I think you guys are selling both your other players and the developers short by not even attempting Arah story mode.
I did it twice yesterday (once with a full pug, once with mostly guildmates who needed it still) and had a blast. It wasn’t difficult at all, and they nerfed the crap out of the latter parts of it (apparently) so once you get past like the 3rd boss or so you can practically autopilot the rest of the instance. The cinematics were great and it was a good conclusion, I felt.
Just use gw2lfg.com and you can find a group within minutes, as I have every time I’ve tried to get one for a dungeon. Everyone I’ve met so far has been helpful and kind, not the troglodytes you are imagining all the rest of us players to be.
I hated Arah. I particularly hate mobs that can one shot me and have oodles upon oodles of health and lo and behold that’s all Arah was. Not wanting to deal with the MMO conceit which thinks it is good game design to make bosses 1000-10,000 times stronger than players despite this not making any sense is why I stopped playing WoW. I didn’t want to have to deal with this in my GW 2 personal story. And the actual dungeon is extremely blah, the 1st boss was extremely poorly designed as it kitten melee. All in all I felt this instance was designed by people who could not let go of the idea of designing dungeons around the trinity and so I had a horrid time. The story also completely deviated from what we saw in the personal story up to this point in time for no explainable reason.
Also if we have to resort to 3rd party websites to try resolving a glaring problem with the game then that is sure sign that there is a huge design failure within the game that the devs need to address.
Things to avoid:
-Don’t have overly melee-hateful mechanics
-Avoid having excessively high auto-attack damage (Anet devs forgot that we don’t have tanks and healers with us)
-No untelepgraphed “instant-gib” mechanics
-No frikkle or unresponsive mechanics (like Simin in Arah)
-Decisions have to have meanigful consequences. You decide to destroy a totem to remove a boon from the boss then it should stay off for at least 15 seconds.
Strangely this list desribes every boss in GW 2. And that’s why I don’t really bother killing bosses in GW 2.
It’s an odd place to be in, requiring Arah story (thus a dungeon run) to complete your personal story – and having people complain about that, and then also people complaining that it’s too easy to do.
It’s like they can’t make anyone happy.
And you never considered that just maybe there are two completely different sets of people here? And of course never even considered that they never tried to make anyone happy which had the necessary result of making or keeping everyone unhappy.
If someone is unhappy because you are making the last quest of a series of solo quests a quest that requires completing a 5 person dungeon then the only way to make them happy is to make the quest a soloable quest. Anet has not taken any steps to actually make the dungeon soloable so they haven’t addressed this group of people.
If someone is unhappy because they think the last boss is too easy then making the last boss even easier must make this group of people upset because you went in the opposite direction of what you knew they wanted.
They should have integrated the rest of the dungeons in the storyline, or let the personal story be over after The Source of Orr.
That wouldn’t make a lick of sense. The entire reason for creating the Pact was to defeat Zhaitan. That was actually the entire purpose for all of your actions for most of the personal story. Trahearne’s Wyld Hunt to cleanse Orr was nothing more than a sidequest which did not invalidate the purpose of the Pact which was destroying Zhaitan. And the Pact’s purpose after cleansing Orr (which should have really had a large effect on nullifying Zhaitan’s power) was still defeating Zhaitan. So your personal story wasn’t even close to over yet, the only thing that was finished was Trahearene’s sidequest.
And that’s also why making the last quest a 5 person quest made no sense whatsoever.
You are not understanding the issue. Yes everyone can find a group, sooner or later. The issue is that in a PERSONAL story line, no group should EVER be required. There is no sense of personal achievement in a forced group.
Is that the OP’s issue, or your issue? There are at least three other open posts on this, I understand the point being made and agree with it (to a certain extent), although it’s nothing I’d get my panties tied up in a knot over. In this particular thread, the OP mentions the difficulty he had in finding a group to complete personal story with his son. I am replying directly to the OP on this point trying to be helpful, not on issues raised in other threads. Sheesh.
The OPer’s issue is that he doesn’t think the final quest should require a group. He raises 2 points in support of this issue:
1) It is hard to find a group to do the last quest.
2) Requiring the player to find a group to complete the last quest goes against Anet’s stated goals for GW 2.
