Guild Wars 2

AMAZING-loved every second of it, worth the run up there^-^.

Agreed. The last slide actually made her seem menacing for a split second.

It was the very essence of flash over substance. An awesome looking cinema that didn’t progress the story or reveal anything we didn’t already know.

it was a nice cinematic for an uninteresting character and a bunch of backtracked story…or lack of story even

The cutscene looked pretty, but it was hollow, as has all of the Living World updates since this all started. The story is gonna have to beef itself up a bit if ANet’s gonna continue to try to sell this novelty of a Living World to it’s players and actually keep them interested.

The cutscene was really good as a recap cutscene but Anet should also had added informations about Scarlet and her motives.

I just don’t get why Anet is playing it so close to the vest with Scarlet’s background. They desperately need to start leaking SOMETHING interesting about the character.

Amen and hallelujah panzer!

It boils down to two different things, either:

1) There is some huge big awesome reveal looming in the near future about Scarlet that will tie everything together and will leave all of us who ever doubted ANet for a second hanging our heads in shame….

or

2) ANet has no idea what to do with Scarlet or where her story is going and is just coming up with random stories to fill time…..

I happen to side with the latter option but maybe ANet will prove me wrong.

Even though it didn’t have much information in it, visually it was awesome and I got a chuckle out of the about Lord Faren’s panties. :P

webtoehobbit.4201:

Amen and hallelujah panzer!

It boils down to two different things, either:

1) There is some huge big awesome reveal looming in the near future about Scarlet that will tie everything together and will leave all of us who ever doubted ANet for a second hanging our heads in shame….

or

2) ANet has no idea what to do with Scarlet or where her story is going and is just coming up with random stories to fill time…..

I happen to side with the latter option but maybe ANet will prove me wrong.

Have you played gw1 were abbadon was the god responsible for shiro the lich and a majority of major events from the gw1 lore.

panzer.6034:

I just don’t get why Anet is playing it so close to the vest with Scarlet’s background. They desperately need to start leaking SOMETHING interesting about the character.

It sounds like you’re assuming Scarlet is a fleshed out character whose traits/motivations haven’t yet been revealed. I seriously doubt this is true. There is nothing being played close to the vest and nothing to leak because Scarlet’s traits/motivations don’t exist past what we’ve seen. Anet’s just making it up as they go.

It was pretty. Too bad it had the Invasive Weed talking over it pretending like we should care at this point. We also learn nothing we didn’t already know by this point.

Marquie Thomas.1873:

webtoehobbit.4201:

Amen and hallelujah panzer!

It boils down to two different things, either:

1) There is some huge big awesome reveal looming in the near future about Scarlet that will tie everything together and will leave all of us who ever doubted ANet for a second hanging our heads in shame….

or

2) ANet has no idea what to do with Scarlet or where her story is going and is just coming up with random stories to fill time…..

I happen to side with the latter option but maybe ANet will prove me wrong.

Have you played gw1 were abbadon was the god responsible for shiro the lich and a majority of major events from the gw1 lore.

I think I should ask you if YOU played GW1, because if you have you wouldn’t have just said what you said. See, the thing about GW1 was that each campaign was a self sustaining story, WITH MEANING! Yes it was all tied together in Nightfall, but it was just another layer to already great story and lore.

This Scarlet story has absolutely no meaning to it at all, it’s just all hodge podge, shoddily put together and has no meat to the story.

I played GW1, which is why I get so heated bout this Living World stuff because I know what ANet is capable of and they are not using it!

When I saw that cut scene I thought “This is it. Scarlet will make her big reveal and we’ll be done with here forever”. But none of that happened. Instead we got nothing new and Scarlet getting away for the nth time hinting that she’s up to no good (yeah like we needed that hint…)

It was certainly pretty… but that was about it. It literally told us NOTHING we haven’t already known for the last 3 months.

It’s kind of funny (if it wasn’t so sad), map chat is FULL of people with optimism that they are going to get to kill scarlet and see some big reveal at the top of the tower… I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth.

Those d|erpy faces…. so bad…. will haunt me forever.

It was a good cinematic.
It must have been specially useful for someone that just started playing or that didn’t pay attention during the whole year.
I liked the last slide. Her glance was a bit creepy.

My only complaint about it is that it was the perfect chance to hint at her motive………..and if anything it made it seem even more like she has none to begin with.

The closest thing we got were those two nightmare court members saying something about not being her to see her plan come together or something like that.

It was a good cinematic. Didn’t show us what we already knew, but it slightly caught my attention at the end. Not only did Scarlet look menacing, she outright ADMITTED that we won’t be seeing her for a while. Meaning this is the final time we’ll see her for the rest of the year.

Anet, I hope you make the next living story about us with Marjory doing some detective work on what led Scarlet to evil. Interrogating people in Rata Sum, invade an Inquest lab to beat down a scientist who knew her, etc. Use that to flesh out her objectives, her motives, her real personality, etc. It’s the perfect time for us to play Batman.

