Guild Wars 2

sAdam.5876:

tl:dr
I think they skimmed through. If they played more attentively they wouldn’t use nearly same graphic for Realm of Torment and “Pale Tree + six Elder Dragons”/“Eternal alchemy”.

Well, there are only so many ways you can do orbs circling one greater orb without drawing the conclusion to be planetary orbits.

What gets me is how the Realm of Torment map barely worked in the first place as it seemed unbalanced and just . . . not considered very well. I mean, aside from trying to justify it lore-wise, why did “Gate of the Nightfallen Lands” even exist? It looked like it was there to balance the diagram on the background. Cut that, and then the Domain of Anguish, then it balances out fine into seven spheres instead of ten.

Vayne.8563:

Boneheart.3561:

Vayne.8563:

Seems to me like people think a hero has to do everything all by themselves.

It feels like there have been sooo many movies and shows, comics displaying the importance of the hero not doing everything by themselves, all recently.
I liked to joke that Avengers was Iron Man 3 (before Iron Man 3 came out), but really who can you say was the main hero there.

Well yeah even if you say Frodo was the hero of Lord of the Rings, Sam saved his life (in the books) and ultimately he didn’t have the strength to destroy the ring anyway. On his own, Frodo failed. It was, ironically, Gollum who through his desire for the ring ended up destroying it.

Which makes Bilbo the real hero for having no heart to kill Gollum when he could have.

( . . . what kind of Thief doesn’t do a backstab when stealthed, though? Seriously. )

As for “Best Instance of a Hero Being Reminded They Can’t Do It Alone” – spoilers ahoy

Demented Sheep.1642:

Although now I’m imagining Marjory going nuts, reanimating her sisters corpse, talking to it like it’s alive while manufacturing replies and patching her up when she starts rotting to try and pretend everything’s all fine. Complete with eye twitching and manic high pitched laughs naturally.

I find it more entertaining to imagine her trying that, then Livia dropping by and going “Oh, dear me, you should see what a real necromancer can do . . . come with me, you have much to learn and little time to do it in.”

lordkrall.7241:

It is also made rather clear in the story that Taimi seems to have a way to fix the WPs so that Mordy can’t use them anymore, which would make this all issue rather moot.

But that would get in the way of his dream of riding mounts through those dredge tunnels and having his head clip through the ceiling every stride . . .

Warrior doesn’t work for me as well as other classes. And I can’t really manage an Elementalist, Necro, or Thief so I stick with Ranger and try to be the one on the floor the least.

. . . and strangely I find it a heck of a lot more fun to play.

You can disable waypoints in the middle of Divinity’s Reach without disabling all of them.

I know you love mounts, but there’s little reason to incorporate them unless the waypoint system was completely removed. And they have too much invested in it existing to really blow it up just to add mounts.

Counter-argument? It’d be best implemented as additions to zones designed specifically to use mounts, much like Dry Top is designed to have the crystals around, and like the Desolation was designed for Junundu travel. Not to back-design in mounts in places where they weren’t intended to be. Ever.

Eggman.1405:

Well, I’m not really making an argument, I’m supporting an opinion.

. . .

There doesn’t seem to be any real argument that the Kodan aren’t the poorest-developed friendly race in the game.

There’s no argument because you’re not making one or leaving room for discussion with “it’s just my opinion and it can’t be right or wrong”.

Sorry, just how it is.

knbBlackTemplar.3059:

Just let me save the world, i don’t care about your relationships, your problems, your crying faces. Let me brutally murder someone.

. . . start with Zojja. Please. Do us all a favor.

Boneheart.3561:

What did it make her?

. . . less one sibling.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

How do you get that “fact” from the page linked. Nothing we know of Varesh Ossa suggests she would bother. Instead, ample evidence that she did not care and simply expected compliance.. backed by Military power. Conscription, Seizure of lands, appropriation of produce, etc etc are not indicative of a Warmarshal concerned with “protests”.

You are correct, however.

The book is junk. Better that Scarlets alliances remain a mystery than do this. Why make up stuff like this when, for another example, the Mursatt, through the White Mantle, duped and manipulated the entire Krytan nation, a story well known and supported by lore.

That book doesn’t handle much to explain how Scarlet made her stuff work, and towards the end when we saw little things? This book and its passage didn’t even matter because she wasn’t doing things that way. She made the Toxic Alliance by saying “hey krait, I have your obelisks and if you ever want to use them properly you better get with the program”.

We know she had the Aetherblades basically working for her under fear of failing her and the potential spoils if they pulled it off.