Reading the OPer’s other posts tends to suggest that he is of the opinion that 1 is not an independent contention (it is hard to find groups for this quest) and that he could not be made fully satisfied by making it easier to find groups (especially since I feel he would rightly be upset to find someone elses character exclusively talking during HIS personal story cinematics).
My first character was a Sylvari, joined the Vigil. He plays the old war veteran archetype, and so that’s why you don’t like him. But, you fail to realize he is Norn. Norn don’t give a kitten what you did before you met them. Actions speak louder than words.
As for Trahearne, as a Sylvari you should know exactly why he’s so important. He’s one of the firstborn, and has the most knowledge about Orr besides maybe a Priory historian. He’s got first-hand experience with being on Orr, and it’s basically his life purpose to cleanse it.
That’s all he is. A firstborn with some knowledge of Orr but he is hardly the only one with that knowledge. And to be honest he doesn’t even have all that much knowledge. You spend most if not all the Orrian quests running around Orr trying to gather knowledge becaue Trahearne has no information which could help you. That isn’t exactly a long resume and certainly one that is going to get you a job as the leader of a military organization. And if he is a Priory historian then that only adds more fuel to the fire because he isn’t even able to meet the requirement of being neutral at that point.
And the idea of the old war veteran has certain prerequisites that Forgal just does not meet, chiefly experience and ago. He is in his late 30s to early 40s (I’m assuming that people age a lot more quickly given their much lower average life spans) and was only level 30ish? 40ish? at the time. There was absolutely no character development and you never find out a single thing about his past. But the problem here is that you are comparing one person with an unknown past (Forgal) to another person with a known past whose accomplishments you had just spent the last 50 levels watching.
If you agree to take someone into your organization on the grounds that they accomplished quite a bit before joining your orginization and then treat them like they know nothing by making them work as a mail clerk then you are a fool who is wasting their time and yours. And it would be highly unlikely for the Norn or any culture to not value prior accomplishments considering every single culture we have ever known that has actually existed has in fact valued prior accomplishments. Having rituals, beliefs, and a government and generally a culture all depend on valuing prior accomplishments.
Well to be honest I think Zhaitan should have been a world event consisting of tons of players, but since they decided to make it a personal story thing I don’t really have a problem with them requiring just 5 people. I mean…this is an elder dragon.
So you have no problems with only requiring just 5 people to kill Zhaitan but seem to take offense to the idea that it could be done with 1 person and 20 NPCs?
Most unfortunate. The entire story is all about uniting the races and creating this uber pact. Only at the end this uber pact is no longer sufficient to defeat the monster that provides them with the very reason for them to become a pact in the first place.
I think this should be changed. All of the other parts of the story were just fine solo, why must the end suddenly require help? I get that you guys are after a social experience, but this is my PERSONAL story All about me. Which I LOVE, by the way. I just hope you see my point and perhaps make a change to this?
Thanks!
-Mog
It doesn’t require help. It is a complete deviation from the story up until that point in time and absolutely zero reason is given for this deviation.
And the instance itself sucks. It was very clear that they designed the bosses with the standard trinity in mind.
And there was no explanation given as to why you don’t attack Zhaitan with the entire Pact since that was the only reason why the Pact was formed in the first place. You finish the last mission with the Pact getting ready to assault Zhaitan, all the airships are being prepped, the guns manned, the entire camp is in a bustle and then nothing. You get a random pug together and slog through a dungeon with poorly designed encounters when you should have been leading the Pact stationed on the lead airship.
I just finished this mission/quest/part of personal story/whatever you want to call it, with a level 10 thief. However, it was extremely frustrating without the use of caltrops and alot of conidition based attacks. I tried it with s/p but that didn’t work too well. Blinding power uses up too much initiative and after that, there wouldn’t be any initiative left to use any skills. Nevertheless, there was a nice trick I found, with the use of the column inside the tavern that has two tables around it. I ran in circle spamming one and use my caltrops for the cripple and bleed, and while behind the column, Doc Howler’s attacks were obstructed. In addition, this also took me out of the immersion in the game due to the frustration (beat it on my 4th try).
I’ve mostly played pvp and I’ve gotten quite good at my thief after playing 600 games with it, so I knew what build to follow. If I had tried d/d or p/d with condition gear, I’m sure I would’ve had it on my try. Anyways, it really sucked that I had to switch weapons just to beat this.