She talked about Faren’s panties.

Day made.

panzer.6034:

It was the very essence of flash over substance. An awesome looking cinema that didn’t progress the story or reveal anything we didn’t already know.

The cutscenes pretty cool. When do I get my Mini Nightmare Tower Model to replay them?

Aerlen.5326:

She talked about Faren’s panties.

Day made.

Not even she could resist such power.

RyuDragnier.9476:

It was a good cinematic. Didn’t show us what we already knew, but it slightly caught my attention at the end. Not only did Scarlet look menacing, she outright ADMITTED that we won’t be seeing her for a while. Meaning this is the final time we’ll see her for the rest of the year.

Anet, I hope you make the next living story about us with Marjory doing some detective work on what led Scarlet to evil. Interrogating people in Rata Sum, invade an Inquest lab to beat down a scientist who knew her, etc. Use that to flesh out her objectives, her motives, her real personality, etc. It’s the perfect time for us to play Batman.

Ugh I’d rather have the, expand current GW2 lore than Scarlet. Because when I think about it, anything involving her will only be full of hype and in the end we won’t learn anything at all (Caithe’s secret anyone ?).

And we’ll probably get back to her in January. Fractals and Wintersday will take the next updates.

Can we get the curscene as a item?

…. Serious?

Personally thought that while graphically pretty, it was completely void and pointless. Complete “style over substance”. Was just Scarlet being her usual Saturday morning cartoon villain “I’LL GET YOU NEXT TIME GADGET!!”.

I loved the tower itself, but Scarlet is such a hopeless waste of a character at this point. I would have forgotten why I cared at this point, except there’s nothing to forget…

When was this cinematic supposed to play?

People really have it against Scarlet. She’s not half bad really. At least she has a personality unlike Traherne. Treharne…. whatever his name is.

I loved the cutscene, I think it’s a build up for the final battle with her. Finally you get to end her!

Look up Sacrlet’s end game in the lore section on here, it will answer everything with two guys vids on youtube that know their lore more than any of us. It seems she even wants to control the dragons and their minions herself and force chaos magic based evolution in all of us. Controlled Radiation-based mutations is her plan.

Eszett.6950:

People really have it against Scarlet. She’s not half bad really. At least she has a personality unlike Traherne. Treharne…. whatever his name is.

I loved the cutscene, I think it’s a build up for the final battle with her. Finally you get to end her!

You call bad jokes and that awful baby-voice a personality? O_o

It was cool but I wish we could just kill her already and proceed with the main lore of GW!

So .. is that it? I feel like there was a joke, but I didn’t get the punch line.

It was a huge disappointment for me. I had a lot of fun fighting my way up the tower, doing the mini dungeons… and then this happened.

I thought FINALLY I will get to slay this horrible boring character… I thought finally we would actually catch her in the flesh… too bad it was in a cutscene where she literally just walks past our characters into her portal. What a bunch of crap.

Is her story ever going to end? It sucks, plain and simple. This patch was one of my favorites… but my god you make us think we are finally confronting Scarlet then snatch it away from us at the last second. Argh.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Anet, I hope you make the next living story about us with Marjory doing some detective work on what led Scarlet to evil. Interrogating people in Rata Sum, invade an Inquest lab to beat down a scientist who knew her, etc. Use that to flesh out her objectives, her motives, her real personality, etc. It’s the perfect time for us to play Batman.

Indeed. Anet, concentrate on Marjory and her back story have seen her only 2 times but jeez she has more character and has me interested more then Scarlet in all those months

Errant Venture.9371:

Eszett.6950:

People really have it against Scarlet. She’s not half bad really. At least she has a personality unlike Traherne. Treharne…. whatever his name is.

I loved the cutscene, I think it’s a build up for the final battle with her. Finally you get to end her!

You call bad jokes and that awful baby-voice a personality? O_o

What else would it be? Harley Quinn of Batman has somewhat the same personality. She’s suppoused to be irritating. If you hate her she’s good enough of a villan.

As for the saturday morning cartoon villian storyline well, it’s not her fault mainly. I think the writers were a bit soft and went too PG 13. If she had killed someone important, or do something awful like sever the ties between Kryta and Ascalon, she would have been a bit more menacing.

You know, I thought that with the introduction of this maniac character (who wanted to be somewhat like a joker) we would get the politics of Kryta shaken a little bit. Zhaitan’s arc is full of the power of friendship and it irritates me to no end. I thought they could use Scarlet as a way to make things a bit more interesting… well there’s still time.

Xae Isareth.1364:

The last slide actually made her seem menacing for a split second.

^^ omg so much this!! When I started to hear more dribble from her I was disappointed (faren and his fancy panties?! – I almost puked) until that one slide where you could actually see some evil in her… why oh why didn’t they include something like this earlier!

