I really hate Scarlet Briar.
I know there’s lots and lots and lots and lots of good reason as to why everyone hates, but I’m more interested in the logic behind it. That is to say… Can someone explain the logic of using this twig as a villain instead, oh you know, DRAGONS?
…
(looks at attachment)
See, this is why I avoided talking about the birds and the bees.
Everything was nice but #4. I will murder you if you say something bad about her voice actress.
I would never bad-mouth Ms. Sparkle. Her work on Scarlet’s maniacal outbursts is a shining gem of competent and energetic delivery.
It’s just that the script only calls for only one single mode of operation for the beep-boop I-am-a-robot villain-of-the-week.
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I don’t care about the armor either way, but I’m glad to see ANet is capable of apologizing and trying to fix their mistake.
Makes them seem human, you know.
There’s a lot of this discussed in the stickied CDI thread…
Oh yeah. There are lots and lots of people speaking their mind making totally valid points. That’s what prompted me to write this wall of text too. I think this may be more unique in leading by example.
Also, could you re-post this? It’s kind of sandwiched in the middle of a wall of text.
I didn’t read the doc, but those 22 points do sound very good. Someone do this.
Fantastic, thank you.
The point of this exercise was to prove that it is indeed possible to do it, so someone definitely can.
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Can krait feel love?
Explain “love” to Krait, please?
Well, uh-
Well.
What happens when two krait like each other very-very much?..
OUCH
Yeah, devs, that’s exactly the kind of situation where you shouldn’t be making glaring mistakes.
I think customer support might honor your request. They do refund money, though I don’t know how they’ll handle it.
I posted a suggestion aeons ago to change Dailies into a quest system that takes you through a Vista, a Skill Point, a Slay 10 Rats and maybe something else on a map in a linear path, on foot. I still hold on to it, despite some obvious disadvantages.
Anything to inject a little more life into Tyria.
I’m all for every suggestion.
Frankly I got more amusement out of these things than the entire Living Story. Good. I like that.
Shame this sense of wonder and mystery will disappear when we find out that it’s Scarlet forming a Thumper Alliance or something.
11. Well that was a bummer. Looks like things are getting worse instead of instantly better when you finish your task. Almost gives you a sense of danger, no?
12. More unexplained stuff is happening. Remember when the Molten Alliance invaded and no one knew what that was? That was fun until we got a bad answer to that question. Again, no Scarlet = Instant improvement.
13. A conversation that doesn’t interrupt the gameplay.
14. Something really big and epic is going on. Don’t see that too often. Might be fun.
15. A recurring central theme of the game. Did we forget about that entirely? What, are dragons that boring? Did we have to have Scarlet in their place? The answer is, Scarlet is terrible and should go away.
16. A change of scenery. Something other than rolling green hills and brown featureless plains. Variety is the spice of life.
17. Aren’t dragons supposed to be evil? Like, all of them. You know, like cartoon villains. Wait, why is this treated like a tragedy? How dare the doctor treat a random act of murder as something to be avoided?
18. So you killed a dragon. Good! Just leave it there. Oh wait, you’re in a Fractal, which is a recording of past history with no ability to change it. I was almost immersed in what was happening for a second there. So that’s also possible.
19. Your health is ticking down even though there are no enemies in sight. And now you have to fight air? I’m afraid of this new type of gameplay. We should go back to whailing on monsters.
20. Use teamwork to accomplish a gameplay goal? Surely you jest. I don’t want to feel a connection with other people in a multiplayer setting.
21. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Plot twists are still a thing. It’s possible.
22. You and your friends are dead. Everyone’s dead. Thanks, Obama. But, guess we don’t have to save the day at the end to have a story after all.
So, you see, you don’t have to have a villain of the week summoning random monsters to tell a story. You don’t need players do heroic things (brutal murder of everything in sight, that is) every time, all of the time. You don’t need to threaten players with horrible death (because they know they cant die). If you don’t need to do that, then surely you can write a story that isn’t just a re-tread of every episode of Power Rangers.
And maybe, just maybe, we can do things a little bit better next time.
And for those of you who reach the end of this post: Thank you.
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So, now that we have the basics covered, let’s… What? What’s that?
Oh right. Knowing these forums, one inevitable reply will always be “Making games is hard, cut the writers some slack” or “Well, I’d like to see YOU do better.”
Alright. Okay.
So here’s what I’ve done with a couple hours’ worth of time and only 3 trait points invested in my writing skills – but, taking into account the lessons learned. Maybe it’s not a great script, but… the point is, could you come up with something better than what we got? I think you could. I think you could come up with something much better. I think I could too.
