The content in the Cliffs last year was all very specifically designed to support the story of the election that was happening between Ellen Kiel and Evon Gnashblade. It really wouldn’t have made sense to keep the map open without turning much of that content off, and that would have left the area feeling very empty and lifeless. There are other reasons beyond this, but for maps like this, which are based around a festival or a special event like the election, it just couldn’t have worked to keep it open year round. It’s only a few more days until you all get to play in the map again. I can’t read into the future, but we love the gameplay and the bizaare atmosphere of the bazaar, so I believe it will continue to be a setting we can return to when it fits with the story we’re trying to tell. :-)
If Anet’s made any mistakes here, it’s that they should have introduced Scarlet’s torment sooner. By now so many players are fed up with her that they don’t really care about her true motivations.
The past year of Living World has been a massive learning curve for us for many reasons, and there have been some areas like this where we agree that there is room for improvement. We’re committed to taking the lessons that we’ve learned over this year and applying them to how we author content and deliver story moving forward, and I’m confident that our storytelling in this format will get better and better as a result!
Checkmate atheists?! Does that mean you believe the Elder Dragons…are GOD? :-P
I love it when old threads are re-animated necro-style :P I would definitely say that I’ve got a good feeling that they have SOMETHING planned for this. It just doesn’t seem like them to throw out a thread like this without something behind it. I mean there are dozens of other monster types missing that have no mention whatsoever.
Hrm. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade but I’ll have to take the blame for inflating this beyond what it is. At the time I was creating the content in Black Citadel, everyone was abuzz about waves of “mysterious” bird deaths and thinking it was a sign of something apocalyptic, when in every case the deaths were quite ordinary and not notable.
When I thought about the absence of gargoyles from the areas of Ascalon where they used to live in large numbers (which, as a player, is a detail I would have noticed), I wanted to say something about it, but without saying what actually happened to them. With the conversation on the scholar in the Black Citadel, I didn’t set out to answer that question as much as I wanted to explore how some people in Tyria, just as they do in real life, respond when presented with things in nature they don’t have an explanation for.
Gargoyles and Mergoyles have disappeared, and at least one person is looking into it. Whether we expand on that story in the future comes down to whether the story of their absence is interesting enough to be worth exploring, and fits in with other stories we want to tell.
Dear lord, what have I done?
You have given us Ham and Braham liking ham.
Now you must complete this in the most logical way possible:On April Fool’s you give away meat maces, Braham must wield one for a while.
evil cackleSo, linguistically, I’m going to propose that the prefix “Bra-” signifies “one who likes.”
Oh man, I really hope in 4 months+ time, we forget about this thread, and we’re talking to Braham and he casually mentions he loves ham.
I wonder if Rox likes green eggs?
Maybe devourer eggs? I wonder what color those fry up…
That would make me Brapizza. Holy cats! You’ve just worked out my new NPC naming scheme!
Sure it wasn’t Matthew Medina in his swarm of answers on reddit?
I should put this on my business card. “Content Designer and Answer Swarmer”
Dear lord, what have I done?
It was definitely part of the Nightmare Tower team’s plan that we would return to that map and show the progression of the cleanup efforts. I can’t say what the timetable is for that, as it’s mostly an environment art task, but I’ll try my best to keep it in the discussion when we’re talking about future content releases. :-)
A wild Barefoot Medina appears!
Konig uses Capture on Barefoot Medina!
Stay with us and this forum! We want more love from you devs!
I do lurk here, but yes I know I really need to post here more. Lemme go look through the forum…
I LOVE these! Thanks for sharing. :-)
To be clear, the only “agenda” any of us at Arenanet have is to tell engaging and compelling stories using our medium of interactive narrative. Part of achieving that goal is to provide genuine and believable characters who have depth and interesting interpersonal dynamics, including the portrayal of complex and compelling relationships.
We have put much effort into making sure that Marjory, Kasmeer, Rox, Braham and now Taimi each bring a unique perspective to the overall Living World narrative, and we love exploring the various relationships of all of these characters, as well as those already established via the player’s personal story. You will see those relationships continue to grow and change, as you would expect of friends and comrades you encounter in real life.
Specifically with Marjory and Kasmeer, we’re trying to present two characters that have a burgeoning friendship and interest in one another, because that’s something that happens in life. We don’t generally talk much about it on forums or the like, because as has been pointed out before, we much prefer to tell their story in game wherever possible. But we would also like to think that our portrayal of their feelings towards each other is more than simply something you can define by “ticking a box”.