WHen I did it the column did nothing to stop the attacks.
I hated Forgal. His treatment of my character or even his necessity simply didn’t make sense. I could understand the idea of having a mentor if my character is level 1 and first beginning, and indeed I really did like the mentor I was given (Caithe). By the time I had Forgal my character was already an established and well respected Sylvari hero. Turning me from a hero into a rookie made about as much sense as saying that Microsoft is going to headhunt the CEO of Google and then make him work in the mail room. Those things just don’t make any sense.
That’s interesting, because I had the opposite reaction. I felt like prior to joining the Vigil, my character was being praised out of all proportion to her deeds, and I think she would have felt a bit embarrassed about it.
It was kind of nice to meet an NPC who wasn’t totally awed by her minor hometown good deeds.
Did you play as a Sylvari? I think they do a much better/worse (because then it becomes interolerable when Forgal treats you like you haven’t done a single thing) making the Sylvari out to be a hero before you join an order. Plus you have all the accomplishments from when you leveled up. I think by the time I first met Forgal I was 10-12 levels higher than he was. And from a RPG standpoint that means I had considerably more experience than he could have had.
Well what accomplishments does Forgal have which makes him a better judge than your character? Does he ever even give you so much as his resume?
In this instance he is a lot of like Trahearne in that the player is simply expected to think that Trahearne is amazing solely on the grounds that every NPC is always like “There goes the amazing Trahearne” and yet not once do the NPCs ever enumerate what exactly Trahearne did to be considered amazing.
All you will see is a zerg of players hopping to the popular dynamic events around the world in a constant circle. Nobody would run anywhere they’d teleport all over the place.
A big NO to this idea.
Lol. People already don’t run anywhere. Instead they sit in Lion’s Arch all day so that they don’t have to pay teleport costs and all those events in Orr go uncompleted because of it.
At least if they removed teleport costs players would be more willing to roam around the world looking for events and we might be able to start completing the group events again.
The entire point of doing so (AFAIK) is to prevent people from abusing the WP system in the first place. If you die, and you decide to WP instead of wait, it’s an added penalty to help instil the feeling of “maybe I shouldn’t do stupid things to get killed” (if you jump off cliffs all the time like me) and further emphasize that just because you can die doesn’t mean you should. It also in theory helps raise the chance someone is to explore an area more thoroughly. If you could hop around for free, why wouldn’t you just go straight to the WPs near profitable things and ignore all the lengthy amounts of content spread about the world?
You could not be more wrong on every single point and this basically highlights the beginning of the problem.
You can’t abuse waypoints by using them to get around the world anymore than you can abuse sidewalks by using them to avoid getting hit by a car when walking through your town. Waypoints are there for the purpose of allowing players to move around the world a little faster so that they don’t have to waste their time running (or heavens forbid walking all over the place). Since waypoints can only be used in one fashion and cannot be used in any other fashion there is no way to “abuse” the system.
Secondly is your opinion that MMO developers should be implementing systems that slap us across the wrist at every oppurtunity. I don’t remember any having ever agreed to letting MMO developers slap my wrist whenever I decided to engage in behavior that hurts no one but my character. And even if I had agreed to such negative treatment, MMO developers are not actually capable of making the right choice of determining what type of actions, which fall within the category of Socratically just actions, should be punished. Think about it thusly, under the current system you have your wrist slapped whenever you get disconnected even though you have absolutely no control in determining whether or not you get disconnected. By deciding to punish players for passive actions that happen to the player and are not actions of the player MMO developers have shown that what they are really doing is not trying to make people better but simply being terrible sadists who arbitrarily slap player’s wrists for their own amusement.
Who cares if I decide one day to jump off a high cliff to see whether or not I’ll die. Who is hurt by this action and how is anyone made better off for knowing that my wrist is slapped? No one of course but there isn’t anything wrong with jumping off a cliff that deserves punishment.
If they want a true gold sink they should put in an income tax. Those that have the most gold should be taxed the most.
I want to see a welfare tax.
Get rid of the negative effect of inflation by making sure that everyone has the same amount of money. And when everyone has the same amount of money no one will be harmed or injured more than anyone else by an increasing price level.
again. you’re asking to get something for nothing. it’s a basic, in gaming — transpo costs.