You see, some people were actually interested in the Thaumanova Reactor, and for a reason – it had an element of good writing we call “Mystery”. Just what was it that happened there? What caused this crazy biz up in that place? Why did the reactor explode? Why is it filled with portals to other dimensions? It’s interesting to wonder. It’s exciting to finally be able to find out.
The Thaumanova Reactor Disaster: “No Scarlet” Edition, Volume I
(Html version)
Did you read the above story/gameplay script? What, you didn’t even want to read it? If so, the rest will be chock-full of spoilers for something you don’t care about.
Did you like it? No? Well, in that case the following will make no sense. But, remember, we’re not looking for a good story just yet, we’re looking for a better one than what we got. With Scarlet, I mean.
What we’re going to do is form a bullet list of what could be done with the story (as proven by example) that would probably be an improvement.
Let’s begin.
1. No Scarlet in sight. Instant improvement in every way.
2. Look at that, a character that’s neither a snarling villain nor a shining hero. That’s odd.
3. The character seems to be talking to you, but also provides some exposition of the plot without sitting you down at the desk for a history lesson. So that’s possible.
4. This character we’ve just met seems to be capable of more than one tone of voice or emotion. A truly unique ability in the land of Tyria, it seems.
5. “Inquest colleagues?” What’s going on? I thought we were in a world of cartoon villains. Inquest did it!
6. The character calls out the player as if they were really there. This happens sometimes in the game, but not nearly often enough. How can you feel a part of the world if the world doesn’t acknowledge your existence? Speaking of…
7. Your actions seem to cause something to happen. Man, it’s almost like you’re playing a game or something.
8. Whoops. And it’s nothing epicly heroic, either. No damsels to rescue, no worlds to save, no villagers to free. Looks like you’ve made a mistake. So it’s possible.
9. Hm, your mistake seems to have had some sort of negative effect on the gameplay. Like that time you drank a potion labeled “Poison” and instantly dropped dead? That was nice. It’s a bit of actual interaction in an interactive medium.
10. That one character you’ve been introduced to is helping you somehow instead of playing dead. This often happens in the Personal Story, but almost never anywhere else. AI companions need to be competent to make us not hate them, you see.
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3. How to Swim in the Soup
And finally, the plot, AKA, “Stuff that happens.”
Again, this is actually really hard to screw up if your goal is to make some kind of story. All you need is things happening, the more the better. If things aren’t happening, you’re just wasting people’s time. No one likes it. It’s rude.
Ideally, what you want in your plot are things that establish and build upon your setting and characters. But this is quite a bit harder, so let’s not go there.
Good: I got nothing. If you had a dragon attack Divinity’s Reach, at least it’s be a plot point, because it’d be an interaction between things we know and maybe vaguelly care about. Oh, wait, the impending attack on Lion’s Arch would count – if it wasn’t sabotaged by the player knowing full-well it won’t be destroyed because it’s still there. Also, players can’t die, so they can’t possibly care about their own death.
Bad: Trahearne. Good job making the plot revolve around someone we don’t care about. Nothing that happens has any meaning now. At this point people will get angry at you for wasting their time with things they don’t care about.
Worst: Scarlet. One thing worse than nothing is a completely random thing that makes no sense, or worse, destroys the rest of your plot. Don’t do things that have absolutely no relation to your established story or characters. Don’t.
So here you go. Your three basic ingredients for making a story. The question then is, does Guild Wars 2 have those ingredients? Did Guild Wars have those ingredients? Can you remember where they were or weren’t used properly, and what’s missing?
Ask yourselves these questions, and any answer you can come up with will make for a better story.
Not necessarily a good story, but definitely a better one.
So, with the latest debacle on the Living Story front stirring up people’s jimmies, I think it’s appropriate time to sit down, start the fire, pull out the marshmallows, and talk about the quality of writing in Guild Wars 2.
Or the lack of thereof.
Note: I have to preface this by saying I’m not a writer. I’m not even a native speaker. I never made vidygames, not a developer. But I still have an opinion and by the Divine you’re going to read it. I mean, if that’s okay with you. Thanks anyway.
You see, a good story is like a good soup. Okay, so maybe it’s nothing like a good soup, what I’m trying to say is: it usually needs certain ingredients to make sure your customers don’t stomp out in vomitous anger. Like salt. Water. This kind of thing.
So, you see, the salt of almost every story is its characters. How they swim around in your garlic soup is what makes the reader care about your epic tale of magic and dragons and bad soup analogies.