And now we know the steam creatures the watchworks were based on were her work so that’s no mystery how she had root user access.

The last mystery we have is how she convinced the Molten Alliance. And it’s not even much of one.

The book is junk for explaining those alliances, but it shows more significantly how she thought about them as “lesser races” to be manipulated and used from the start.

As the OP suggested this seems to be done with either no knowledge of GW, or worse, with disdain for it.

I still don’t see where you get that from.

perilisk.1874:

Maybe when the queen is killed, an ancient human magic is broken allowing demons from the Mists to begin invading Tyria, and then we have take the Locket to the Blades… err Shining Blade, and help them track down the heir before the demons. Then the heir uses the magic of the locket to turn into Glint’s baby or something, I don’t know. Then, Glint Jr. gives us the power to head north and yell at Jormag until he dies.

Too much skooma, this one.

Though if people keep insisting to me there are only five human gods, I might have to wonder.

ThiBash.5634:

I think you’re misinterpeting it. Its not about the centaurs working with the Kournans.

It’s the fact that Varesh manipulated her people by making the majority think the centaurs weren’t slaves, and in that way prevented major protests.

The decieved lesser beings are in fact, her people, who think that the centaur-forged blade they’re adding a hilt to came from a freewillingly coöperating centaur smith.

Or the lesser beings are anyone NOT following Abaddon, depending on when it was written . . . before or after Varesh made it obvious she had gone well over the Chosen One dive and into “Don’t care, evil”.

ThiBash.5634:

So, which is the more likely first target?

Jennah was referenced through the locket, and she’s a powerful mesmer so there’s lots of magic to drain on.

Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ll hit Jennah so soon. She may be a powerful mesmer, but individual beings probably aren’t comparable to other things the vines could go for. Like, say, some of the channeling Skill Point locations which are supposed to be dormant energies which can be tapped by our characters?

Then again, Trahearne is a bigger threat and has a jummy magic sword to eat.

That sword is gone, though. Its energy was expended to cleanse Zhaitan’s grip on the Artesian Waters.

Aedelric.1287:

The way Arena Net are handling the current Living Story works well.

We get new story, we have new regions and we can tackle it all in our own time, no tight schedule. The writing may not be up to snuff, but it is a vast improvement over season one.

Pretty much my feelings so far. The writing is a bit better, but because it’s more focused on a single storyline rather than scattered among several “chapters” with little discernible linking matter.

I am not sure how I feel about “Favor of the Zephyrites” but we’ll see. I do pine that we didn’t get an intro video of the vines engulfing Prosperity . . . I logged out one day and it was fine. Logged in the next and ‘someone send me some Agent Orange’.

nexxe.7081:

Poplolita.2638:

I’d rather have FREE content every 2 weeks, than to pay for an expansion.

It’s basically free vs pay. In my case, free win, not even up to discussion.

Yes, free updates, but look deeper into them, and start to compare and contrast, to the more traditional MMOs, and you’ll find out that other MMOs put out more meaningful content for your characters and gameplay.

Mmm, speaking from a time when I played a traditional MMO (perhaps the father of traditional MMOs), content I can’t experience due to whatever reason might as well not be any content at all. Specifically, the kind aimed at the top 5% of the servers’ playerbase. This gets worse when it piles up on top of itself in tiers to where I’m locked out completely after two expansions I paid for and can’t do anything with.

Though it is almost as disheartening as my “first MMO” and its expansions being largely built on pushing technical aspects and new areas which I was too unskilled (at PvP) to travel to for long. . . that corpse run was a tiger-sized kitty.

Facepunch.5710:

It would be really interesting to hear in detail how some of these characters fit into the lore. I know that some people, often RPers, will write up short stories to describe their toons’ histories, but not everyone is a talented writer.

I had a small notepad file I wrote up while I was slowly working through how “Tobias Trueflight” existed in Ascalon, and now today. That’s right, I took a crack at explaining the inexplicable.

I’d tell you more, but you haven’t proven you can be trusted yet.

Aedelric.1287:

Could see her death coming a mile off, the Kas/Jory story is so badly written.

Let’s be honest, most people pegged her as a sacrifice to the God of Drama the instant she showed up in the epilogue and identified herself as Marjory’s sister.

I wish I’d started the Death Pool then, I could have made a couple coppers.

Vayne.8563:

So you want back and they said here, have a bumper sticker for your car.

It said “I shopped at Evon’s Discount Goods and all I got was this lousy sticker and a piece of a claim ticket for something neat.”

