Guild Wars 2

Id like to give my impressions with this with my critisisms so ill be a fair one to give this an even handed review:

The Story

The launch of the new Season story was epic, the voice acting felt right, the plot development flowed brilliantly I enjoyed every moment of it.

Five new missions in a single episode was more than I was expecting, so I’m pleasantly surprised to see how much development went into giving flesh to the story side of the game, with some rich char development in the right places.

This paced better than its predecessor in the same way the flame and frost dungeon paced, it felt like a proper adventure and I enjoyed every moment of it, I was really enthralled by what was going on right off the bat.

Maybe its because I followed S1 to the very end and I enjoyed it story wise despite its flaws, but despite my bias, I really feel you’ve ramped up Season Two to a whole new level of brilliant.

Other MMO’s better be scared because story wise GW2’s really making a solid comeback.

The New Zone, Dry Top

A returner from GW1 but with SO much changed about it its almost unrecognizable, this small but simple zone features a good use of new templates, new zone assets and makes use of older mobs in an enjoyable way.

Visually, I love this place, its stunning, the audio for Dry Top is fantastic musically, the orchestra really gives life to it.

The use of Zephyr Crystals to explore the zone just makes it fun too, adding those little pockets to explore and puzzles to solve.

However, I can make one criticism about this zone.

While I do like it and hey, it includes a nod to personal story for certain human players (you know which char I mean!) It does have one major letdown.

The zone is tiny compared to even Southsun Cove.

Adding a new zone is hard work, I cant discredit that, however, this one feels like its not finished, and hopefully that is the case since I get the feeling this feels like a giant demo preview for the entire area, as Dry Top’s small region is… lackluster.

Not only that but the limited activities to do will guarantee that outside story and repeating it for achievement sake, you will run out of things to do here, fast.

My problem with that is that 2 weeks with a tiny new area and a single story update feel great except they also feel a little shallow.

Hopefully there will be other distractions that come with future Season 2 updates because without them, adding small zone additions per patch wont really be enough to feed the masses for long, especially given people are easily starved, and even more easily bored.

A possible solution:

Make use of existing regions in the game to add even more story missions thus giving people more to do while they wait, making each episode feel more like a lengthy chunk of content.

At the very least, this might please those that aren’t as easily distracted at others with something to do that isn’t just recycling 5 new missions and 1 new (small) zone.

TL:DR?
- The Story is fantastic, kitten you for leaving me on a cliffhanger, I want more!
- The new zone is visually and musically pleasing.
- The new update creates an over hype for wanting even more content sooner than later, hopefully the game will take advantage of this.
- Suggesting implementing more story missions/side missions in present and existing areas to give more chunk to the meat.

There’s improvement, that is plain to see. Lots of hard work has gone into this.

- I fully agree, the zone is FAR too small. Massively under par for 1 new zone in terms of size. The feeling of exploration is gone for me in this zone. The jumping at the start felt awkward and out of place. Really needed to in it’s own park to one side really for those who don’t want anything to do with jumping puzzle stuff.

- it looks beautiful and the ffects are excellent. If the zone had size and weight it would be the best zone in the game.

- The music is excellent. Not having Jeremy Soule hasn’t affected the score, in fact I’d argue it has improved.

- The story is much better and with substanbce.

- However, once again the NPC’s are being deliberately ignorant in order to delay parts of the plot. Why is no one talking about the dragon roar? why is none mentioning a dragon in Maguuma? Why is no one tying a dragon and the jungle corruption together? If I was an adventurer…these would be major conversation points. ALso, was there meant to be a cutscene zoning in? It was a bit weird zoning in suddenly goign straight to the Zephyrite story with no lead in at all. Bug maybe?

- the journal is excellent. Neat and and natural to the rest of the game/UI

- Lots of big bugs (all reported mind you as I find them).

Overall impressed, but some frustrations mitigated the excitement of a new zone

Yea i actually enjoyed it..even story wise left u with a lot of questions yet had some nifty twists in it. It’s definitely an improvement compared to most we got last season. A good start. A bit short’ish if u ask me but good.

Also the map has interesting mechanics behind it..from the dust storms that also changes the mobs, to lots of events in a small area + timed crystal skills and whatnot. It’s a fun map overall….even tho i usually am not a big fan of wasteland type maps where there’s only dust, i actually had fun on it. Not sure because of the map itself or because it was just something new to do.

I also like the chests that appear when the dust storm starts……the very sad thing about GW2 still remains tho. RNG and overall droprate of items that matter is draconic-low compare to any other mmo in existance. The drops are so bad cross all the game, u literally stop giving a kitten about them overall. Why waste hours apon hours of time trying to get chests (in general)? At best u get 1-2 exotics which are so bad u try to salvage for a few ectos and a lot of the times u don’t even get those. Most counterproductive drop rates i’ve seen in my experience.

Now question is…we have to wait 1 month for the next thing? If that’s the case they should really put in more content. I honestly finished it in less then an hour. All there’s left are some extra achievement points which i am not a HC collector of.

I thought it was pretty good overall.

Some serious issues though:

- For me, NPCs in the story were 80% of the time having multiple characters speak their lines at the same time. Kind of ruins the narrative experience. I guess that might be a lag thing so please find a way to make sure it doesn’t happen.

- A lot of lag on the servers that impacted my sessions going through the story while in combat. And this will probably happen every release, so that’s concerning.

- When fighting the boss on the platforms my heroic crew all stayed at the bottom attacking stupid worthless roots. I wanted to fire them all. Please put a “go home” command in the future for these forced player companions.

Other than those QA issues, I think they’re on track for a better season.

epic start really? The new map Dry Top is so small. This new LS2 is just like the rest of LS, can finish everything in 2 hours or less.

This is fantastic, just keep pouring this kind of update on my eyeballs, please!

I agree with the OP! Great start to LS2! I’m assuming as the story continues the map will continue to open up to new areas??!!?

However, I don’t like that the LS is not account wide…super annoying to have to unlock everything over and over again. I like that it is lvl 80 so it doesn’t get packed full of people trying to level their lowbies. It also makes the drops better too.

Overall, it has been fun playing with the elemental aspects in map and combining puzzles along with map roaming. Fun fun

I love this update. The story is told much better than in S1 and in a few missions you can try to interact with different things and being rewarded with a couple of text lines/voice lines. The mission achievements are interesting and require more than simple DPS as normally.
The zone is ok. I’m not a huge fan of it, but that’s mostly because I don’t like jumping around too much. But still some nice ideas.
The only real problem I have with this update are someof the zone achievements. The coin collection is nearly the same as the crystal collection in the sanctum. And again a JP+diving…

Hi i just want to say that i think ppl are right to assume that the map will open gradually as the story progresses because if you think about it logically and from the personal story it was sprawled out in to 2 or 3 parts in a single zone. I believe that that is what Anet is planning to do also to shed some light on wiseman.4075’s gripe with the story not being account wide i believe the reason for that is because like the personal story i think Anet is possibly planning to add player choices to the chapters so to have them play out a bit differently and not having the story account wide allows them to do this with ease.

just some food for thought

I agree with the Op,this was a nice start to Season 2. And I can’t wait to see how this season unfolds.
The only thing that is annoying me so far is the story tab with the fact you can’t select a specific mission to play.

With this update Anet has managed to restore most of my faith in the future of this game, which was previously utterly annihilated with the introduction of megaservers.