prior to LS3 were all meta-event oriented, and so naturally a lot of those “small dose” players started to feel left out. Sure, they could always go and play older maps, but everyone wants to enjoy new things and not just repeat the old stuff. The fact that the devs are making some maps that move in the opposite direction for a change is a good thing.
I’m sure its not a permanent change to all new maps going forward. Especially when it comes to the next expansion, I’d be shocked if they didn’t go back to HoT’s method of incorporating the maps into the overall story, because its a pretty cool approach to storytelling. But they can’t JUST do that.
The problem is they have been doing JUST the heart maps for a while now rather than alternating different types. If they had done some heart maps and some meta maps, I probably wouldn’t have posted. It has been over a year since there was a new meta map, so people that like the meta maps have the same problem that you had when they were just releasing meta maps. To me the hearts are boring, especially doing them more than once.
I think part of it is probably that because we’ve gotten 3 maps in a pretty short period of time it feels like the quality of each individual map maybe isn’t as good as if they’d spent that same amount of time on just one single map. It’s a tradeoff, and I get that. Would we as players rather have one great map to play over and over and over or 3 okay maps to switch between? I am not completely sure what is better or worse, but I like variety so I’m okay with this for now.
I will say that if the next expansion maps are like these 3 that would be no bueno. These 3 have been a clear step down from HoT maps for me, which is another reason why they feel lackluster when I play them.
I’m not all that big on huge, time-consuming metas myself. I applaud the changes they made to mitigate the meta in most of the HoT maps. Players can now come in and do a few events, getting immediate rewards instead of having to wait for an hour or more to get a “participation” reward. You can even do this to some extent when the remaining big meta is running — VB night, Octovine, or King of the Jungle — though rewards are better, of course, for those who run the whole meta, which now takes 45 minutes or less. (I wish they could make similar changes to DS, where you can’t do anything, even map completion, unless you get into a full map with three zergs running. And you generally can’t do that unless you are present when the map resets.)
But the basic strategy in LS3 maps seems to be avoiding events for the most part in favor of farming. Some of the farming may involve champ events, particularly when the champ is needed for a daily and the pre helps complete a heart. Otherwise it’s about getting to as many nodes as you can in as short a time as you can. That’s going way to far in the anti-meta direction, IMHO.
You don’t need to have an actual map-wide, long-running meta to give events on a map more of a feeling of unity and sense of progress than we get from the LS3 maps. Many of the core maps manage to do this just fine without a HoT or Maguuma-Wastes-style meta.
Okay first of all i agree, the maps dont feel immersive and they dont feel like theres anything to hold you there for more than the time it takes to collect the map currency and do the dailies and our player char so far agrees. In each episode after he/she has done his/her job on the map then moves on to the next and never looks back (so far), while we keep going to the hot maps like tarrir and ab (taimis place) because theres strong longlasting importance to this places unlike with the new maps that are bursts of importance that last for very little and then the map becomes purely mechanicly worth( currencies/items ). I’d lke at some point to get to expieriece the kind of se2 maps again like sw and dry top where multiple episodes take part and generally us and the pc have a reason to stay there for more tha the period between of each lw release
Long story short the maps feel like the instances for the personal story they served their purpose added to the narative theres no point now to look back at themboth lore wise (atm at least and dare i say fun wise? (because tbh i had fun everytime i did the meta in sw and generaly ran around and i dont geet the same feeling as strongly with the new maps)) .
With that being said i like the concept of farm maps, maps that purely serve the purpose of farming to get rewaded i enjoyed that in wow too, but i wouldnt like that to be the defining similarity and factor of each one of the new maps of lw s3.
Over all really pleased with the quality of what we geet but i wouldnt get mad or feel betrayed if we got a release in like 3 or 4 months and the maps it brings stays relevant longer and not only as a farm map but as an importand map (story wise and event/mechanically wise).
p.s. i hope i made what im trying to say here clear and not caused any confusion.
extra p.s. i’d like to add that the best hibrid of a farm maps and event map you ahve done inho is sw and you should ty a bit moree to stay true to that while you change the narative and the thematic to make the feel diff from eachother and unique.
(edited by zealex.9410)
While I agree that the LS maps aren’t as immersive as HoT/SW, I kind of understand the reasoning for it. Since the advent of gliding, maps need to be designed differently to cater to it, which probably demands alot more resources to do properly. They might not have as much time to sink into a LS map as they did with expac maps. At least not at the current release interval.
When they released Bloodstone Fen, I was kind of expecting it to be like Dry Top in that we start off with one small bit of the map unlocked, and then more pieces become accessible as the LS moves along so you end up with a bigger map. I did enjoy the map and gliding. I was a bit disappointed to move to a whole different area with dreary colors like Ember Bay. The environments seems kind of scattershot in theme between volcanoes, icy mountains, and red chaos and a bit gimmicky with things like thermal propulsion bouncing people everywhere.
Other than that, I can’t really put my finger on why the maps don’t interest me as much. Maybe it’s just that fighting more dragon minions is getting old. None of the enemies seem to have much personality. They’re all a bunch of mindless drones/animals fighting for a handful of rarely-encountered dragon overlords that are behind the scenes. At least when you are fighting an enemy human faction like in GW1, the main enemies have some culture (ie. Kourna)and feel more real and complex.