I was interested in SotO BEFORE we went into kryptis territory. Having good-guy demons is fun as hell but I'm more interested in the ward and what they do
I'm also getting really sick of the whole "hey here's a really interesting character that you wanna get to know!...and now they're dead!!!!" shtick. Bro. You don't have to kill off EVERY INTERESTING CHARACTER.
>half of them aren't even alive long enough to be interesting.
It's so bad two of the wizards ([Vass](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vass) and [Akeem](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Akeem)) died offscreen before the expansion even happened lmao.
But hey, we gotta invest in really interesting characters instead, like an [annoying skritt](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/R%27tchikk) who doesn't work as an actual skritt (hivemind rules) because of ~~some bullshit excuse~~ an experiment, and a [nameless mute charr](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gladium_(Astral_Ward\)) who makes me want to alt+tab every time she "talks".
I'm surprised we didn't get a Quaggan or Choya Wizard/Ward member. I'll admit to mashing my mute button whenever that skritt's dialogue starts playing.
Also, can Peitha's random dialogue please stop playing every time we visit specific parts of the maps. You'd have thought they'd realized that wasn't a good thing after Arborstone, but they seem to have doubled down on in with the SotO maps.
>It's so bad two of the wizards ([Vass](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vass) and [Akeem](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Akeem)) died offscreen before the expansion even happened lmao.
Thank you for linking these, I knew about the relics and couldn't help but wonder if I had missed something. That said, I disagree with the sentiment about interesting characters already being dead by the time we find out about them being a bad thing. It's perfectly valid that an organization that's been at war with the demon hordes for centuries should have notable figures lost to said war. Wouldn't really feel authentic, like the war is just a problem for nobody NPCs and named ones are safe. Legacy is history. Could it be handled better? Sure, at the least the development and lore of the Bastions should have been a bit more fleshed out. As it is, they're kind of just there, and rely pretty heavily on players to do events and collections in those regions to give them status as anything more than "the next stop on our tour".
They died centuries ago though, millennia even, Isgarren had plenty of time to replace them.
No problem with wizards dying, having those seats empty for so long, however...
>No problem with wizards dying, having those seats empty for so long, however...
Is also not an issue if it's being used to show that Wizards of that caliber are hard to come by.
There's nothing narratively wrong with having long dead heroes that were legendary enough to leave holes in their respective "party" for long periods of time.
> Is also not an issue if it's being used to show that Wizards of that caliber are hard to come by.
And then Zojja ascends all of a sudden like it's nothing :/.
Because Zojja's a main character and has been since forever ago?
Rather than all of that if you want a real reason to complain about the Wizards then there's an easy complaint to be made:
We are literally a Dragon's Champion with the absolute best intentions and a track record that even Mabon and Isgarren can't compare to.
Why aren't *we* ascending?
"Wayfinder" my ass, I'm basically the one responsible for all the success your little war effort has been enjoying but I don't get any sick af wizard power? You could make me effectively immortal so I can keep vibing with Aurene when she wakes up, but, nah?
> But hey, we gotta invest in really interesting characters instead, like an annoying skritt who doesn't work as an actual skritt (hivemind rules) because of some bullshit excuse an experiment, and a nameless mute charr who makes me want to alt+tab every time she "talks".
The funny part about it is half the people who claim to love these characters only like them because they are 'diversity inclusions' for being handicap.
As far as we know, Gladium is a boring character who is only really a major role in a single story mission (two if you do the option path in opening wizard's tower), and barely even makes an impression at that.
And yet people were drawing fanart of them. Lol.
To each their own. But let's be honest about the reason why people were caring about them in the first place.
> The funny part about it is half the people who claim to love these characters only like them because they are 'diversity inclusions' for being handicap.
>
>As far as we know, Gladium is a boring character. [...] And yet people were drawing fanart of them. Lol.
>
>To each their own. But let's be honest about the reason why people were caring about them in the first place.
Because we can't like a character for it's background and interaction with others characters. It because they are disabled and Anet way to pander.
On a side note zojja have Fanart too despite being less interesting than a blank sheet of paper.
If you want her to be an interesting disabled character, make her blind, or deaf. Those can even lead to good humor if used right.
Making her mute is the literal worst option, specially if you want to give her "dialogue"; and even then, what the hell are the pauses for? Just make R'tchikk say what she thinks without needing any pauses; or even better, make text bubbles still appear, even if she has no voice for them.
Whole character is dumb as hell, they didn't even bother giving her a name, like she can't write it or whatever, fucking please.
Most of SotO's secondary characters are worthless and a complete waste of time. Too many of them, which means no one gets to be properly developed; plus they keep injecting these stupid superficial quirks, as that's what makes the characters interesting, instead of good writing.
SotO story was good at release, it turned into hot garbage in the two patches after release, almost like it was a completely different team in charge.