Regarding trimming stories of all but the “relevant details”: I would say that many of us on the dev team would actually agree with the idea that how two characters relate to one another, regardless of whether that interaction has direct bearing on the direction of the main plot-line, can and should be considered relevant. Such breadth of character traits may advance a side-plot, or no plot at all and can be used to simply establish a personality type or a behavior which informs a character’s actions as they progress through the narrative.
Of course there is a limit: Learning whether or not Braham likes ham, for example (say that five times fast) is probably better left on the cutting room floor, but exploring whether Braham likes Rox, or Taimi, or Logan (does anyone else want to see a guardian duel between these two?), well we believe that there’s real emotion there. And if it advances a plot, great…if not, it’s still part of the landscape of those characters, and that’s really important to us, and something that I would say we are more than eager and willing to explore.
I also want to chime in and say that I really liked a lot of what you guys did with this release. The puzzle was an awesome change of pace and it was actually fun figuring out the solutions, even if they were pretty simple. And a small touch, I liked that you guys did that panning cinematic around Marjory, Kasmeer, AND our characters when you first talk to Marjory. It was a small thing, but it was inclusive to us, which is something I’ve felt the living story (and even the personal story) hasn’t been. Usually I feel like I’m just along for the ride, and the story hardly acknowledges our contributions. This release, steps were definitely taken in the right direction to rectify that (although there’s still a ways to go). The cutscene at the end of the tower exploding was also, as everyone has already noted, completely awesome. Easily the best cutscene you guys have produced.
And finally, I wanted to mention that you guys did a great job with the dialogue, both ambient and direct interaction, at the camp in Kessex. I spent a good 30 minutes just hanging around there listening to the ambient dialogue and exploring all the conversations. I particularly liked how some conversations you could have would affect others. For example, when I first talked to one of the characters, she asked me if I had heard anything about the fate of a particular skritt inside the tower. The exit dialogue option was “I’ll ask around,” and I specifically thought to myself “Yeah, not like it’ll affect anything.” But I was wrong. Another character did know the fate of that skritt, and I was able to go back to relay that information to the original character. It might not have affected anything (although in the future it would be amazing if this kind of dialogue interaction carried over between releases) but it made everything feel more substantial and fleshed out.
This release has given me a bit more hope for the living story model. Good work guys, I hope we continue to see improvements like those I mentioned.
Thanks for the comments, Cliff.
I was very pleased with how the puzzles eventually turned out. They started off being quite complicated and even esoteric, but as I was implementing them I really began to see the flaw in that design. Namely, that someone coming into the game during this release, who hadn’t played the previous releases would have NO idea or context for some of the solutions. So although you can still see the skeleton of the plans I laid out for those puzzles, in the end I erred on the side of making them as accessible as possible, so they’re simple, but hopefully capture the flavor of those prior releases.
The camera pan including the player character was most certainly a deliberate decision, and will be something that, at the very least, I will continue to advocate for. But I had a lot of fun creating some of the in-game camera sequences during this release, so I hope to be able to do more cinematics in a hands-on fashion.
All of those conversations and scenes in the post-release camp were done entirely by our writing team this time around. A couple of us on the content design side were able to sit down with them and actually teach them how to do basic spawning and scripting, and with that base of knowledge they were able to populate the camp with all those interesting characters, which I think of as a huge win for the studio. It’s not that we’ve not had the capability in the past, it’s just that those kind of things usually end up low on the list of priorities for those of us who do the bulk of the content authoring, because although it’s really not hard to do, it’s also usually not that intense in terms of setup and scripting. When you are faced with the decision to fix a half dozen Pri.1 and Pri2 bugs or implement an NPC with conversation, the former will always take priority. So I would like to think that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that the bar will continue to be raised on content like this.
I’ve just got to chime in here. When our team first brainstormed this release, we went into it a little bit nervous about how the destruction sequence was going to be pulled off and if it would match up to the visions we all had in our heads, but the end product when it came in, just took our breath away. We’re really happy to see that you all enjoyed it too!
Major kudos to Matthew Oswald and the entire cinematics and audio teams for helping us cap off that release, literally, with a bang! :-D
Hey guys,
So, yes unfortunately the travel golems were reset due to the type of progress checks that we place on some types of content. We have a variety of types of progress that we use to track player’s participation in content, from permanent to daily, and in this case the travel golems were set up using a monthly progress type. Since the “Tower of Nightmares” was released on 10/29, that meant that on 11/29, the travel golems would reset progress. There are a number of reasons which are mostly technical that I can’t get into for why we set it up this way, but the short answer is that this is an unfortunate oversight on our part and you have my deepest apologies for the error.
The 12/10 release will resolve this issue.