And transportation costs nothing. In fact everything in this game costs nothing since it is being created on the spot from nothing. So what we are asking for is to have to pay nothing for something that costs nothing to provide.
I hated Forgal. His treatment of my character or even his necessity simply didn’t make sense. I could understand the idea of having a mentor if my character is level 1 and first beginning, and indeed I really did like the mentor I was given (Caithe). By the time I had Forgal my character was already an established and well respected Sylvari hero. Turning me from a hero into a rookie made about as much sense as saying that Microsoft is going to headhunt the CEO of Google and then make him work in the mail room. Those things just don’t make any sense.
The idea is that NPCs can’t deal too much damage because it is the player’s role.
But by this same logic the enemy NPCs also should not be doing much damage because it is the player’s role to not die.
And it really didn’t make any sense why my character didn’t go back and save Apatia. I was already there and had already whooped the kitten of the rest of the Krayt, taking an extra 10 minutes to kill the slavemaster wouldn’t really be putting anyone at risk or going out of my way. And considering my character made such a stupid choice I was extremely fed up with her continous harping that she had to go back and save Apaita. If she was really that important to you then you shouldn’t have abandoned her in the first place.
He corrects the charr by saying “The Pact did it. Our combined efforts made this happen.” Your character is part of the Pact.
No. The Pact lay dead at the feet of the mobs. I was the only one left standing.
And you are part of the pact. Not to mention if nothing else they were cannon fodder which bought you a little time without being the sole target for a while. That is team work if you ask me
I ceased being part of the pact the moment the story focused on Trahearne and left me in the dust.
Well for one, it creates more group depth and teamwork than what we have currently. When the roles depend on each other rather than just work along side each other with rather homogeneous effects, many players find that to be more satisfying. After all, i bought this game thinking it was an MMORPG, not an online cooperative action / adventure game with platforming elements.
Firstly, no, it doesn’t. It places the fate of an entire group in the hands of 1-2 players who, if untalented, can ruin the experience for EVERYONE else. Failing because someone else failed at their one job? That is unacceptable to me. And it happened so often in GW1 that when GW2 promised “no trinity”, I was 100% on board with it before I’d even played so much as one second of the game. Losing because another player lacks skill isn’t my idea of fun. Me rescuing my entire party from certain failure in a dungeon by using my own dodging skills and clever tactics? THAT is good game play.
Secondly, let’s pretend for a moment that it does “create more group depth”. In what ways exactly? I see you say this all the time, but when asked for specifics, you can never actually provide examples of how this game’s combat is so vastly inferior to GW1’s. You just keep repeating the same thing. So now I’m putting you on the spot: how does GW1’s trinity gameplay “create more group depth”? I want specific examples.
I have responded, but it’s too long to put as a post so i am adding an attachment.
You know as an Engineer, I aoe damage but in less than a second I switch kits and become a healer…
This whole post seem ridiculous to me…
You can heal, sure, but you don’t become a healer in the true sense. Sustained, reliable, distinct…none of those descriptors fit with any healing options or even the base mechanics in this game. Obviously the breaking point is that many feel that homogeneous, indirect, and thoughtless healing on an irregular or burst basis is sufficient to act as a satisfactory and again, distinct support / healer role.
I see this as something all classes can do in one form or another. Those flavor differences are not viable, mechanical distinctions in my opinion. They don’t add much depth or risk / reward when they are not active, specialized role mechanics, but mere additions to the “jack of all trades, master of none” scheme that every profession in GW2 is a victim of.
Again this is just my opinion. What’s unsatisfactory to me may be satisfactory to you.
Not a true healer? LMAO
ok what part of healing others and buffing/debuffing makes me different from your definition of a healer….
tell me which part of my skills prevents me from doing so…
Being able to and heal and being a healer aren’t the same thing.
Being a healer implies being able to perform significant and continuous healing (nonstop significant healing) over a long period of time.
Healers dont’ actually add anything to the game. If anything they subtract from the game because they become their own reason for existance.
When devs develop a game with healers they design it in such a way that the boss cannot be completed without being spam healed by making the boss capable of killing a play within 2 to 3 hits if they don’t get healing. However if the game did not have a healer the same boss would not have been designed to hit so hard.
