Guild Wars 2

…Because I was expecting very little. Very little AT ALL. It was still rather poor, though. Here’s my opinion, chapter by chapter:

1. Gates of Maguuma: in which we first enter Dry Top. In the original release of Guild Wars 2, the meta events were aiming to be epic – the meta event in Frostgorge Sound builds to a multi-staged dragon fight, for example. In Dry Top, the meta event builds to… Loot. It cycles like a clock, with the same few events repeating over and over, without any kind of branch or any progression between each other, between champions appearing here and there and the sandstorm that is basically a moment to farm champions and chests.

In other words, it’s basically a box made for grind. Repetitive, shallow content focused on rewards with little to no polish – and there are few things less polished in this game than the incredibly immersion-breaking yellow announcements in the middle of the screen saying, “champion X is up, go farm it”. Looks like ArenaNet knows how much of their playerbase is made of grinders, but it’s interesting to contrast this with how the enemies in the storyline instances don’t drop any loot. The developers want people to farm Dry Top, not the instances, it appears.

It’s also worth noting how ArenaNet took a fun mechanic – the Zephrite Aspects from the Labyrinthine Cliffs – and made them into something annoying by both adding a timer (while keeping the limit of uses, because having two handicaps is great) and by using them in the middle of combat. The mechanic of entering and leaving a transformation is not smooth in GW2 – often, clicking on the skill to remove the transformation, or in this case leaving the aspects, simply doesn’t do anything. That wasn’t an issue in the Labyrinthine Cliffs since there were very few enemies there, but in Dry Top, well…

Speaking about annoying, one way to judge the quality of encounter designs in a MMORPG is how much the designers rely on stuns (as in, knock backs, launches, daze, stun, and everything that prevents players from doing anything). It’s a very simple mechanic, often with few counters (Stability is not readily available, and stun breakers have long recharges), that is often used by developers when they want to make combat more than just receiving damage, but can’t think of something with some actual degree of complexity.

The fight with Aerin is ALL about stuns. Worse, it’s knock backs from platforms, highlighting how the NPCs can knock our characters from highs but we cannot do the same to them. This fight also uses very clumsy the aspects in combat, often with bugged results. It’s as if ArenaNet tried to design a fight to show us the flaws in their game.

2. Entaglement: this chapter begins with our characters saying “Oh no, Mordremoth did this!”… But from the point of view of someone who’s playing the Living Story now, there is no “this” – the village was already destroyed in the previous chapter, so there’s no change to actually show us the attack. Worse, Mordremoth’s identity comes out of thin air – he’s not mentioned once in the previous chapter, it’s not said how our characters learn that the dragon’s name is Mordremoth, or how it has been learned that the dragon Mordremoth is the source of the attacks. For the records, when the NPCs begin talking about the Mordrem, they never mention that it’s how they have decided to call Mordremoth’s minions.

In other words, the identity of the main villain is said as if it were already known. This is very poor storytelling, considering how important this plot point is.

The boss fight of this chapter, against the Mordrem Thrasher, has some issues as well. Kasmeer’s shield is somewhat useless, considering how it’s far more effective to avoid the red circles and keep defending the explosive bone minions than hide in the shield and allow the minions to die. That’s actually a great thing – considering how this fight is bugged and the NPCs can simply not be there, if the shield were required, this fight would become impossible to be won.

3. The Dragon’s Reach – Part 1: now ArenaNet is trying to be cute. They ask players to do dynamic events in order to progress through the storyline. There’s no way this could work. Either players would have to really be part of the dynamic event, and thus risk having to wait in the map for God knows how long until the event actually begins; or, talking to the NPCs while the event is not active counts as having done the event. This leads to nonsensical dialogue, such as a NPC telling our characters “You’ve got a talent for this” despite how our characters haven’t done a single thing.

I got to play through a single event in the Iron Marches, the “Rescue the captured workers” one. Vine chambers randomly capture players, and there’s nothing you can do to avoid that (no, the pheromones are for a different event, not this one). Remember how I talked about developers using stuns as a lazy technique to make combat more interesting? Here it’s even worse – you get randomly stuck among enemies using ground effects, without being able to move away from them. I’m happy I didn’t need to do the other events, considering how so much “fun” this one was.