Let’s start with the basics.
1. Characters
This isn’t actually such a hard task, and you have to admit Guild Wars 2 throws some interesting people at you here and there. Well, occasionally. That’s a good thing.
All you really need to do to make people care about your characters is to show them speaking their mind or interacting with something. You may not feel too attached to someone after that, but if they suddenly fall down screaming, you’ll just a tiny pinch of sympathy somewhere in the back of your head.
The rule here is simple: the more the better. The more you know about someone, the more invested you are. That’s it. This won’t get you quite as far as making good characters, but it will allow you to make decent ones, and thus a decent story.
Good: The commanders assigned to you in your personal story. You spend time with them. You see them do things. You talk. You might not like them, you may not care, but at least you might vaguely remember them.
Bad: Destiny’s Edge. We have no reason to care about a bunch of people we don’t know and their petty squabbles. Moving on.
Worst: Trahearne. Scarlet. Oh boy. This magnitude of screwtititude usually comes about due to writer’s egotism – by which I mean, when the writer fails to take into account just how a player might feel when suddenly all their attention is asked to revolve around a random unlikeable and undeveloped pebble that is suddenly elevated to status of a God. Deicide is an absolutely justified response in this situation.
2. The Soup
Which is the analogy for the grand setting of your story.
Guild Wars 2 looks amazingly pretty thanks to hard work of every artist, but contains almost nothing interesting in it. Moving on.
Actually, no, let’s not move on. Let’s talk about what makes something not just pretty, but interesting as well. The formula here can be summed in one word: “History.” Something that happened to a place, something that the place means, something that a place can do.
The procedure here is also dead simple, then. Show things happening. Tell us what happened. Tell us what can happen. The only obstacle is to not bore us to tears by exposition: it has to be put in just the right place.
Good: Ascalon’s ghost plains. Works amazingly well if you know and care about the backstory of this place, but even without it, you still immediately understand that something really bad has happened here. You might not care too much, but you do remember it.
Bad: Iron marches. The only purple place on the map that looked so cool in the concept art. Lots of monsters and even a dragon, yet nothing’s really going on.
Worst: Orr. The one thing you can do even worse than nothing, is to introduce a concept that sounds interesting and make it shockingly droll, void of all meaning, or even outright depressing. Nothing is more depressing than a bunch of respawning zombie mobs standing around a featureless desert doing nothing at all.
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The problem is that without Trinity, we get Berserker.
That is, having three possible roles to play is a lot more than fun than having just one.
GW2 wanted to do with at least eight professions with different play-styles which can be further customized, but because of how the game is built, your only route to success is to DPS, DPS, DPS, dodge, and DPS.
So people aren’t complaining about abolishing the holy trinity per se. They’re complaining about not replacing it with anything better.
Can krait feel love?
Okay where are these food buffs for someone at level 20ish?
Trading post, usually.
They barely add anything though. It’s more useful for stats increase or magic find, but good food can cost a lot of coin. Laurel and ordinary experience boosters, however, are costly and pointless. Don’t ever buy them.
In short, lots of things boost your experience by so little you won’t even notice it.
Probably the most useful booster is your Daily, which gives 5% (I don’t know) of your current level per completed task. But obviously this way it’d take a couple of months worth of dailies…
Second most-powerful boost is killing mobs that haven’t been killed in a long while, which can give bonus XP in thousands – and given how barrens most locations are, these aren’t too hard to find. Especially near Orr.
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IMO one of the problems with the game is that leveling is too quick. Experience needed to level should be about 150% of what it is now.
Why.
After you have reached max level on at least one character, there should be an option when creating the next character to choose if you want to level from scratch again or insta-80.
Especially considering there’s really nothing new there.
At least in most MMOs (I assume?) rolling a new class or race is REALLY like starting from scratch, but the difference between playing different professions in GW2 isn’t anything you can’t grasp – whoops, double negative – in a couple of hours tops. Not outright master, no, but you already know most of everything by playing one character.
So it’s just that much more tedious. No thrill of discovery, no rewards, no nothing.
It’s not a mindset, it’s a question.
…Wait, are you asking me to me answer a metaphorical question?
I don’t think we’re communicating properly. Actually, I think you misunderstand what people are asking for when they make these threads. Pretty sure that’s got to obvious at least one some level.
Do the words “how to make a good game” ring a bell?
oh hey no one cares !
The mods sure do if you keep at it.
This thread is basically “I want 80, give it to me now (or sooner)” but nobody has stated why they need it.
Did I mention I absolutely hate this mindset?