She’s still a terrible villain but at least that one slide gave her a bit more character. It stopped her insane ramblings and made her look focused and evil.

Oh no!
Someone has something good to say about the Living Story… About /SCARLET!/
Quick! Every naysayer come in and shout out their opinion /yet again!/ This horse hasn’t been beaten quite to glue yet!!!!

Sarcasm aside, what exactly are you are expecting? Shakespeare level writing for characters in an MMO?
Scarlet /is/ a comic book villain. Explaining how or why she does the things she does is akin to asking how the Joker manages to get enough explosives inside a building to threaten to blow it up without anyone seeming to notice. If anything, she makes more sense then the Joker ever does because at least in Tyria, you really /can/ use ‘magic’ to do all sorts of things (like oh… I dunno… combine things that don’t normally go together… Like Oakhearts and Clockwork…)

As for the cinematic itself… I liked it. Just as I liked Scarlet as a Joker-esque villain. That’s my opinion, which makes it just as valid as anyone elses here (minus the constant vitriol aimed at the Developers. :P)

Honestly? The way she talks. I just wanted to punch her in the face while watching this cutscene. Simply becouse of her demeanour. Not becouse of what she says (I dont think anything she says makes much sense anyway) but becouse of how she says it. Perhaps that is ANet’s intention? If so, I am not sure if that is the best way to handle it…

Eszett.6950:

People really have it against Scarlet. She’s not half bad really. At least she has a personality unlike Traherne. Treharne…. whatever his name is.

I loved the cutscene, I think it’s a build up for the final battle with her. Finally you get to end her!

Trahearne gets hate for overshadowing the player in the personal story. It stops being a Personal Story and it becomes Trahearne’s Story. I don’t dislike him as much as many others seem to.

He has a personality, it just comes off as meek or restrained. A part of the Personal Story deals with his burden (cleansing Orr is his Wyld Hunt, note that doesn’t mean defeat Zhaitan, his job isn’t done yet) and his many doubts about his ability as a leader. For all of his flaws, Trahearne is a lot more than what Scarlet is.

Personally I wish I hadn’t of read this thread before watching the scene. Obviously there were no spoilers (nothing new is established aside from in-game confirmation that she was behind the Molten Alliance) but the hype in the thread had me expecting something good. It was nice animation, I like the style (I personally prefer the scenes from Flame and Frost and the scene where Kasmeer removes the veil over this kind of thing) but I was expecting something with substance. Maybe a big revelation, some awesome action, anything more than a stylised “Previously on the Living Story”.

I think it’s important they establish in-game she was behind the Molten Alliance (it’s still not explicitly stated if I recall correctly, merely implied again I did it a second time, I recalled incorrectly, it’s fully stated in-game now, most of us knew, it was just a case of confirmation). I also think a lot of people didn’t follow that she’s been behind everything all year long, and others simply missed it, so connecting the dots for them is useful. I have doubts how useful minimal flashes of scenes from the last year are going to be at delivering information to people who weren’t there at the time, but It’s better than nothing. Hopefully this means they are about cap off this story for good now that everyone is caught up.

I enjoyed it, but I wonder why it even exists. The resources for this could have been better used to tell some of the story that didn’t exist in the game – something important like “What Scarlet Saw”. Such an important piece of the plot never made it into the game (I agree that many of the website stories don’t need to be animated or put into the game but “What Scarlet Saw” is the turning point for the central character of GW2 right now, it should be in the game) and this style of animation would be perfect for delivering it.

The ending cutscene was nice, seeing all those characters.
If this was supposed to be a recap of her exploits I’m rather meh about it.

Now the game itself was fun. Going through all those levels and playing the instances.

Nilkemia.8507:

It was pretty. Too bad it had the Invasive Weed talking over it pretending like we should care at this point. We also learn nothing we didn’t already know by this point.

I can’t get two things out of my head during this event:

1) “Feed me, Seymore”
2) and the rumor weed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry-Boy_and_the_Rumor_Weed

all i saw was still screenshots a character model face stretched out making it looking weird, a summery of old updates and zero explanation still for whats going on. Then the real kicker she walks away slowly and you can do nothing for no reason.

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

Oh no!
Someone has something good to say about the Living Story… About /SCARLET!/
Quick! Every naysayer come in and shout out their opinion /yet again!/ This horse hasn’t been beaten quite to glue yet!!!!

Sarcasm aside, what exactly are you are expecting? Shakespeare level writing for characters in an MMO?
Scarlet /is/ a comic book villain. Explaining how or why she does the things she does is akin to asking how the Joker manages to get enough explosives inside a building to threaten to blow it up without anyone seeming to notice. If anything, she makes more sense then the Joker ever does because at least in Tyria, you really /can/ use ‘magic’ to do all sorts of things (like oh… I dunno… combine things that don’t normally go together… Like Oakhearts and Clockwork…)

As for the cinematic itself… I liked it. Just as I liked Scarlet as a Joker-esque villain. That’s my opinion, which makes it just as valid as anyone elses here (minus the constant vitriol aimed at the Developers. :P)

Maybe Anet is targetting people like you – the easily pleased.