Why didn’t you test out this theory on a lower level character with a 2 copper weapon?
And I don’t even understand what would lead you to form such a theory.
It would be like if someone suddenly wondered if they would still be affected by gravity if they were 30,000 feet off the ground in the airplane and decided to test this theory by throwing themselves off the plane.
Something that remains to live can be killed, right? Although I would assume something that will always live could not. Difficult stuff.
EDIT: Also, sorry to necro a post, this just bothers me.
Reincarnation.
Living afterall means existing. So long as it continues to exist then it must still be living even if i actuality it had died. Something which dies and gets reincarnated hasn’t stopped existing because otherwise it could not be reincarnated and the thing which was supposedly a reincarnation of the now inexistant thing would actually be a brand new thing and would thus have been created and not reincarnated. Reincarnation therefore supposes a series of transformations of a thing that never ceases to exist.
Simple solution to make everyone happy: level 80 legendaries don’t scale, but can be used as an optional component in the creating of level 90 legendaries to greatly reduce the investment required to make the level 90 legendary.
OR they could just stop adding anything to their game, because all people seem to be able to do is whine about everything that changes.
That’s what happens when all the changes are viewed as negative.
Maybe Anet should actually try to garner or allow community participation in the decision making process.
The easiest way to accomplish that would be to allow us to elect player representatives who work with the developers so that changes are made which the overall community either desired or at least supported.
But I believe a developer actually did try to do this and it was a huge disaster.
No. Top tier is only top tier when it is top of the top level.
Given the current direction of the game (gear treadmill) it is extremely likely that a new set of Legendaries will be released for players of the new level cap to acquire via grinding and these new Legendaries being made for players of a higher level will of course necessitate having better stats so that they are functionally equivalent at their level to what the current legendaries are for players at the current level cap.
I’ve hit some tricky storylines too but hang in there and keep trying – I know this sounds stupid and eyeroll-worthy but you really do learn a ton about your profession this way. I will say that it seems this might be a bit difficult for someone brand new to GW2 as one of their first experiences with story quests.
The only thing I learned was that NPCs can get stuck in stairs.
When an NPC does an imbalanced amount of unavoidable damage there is nothing to be learned but how to overcome frustration when one is made powerless. And to be quite frank I do not feel such a function is appropriate for a video game developer.
I’m divided when it comes to underwater combat. While Ireally like the concept and artwork and some of the execution, I feel that for some classes the skill choices for the weapons don’t mesh together very well and for all classes the damage they do underwater is simply too small so that the fights drag on way too long.
And as already mentioned whenever you start fighting one enemy you always finish fighting 16 which thankfully enough is a lot easier to manage underwater because the enemies hit for less damage, have less annoying abilities (if they even have any), and usually aren’t ranged. So if you were fighting 16 mobs on land you’d probably be dead but underwater you can handle it no problem, it just takes forever.
You can’t create a living world without giving NPCs an actual purpose (I am thinking of how an entire ant hill is modeled by creating individual ants with a tiny set of like 3 behavorial algorithms which produce very complex macro behaviors) and allowing players and NPCs to actually interact with the world and each other. I really think such a task is beyond the capabilities of the hardware, software, resources and experience of video game developers.
But even still the world lacks any feeling of life or purpose.
Actually if memory serves me right GW 2 was originally supposed to be a lot more dynamic and interactive than it currently is but this design goal had to be scrapped because it was untenable because of the aforementioned reasons.
If ANet starts doing things just because the majority wants it, not only are they giving up their pride in their product, but they’re also giving the implication that there is nothing that cannot be changed if enough people argue for it.
Isn’t that more and not less desireable in a game that is played by a community? Would you rather play a game where you have say in what changes are made or rather play a game that is run by a heavy handed tyrant?
And the point of the matter is that this is simply the free market at work. Anet wants to sell you stuff and in order to sell you stuff they need to sell you something that you want so it is in their best interests, and indeed their design is centered around it, to tailor the game to appeal to your interests and desires.
Unless you want another game touting “artistic integrity” like Mass Effect 3. Your artistic integrity only matters insofar as the majority agrees with your vision. The moment your vision doesn’t agree then your integrity means nothing. You could say, “Well at least I still have my pride” but that doesn’t put bread in your belly.