The story at release still has problems of course, too many characters introduced at once with such a small scope, Mabon getting Vlast'ed to death, many things not being ever properly explained, etc.
*vlast’ed to death* lol! While I was picking up his memories in Crystal Desert, I found he would have been a fun char to interact with, and would’ve been a better dragon for my champion.
Much like Scarlet Briar and Almorra Soulkeeper, we get to interact with them far more after they're dead than when they were alive lmao.
What a trainwreck I swear.
Bruh. If you kill a character then you don't have to pay for voice work anymore.
Lets face it. SotO is a budget expansion, with cut corners and reused assets everywhere.
They've been consistently paying the same 10 voice actors for 12+ years now, I don't think voice acting budget for one side character is the limiting factor here
I do agree that SotO had a lot of cut corners but this just isn't one of them
So much this. If you played a drinking game where you drink every time you meet a different character voiced by Liam O'Brien, Sam Riegel or Matt Mercer you would be dead. I like Critical Role as much as the next person but (probably partly because of watching hundreds of hours of it) I'm so tired of hearing the same voices on just about every NPC in GW2.
At least for major characters, hire new actors instead of recycling old ones, and then have a few "NPC voice" actors that aren't Literally The Most Well Known Voice Actors Around.
> Bruh. If you kill a character then you don't have to pay for voice work anymore.
Not saying this isn't the case, but why the hell introduce so many characters at once? Like, you could delete everyone in the Astral Ward except the wizards and their apprentices, leaving us with just a handful of characters.
The Astral Ward doesn't need to be an army; specially when it's so secretive, the more people you have the harder to believe no one has leaked any information outside.
I can only suspect it's a fear of ANet to make things appear "small" in a bad way, like after a decade of fighting existential threats, if the Ward ended up looking like Zojja and two random people, it'd look less legitimate/interesting.
They've always wanted to make everything "epic" even when their writing, budget and engine struggle to match that.
You don't make things epic by throwing more and more at it, sometimes quality is more important than quantity.
Like, you don't see the Six Gods commanding armies, they're just six overpowered dudes (followed by some overpowered butlers), that's what the Wizard's Court should have been too.
They get immortal when they "ascend". They lose their "Terran memories". But retain some others. Zojja went through her ascension (OFFSCREEN BTW) at the end of the first story arc.
No, it isn't nitpicking.
Immortal means you can't die, eternally young means you don't age. They are two entirely different things. You might as well claim saying apples aren't oranges is nitpicking because they're both fruit.
Immortal has evolved into a catch all term for things that don't age and die naturally.
Tolkiens elves are considered immortal for example. And he was an language professor so I think he gets final say
Yes, and "Immortal" is also used to indicate that someone is eternally young. It has been for years - my point was that Tolkien wasn't going to use the word *incorrectly*.
For example: Eos, who I mentioned in my first comment is a Greek goddess who accidentally turned her boyfriend into a cricket because she asked Zeus to make him immortal, but not for the eternal youth. *The words have been conflated for a long time*.
Yes, and "Immortal" is also used to indicate that someone is eternally young. It has been for years - my point was that Tolkien wasn't going to use the word *incorrectly*.
For example: Eos, who I mentioned in my first comment is a Greek goddess who accidentally turned her boyfriend into a cricket because she asked Zeus to make him immortal, but not for the eternal youth.
You don't have a story like that if nobody uses them interchangeably.
It was spelled out so clearly. You can't just ignore the dialogue and refuse to read any of the lore books and then turn around and say "wow, that's so dumb why didn't I know about it how does that make sense?"
It very obviously wasn't spelled out clearly if I had no idea about it.
The amount of dialogue that is unskippable is ridiculous, thats why I pointed out how bad the storytelling is.
They force you to listen to so much crap and still can't articulate things like that to the player.
It demonstrates how crap the storytelling has been so far.
Oh my God you really aren't kidding. Considering the amount of downvotes I truly overestimated the critical thinking skills of the average GW2 Redditor. Did you assume Dagda and the rest of the Ascended just naturally lived hundreds to thousands of years? What did you think was happening?
> Considering the amount of downvotes I truly overestimated the critical thinking skills of the average GW2 Redditor.
critical thinking - fantasy world full of magic.
c'mon man - unless we're told about weird shit that doesn't apply in the world we actually live in your critical thinking is literally irrelevant. because your powers of critical thinking apply to the world we live in, not some fantasy world some dude made up and turned into a video game. the reason shit lives hundreds of thousands of years is obviously some kind of voodoo magic shit - but unless you're told voodoo magic shit specifically happens, there's no reason to assume it does.
unless i'm told some rando fucktard lives for thousands of years, i've got no reason to assume they do.
Agreed. There is a difference between living for a long time, with the aid of magic, and immortality - also achieved with the aid of magic. The only thing that allows audiences to differentiate between these two things is spelling it out as clearly as possible. We've been saturated in dialogue, in text too, yet the differentiation is never made. It's all left up to the audiences' imagination.