Huh. Thanks for the follow up reports guys. Both our embedded QA tester and myself spent about some time this morning trying to reproduce transcribing an obelisk and having combat interrupt us at various points. We weren’t able to get to a point where the transcription process completed, but it didn’t count towards the achievement. Based on the reports I’m seeing about people logging in and having the achievement update, it sounds like there might be something else going on.
The transcriber can be received multiple times, provided you don’t already have one on you. That’s the only check that Dolja does before offering you the transcriber, which is just to prevent players from accidentally flooding their inventories. Well, and like any NPC she checks to see if you can actually receive the item (usually meaning that you don’t have a full inventory, but can also happen if you have some kind of transform on you).
Yes, that moment was a flashback to what had just happened. In hindsight, it’s possible some kind of screen filter or effect might have made that clearer. If you look carefully you can see that it does go from night to day, but it might be subtle enough to be missed.
This change has actually been needed since launch. As noted, we’ve already been using these difficulty mobs in content, though in a more limited way. That was due primarily to the fact that both species ended up being named “Veteran”, but one was solo-friendly, the other was not, and all it did was cause confusion. There will be more updates in the future to bring the rest of the species at this difficulty level in line with this change.
Just so you know, I’m keeping my eye on this thread. Internally, we’ve been completely unable to reproduce this issue. Having said that, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to account for all the variables with a Live game. Things to check would be whether you accidentally deleted the transcriber, or if you’re trying to complete the achievement on a character that doesn’t have the transcriber in their inventory? Just because we aren’t seeing it in our own testing, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
I can’t claim infallibility here, so I’m taking claims about this being a bug with a very open mind. If you all think of anything else, even small details about what you may have done or seen when transcribing, please post it here. Thanks!
Thanks for expressing your concerns. It’s definitely our preference to give players as much choice about their instanced experiences as possible. Whenever possible, we make instances capable of being either soloed or completed in groups.
However, in this particular case, because we are manually intercepting everyone over level 25 and automatically loading them into the instance, we currently don’t have support for parties to be brought into the instance together under those circumstances. This is something that we are looking at addressing for the future. It was not an easy choice, but for narrative reasons we felt it would have been less impactful for players to load straight into Kessex Hills without having experienced the instance beforehand.
I do regret that we weren’t able to offer “The Nightmare Unveiled” as group content at this time, but hopefully the remainder of the open world content makes up for this.. :-)
We’ve identified a bug in the Timberline event chain which is sometimes preventing that krait witch event from starting. We’re working on a fix – release TBD.
I haven’t seen any other reports about the krait witch event in Kessex Hills not running or delayed in starting. curtegg, what world are you playing on?
To answer your first question, yes, you will get rewards for completing the instance each time, though it will not be the same set of rewards on subsequent play throughs.
We agree! We do our best to make sure that any time we have a cinematic, they’re accompanied by subtitles. For this particular release, we ran into some technical problems which prevented us from importing text from one of our tools to another. We’ve already begun to outline a plan to resolve this for future releases. Sorry for the inconvenience.
We also moved the vista so that you can access it. In case, you know…you’re curious. :-D
Haha, no my posts are not some “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” diversion. By all means, this is an interesting discussion. Although I think the evidence that Queen Jennah being real is fairly well established, I actually do enjoy reading the theories about her being nothing more than an illusion in the same way I’m fascinated by web pages which describe how we never landed on the moon, or that 9/11 was a cleverly orchestrated government plot. :-P
I too have argued that we need a “hide footwear” option on characters, but to no avail. We got the option to hide gloves/gauntlets not that long ago, and that was in response to a bug that was needed to be fixed. hint
Queen Jennah has simply discovered that shoes are overrated, and lives her life barefoot. Think of how much money she has saved the kingdom, not having to buy her shoes for every occasion! ;-)
Seriously though, there are at least a handful of us devs who practice a barefoot lifestyle. I’m sure some people will always think it’s “weird”, but at least around the studio, it’s become just another facet in a diverse workplace.
Sorry, I know I’ve been somewhat absent from the forums for much of this year. That’s something I aim to remedy.
It hasn’t been forgotten. But it hasn’t moved either. :-)
The ‘votes’ that count are the submission of Support Tokens to either candidate basket on the Zephyr Sanctum.
Using the candidate buttons to represent a candidate will allow you to do the content that progresses the achievements.
The best real world analogy I can give is:
Support Tokens = Voting
Candidate Buttons = Campaigning
Actually the sonic periscopes (and their associated events) remaining behind is just a bug, and a fix was authored for it the day after the last build went Live. However, as sometimes happens with these things, hat particular fix was delayed and will get rolled into the May 28th build. Sorry for the inconvenience.