I think I did.
Like a dog chasing a car, what are you going to do with it when you catch it?
I will assert my dominance by peeing on it.
But that’s just me.
Although I sense your comment is a metaphorical one, to which I must confess I do not quite catch the insinuation.
Leveling is not hard but yes it is tedious
There’s the reason for this thread.
…this thread looks like someone complaining about wanting things handed to him…
I REALLY hate this attitude.
This sort of insidious sort of mindset that seeks to make life difficult for everyone just for the sake of wasting everyone’s time. Why would anyone actually think that?
It’s like something Satan himself would tell you when you’re crawling through the waist-deep snow towards an old can of beans: “What? Do you want life to just hand it over to you?”
Yes.
Yes I would like you to hand me a can of frozen beans, Satan.
Mad Queen I have done crafting up to as max as I could, done storyline often but not caught up with it, and participate in events out in the game world and my thief is at 24 hours played and only level 31.
Sounds about right. My progression has been about the same, even though I would go out of my way to complete zones.
I can only guess Mad Queen is comparing GW2’s progression to some other incredibly over-the-top grindy experience. In which case it might be better, but that wouldn’t make it good.
why dont we also get a legendary weapon of our choosing just for logging in…
Why do these threads inevitably get replies from people who think it makes some sort of universal justice to waste everyone’s time?
Thanks.
Sounds like the situation similar to GW2 then, but with different methods of gaming the system.
My understanding is that BLTC is actually a website rendered through Awesomium (WHY!?) so fixing it is pretty much impossible.
Which is terrible. I think most desktop gamers would prefer smaller interface. I certainly do.
I mean heck I can reach level 90 on a WoW character in 3/4 days tops.
I never played WoW beyond the trial 20 levels, and I thought the speed of progression to that height was pretty much perfect.
How does the rest of it compare to GW2? Faster, slower, more tedious, or less?
Name one other game where the AVERAGE rate of reaching max level is 5 days…
Uh, no. It’s definitely not 5 days.
Also, that’s still ludicrously long without lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of mechanics and content to chew through in-between.
I like the lack of subscription fee. Both from the perspective of not eating away at my money, and for alleviating the pressure it puts on you. Play whenever you want… That’s good.
I agree. The progression to 80 is set at glacial pace unless you use munchkin methods. It’s not fun, it’s tedious.
What was wrong with GW1’s system? The levels there only served as a tutorial in getting you adjusted to different elements of the game – and then progression was all about learning new skills and mixing up your build. This is a Perfect approach to endgame in MMOs.
(I should mention I could never get into GW1 for other reasons, so I don’t know much beyond that.)
And they say forums are full of trolls and whiners. I see more salient and well-written criticism in this thread than I’ve heard coming from some professional game designers.
My own list would be way bigger than five items, so I’ll just mention one item that I can put into words…
1. Lack of design documentation. What’s that? It’s a an ordinary text sheet presenting a grand plan for the entire game that you’re making, taking into account ALL game systems and features before they’re developed. This is needed for many obvious and not so much reasons – but… But.
In case of Guild Wars 2, it would mainly be needed to avoid having one part of the game completely contradict another.
- “Let’s focus on cosmetic progression.” Then, instead of progression, only allow switching out gear looks for cash once and once only.
- “Let’s allow players to easily switch out their builds with skills and traits.” And lock them down to a very specific and costly set of armor.
- “Let’s have a huge open world with lots of attention to detail.” Then let’s make sure most players populate only 1/100th of that world and have no reason to do otherwise.
These are all contradictions in design. Makes the game feel schizophrenic or, worse, lying straight to the player’s face.
(I’ve written and read some design documents, by the way – it’s not an easy task, and it’s barely ever done right in any industry. It’s really friggin’ important.)
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In answer to your question…
No. No one else has this problem. Because that’s ridiculous, and bordering on disturbing. Don’t.
…
These krait stories warm my heart.
From memory, the game didn’t change one bit in any noticeable way since release. Well, except that most maps are completely barren now.
Good job wasting a whole year on temporary content most people will either never see or never see again, devs. What are you doing?
I think the best part of the game is leveling up to 80 the “usual” way with other people alongside you. So, you know, if you have friends. Or if you’re sociable.
I enjoyed helping random people get to vistas or complete renown hearts more than anything else that I can remember.
I know GW1 survived with its huge amount of horizontal progression, where you could always experiment with new builds and hundreds of skills, which isn’t really an option in GW2. Which is pretty lame.