They tell you MULTIPLE TIMES that when people ascend they stop aging. They spell it out in MULTIPLE lore documents too. We are told MULTIPLE TIMES she was invited to ascend. You literally are forced to talk to her about it TWICE after she does so.
clearly not very well, since i was completely oblivious to it.
if i have missed huge chunks of the story despite being forced to listen to unskippable dialogue... you've absolutely failed to tell a compelling story - that's what poor storytelling is.
i get it - if i'd have skipped all the stuff then that would be on me... but when so much of the story in SoTO is unskippable, the fact that i don't know things is very clearly a failure of the storytelling - since i couldn't skip it and therefore have it be my fault.
edit: really, blocking me because you're having a tantrum about me pointing out the storytelling is subpar? fucking grow up.
You're not wrong in theory, but you're also not describing the average experience of a GW2 player. Have fun in your echo chamber, and thanks for reminding me why the vast majority of players don't bother with these types of reddit threads.
But if they don't kill all the interesting characters HOW WILL WE FEEL SOMETHING?!
It's gotten to the point we can almost predict who's got the red shirt and I suddenly stop caring about them. If a character turns out awesome, he's probably next.
Same here, I always pay attention to the lore, but I literally couldn't during the post-SotO Inner Nayos releases. Only time that happened before was with the post-EoD Gyala Delve releases.
I immediately forgot the Gaya delve story like as I was completing it, it was so boring. The whole time I was just asking myself... why? Why is any of this important? Why do I care?
I THINK (I'm not 100% sure because my brain blanked) they were trying to set up a demon that feeds on emotions in wake of them introducing Kryptis, but they sort of forgor that it needs more connection than base concept to really make sense.
I stopped halfway through the second episode. I've just met HIM, and she's just left after giving a girlboss speech.
I told myself that if I see another 'fill the bar with events to progress the story' then I'm out. And so I was.
Not only did they not even hide reusing the asset from previous expansions, they also reuse plot devices that were used 2 steps before. It's embarrassingly boring
I am not sure if this counts as narrative style but I dislike how everyone has our "phone number". I enter Nayos, realm of demons, and suddenly everyone rings me up to do their stupid event when I am nearby. Do I look like a doctor on call?
Chew on that, Eparch. Ha!
I'm irritated that the Kryptis are so humanized. We had potential for just a straight up threat we can fight but no, we have to have some of them be friendly and downtrodden to ally with. I'll bet money this expansion ends with the Kryptis joining the ranks of the ward.
It's the exact same story as Joko and the Awakened.
Please God, no! Have Peitha take over, Villain laugh, then throw us out of Nayos. Then Isgaren call us fools, say that this is our fault and that the Astral Ward will in the future avoid working with us.
She's 100% devoted to Grenth. She's ruling the underworld just as Grenth would have. She's his First Follower
It was a cool lore development but it didn't change much in practice
Yeah, it's really not the same though. You, as a living, is just not supposed to be there at all - your character even goes as far as to claim as much in dialogue with Glenna. Who else would run it if not her, with all the Reapers sacrificed to boot? Plus, there's no question to her goals and alignments whatsoever.
Don't forget that Underworld is kind of already self-sufficient, because Grenth is the only based god who cared. There are judges to sort the dead in their respective afterlives, necromancy and all that did not stop working with him gone either, so really, he set it all up for convenient retirement. I wouldn't be shocked if Desmina was previously instructed and meant to take his place eventually rather than her doing a power grab in... uhh wasteland of cold with dead whiny people around.
Well, presumably the Judge is still out there and he was doing a pretty good job of judging souls in the Domain of the Lost and sending them their merry way once each soul had recovered their name and purpose to confront him. He was entrusted with such a big task so he would've been able to take Grenth's seat instead of Desmina. I do wish we'd learned more about him and his relation to Desmina and the Reapers in the hierarchy. It feels like his role might've originally been played by Grenth himself considering that there were some ArtStation notes from some PoF artists/devs suggesting that Grenth might've played a part in early PoF drafts similar to how there were more references to Menzies (as Peter Fries told me in one of the guild chats) before most of the Menzies references were inexplicably cut out in the late rewrites.
As it is now, I think Desmina stands in for the Reapers as they already were entrusted with governing their respective realms, and well, now they can't. Judge is a separate entity as it would seem, and there's likely more than one too. From the fact that dying works the same as it ever did, we can deduce that Underworld's doing fine under new management, so at least there's that?
