Guild Wars 2

This whole post is probably a spoiler. The story was bad. Very bad. I wasn’t uninterested, I was actively angry about how bad it was.

1. The whole deal with the Oath is ridiculous. My thoughts during this boiled down to, “Who the hell do these people think they are, who is this Kerida person, why is she talking to me like an actual child, why is the Shining Blade inducting me into their inner circle, why is any of this necessary, and your big secret is that you want to kill a mursaat?” Is this a joke? You want to throw rocks at me, threaten me with death, and, frankly, go way too far with bringing me into your organization, when you could have just been like “Hey, want to kill the last mursaat? It’s on the way to where you’re going.” I don’t see any reason the PC would have a problem with that. Not to mention how laughable this becomes with non-human characters. There was no reason for this section to exist.

2. Livia and Lazarus. No one that didn’t play Eye of the North cares. Even worse, players who don’t know/care about her will have no idea why this random woman, who was just introduced, is talking to their character like it’s a chore. Even WORSE, the PC acts like an idiot the entire time, basically justifying it. It’s antagonizing to the audience, and robs players of the fantasy that maybe, just maybe, their character has some kind of personality.

3. So, Balthazar is doing… what? Why? Because reasons? Even the tiniest hint about what the hell is going on? No? I am, however, happy that it was at least acknowledged, via the scene in the Divinity’s Reach temple, that an actual god popping out of nowhere is a big deal. Kasmeer losing her mind when a god appeared in the flesh last episode is probably the most reasonable reaction to that, but most everyone else seems to be like “It’s just your mythical god, bro, why are you freaking out? Don’t be a kitten.” Really?

4. Braham. I’ll buy that he’s gathered an army off-screen, Game of Thrones-style. That’s fine. Actually pretty dope. I’ll buy that he’s marched north. I can’t buy that he already “surrounded” Jormag, and was totally about to kill it, but then got robbed by the PC’s actions. Can you just roll up on an elder dragon now? Is Jormag not the reason the Norn had to flee south to begin with? Did the Norn rally that much strength, or did Jormag get that weak? This raises so many questions I don’t even know where to start.

5. More loose threads than a cat with a ball of yarn. It’s completely understandable, and expected, that major plot points are being saved for the expansion, but instead of generating interest and excitement, this season was more like running around in circles, blind, confused, and frustrated. If anything, this lowered my expectations for the expansion.

Gameplay was tight, though. Challenging and engaging without being artificially difficult. A+ on that. F on storytelling.

What bothers me the most about the story is the supreme lack of tension. I find myself unable to care about most of the recent characters and their issues. This seems to stem from a few things.

First, there have been a lot of characters introduced out of literal nowhere that players were expected to sympathize with, and want to be around, for no other reason than “these are the good guys, love them”. Trahearne, Kasmeer (and all of Destiny’s Child, for that matter), and the Zephyr-whomevers could all be replaced by cardboard cutouts and it wouldn’t really matter. These characters don’t consistently do anything useful that couldn’t be done by a squad of random soldiers, because there are just too many people with names claiming that I’m their “friend” or “boss”. To choose two at random, if Braham and Marjorie both died in the next patch, the war effort would not suffer at all, and I wouldn’t really care. I don’t know these people. I’ve slaughtered thousands, I should listen to your mommy issues why? Your special power is that you’re huge and stupid, Braham. I can pick any soldier off the line for that.

Second, there is very little tension to the overarching story itself. The Pact is, at this point, a powerful war machine. The part of the story where it became that, I thought was pretty cool. The problem with that is that the audience now has an expectation that the full power of that machine will be brought out every time. The Avengers suffered from this. It was cool to watch all their origins, and how they all gathered together into an unstoppable force, but at that point, the conflict stopped being “will the good guys win?” and became “by what degree will the good guys win?”. A united force of heroes is great for the climax of a story, but its not sustainable. It gets boring VERY fast. I can point back to superhero movies again here, but I won’t.

So, TL:DR, I think the devs need to get their Game of Thrones on, hedge the superfluous character tree a bit, assassinate Trahearne, break up the Pact and get some civil war between the Orders or something, because the black and white hero-slays-dragon-the-end story got old a long time ago.

He doesn’t steal it. He had every intention of going to the summit and letting Taimi keep her magical plot machine before, as others have pointed out, it caused evil monsters to burst from the ground and try to kill everyone in the room. After he almost dies as a direct result of the test, he changes his deal to include the confiscation of what he sees as an exceptionally dangerous device. He isn’t very wrong to see it like that.

It’s not like Phlunt is twirling his mustache and tying Taimi to the train tracks. He explicitly states that she can have it back when she graduates.

Nice quality-of-life idea. Like Zorby said, they’ll probably do it eventually.

If done incorrectly, with trivial effort, the Boss Blitz yields trivial rewards. If done correctly, with non-trivial effort, it yields non-trivial rewards, relatively speaking.

Also, the achievements are super easy. Y’all can’t fight veterans?

It’s only four or five specific places, and in my experience, if one of those champions is up, the zerg will be there in under 60 seconds anyway. If I want to shoot at the troll until they get there, that’s my own business. If you’re really worried about super-efficiency, be faster. Entitled kids.