This is not bugged, it’s by design. It’s a different type of liquid karma item that will give you an amount of karma appropriate to your level when used, which is why it doesn’t stack with the others.
With all due respect, balancing content like a story instance is completely different than balancing an enhanced jumping puzzle like Super Adventure Box, so for us it just wasn’t feasible to consider doing an “easy” and “hard” mode in this particular case.
Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.
For those of you who have taken the plunge and shut down one of the Molten Facilities, thank you so much for giving it a try and giving us your feedback. Hope to see you on the front lines!
This will be achievable once all of the Molten Facilities have been destroyed. :-)
Hey all – Thanks for the eagle eyes. We’ve identified the issue, and will be fixing it shortly.
If this is boring to you personally, hopefully there are other achievements that help you meet your monthly. :-)
While I agree with everything you say fundamentally, I’m a bit curious about the reasoning behind this particular achievement. The best thing about the new daily/monthly set up is that according to what part of the game appeals to you most you can usually get them done without too much of your time bleeding into other areas. For these periscopes, they don’t exactly add anything to the game. Are there people that actually find these fun? Not easy or convenient for achieving the requirements of the monthly. I mean genuinely intriguing, captivating, interesting, thrilling, etc.? They aren’t even part of any sort of routine while normally playing the game.
I’m sorry you didn’t feel they added anything to the game. As part of Flame and Frost, they were positioned to make the Molten Alliance feel like an ever-encroaching threat, and that they were planning for something by spying on their enemies.
Specifically addressing the achievement, while we hope that all the achievements are intriguing, captivating, interesting, etc. as you said, the new system allows you to pick the ones that appeal to you personally. Admittedly, I wouldn’t put anything into the game that I felt was not fun. For me, the design goal with the perisopes was: yes it’s not fun to get knocked around. It IS fun to dodge and deke carefully and feel a sense of victory when you defeat something challenging and yes, somewhat frustrating.
However, this can be very subjective and there can be a fine line bwteen being challenged and feeling like you’re being punished, and as you’ve seen when we feel something is more punishing than fun, we aren’t afraid to change it and so we have.
You might not have found destroying the periscopes for their logs fun. Maybe you prefer jumping puzzles or events, in which case there are monthlies to suit your tastes. I’d like to think that this periscope achievement does appeal to some of our players, and we will definitely be looking at feedback and data we get from achievements like this to help inform our future design decisions. Thanks so much for your feedback! :-)
Hello! Thanks for starting this thread. :-)
As one of the designers for the Molten Weapons Facility, I would just like to say that one of our chief concerns throughout the development of Retribution was to address this very issue. We worked hard to ensure that the dungeon experience we have crafted is not simply possible to complete by groups of all different skill levels and compositions, but more importantly that it is lots of fun and rewarding for everyone. I understand the concerns about jumping into a 5-man instance if you’re more accustomed to solo play – in fact as a player I typically share those feelings, so rest assured that such concerns have been and continue to be addressed firsthand by our team!
Flame and Frost has so far made use of many of the different types of content available to players of Guild Wars 2. There have been open world dynamic events, solo instances, scavenger-hunts and achievements. In this case, with the culmination of Flame and Frost, given all the tools in our tool kit as developers, a 5-man instance was really the thing that made the most sense for us to pursue, as it enabled us to best tell the conclusion to this story arc in the way that we wanted.
We’re paying careful attention to this balance of content types, and the Living World teams will always strive to offer a variety of content to our players on a regular basis, and to make that content as compelling, and accessible, as possible.
Speaking personally, I hope you’ll join all of us on the Flame and Frost team and give the Molten Weapons Facility a try when it releases next week!
It checks player level, and will account for down-scaling. So if you take your level 80 to an area where your level is dropped down to 15 or below, you will no longer get knocked back.
It’s true that other monthly achievements were set lower, but we made this higher specifically because there are a finite number of these, they do not move, and they respawn quickly. Monthlies are meant to be achievable over the month at a reasonable pace (5-10 per day), and as you are doing other kinds of content, but it’s entirely possible to do it faster and farm if you want. As you noted, this would incur an upfront travel cost to tackle all 50 per day. If this is boring to you personally, hopefully there are other achievements that help you meet your monthly. :-)
It does indeed help us to track player’s progress in the Living World content, but it’s also a good way for us to communicate to players who like a bit more of a directed experience, since currently we can’t use the Personal Story system to relay information to the player about where to go for the Living World content and what to do next. We agree that using achievements this way may not be the strongest solution and we’re investigating alternatives. We will likely continue to use the achievement system until a stronger system is in place.
Since absolutely nothing of Owl remains, the norn chose to convey that by sculpting Owl’s memorial from wood.