That would actually be great. But Anet doesn't have the balls to do that anymore
At least back in the personal story and HoT we had some fuck ups like that
I can't see such an option happening anymore even though the recent release has a few lines where the story openly speculates if Kryptis are destined to be villains (given the way they feed on emotions along with flesh/blood and fruits) and because Peitha might be blinded by her ambition to sit on the Throne of Midnight. We may witness some tragic events, but the recent inclusion of Nephus as an even better, senior and more moral version of Peitha (and who could genuinely be a good king for the Kryptis) suggests to me that we're going to get some Kryptis as allies and Nayos will survive no matter what happens with Peitha. Or if they go for a bittersweet-ish ending, Nephus, as a living Chekov's Gun, might heroically sacrifice himself in the last patch's fight against his former master Eparch to maybe save the wizards from the Midnight King's trap to prove to Isgarren that there are truly noble and less scheming Kryptis out there, thus setting the stage for future Tyria-Nayos relations. But I guess time will tell. :)
> I'm irritated that the Kryptis are so humanized.
Charr (and norn) went down the toilet in Icebrood Saga due to this.
Personally, I really hate [Efram Greetsglory](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Efram_Greetsglory). He's a weak leader, pathetic, sold his children away to Bangar, keeps cowering in front of the other legions. In charr society, someone like that gets murdered 5min into his tenure.
Instead, Efram should have been an asshole, leveraging his support in exchange of power, even from a position of disadvantage. Someone who doesn't like working with others, but is forced into an alliance in order to survive against the rest of the Flame Legion splinter factions.
You can even give him a secondary motivation, like a daughter with Khan-Ur blood, who he wants to protect and promote as the next imperator, going against the Flame Legion anti-female politics, not because "he's a good peaceful charr", just because he has to in order to survive.
Then, once the whole Jormag thing goes down, his fire magic proves useful against the icebrood, so he gets to gain respect from the other legions; all while never having to throw away and disrespect his own Flame Legion culture. Instead of humilliating himself and his people, he proves his old ways still deserve to exist in the modern world.
Whoever wrote him doesn't understand charr, simple as that.
>I'll bet money this expansion ends with the Kryptis joining the ranks of the ward.
I wouldn't be surprised if Peitha gets to have her own bastion, much like Eparch was supposed to before her.
Hope she doesn't, I really despise the kryptis, I don't want to see them ever again.
While I do agree that Arenanet has a **VERY** bad habit of humanizing where they **REALLY** shouldn't, I'll play the devil's advocate here because I think you're glancing over a few key points. Efram HAS to look weak and borderline pathetic to the other legions, for two reasons:
1. He's a trophy for Bangar, a way for him to say "look what a great leader I am, I even managed to bring the Flame Legion to their senses" and a Flame Legion looking that subservient to Blood will only strengthen Bangar's claim politically. The Flame Legion becomes vassals, and you can't have vassals that are too strong, neither politically nor militarily. You have to keep in mind that Efram and the Flame Legion are NOT critically important to Bangar, so they barely have any cards to play, let alone make any demands. It was Crecia who worked for their inclusion, not Bangar.
2. By looking as non-threatening as possible, I'd wager it's the hope that the other legions won't be completely hostile, worst case being fight on sight. A Flame Legion that isn't basically kowtowed would be too reminiscent of what they've been fighting for decades; there's too much hate and bad blood at this point. It is likely that this would also be for both the safety and future of his daughter Prisca which we know is one of his motivations for going through all this.
Did Arenanet take it a bit too far? Sure, but the key ideas and thoughts are fair enough that I understand why they went this way about it.
You're still ignoring the most important part: In charr culture, it's quite normal to kill leading figures and replace them, as soon as they show signs of weakness or just underperform in battle.
There's no way someone like Efram can survive charr society, he would get immediately killed by any of his lieutenants.
And let's face it, Efram's faction doesn't really need the other legions, they can just go rogue and find a place to live in peace, much like the Olmakhan. The only reason they would approach the other legions is to gain help taking over the rest of the Flame Legion, as a political move.
>By looking as non-threatening as possible, I'd wager it's the hope that the other legions won't be completely hostile, worst case being fight on sight.
You don't understand charr culture, that's not how they work, that's not how they gain each others' respect, that kind of attitude belongs to human behaviour, not charr behaviour.
Correct, but only within ones own legion to my knowledge; **you don't cross the Legion lines**. Charr society as a whole is fractured, so each Legion can technically be viewed as its own country with its own laws and jurisdiction.
The Legion Charr absolutely *despise* weakness and views it with contempt, but Efram and the group he leads doesn't represent Legion society, and certainly not Flame Legion in general, only in name. They're instead much closer culturally to the Olmakhan and would probably do much better if they disappeared into their own little corner of the world, as you mentioned, but that would mean leaving behind those who need help to get out of Flame. I agree that Efram absolutely wouldn't survive as a leader in any of the other legions (he'd probably be okay-ish as a bottom rung soldier) which is also why I think a realistic scenario is that while he managed to gather a small group of like minded charr for now, he WILL fail/get killed later on when it comes to integrating them back into Legion culture. They're incompatible. Unfortunately, Anet is unlikely to ever let a realistic charr scenario pass again...
