Guild Wars 2

Reesha.7901:

RNG, RNG, RNG.

My friend and I did the entire event together. So far, he got enough to make 5 keys (and more). I got nothing.

I guess I have to pay to get my keys. Yay! I love RNG I really do. It is one of those things where players get rewarded fairly for their efforts (cough).

If there was one thing I could remove and one thing that I am fed up with in this game: RNG.

It’s another part of their pre-launch design philosophy they scrapped. They talked about doing a dungeon and getting something you want (instead of hoping for a 1% drop item), feeling rewarded each time you did a dungeon (originally it was one piece of gear per dungeon run, that turned into tokens and several runs). Now we have an entire tower where you can run around in it for hours, get to the top and get nothing but a rare or two with some blues and greens.

A Massive Headache.1879:

Kormir didn’t steal anything from you, she was the one who was able to absorb abaddons power, not you.

She was gifted that from the gods in the Realm of Torment. So how did Kormir get from her cell in Gandara all the way to the Realm of Torment and past Shiro and the Lich? She didn’t.

The player freed her from her cell. The player chased down and defeated Varesh. The player escorted her all through the Realm of Torment. The player defeated Shiro and the Lich (for the second time) and the player was the one that took down the god who’s powers she took. So what did Kormir do? She lead the Sunspears to slaughter, got captured, needed to be rescued then watched as we did all the work from that point on only to be conveniently handed the gift from the gods. I get it’s a game and I get that players should do the work, I also get that it wouldn’t make sense for the players to become a god. I’m not going to pretend Kormir deserved what she got.

As soon as she became a god, all six of them went on an indefinite hiatus, coincidentally coinciding with Tyria’s greatest time of need. Apparently her uselessness is contagious and she infected the other five gods.

Durzlla.6295:

I still wish they would’ve kept Kudu alive long enough to be what Scarlet is supposed to be…. as much as i love Scarlet he was much more awesome… God rest his tiny little soul…

That being said i’m not seeing anything Scarlety about this patch, if anything i see Faolin, or other Nightmare Court members, being involved in this, i mean they have tons of mesmery magic, which the krait seem to have lost over the 250 years since GW1 (as well as their frills), not to mention it’s called the tower of NIGHTMARE, and that there’s vines and stuff growing off of it which fits with Nightmare Court, and the Krait are using plant weapons and look like they’re glowing like those Husks in TA do…

If scarlet was directly behind this it’d be more steam punk, not to mention Scarlet doesn’t get anything from helping Krait, Nightmare Court do, they just wanna cause pain and agony and torment, what better way to do that than cause every land dweller to drown? They haven’t given a kitten about who they helped in the past, why start now?

What did Scarlet get from anything she did? The story hasn’t told us her motives and most of her appearances are inconsequential. She’s directionless from the perspective of the player. Why did Scarlet manipulate the Molten Alliance? Why did she try to get Mai Trinn onto the Captain’s Council? Why did she attack the Queen’s Jubilee (we actually know this, it was said in a lore interview that she felt challenged by the boasting humanity was doing so she wanted to prove a point – her motivation at the time was that shallow)? Why is she building an army of clones in Twilight Arbor? Why does she continue to have seemingly inconsequential invasions? What are they even invading? Was she involved in the Secret at Southsun? We’ve had almost an entire year of following her around with her exploits and they are jumping all over Tyria and don’t seem to have anything to do with each other.

I don’t think the writers want Scarlet’s MO to be “engineer + x = theme for the patch”, it’s “x + y = theme for the patch”. The Molten Alliance wasn’t Scarlet’s engineering, it was dredge weaponry combined with Flame Legion fire magic. Following that trend, krait magic and architecture combined with sylvari magic and architecture could be the theme of the new patch as well as the result of Scarlet’s Villain Sue “genius”. In the same lore interview, Angel says Scarlet likes to combine two things that don’t normally go together just to see what happens. That’s why we had the Molten Alliance, that’s why we have the Clockheart and it could easily be why we have a krait tower with thorny vines coming out of it. Her last name is Briar and that tower has a giant briar coming out of its side. At this point, it’d be surprising if she wasn’t involved.

I wish the writers would trust that the krait (and their existing motivations) alone are more than enough to carry a story. The krait are an interesting enemy faction and, like most factions in Tyria, their story and lore is underutilised. Shining the spotlight on them for a patch and expanding on their motivations, goals and ambitions would be a fun and exciting adventure in Tyria. We don’t need a lame gimmick from Scarlet to make the world interesting – it already is.

Scarlet reduces stories to their superficial components – Flame Legion are simply their flame magic, the dredge are simply their weapons – rather than expanding on their complexities. It dismisses the complexities (and in many cases, goes against them) simply to accommodate Scarlet. The world of Tyria is already exciting and interesting. We don’t need Scarlet to use her gimmicks to dumb it down for us.

For those who don’t know, Kormir is the 6th human god, but she wasn’t always a god. She was once an allied NPC of the player in GW1 who let the player do all the work while she received the ultimate reward. If you’d like to know more, this video explains it all:

Or you could just vote for Gnashblade and see it for yourself when he unlocks it as a fractal.

I don’t think I need to explain to anyone who Trahearne is.

So we run around on Southsun getting barrel rolled by karka and dodging mines in Canache’s layer only for Kiel to arrive once the work is all done and take the credit for all our work and taking praise from Magnus.

Then we run around finding the murder suspects and working with Marjory to solve the mystery of the Dragon Bash to once again see Kiel steal the credit.

Finally we invade the Aetherblade Retreat and take down the pirates and stop their ship from escaping (while Kiel talks nonsense about needing us to jump up a bunch of platforms to unlock a door for her, she is absolutely useless – remember Rox and Braham in the Molten Facility? Those guys were helpful). At the end of it all, pirates we defeated leave behind their ship, but it’s not handed to us. Kiel gets it. Once again, the NPC gets the rewards for the player’s hard earned work. To add insult to injury, based off the foundation of the player’s hard work, Kiel is put in the running for the Captain’s Council while we run around waiting for the next thing she is going to take the credit for.

It’s great that Kiel wants to put a discount on WP costs, that’s really useful for people who don’t have an air ship to fly around in. It’s a real shame the player didn’t just defeat a bunch of pirates who owned an air ship, that could come in real handy as an alternative to WPs.

With Kiel’s track record I don’t care who her opponent is. Anything is better than supporting the legacy of the third coming of Kormir. Well, maybe Trahearne isn’t better.

So in GW1 most of the story content was acted out with cut scenes. This was a really powerful tool that helped deliver a much better story. It’s great to see they have brought it back for Flame and Frost, replacing the old close-up dialogue screen. I like this so much better (although hopefully they become better as doing it, they could have done much better than they did – they are light years away from the quality that WoW puts out, even GW1 does better). How do you feel about the change from dialogue screens to acted out cut scenes?