But there are others, the people that are complaining in the forums, that want something more; a character with depth, a story that develops, questions that are answered, a motive…

Then go read a book …

Captain Obvious was making this scene

Yep, the cutscene animation was very cool to look at. Anet has my thumbs up for that.

It is great to see Anet trying to get back to the style of Horia Dociu’s old cutscenes. Those were superior. If there are any devs reading this, could you tell us who is animating these now? They are doing great.

Constructive criticism: In game assets fall flat and are goofy-looking in this context. It would be worth cutting the length of the animation down a bit if it meant the art could all done by some of your better character artists like Jamie Ro or Jia Ruan.

Idk, I kind of got a little annoyed because my party had her completely surrounded in the cutscene, and yet we just end up letting her walk away with no one stopping her. Personally I don’t like Scarlet as an enemy (She kind of annoys me) so I’m not really looking forward to having to deal with her again. Also still nothing hinting about Mordramoth (nature Elder Dragon) like i was hoping for even thought it would have been a perfect buildup, but oh well. Looks like we will get to fight the Frozen alliance of Zealot kodan and Sons of Svanir or whatever random alliance she makes next…

remember when cinematics in gw2 were actually animated scenes and the characters were actually speaking and emoting, rather than just a slideshow looking like it was put together in 20 minutes?

Maverick.6053:

remember when cinematics in gw2 were actually animated scenes and the characters were actually speaking and emoting, rather than just a slideshow looking like it was put together in 20 minutes?

Perhaps not 20 minutes. It takes time to create even such slideshow. But lets be honest. The subpar quality is the effect of their crazy release schedule. Static cinematics, shallow content, lots of bugs due to lack of testing. Its not that Arena lack skills to do it properly. They have some amazing and talented people out there. But they are trying to do something impossible. You cant release a deep and polished content every two weeks. You just cant. Not at that scale. I hope this madness will end sooner rather than later.

Thobek.1730:

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

Oh no!
Someone has something good to say about the Living Story… About /SCARLET!/
Quick! Every naysayer come in and shout out their opinion /yet again!/ This horse hasn’t been beaten quite to glue yet!!!!

Sarcasm aside, what exactly are you are expecting? Shakespeare level writing for characters in an MMO?
Scarlet /is/ a comic book villain. Explaining how or why she does the things she does is akin to asking how the Joker manages to get enough explosives inside a building to threaten to blow it up without anyone seeming to notice. If anything, she makes more sense then the Joker ever does because at least in Tyria, you really /can/ use ‘magic’ to do all sorts of things (like oh… I dunno… combine things that don’t normally go together… Like Oakhearts and Clockwork…)

As for the cinematic itself… I liked it. Just as I liked Scarlet as a Joker-esque villain. That’s my opinion, which makes it just as valid as anyone elses here (minus the constant vitriol aimed at the Developers. :P)

Maybe Anet is targetting people like you – the easily pleased.

But there are others, the people that are complaining in the forums, that want something more; a character with depth, a story that develops, questions that are answered, a motive…

How about you make a post that proves : 1) Scarlet has no depth, 2) The Story Doesn’t Develop, 3) No questions are ever answered, and 4) there is no motive.

Scarlet has depth as a character. Everything that was showing in (and out) of game has proved that to this point. What, is everyone angry that there weren’t subtle hints in Beta in early 2012 about this? Is everyone angry that they didn’t know anything about scarlet when the first living story update hit? Is everyone angry that they didn’t know the character’s motives 9 months ago?

What? You guys are telling me that you automatically knew that there was a crazy guy named Sephiroth who has god-like powers that wanted to summon a giant space rock to destroy the earth, and the only reason he is doing it is because he found out that he is a clone of his alien space mommy that came to earth in order to suck out its life energy before destroying it, and you found this out on the very first cutscene of Final Fantasy VII?…No? I thought not.

(…this post comming from someone who HATED Living Story up until a month or two ago…)

On the subject of the cutscene, I liked it. I like the style, and I thought it was a good reward for going through two hours of Pain, Torture, Death, Unfair Stuns and CC effects, watching other players run into the spore mines and killing a dozen other players in the process, etc. I liked that it tied up, and explained the entire living story up to this point, even though I knew all of it already (….except for Scarlet’s attraction to Faren’s panties). I also like it better than getting the millionth back or helmet skin that I will get anyways, but will probably just sit in my bank unused until I can think of a character to put it on. (I have two bank tabs filled with unused skins right now…)