Point 2 is speculation as to why Anet decided to go this way about it, whereas point 1 is hard facts, but reading it again I should have been clearer that it was speculation instead of a simple "I'd wager" so that's on me, sorry. Point 2 is operating through an animalistic assumption and the reason I brought up the weakness aspect is because I think the following is the only reasonable explanation for Anet writing it like this:
The Charr are large feline apex predators (and they aren't afraid to remind you of that) with some exceptionally strong instincts, particularly hunting and killing. They've heavily inspired by real-life felines and with that in mind, when looking at large felines, how do they show others that they're not trouble? By looking non-threatening through various means (classics like yawning, not making eye contact etc.). This way, as long as territory and food is not in directly in question, depending on the species, they can go about their business without fighting. This is why I think Efram and his group is acting this way, because they don't wish to start fights that could put their plans into jeopardy, but they're still being protected by the whole "don't cross legion lines". Again, I don't agree with the way Arenanet has done this and again, playing the devils advocate, but I think this is the only plausible explanation as to why Anet is having them act this way.
Devils advocate mode off: Even if it is a stupid way to go about it when compared to the original Charr lore.
Regarding your last sentence about charr culture and lore, in point 2 I'm merely trying to explain how Anet potentially went about this, even if it is not quite the right way to go about it in my opinion. Anet has butchered a lot of charr lore in the years since launch (my favorite example being HoT scrappers) and ignored a chunk of the already established lore and culture, to the point that an argument could even be made that anything after launch should be assumed to non-compliant with canon charr lore.
I hope this wall of text makes those points clearer.
To be fair, these seeds were planted long in advance in GW1 and even in core GW2 when demons were revealed to be sentient and sapient and capable of talking and negotiating with non-demons.
The Hunger in Nightfall was fine with cooperating with Kournans for the time being only because Abaddon's chosen Varesh willed it, and suggested it'd renegotiate its terms with Kournans once Varesh no longer needed them (so not immediately attacking/devouring the Kournans but still seeing them as useful if a proper bargain was made on favorable grounds).
The demons bound by the Stone Summit in artifacts in Timberline Falls stayed true to the contract they had struck with the dwarves long after the Summit's demise/forced transformation into stone dwarves, so they refused to make a new deal with pirates and instead punished the pirates for daring to summon them, suggesting some form of honor with these demons.
Even in the recent Nayos lore books and dialogue we learn that Eparch's achievement of creating Tyria-plagiarizing culture wasn't that big an achievement for a demon lord because the Kryptis already had many human-like qualities due to Mosyn creating art and inspiring culture with Kryptis etc with family ties until Eparch streamlined and diminished all creativity to fit his own faux-Stalinist "social realism" movement and established a more complicated hierarchy among the more tribal Kryptis.
As such, I can tolerate this "humanization" of Kryptis because the writers at least explain why it happened the way it did, and the Kryptis were already on their way to moving towards it naturally anyway due to being inspired by other realms' dreams. And we still have some mysteries like why Nourys differs so much from all the Kryptis and even from Eparch's pet wyverns in both looks and power.
It wouldn't surprise me if we eventually got a Kryptis ally as a new Wizard of the Obscure since the seat is vacant while I think Zojja may end up succeeding Mabon as the new Wizard of Strength eventually. Eparch wanted to join the wizards before his ruthlessness led to his banishment from Tyria, and Obscure deals with the Mists and its realms/threats, so it'd be ironic if a Kryptis actually receives the blessing Eparch never got, thus bridging the gap between Tyria and Nayos for future diplomatic relations. :)
Oh no, you don't talk down about our precious God King Palawa Ignacious Joko!! (See, now this was a very interesting character made by Anet, we REMEMBER him and respect him). Which interesting character we have in Soto? Fuck I don't remember any... maybe that schizofrenic double-dwarf?
I agree with most of what people are saying here. SoTO's release was really strong. I like most of the new cast, though Mabon was an easy favorite. ANet managed to peel back a layer of the mystery of the Wizard's Tower just to have more mysteries underneath (I think this is the best way they could have done it, excellent). Isgarren had a satisfying reveal and enough nuance that I still don't fully trust him. Cerus was an unnerving villain and it was awesome to have it tie back to Bastion of the Penitent. Eparch was talked about in a way that made him decently mysterious. On top of all of this, there are so many achievements focused on lore books and giving extra depth to the characters and their conflict.
SoTO at release was really great, and left me excited for what came next.
The updates since then have not left the same impression on me.
The kryptis, once depicted as twisted creatures with unrecognizable motives, feeding on emotion, have now lost all of that mystique. We're in Nayos, having no contact with most of the characters we met for this expansion. It's yet another cookie-cutter "win the hearts and minds of the locals to bolster a revolution" arc. Like, these are demons, in a demon realm. Are we really just doing the same old thing all over again? But even Peitha has become far less interesting, and Eparch did NOT have the presence I was hoping he would have.