I think ANet’s plan with ridiculous grind and per-character restrictions on Ascended gear was that people would be occupied with it for a very, very long time.
In practice, it seems, most quickly figure out how big of an investment it is and choose not to bother.
All my laurels go towards saving up for a Mystery Cat Tonic. Much better investment.
I had a krait over for dinner once.
He brought over a whole village of slaves. It was awkward.
I agree, it looks amazing.
What Trahearne Story needs, is a better writer.
What we got was a noble effort with a bit of creativity and a modicum of investment behind it, but on the face of it, it was outright sabotaged by not understanding the basic tropes of written fiction, less of all the synergy between the player and game elements in an interactive world.
Here’s the improvement plan in four simple steps:
- 1. Kick out whoever was responsible for writing the original.
- 2. Look on the Internet for five minutes and hire someone who’s ever written a successful fanfic.
- 3. Saddle them with the task of rewriting dialogue in existing missions.
- 4. A few months and lots of angry and obscene gestures from your newly hired specialist later, recast whoever you find lying around the office as voice actors and redub the lines.
Done.
Addendum: if in Step 3 your writer hands over plain text instead of acting directions to the voice actors, start over from Step 1.
Funny story: on the day when Xbox One PR team announced it’d probably only run its games in 720p resolution rather the common today 1080p, some people jumped to its defense by saying that the two-times lower resolution actually looks better than the higher one.
That’s basically the people who defend grind in Guild Wars 2.
“Ordinary MMOs … You have fun tasks that you occasionally get to do, and the rest of the game is this boring grind to get to the fun stuff … We don’t want that in Guild Wars 2.”
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I’ve seen this problem too. Also, sometimes the skill activation will delay by a second or two, which can easily mean certain death.
Why would they make the low-level zones playable again?
This way they wouldn’t have wasted all their time and effort of years of making them, and as Living World releases have shown, ANet LOVES wasting their time on content most players will never even get to see.
Work, content, then abandon content. That’s how it works.
I would like it gone.
In fact I’d like Exotics (stats, not looks) gone as well.
Less grind. More room to experiment.
Title speaks for itself, I think. You’ve been looking for ways to make Karma matter, here’s one way to do it.
Same way Legendaries currently work: right-click, choose a new set of stats.
Consider that high-level players will probably want to switch often when doing different dungeons/WvW events. Plus, newer players might like it a lot more than looking through Trading Post listings for improvements to their build.
Suggestion. Thread. There you go.
This is actually a common pitfall of many modern RPGs.
Graphics designers spend so much time modeling and texturing an impressive landscape and yet the players end up staring at the blurry floor texture most of the time (Kingdoms of Amalur, I’m looking at you here).
It’s your basic conflict of game design. You have to think of your game as a whole when you start making it.
Yeah, they’re pretty cool. A shining beacon of light in an industry that usually has zero customer support on all fronts, too.
Its non immersive, recycleable, non repeatable content that most won’t remember a week after its gone. No exciting long term goals apart from a legendaries which are an endless grind (been there done that) and a gear grind which is a slap in the face from what the game was advertised as before release.
Hit the nail on the head, buddy.
It’s just plain poorly-executed. Even with the current scheme – go to a zone, slay some re-skinned baddies – the content could be fun if it had a better theme and a better execution of underlying gameplay.
There’s also that “Dragons destroying a big-huge world we spent years making? Pah! Booooring! Let’s do something else” factor, of course.
Saying something is false doesn’t make it false.
I’d like to reply, but my this is my second post to be deleted in two days despite insulting no one, less of all you. (EDIT: Oh. Looks like I don’t have to tell you about that now.) At the very least, rest assured I wasn’t addressing you or anyone here despite the unironic meaning – it was more of a statement towards developers.
I’m getting a strong feeling ANet’s mods don’t want any criticism of the game on this board anymore. I’ve heard this has been the case early on in GW2’s life too.
As for the topic…
As I said, I think the OP serves best as a rhetorical question. No answer is needed.
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This might work. People naturally flock to where the rewards are, after all.
The game’s boring. That’s why most people resort to farming.
At least for all that repetitive effort, there’s a glimpse of reward in the form of a shiny trinket at the end.
The karma nerf was pretty absurd.
Apparently I somehow earned 1,000,000 karma before the patch. Don’t know how. I don’t play often now – log on to take a screenshot or check out the new update – and I think I barely earned 1,000 points since, without resorting to any form of farming, obviously.
That’s too big of a difference, really. A wrong fix to the wrong problem. Karma needed exclusive rewards offered for it – as was promised. That’s it.