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Well. It’s as poorly done as the original problems the writer is trying to fix.

There is no ingame evidence of a Kournan/Centaur alliance in GW.

That may actually be the point.

Devildoc.6721:

Zhaneel.9208:

Great point!

Perhaps this was post Guild Wars and GW Beyond? Maybe there were a small group of centaurs and humans that worked together in some remote part of the continent.

THE BOOK SAYS VARESH (meaning it was DURING the Nightfall crisis, not after), WOW, HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT THAT?

Once more, with feeling.

Having hit that point myself right now, meh, it’s really possible the writers did play Nightfall and remembered how things went down.

darkace.8925:

In one scenario the chefs are allowed only so much time to prepare each course, and then it’s served whether it’s ready or not.

Never had a dinner at a restaurant where the course was brought to me incomplete, or not ready . . . and from when I worked in it, the kitchen would not send out a plate which wasn’t done.

Given this is what was advertised . . . and what some players asked for in the CDIs, I just shrug and enjoy my meal however it is served. Or skip a helping if it isn’t to my liking. (Like if it involved bell peppers, or fish, or raw onions.)

Smith.1826:

And this is the part where the food analogy starts to fall apart in relation to their payment model

. . . why? I’m not paying anything for it. It really is like Thanksgiving dinner, without all the drama in the kitchen of trying to get everything done more or less within the same hour.

Shardelyss.4807:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

In a pinch, maybe you can get in touch with Jason Saldana or Geoff Ramsay. Either would be perfectly acceptable.

Just picturing their voices running amok in GW2 universe…. ha. Just make sure Burnie writes their lines for them though.

Or Miles . . . in a pinch.

Wanderer.3248:

You get one pair, and the skin for the others. You don’t get three pairs of actual gauntlets.

Not what I wanted, but that’s worth knowing the rest unlock. Didn’t want to assume so until I heard otherwise.

CharrGirl.7896:

I loved her Time Warp. Probably the most useful NPC in the game currently, and they actually revive you when you’re downed (for the most part).

Kiel was doing that a fair bit for a PUG when we were storming the Aetherblade Hideout. So it’s been happening for a while, that reviving mechanic.

Nilkemia.8507:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

darkace.8925:

CharrGirl.7896:

You obviously don’t read the dialogue because it ends up with us discussing how we should talk to the Pale Tree.

One of the last things said in this chapter is, and I quote Kasmeer here, “if only I still had my family’s wealth, I could take her away from all this. Keep her safe. Give her the things she deserves.”

Alas, only we can give her the things she deserves.

. . . better armor skins, and the chance to teach us how in the bleeding abyss she made that bone bridge.

Don’t forget those deluxe-sized bone minions. While we’re at it, we’d better question Kasmeer about how she drastically reduced the cooldown for her Time Warp.

She either had barely any cooldown for hers or none at all, she actually overlapped two of them during the fight on the walls!

Yes, WvW mesmers demand instruction immediately for these things. These clearly are more important than worrying about whether or not I can fit Mr Sparkles in a trebuchet.

BlueZone.4236:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

BlueZone.4236:

Serophous.9085:

BlueZone.4236:

Yeah, I like my content the same way I like my meals. Served on a plate rather than drip fed.

Except you would take said food on said plate, shove it all into your mouth at once, finish the meal in one big gulp, then complain two seconds later about there not being any more food.

No, I’d eat it like a normal person, leave satisfied, and hope for another pleasant experience the next time round.
No need to project your experience onto mine.

And no need to impugn my dining habits of eating a salad and then the entree, either . . .

Yeah…no clue what you’re talking about. If you want to partition your meal and call parts of them salad, entrees and desserts. A bit silly, but be my guest.

You’ve never had a multiple course dinner, have you? Ever eaten at an Olive Garden? Any restaurant where you sit down and you have things come to you as they’re ready, like appetizers, then entree, then dessert?

Really?

darkace.8925:

CharrGirl.7896:

You obviously don’t read the dialogue because it ends up with us discussing how we should talk to the Pale Tree.

One of the last things said in this chapter is, and I quote Kasmeer here, “if only I still had my family’s wealth, I could take her away from all this. Keep her safe. Give her the things she deserves.”

Alas, only we can give her the things she deserves.

. . . better armor skins, and the chance to teach us how in the bleeding abyss she made that bone bridge.

All right, so I’m combing through my alts and trying to compress old junk and get rid of stuff. I come across the ticket for these . . . okay, right, should get those now. Only there are three gauntlets, one for each armor type – except all three use the same model.