This is ridiculous. If I hired someone to mow my front, back and side yards and said I would pay them $30 to do so and I need it done by the end of the day and they came back to me at the end of the day and said, I only mowed the back and side yards but didn’t mow the front, so you owe me $20, I’d tell them to kitten off, the contract was for the whole job, you failed you get nothing.
Another example:
I get in a car accident and take it to be fixed, I am quoted $4,000 for the job, I come back when its supposed to be finished and the guy tells me we only fixed the left side but the right side is still all smashed up. A half done job does not get half the fee, a half done job gets sued for breach of contract.
Think of your daily as a contract, you have 24 hours to do 5 things, don’t do them, you don’t get paid (rewards). The end. period. finished.
Actually you’d probably owe them the value of the work they did and they might owe you the value of the loss you suffered from their failure to fulfill their obligations under the contract.
Obviously you could contract to say that they will only be paid if they finish 100% of the job within 24 hours but I feel that the case might still be resolved as per above. (ie they were only in breach of a single term of the contract when they decided to stop however they work the did do was completed within the terms specified by the contract)
And if the daily is a contract then it is a contract solely because of reliance as it lacks consideration (that’s actually a lie, Anet benefits from having you logged in because that’s more chance for them to sell you stuff which only makes it worse for them). And because it is based on reliance and not on consideration then the basis for restitution are the damages suffered by the player as the game would not have been made any worse or better off regardless of fulfillment. And since the player has no bargaining power then the game would not be able to win by saying that this was a contract where the player only agreed to be paid if they completed it within a day since:
1) This was never a part of the contract which only lists the tasks that need to be completed by one party and contains the word “Daily.” Since there is no actual definition of what daily would mean in this circumstance then you’d have to look at what daily means within the parlance of the industry and of course what daily actually means isn’t resets every day but rather can only be completed once every 24 hours so a failure to complete a dialy quest within a day does not thereby cause a party to be in default.
2) The player wasn’t able to negotiate. The contract was presented on a take it or leave it basis and there was only one entity that the player could contract with. The only defense is that there was no duress and the player could have chosen to do something else during this time like play another game or do something else within the game with the counterargument that the only way to get laurels is via this daily task.
Calling this a contract would really be the worst possible option for your position.
And your position certainly isn’t one that is taking a moral or humane stand. Rather you are taking a hardline approach that treats everyone as if they had the same amount of free time as you do which makes me think that you have no professional or familial obligations because otherwise I’d expect you to have more empathy. And if you are a type of person who has not yet reached the point where you have the same types of obligations that we do and therefore cannot be considered our peer or able to represent us then you cannot dictate whether or not we should or should not be able to complete a dialy task within a single day or a period of days because this issue is completely irrelevant to you and you have no stake or interest in the decision.
And considering that I just wasted my lunch writing this post I probably won’t have enough time later to finish my daily once again. T_T
The best part about the card game system was that is allowed you to beat the game without having gained a single level (because you could turn your enemies into cards ansd thus avoid earning XP) and then transmute the cards into materials and magic that you could use to make the best geat for your characters and give your characters max stats.
No levelup FF8 games were the best but the hardest to pull off if you were a completionist which meant you had to get the GF which would randomly come in and kill the mobs before you could turn them into cards.
But if you did pull it off the game was impossibly easy. The reason is that in FF8, the mobs stats were based on your character’s level. So a final boss that should have had over a million hp and stupidly high resistances would have only 120,000hp and no resistances if you never leveled. And since most of the characters could use limit breaks every turn that hit multiple times for 9,999 damage per hit you were able to one shot basically every boss.
To everyone complaining, remember… this is a f2p game.
B2P: buy to play.
F2P: free to play.
P2P: pay to play.
if GW2 costs 60$, but doesn’t have a monthly sub, which of these categories does it fall into?
The same category that GW 1 fell into which was none of these. The fact that they now want to make more money than they should be entitled to given the expectations that they created and sold the game around is not our fault but theirs.
If Anet wanted GW2 to be F2P they should have advertised it as such from the beginning.
Crafting was a bit “grindy”, but I gather enough mats while leveling through a zone normally to almost craft without needing to go out and farm. Actually, I can just buy some of the mats off TP with gold I earned from leveling. You can reach around 350 without really spending more than 1-3g on TP mats.