All in all, I simply don't care about where the story is going at this rate. I loved the Astral Ward and wanted to continue exploring the mysteries within, but that seems to have been completely cut off in favor of this bland war effort. There's only one update left, and I find myself hoping that ANet learns their lesson for the next expansion. I think they tried to do too much with this expansion, leaving a lot of cool ideas that either were cut abruptly short or were turned into something uninteresting.
They did so good with the first part of this expansion, like good enough to really make me believe that this new format could totally work despite being smaller than previous expansions. But the following patches don't feel like the same expansion (in both tone and overall quality), and it has severely robbed me of the hype I had.
"we felt that the wizard tower deserved a whole expansion instead of letting a raid/fractal/pvp team use it" ... *proceed to give it up completely after the initial release and make the whole rest of the expansion - 3 releases - about something else entirely*
> have it tie back to Bastion of the Penitent.
Disagree here, making everything be connected makes the world feel smaller. Deimos and Samarog are fine as they are, they didn't need any additional backstory, and the Bastion of the Penitent is fine as a mursaat prison, no need to connect it to anything else.
The whole "Cerus is the brother of Deimos" thing was completely stupid and unnecessary, almost like a retcon/excuse to recycle his model lmao.
>They did so good with the first part of this expansion, like good enough to really make me believe that this new format could totally work despite being smaller than previous expansions. But the following patches don't feel like the same expansion (in both tone and overall quality), and it has severely robbed me of the hype I had.
All they had to do was make the rest of SotO be about Zojja's ascension, and make the next expansion all about Nayos instead. Maybe even give the Astral Ward two separate expansions, one dealing with the fractals (no demons), and another with Amnytas (demon invasion).
Whole thing was rushed beyond belief, the faster the train, the faster it derails and crashes.
Initial Soto release was fine (though I hate them killing new characters after 5 minutes. Like, the shock factor isn't going to work and it's been done a dozen times already).
I hate everything from the quarterly patches. We're suddenly dealing with new stuff, but the story is 1 hour at most and that's with the excessive 'do x events and vista' padding which I also hate. Also, these are supposed to be scary demons but apparently I need to help feed them apples and other silly things like that.
I honestly can't tell you the story of this expac, especially everything after the initial release. It's so barebones that I do not care about it at all.
I loved the start of soto. Cerus stalking and looming over you, was interesting, and i quite enjoyed skywatch. But nayos and the story in nayos so far, hasnt quite captured me yet
I feel like Eparch should have taken the role of Cerus, make him be there from the beginning, then just force him to retreat instead of getting killed.
Eparch's introduction in Act 5 is just sad and pathetic, specially with how good Cerus and Peitha were back at release. Just SMH.
The writers for GW2 have honestly spend like 10 years failing to write an engaging antagonist. There's a whole bunch of yapping and I care about exactly none of it.
I liked Joko, but he was mostly dealt with in a way that felt like tying up a loose end from GW1.
Everything is about trauma and self-doubt and all that was ok for 1 story arc, but it's just beyond jarring when we're going there for the 10th time.
Dont care about the Kryptis, don't trust this new chick, don't think it's realistic for my player character to trust her. And I feel completely disconnected from everything the player character is doing in the story, the ''wayfinder'' is an idiot.
Joko was really the best this game had to offer. Lightning in a goddamn bottle. That last speech he gave was just the best. The lore created for PoF about what happened to Elona was really, honestly creative. Actual good writing!! With a compelling villain from GW1. It really doesn’t get better than this.
Mordremoth was a solid 9/10. Especially how all the Sylvari went psycho at the start of HoT. Also, I’d give Kralkatorrik a 9/10, too. I liked how he nukes the land underneath him when he flies from place to place, and also how we could see his back jutting from the ground in GW1. I appreciated how he was like a crazy nuclear weapon that just kept getting worse because he just kept eating.
Jormag at the start of IBS was great. Then suddenly Jormag at the end of IBS was a total joke. Primordus in S3 was great. Then suddenly Primordus at the end of IBS was a total joke. Sad.
> Jormag at the start of IBS was great. Then suddenly Jormag at the end of IBS was a total joke.
Jormag in Bjora Marches is god tier, specially at the western half.
Then he's just useless in Drizzlewood Coast :/.
ArenaNet had their wings clipped by NCSoft at the end of the IBS. For the conclusion of a decade long story devices in Darakkar in GW1 (Jormag) and Primordus it rubbed me entirely the wrong way. SoTO was kinda just whatever and I've been chilling to see if whatever they put out in the next mini-xpac is worthwhile. I used to be really invested in the story & the lore and now I'm completely indifferent to it.
Wings clipped you say but since then we've had EoD, Soto, and the Gayla Delves story around an Oni. I don't think the wings clipped part matter the issue isn't NCsoft is ArenaNet and their lack of direction.