Is there any chance someone over in the offices can maybe, I don’t know, make it so having one unlocks the other two since they’re all the same model? It’s relatively minor but . . .

I assumed mine heard of it because of his connections to some people who have secrets to keep. Now, where did I leave those apples?

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Shiren.9532:

Kasmeer and Marjory talking about their relationship has nothing to do with anything but those two characters. It doesn’t advance my knowledge of Mordremoth, it doesn’t advance my knowledge of ley lines or Scarlet or what’s going on. It’s entirely about them, any player not interested in them and their relationship is going to find little value in this dialogue – it’s essential private/personal/intimate conversations the PC has no role in. That can feel intrusive when it slows down the pace of a story you are otherwise interested in.

Or doesn’t slow it down, but just sticks a little distracting “what the heck was that?” in it. Honestly, what it feels like is this is them trying to build something up so they can yank on it later. And like a certain dead prince, some people will go “oh no!” and others will go “die faster!”.

Lasica.5068:

This is thread #1 we always get after each living story update. Tomorrow we’ll get the one about there not enough burly male characters with stubbly masculine rugged good looks and eyepatches.

Don’t worry, the red post always goes in the thread praising Marjory and Kasmeer ensuring that thread gains the highest visibility, keeping it on the front page and colouring all the following feedback.

I’d rather those stay and the ones mentioned before disappear. Unless we can make them all look like Jack Black.

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

Tamias.7059:

webtoehobbit.4201:

This is unacceptable from a lore perspective, this is worse than anything Scarlet ever did. I hope they hotfix this and have us get the name via a book or note in Scarlets room, that would be bearable, but this? Just unacceptable.

Do you think you might be being a little hyperbolic there?

But isn’t that how complaints are /supposed/ to be on these forums?

Nah. There’s not enough blame on the Gem Store or certain developers.

Relevant link

Known issue, apparently some datacenters hosting GW2 and Wildstar are having issues staying connected.

Zhaneel.9208:

Great point!

Perhaps this was post Guild Wars and GW Beyond? Maybe there were a small group of centaurs and humans that worked together in some remote part of the continent.

Someone said it namechecked to Varesh Ossa.

Which, if so, says this was probably written when she was in power and making the centaurs work via enslavement. And probably before the battle at Gandara.

BrunoBRS.5178:

you’re expecting kormir to be useful, and therein lies your problem. can’t tell how many times i screamed at her when my party wiped against abaddon and she would run on top of my corpse and stay there.

Dunkoro was there too. We really could have pushed, killed her, and only potentially have died horribly. Especially since at that point great-grandpa Tobias had smacked around titans and Shiro’ken . . . he drops everything and runs because some freaky demons show up?

To quote a quirky sergeant: “We don’t run from the end of the world. We charge!”

BlueZone.4236:

Serophous.9085:

BlueZone.4236:

Yeah, I like my content the same way I like my meals. Served on a plate rather than drip fed.

Except you would take said food on said plate, shove it all into your mouth at once, finish the meal in one big gulp, then complain two seconds later about there not being any more food.

No, I’d eat it like a normal person, leave satisfied, and hope for another pleasant experience the next time round.
No need to project your experience onto mine.

And no need to impugn my dining habits of eating a salad and then the entree, either . . .

RedStar.4218:

We already have random NPCs dying early and often. If you bother to write a secondary NPC, it’s a waste to have it die like that.

Well not exactly a waste. It brings Marjory and Kas even closer, which I suspect is the goal…If this LS doesn’t end with one of their death, it’s going to end with a wedding proposal…

. . . wedding proposal you say? I’ll go find a proper band, and just the right music.

Don’t worry, I think I can solve a lot of problems about the comparison of LS and other fiction real easy.

sorrow.2364:

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

I think that the death of the character was too rushed to the point it did not gave time to the player to build a bond with her. I don’t even remember her name!

His name was Robert Paulson.

Agreed – this seems way too early to just get rid of someone like that unless a whole lot more are going to follow.

. . . can the next one be Taimi?

BrunoBRS.5178:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

You do realize there’s no exact time stamp on this quote, nor any mention of which “Ossa” it was?

. . . creating controversy over lore where none should exist.

actually it does call out Varesh Ossa by name on a previous page.

doesn’t change anything though, it’s Varesh being an enslaving dictator and trying to paint it as a pretty thing, like any dictator would.

Given she was also a madwoman who fancied herself the Prophet of Abaddon . . . it’s a good thing Kormir killed her in that plaza before she could summon up demons. Oh wait, that didn’t happen. Darnit.