They have added new content, and it’s fantastic for the most part, but I think removing content is maybe not so good an idea. I would love to go hang out on that giant Zephyr ship thing. I would love to not have all of Lion’s Arch cramped into Vigil Keep. I really hope they fix that soon.

Rauderi.8706:

But, but.. if you remove auto-targeting of ambients, how are my bounce-damage skills going to hit you twice?

I think this is actually a pretty good argument. Ambient creatures exist as just a thing that you can target/hit. I think it provides some interesting, situational options, like bounce-damage, CnD into stealth, or carelessly revealing yourself because you stumbled on a rabbit.

Lishtenbird.2814:

So yes, since the only important class in this game doesn’t really need traits to be viable in PvE till level 30, having the game balanced around it doesn’t surprise me.

lolwut

Phantom.8130:

Will.6210:

Players who are satisfied rarely post about how satisfied they are. Forums generally represent a vocal minority.

Actually…. that’s a myth.

The people who post on the forums are the most passionate about the game. Good companies understand how customer feedback works and pay attention. Bad companies believe the myth and wonder why their customer base is shrinking.

Fair enough. The reality still doesn’t seem as catastrophic as some things on the forum make it seem, though. There are definitely problems, but I for one haven’t experienced anything super anger-inducing since the patch. Oh well.

It gets better when a several-mission section of the personal story is dedicated to defending Lion’s Arch, complete with heroic sacrifices.

Whoops.

I actually thought the encounter was just buggy. Half the time I just walk into the room and immediately die, along with everyone else present.

“I felt the same hollow, empty, nothingness where my soul should be, like I do every time I cut my way through dozens of lives for the vague promise of mid-range treasure. I’m a HERO!”

Celebrating a death is always in poor taste.

I bet it’s Trahearne. He’s a crafty little kitten.

Think about it. If he somehow caught wind of Scarlet’s plan, he would let her do it, because he leads the Pact. The Pact is in the dragon-killing business, not the pirate-city-saving business. He would tip off the player characters in order to minimize damage while still allowing Scarlet to raise that dragon, specifically so that the army he’s gathered can kill it. Kill it for real, and for good. There’s no way to get at those dragons without looking like a colossal jerk, so he let the tree-baby with the inexplicable British accent wake it for him.

New patch reveals that they do know about the dragon. Some fat chick is investigating.

I did some PS on an alt the other day, involving joining the Order of Whispers. I thought it was interesting that I was meeting my secret contact in the smoldering ruins of Lion’s Arch, with unnamed citizens wandering around the debris like nothing happened. I’d wager that’s confusing for new players.

Many of you have, in the past, and will continue to, in the future, complain about the character Scarlet Briar, introduced into the living story rather abruptly and for no reason. I also, am here to complain about Scarlet Briar. So, if you don’t want to hear it, and think that this is a waste of time, stop reading now. Go solve world hunger or something instead. In the meanwhile, I and like-minded folks will continue to kitten about digital nonsense. Carry on.
First things first. There is a term in the role-playing community known as a “Mary Sue”. A Mary Sue is generally accepted as a character (generally in fan-fiction) who is perfect in every way, and never fails. Wikipedia refers to this type of character as an author-insertion fantasy persona, while Urban Dictionary defines her as “A female character who is so perfect as to be annoying.” This is what I view Scarlet Briar as.
To elaborate, she was presented literally out of nowhere. There was no build-up, no reason, and no rationalization to this character’s appearance. I do not mean she figuratively came out nowhere, I mean she LITERALLY came out of nowhere. She was abruptly introduced as a super-genius, super-evil wunderkind who controls an army for some reason, can control robots built by humans who have never spoken to her, etc., you’ve all heard this much before. The salient issue here is not what she is capable of (I’ve read roughly a kittenton of arguments about that, and so have you), but why she is capable of doing it.
It is because Scarlet is a Mary Sue. She is the result of a lack of ideas. A lack of creativity and foresight. Scarlet Briar is, as we say in the writing business, an kitten -pull. She was pulled out of some overworked writer’s kitten because he didn’t have time to think of something better. Arenanet, bless their hearts, needed a villain to carry the living story, and they needed one right godkitten now, and it’s all your fault. Yes, that’s right, your fault. You. You did this. You, the consumer. You were the ones who demanded new content. In fairness, it’s also their fault for agreeing to deliver it every couple weeks. That’s a mistake. Take two weeks to create some exciting new content for a large scale MMO, and let me know how that goes. Wait, you don’t have to, we all know how it goes. Poorly. We end up with stupid bullkitten like Scarlet Briar. Really good content takes time to produce, and y’all should just shut the kitten up, give these tired people some real time to make real kitten, and be happy about it a few months later.
But that’s not going to happen. You will never see the same amount of satisfied voices as dissatisfied ones. This is, obviously, because people who are content do not feel compelled to express how content they are. The only voices heard are the voices who speak, and the ones that speak are the ones that are kitten ed. But I digress.
Scarlet Briar. She is a chapter out of the “Book of what not to do in Storytelling”, right up there with a scrolling wall of exposition, a la Star Wars. Don’t be like George Lucas. You’re better than that. When Scarlet’s story arc is done, let it die. Bury it, build a cement building over the grave with no doors, and throw away the key to the non-existent door. Then introduce a villain that makes sense within your own lore. Like dragons or some kitten.

Black Powder basically makes you invincible against melee enemies.