In Frostgorge Sound, it’s even worse. Players actually need to participate in the (old…) group-based event there in order to progress the storyline. Even ignoring how it’s very cheap of ArenaNet to make players redo old content in the middle of a new storyline, and how it’s nonsensical to add a group-only activity in the middle of something that has every other piece of content focused on solo play (again, for the records – see the final mission in the original GW2 release’s personal storyline)… Not only players need to stay in the map and wait God knows how long for the event to start, but it’s also one event in which players may decide to focus on champion-farming instead of on finishing the event itself, leading to failure because farming is more profitable than winning the event. This was a very predictable issue (hello, didn’t we see the same thing over and over already, beginning with the Scarlet invasions all the way back in 2013?), that ArenaNet could easily have fixed, but they have chosen to not do so.

The chapter ends again recycling old content, this time the Charr starting instance. I realize ArenaNet has said that few people play as Charr, so most players had likely never seen the fight against Barradin, but still, reusing the same scenery just looks bad.

4. The Dragon’s Reach – Part 2: in the Party Politics instance, guess who returns? Canach, one of the annoying NPCs that ArenaNet insists on pushing on us? No! Well, he too, but we see one place where we can use the old Personality system. Remember? That division between Charm, Dignity and Ferocity that ArenaNet stealthy removed from the game without ever bothering to tell us why they did so, or if it would ever come back? There’s one dialogue in this instance that allows us to pick a choice based on our character’s personality.

The boss fight, against the Shadow of the Dragon, shows the biggest improvement ever to the Guild Wars 2 combat system: now we not only have red circles to avoid, but also… Red triangles!!! OMG!!!!1111 ArenaNet never really managed to advance the GW2 combat system. Even after all those years, this battle could be resumed as: avoid the red (or orange, in the more garish version) circles/triangles/whatever, attack everything you can attack until it dies, and you win. You don’t even have to look at the dragon in order to win, just keep looking at the ground and that’s it.

5. Echoes of the Past: there’s a lot to hate here (as well). The Silverwastes, much like Dry Top, are basically a grinding park – repetitive and shallow events over and over in a very small time frame, lots and lots of farming (the extraction system to take organs from the Mordrem is ridiculous), focus on reward and not on the experience itself (and speaking about rewards, the Luminescent Armor is incredibly cheap; it’s an armor that cannoy be dyed, and it’s just a dye over the Carapace Armor…), and so on and on and on.

…However, I actually like this release a bit. The Pact camp in the Silverwastes has all the attention to detail that we rarely see from ArenaNet these days. The huge amount of ambient dialogue, all the nods to previous events, the decent dialogue during the “Reunion with the Pact” instance… That was actually great. All the lore nods through the books in Hidden Arcana were very interesting, and it’s great that ArenaNet bothered with all those things. The fights in Glint’s Lair at least tried to be different, even if the environment itself was disappointing – it looked far more diverse when we saw it in the original Guild Wars, with the ambient of each aspect having a different color.

6. Tangled Paths: nothing really worth discussing here. The boss fight in “Tracking the Aspect Masters” again relies a lot on stuns, but that’s ArenaNet for you. The best thing in this chapter is probably the loading screen for “Into the Labyrinth”.

7. Seeds of Truth: the Caithe chapter. Considering how long we have been stuck with the same skills, it’s refreshing to have different skills to play with, even if the cost is losing the ability to play how we want (but hey, that’s a recurrent theme in GW2).

8. Point of No Return: talking about recycling content… As much as I enjoy nostalgia, ArenaNet could have at least used a desert environment for the Turai Ossa’s segment. They could also have used the original voice – all dialogue spoken by Ossa was copied from the original game, so they wouldn’t even need to record something new, just using the old recordings from the original Guild Wars would have worked.

The battle in the Pact camp only highlighted how we have spent the entire Season 2 fighting basically the same enemies over and over. I wouldn’t be sad if I never see a Jungle Tendril again.

The last boss battle again relied heavily on stuns, but of course that was to be expected. It had a few interesting mechanics, at least.