Not true! My character has one of her feathers.
Ah, but you can’t very well make a statue from a few feathers left behind. :-)
Hello, we made some changes to the periscopes with a hotfix yesterday which should ease the pain these things have been causing. The knockback has been reduced for players level 16 and above, and removed for players 15 and below. Hopefully this will help players wanting to get this achievement for their monthly.
The periscopes did undergo some changes to hopefully make them better for all players. Also to clarify, not all periscopes have a chance to trigger the backup events. Only 3 out of 10 in each map have the events attached to them.
There is an Orrian Syllabary, actually. Sadly, it was rather challenging to use and to QA test, so we shelved it – but yes there are at least a couple samples in the game. I’m going to inquire about whether I can talk about it more, since I think it unlikely that we’ll ever actually use it for anything outside of sating your curiosity. :-)
So, to answer 1, there’s certainly cases where this may be an oversight, or a bug, but there’s also cases where we deliberately give NPC’s knowledge of the player – the presumption being that you’re a hero and carry a reputation with you. It’s true that this might seem odd if you have a sylvari sapling barely out of the Grove, but to cover every possible contingency in NPC conversations would have taken a tremendous amount of time so this can sometimes just be a conceit we’ve used to give the narrative a bit more of a personal connection.
For 2 – the “spirit heads” are common on all the lodges. But, you’re right that there is a significant difference here for the norn in how they chose to depict the shrines, because the spirit of Owl was not just lost, it was devoured by Jormag. Since absolutely nothing of Owl remains, the norn chose to convey that by sculpting Owl’s memorial from wood.
This is most definitely a bug.
Humans can’t be “called” to a Wyld Hunt, although they may accompany a sylvari who has been called to one, and so they may be said to be “on” or “part of” a Wyld Hunt, but this would be confusing to most, so we would never say that with NPC dialogue. A true Wyld Hunt comes to a sylvari from the Pale Tree, and can be many different things, but it requires the connection to the Dream that all sylvari possess.
Canonically, yes the Lost Shores weekend and lead-up was set after the events of the Guild Wars 2 personal story and the defeat of Zhaitan, so this is partially what made it possible for the karka to establish a clawhold on Southsun Cove.
As to whether there can be risen karka: while it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility (although pitting dragon corruption vs. karka impenetrable shell would be an experiment I would be interested to watch), the karka are recent arrivals to the surface from their original home deep in the ocean. The ocean is a big enough place that the karka managed to settle on Southsun without encountering many risen, and they avoided Orr for the same reasons they fled their home. The karka are an old, old species so they have encountered Elder Dragons and their minions before…and they’re certainly smart enough to understand the threat they represent.
The Skipping Stones jump puzzle was co-authored by a couple of the members of the team. Jordan Anton did the design, and he was partnered with Jason Jones on the environment art. But the spirit of Josh lives in all of us whenever we create one of these puzzles. ;-)
Lionguard Lyns will be coming to Lion’s Arch after the event at 12:00 PM PST today. Unfortunately Miyani is experiencing a bug whereby she is giving players access to her post-event state and updated vendor tab a little early.
We know that this is a topic that’s going to be heavily discussed, and we definitely want as much of your feedback as possible, both positive and negative (so long as it remains constructive and within the guidelines of the rules of conduct). However I would just like to point out that this:
“…fact that it’s the highest concurrence time…”
is contradictory to this:
“why not choose a time where there’s a higher chance for people to choose to attend?”
The reason we chose the times that we did, when concurrency is at its peak, is precisely because it offers us the highest chance for the largest number of people to attend. By definition though, because concurrency rises and falls, that means it’s impossible for us to choose a time that offers us a chance for everyone to attend.
Offering events like this at multiple times for different time zones is certainly worth considering, but given our team’s goals and the timeline we had to operate in (we fielded our team immediately after shipping the Live game), it just wasn’t feasible for us to consider such an option for this particular event.
Having said that, this decision is something that we realized would not make everyone happy. Keep in mind that there is a tremendous lineup of content to choose from during the weekend and after, with both the island and the Fractals dungeon remaining active, and we will continue to listen to both criticisms and compliments about these special events in order to continually improve your playing experience.
Allow me to clarify. My answer was specifically addressing the OP’s question about our new map, Southsun Cove. The content there does not count towards map or world completion.
In addition to that, we have added two new POI’s to Lion’s Arch, that DO count towards map completion and world completion, which will reduce your percentages if you’re at 100% already. So you will need to unlock those two POI’s to recover your 100%. This should not impact your achievements, your rewards or your medal.
The loss in achievement points is a bug that has been reported and is being looked into.