And that is why the crafting system fails as implemented.
You should not have to spend a single dime to buy mats to level up your crafting so long as you are only making equipment appropriate for your level. The fact that you can’t actually get enough drops even if you go out of your way to find them is a problem no matter how you try to slice it and dice it.
I like that he lacks confidence, I like that he doesn’t exactly leap at the chance to be the leader of the Pact, and I like that he overthinks everything. I will take him over some bloodthirsty, overconfident, throw-wave-after-wave-of-my-men-at-the-problem army jock any day.
At least Zap Brannigan is enteraining. Trahearne has no positive qualities and there is no adequate reason why Trahearne was chosen when he was so clearly unsuited for the job.
The extremely shallow, unbelieveable and BS reason we were given just doesn’t cut it with me.
Let’s be honest here, its not you’re story till you can write about in Bio section of your character. This is all meta thinking but that’s what I loved about City Of Heroes, yes you had you’re own tale, but you also had a description of who you were, what you did and how you planned on going out.
I like the story arcs in GW2 but its missing a few things.
If I thought my story could exist only insofar as what I could write in a character bio then I wouldn’t be playing a MMO but a pen and paper RPG. The point of a video game is being able to visually see and act out what you could only imagine and replicate through dice rolls in a PnP RPG.
Dialogue The actual dialogue is atrocious. Most pertinent example: before Seiran sacrifices herself, she spouts some completely random nonsense about friendship. “Player, you taught me that friends can do anything together!” What? How? We grabbed some awful cliche blooddragonravenMAGIC sword, and rescued some quaggan sure, but there was no bonding. There was no moment where we became friends. We just randomly ran around for about 30 seconds total (because these story steps are so very short and so very far between) with her being bubbly and us accomplishing things. At what point did a friendship form? We were never asked to trust one another, or had lengthy conversations, or anything really. We just worked together on a few brief missions. And furthermore, she was exactly the same person in this story step as she was when we first met her. “I was so selfish when I met you, but now I’m not!” Uhhh…. okay? She never acted selfish, and in fact ran out to help everyone and anyone she met. Since the day she showed up. She hasn’t changed whatsoever. So the things she says towards the end of the mission are just random garbage that you think you’d hear out of a particularly saccharine children’s cartoon. And for the record, I am a person who personally believes what others find cheesy and saccharine: things like “friendship is wonderful and important and powerful!” and “we all need to work together to make eachother happy 8D,” but with Seiran it is just atrociously forced, unfounded, and godawful. It derailed any pathos for the events that transpired.
Same for me but replace Seiran with Forgal who is probably the most boring and easily forgettable character in Guild Wars 1 or 2. Seiran at least had a bubbly personality.
Well, having a NPC lead the Pact instead of the player character solves the problem of naming the slayer of Zaithan in future expansions. They can say “Trahearne’s Pact has slain Zaithan.” instead of something lame like “A mysterious adventurer slew Zaithan.”
I disagree completely. Regardless of whatever role the player fills, Anet will still run into the problem of trying to figure out what the NPCs are going to call the player. Thus the player’s involvment or lack of involvement is completely irrelevent to the problem of what Anet is going to have the NPCs call the player now or in the future.
Plus, it isn’t “Trahearne’s Pact” it is just “the Pact.” And of course there would be the complete nonbelieveability of putting Trahearne and slaying together unless you said “<blank> has slain Trahearne.”
And when Trahearne says, “This won’t end well” he really means that it won’t end well for your side. He says this because he has such a lack of confidence that he is Anet’s version of Eeyore.
I think that if we had to create a measure of what constitutes acceptable challenge and what constitutes poor game design it would be thus:
An acceptible challenge is where the player comes away from a defeat thinking that if they had done X instead of Y at time t then they might have had a shot.
Poor game design is where the player comes away from a defeat thinking that there was nothing they could have done to change the result.
This is clearly a case where I came away thinking that there was nothing I could have done to change the result and therefore falls into the category of poor game design.
Or how about its the fact that, when it says recommended lvl whatever and you are that level and thing you have to fight is 2 levels higher and a elite.
And then the reward is an item 2 levels below the recommended level.