The Story: this time it was better than in the Season 1. It would have been hard to make something as kittencarlet, but at least this time the writing team went in a better direction – they used the lore already within the game since release (Sohothin, Ogden, all the previous hints that the Sylvari were dragon minions, etc), instead of pulling stuff out of nowhere (Scarlett, the Aetherblades, and so on). All the lore bits in the Priory library were great, and the ambient dialogue in the Pact camp is also great. In the original release of GW2, the ambient and dynamic events dialogue was amazing, leagues better than the dialogue from the personal storyline, and it’s nice to see a return to form in this aspect.

Conclusion: story improvements, the soundtrack wasn’t bad either. Mechanically, a nightmare. Most of the new mechanics introduced are ill-conceived and clumsily implemented, the new maps have clearly been conceived as a grinder’s paradise, and the idea of elaborate and meaningful dynamic events has been thrown away in favor of small, repetitive tasks for people to farm.

Next to zero polish as well. The game added new currencies, but didn’t we already have enough of those? Don’t we have a wallet system exactly to store currencies? So why haven’t geodes and bandit crests been added to the wallet? Couldn’t the user interface for the Aspects be improved, since we are now expected to use them in the middle of combat (and in the middle of a boss fight, even)? Honestly, who thought it was a good idea to display the huge yellow notifications in the middle of a screen for each farming bag in Dry Top and for each time there’s a new attack in the Silverwastes? If two new maps have been added, why don’t they count for map completition, and why don’t they give anything when you complete them, contrary to every map the game had on release? This has created a situation in which we have “real” maps, and “second-tier” maps like Silverwaste and Southsun Cove, a division that new players are not going to understand. And so on.

It’s very hard to trust ArenaNet to make high quality content in the coming expansion, based on Season 2. While I can believe they will give us a decent story, it looks like the new maps will be basically more farming grounds with shallow dynamic events and very little polish.

My experience is quite different from yours. Dry Top to me was a cool, fun zone to explore. And you know, most zones don’t really have this great amazing meta that builds to a crescendo. A couple do but you ignore the stuff in many other zones.

Dry Top and Silverwastes are two of my favorite zones. The stories themselves are fine, but I think were introduced as much for people who like hunting achievements as just for the stories themselves.

What you’re really saying is that the Living Story isn’t successful because it’s not to your taste, which is fair enough.

It’s more to my taste than yours.

The only real question about being successful or not will really come from how many people actually logged in and went through it all, which is probably quite a few.

To be fair, I liked season 1 better but of course that had it’s own issues.

I liked Season 1 better, but, frankly, I also had a lot more spare time during Season 1, so I didn’t feel the blistering pace of it like a lot of people did. Now, however, I’m tighter on game time, and it’s been a big convenience to pick up and play the smaller story chunks. I still get frustrated by the story sometimes, moving by inches instead of by feet, but that was generally true of Season 1 as well. We did get some cool instances along the way.

As for the two new zones, I really like Dry Top and Silverwastes. I think they’re well-designed and fun. -shrug-

Season 2, like Season 1, isn’t without flaws, but without writing a very, very lengthy post detailing and explaining them, I had a pretty positive experience.

My God, there’s a lot of bloated opinions in this post.

I for one actually thought that The Silverwastes was a beautifully designed zone, Dry Top was a fun and interesting map thanks to its sandstorm mechanic, and the story was much more focused and interesting than anything in Season 1. There was a lot to like about Season 2.

My only real disappointment was the lack of quality feature packs, but it looks like the expansion is meant to address that.

Test.8734:

I got to play through a single event in the Iron Marches, the “Rescue the captured workers” one. Vine chambers randomly capture players, and there’s nothing you can do to avoid that (no, the pheromones are for a different event, not this one). Remember how I talked about developers using stuns as a lazy technique to make combat more interesting? Here it’s even worse – you get randomly stuck among enemies using ground effects, without being able to move away from them. I’m happy I didn’t need to do the other events, considering how so much “fun” this one was.

That is actually not true. The vine chambers are not random. You will see a targeting thing on you that looks the same as the warrior skill “On My Mark!”(ogres also use a similar skill), dodging will prevent you from getting stuck in the vine chamber.