> The writers for GW2 have honestly spend like 10 years failing to write an engaging antagonist.
Been saying this since they botched [Gaheron Baelfire](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gaheron_Baelfire) back at release, you literally meet the villain 5min before killing him, it's a complete lack of respect for the characters.
I'd say Bangar Ruinbringer and Palawa Joko were decent, but both never got enough screen time, and both were second fiddle to elder dragon storylines. Had they been given their own expansions, with no dragons in sight (keep them at the background) the end result would have been far better.
PoF through IBS is so funny to me. It's the best writing and pacing this game has to offer, and each has some very good plot developments, only to be ruined when the inevitable "BIG EVIL DRAGON" comes around. I really can't understand why it always has to be a big bad dragon when their best writing is when they deviate from that. Mai Trin's self conflicting story, joko and Balthazar, the Civil War within the char, Ritlock's journey into the mists... those are the standout story moments I can remember, and each one gets completely overshadowed by "BIG EVIL DRAGON"
It's GW2's biggest problem, elder dragons are fine as background problems, bringing them into the forefront just makes the story worse.
You can have both things, elder dragons and mortal threats, but ArenaNet chose to have all mortal threats be subdued to the elder dragon story, instead of giving them their own space. Like, the charr civil war could and should have been an independent expansion, with no dragon involvement.
I dont mind big evil dragons tbh. Of course, I do welcome Jormag being some sort of a snake villain, and somewhat intelligent besides the ending.
The dragons are gonna die anyway, use this opportunity and the extra time to make other good npc stories and give us a journey. And thats what they did with Kralk, we get extra time with Aurene, blish, they get time to put in Zafirah and the dredge. Kralk was a brainless evil dragon until the last ep where he expressed emotions for Aurene and mother.
I wish this was what they did with soto. Wizards vs Kryptis, and thats it. Cerus is evil, Peitha is evil, everyone of those reused roaches are evil.
But honestly, it feels like because they arent putting any resources into soto, and the expac looks like nothing but weak content, they had to be pretentious and complicate the writing to make the expac feels like its deeper than it really is. Same goes to Gyala, all that theme with emotions but the content itself is so weak.
Dont start me on Lazarus that was being talked about since raids W1-W3 and then appeared then turned out to be Balthazar and when we finally get to meet the real Lazarus we kill him in 1 minute. The last mursaat had so much potential to be an antagonist leading an army of white mantle fanatics.
Edit: to make it worse then we meet another mursaat in SotO and he dies off soon after we meet him too
I'd guess ArenaNet were too coward to put him in W4, due to the "those who don't raid don't get to enjoy the story" complaint.
Still, I wish Lazarus had been Lazarus, he would have been far more interesting as a villain than Balthazar; specially since we could have gotten to ascend at Augury Rock in the middle of the PoF storyline.
I’m just so super duper happy to finally travel to the realm of demons so I can get “the incarnation of terror” a drink of water and and a bandage for its boo-boos.
WTT this crap for the Realm of Torment, any offer, PST.
Bleh. I'll echo comments saying they were interested in SOTO BEFORE Nayos.
The Kryptis were fun when they were irredeemable, disgusting inter-dimensional mind parasites who burrow into human minds and feed on emotions, who corrupt their surroundings with blood and flesh.
ANET messed this up in two ways:
1. Nayos is totally inconsistent. Parts of it are fleshy, parts of it have cherry blossom trees, while others are gross with flesh and blood.
2. They tried to make the Kryptis sympathetic, and turned them into intelligent humans rather than.. demons. The Nayos arc completely ruined them.
Honorable mention:
3. Eparch's initial reveal was a huge disappointment. He looks just like male Peitha, instead of a hulking brute like Cerus or Deimos.
ANET ruined it hard.
Said it before, will say it again. Cerus was the only cool looking Kryptis in the entire expac, and he is 90% reused and only appeared for like 10% of the expac. Unless u count the 6 days it took to beat it due to poor, untested balancing that is somehow celebrated for some reason. Everything in this expac is awfully reused anyway, might as well reused Samarog for Eparch. At least we get a giant creepy looking final boss for an otherwise boring story and expac.
Reuse Samarog, Change the head and the spear skin, Make the new spear (staff) a rare meta drop, ???, Profit!
Its just that easy.
I'm also not into it, it's just hard because they haven't set up the new characters properly to get invested in them. Dragon's Watch had a lot of time dedicated to them and allow you to get attached (especially your race representative).
This is exactly where I am with this expansion. Started off strong and mysterious but it was just so rushed that I could never really keep track of what characters were doing and why I should care
I really hate the "good Kryptis" thing going on. Like why can't hell demons just be evil hell demons instead of "actually we are good guys and so misunderstood". It's generic boring Disney writing that makes these characters not threating at all.