Only if you can get Steve Blum to voice my human ranger like the ancestor who fled Ascalon.

I will also accept Crispin Freeman or Beau Billingslea.

In a pinch, maybe you can get in touch with Jason Saldana or Geoff Ramsay. Either would be perfectly acceptable.

Ronin.7381:

Well, give me an example of one that would or has.

Yeah, no, not going to go searching. But as there are movies which mock tragic things, I suspect there are adequate amounts of people who would do it then go “it’s just a joke, lighten up”.

Major distribution/production companies might not touch them, but they’re not the only ones who make games . . .

But if you want I’ll list a low-key one:

There’s Origin’s mocking of an incident with Richard Garriott. (One of the Ultima games lets you ‘parody’ a real life incident where a plaque fell on his head. Not fatally, naturally.)

Activision for example wasn’t advocating for a group of Russian terrorists to go to their nearest airport and murder their own brothers and sisters.

Mmm, EA has, however, many glorious “questionable” ad campaigns under their belt.

There’s no correlation between what happens in the game and how it reflects on that crash in 2012 due to user error who is also in a lot of crud for making the mistakes he did. It really is grasping at straws trying to make a big deal out of nothing. Arenanet doesn’t strike me as gloating about the real life incident.

ANet doesn’t strike me as the type to make light of events like this, either. It’s been a slow day for hating on ANet though, so we get topics like this.

Toasty.5014:

My only answer I can come up with is a mix of “The plot demands it” and “writing is hard, you guys”.

Especially easy to make that kind of mistake if what you’re writing is not what is actually going in the game. But this might require some explanation for how this is entirely plausible without meaning “the writers are incompetent”.

Let’s start with how writing probably happens in the first place, you sit down for work and pound out 1000 words of lore text. It’s probably one of many times you do this, so you have a backlog of what you’ve written and know what you wrote and what details you have written down before.

Now you hand it off to the team meant to put it into the game. They read it, like every other bit you send down, and work on distilling it down to something they can fit in the game through NPC dialogue or other text outputs. But unbeknownst to them, they made a crucial error in forgetting there is one detail (“The dragon’s name is Mordremoth”) which they have read a dozen times by now . . . but never actually made it into their text.

So for them, it’s a “known fact”. They come to a point where they need to reference the dragon and someone puts in the name, never checking over the previous released files (it could be they had it in before but it wasn’t released for whatever reason) to be 100% sure the name was used. After all, they “know” it and it’s been used in the stuff they get for who knows how many weeks, so it must be common knowledge . . .

Them we get . . . this. Which for some reason becomes something to point, laugh at, and go “hehe, they can’t write”.

. . . this, mind you, is why I always hand off my writing to people I know haven’t read it, before I go for a final draft and release. And why I always used to read my essays and term papers backwards and then out loud to catch typos.

All seriousness? It actually is hard to write. This is why so few people actually bother doing it (compared to the rest of the population).

Serophous.9085:

BlueZone.4236:

Yeah, I like my content the same way I like my meals. Served on a plate rather than drip fed.

Except you would take said food on said plate, shove it all into your mouth at once, finish the meal in one big gulp, then complain two seconds later about there not being any more food.

I’d think they’d actually choke first. Or have their stomach rupture from storing that much food which hadn’t been processed first by chewing.

I should be fair though. This is assuming this person isn’t a reptile or something similar which eats food whole.

Ronin.7381:

hell no video game company on the planet, would mock tragic events like this.

. . . I would not be so sure about that.

goldenwing.8473:

For those still enjoying what this game offers, I envy you.

I enjoy what this game offers, and I enjoy what Minecraft offers, and when I can’t do either of those there’s something much more entertaining for a while.

“Achievement Hunter”.

Ayrilana.1396:

It’s your PC and/or internet connection. I know you probably here that all the time but it’s true. This is especially so if you get 3-5 FPS on the lowest settings.

Don’t try playing it with Comcast as an ISP. (Tried it once when at a friend’s apartment. Never again.)

I’m just waiting for when something happens at Skrittsburg and I get to hear groaning from that end of the Rust Belt.

You do realize there’s no exact time stamp on this quote, nor any mention of which “Ossa” it was?

. . . creating controversy over lore where none should exist.

Yeah I don’t recall it either but just roll with it. I mean, I had the same experience when I was told there was six dragons and went “but . . . there’s no mention of a sixth anywhere . . .”

Pretend it always was known, and have another bottle of fine Elonian Wine. (Don’t give any to Zommoros until he gets less stingy with the precursors.)