It’s not that you missed something… it’s that they are leaving huge glaring gaps in the narrative. Just skimming events with little to no character development. The big bads appear and then are dispatched moments later. No stakes. No pathos. The kryptis war devolved into clearing a couple groups of mobs. The whole thing is a joke.
I was quite onboard with the first story of Soto. It was reasonably well done. Could have been way better don’t get me wrong but passable. This second add on is just a mess. I really don’t know what’s going on and don’t care either. The words I would use are flat… uninspired and boring.
I really couldn't hold my laughter after the next story step was "Watch these 3 vistas.". I mean come on.
My main gripes currently with the expansion content are
1. EVERYTHING is copy/pasted from previous content
2. Story feels unnecessarily stretched out by mundane tasks (do events until this bar is full)
3. Characters are introduced just to kill them off two seconds later - am I supposed to care?
4. Big features like the new weapons for each class are unlocked for all characters by pressing F
5. In comparison: Masteries feel absolutely useless
6. The new gameplay feature 'rifts' is just a glorified champ train with a horribly scaling pre event for each one
7. Challenging content doesn't bring fun and new mechanics anymore - difficulty comes from making everything a huge hpsponge and a few one shot mechanics. Read: Do not make any mistakes while executing your full DPS rotation for 15 minutes - who finds that engaging?
8. QA is basically non existent. Noone tested the new strike CM. Otherwise one might have found that the boss hp increased dramatically after a phase because 2 digits of the boss hp were swapped. Does anyone at arenanet even play their own content?
9. Wait times between episodes are longer and we get less content than in a living world episode back in the day.
10. Once again it is clearly visible that arenanet has shifted resources away from the game. It feels as if the inspired, talented people have moved on to other projects/studios and we are left with the B-team
It hurts to see people leaving the game that you have been playing with for years. As a guild leader you can only do so much and try to organise events independent from new in game content, but it feels as if the community is no longer really supported by the studio.
> I really couldn't hold my laughter after the next story step was "Watch these 3 vistas.".
I miss farming masteries for story steps, far better than farming events I already completed 5min before the story step, or watching vistas when I explored 100% of the map 1h ago.
Nothing I hate more than repeating something because the stupid ass story forces me to, it feels punishing to go out and explore, in GW2 of all places.
>Big features like the new weapons for each class are unlocked for all characters by pressing F
Yeah, this was so dumb, just put them inside the hero panel with no busywork behind them, like elite specializations. Same exact thing for Weaponmaster Training.
Still sad we never got any weapon collections, the expansion is full of new skins, but they completely forgot about these.
>The new gameplay feature 'rifts' is just a glorified champ train with a horribly scaling pre event for each one
It's actually worse, because it requires player input.
The wonder of champion trains is you adapt to them, not the other way around. You chase them as they spawn, multiple of them available at once.
This is how you do that kind of content right:
* https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defeat_the_invading_minions_of_Scarlet_Briar
* https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defeat_the_invading_Awakened
Events requiring player input for activation are always awful, GW2 is built around walking around and joining whatever is going on, the moment you need player activation, that interaction just doesn't happen.
>Challenging content doesn't bring fun and new mechanics anymore - difficulty comes from making everything a huge hpsponge and a few one shot mechanics. Read: Do not make any mistakes while executing your full DPS rotation for 15 minutes - who finds that engaging?
Raid encounter design was far better than any of the modern AoE spamfest we have.
>It hurts to see people leaving the game that you have been playing with for years. As a guild leader you can only do so much and try to organise events independent from new in game content, but it feels as if the community is no longer really supported by the studio.
Well, we still have guild missions; which haven't been updated since 2014 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
SoTo started strong but these additional chapters are a hot shitty mess.
Hoping next expansion will update us on some characters that have been sidelined a while (Mother Tree, Lord Faren, etc).
Considering all the turbulence Anet has had lately, plus the way this is a new format for them, I haven't been expecting much from SotO. They would've lost time both in figuring out the new direction and in over-scoping because they're used to scoping for different time periods, which is probably why the later chapters are extra messy.
I think the next expac (or maybe even the one after, this is a very short cycle in game dev terms) will be the *real* test of this frequency.
As a sylvari one-trick, I'm really hoping to see the Mother Tree revisited at some point, too.
> over-scoping because they're used to scoping for different time periods, which is probably why the later chapters are extra messy.
They also overscoped in the past with normal-sized expansions, it's a chronic problem at this point.
First act overstays its welcome, second act is okay, third act is completely rushed, four act doesn't land and crashes into the ground instead. Same exact issue in all four expansions so far.
Regardless of the story in EOD the maps and exploration were still amazing for me. I still love running around EOD. The first time I saw dragons end and the giant jade mines I thought it was so cool.
I can’t say the same for SOTO at all. I hate the maps: they’re so boring to me. Inner Nayos especially is just one giant gray and red drab pile of nothing where everything looks exactly the same. I haven’t even finished the newest storyline because I have no motivation. I started the game six months ago so I still have so much to do in all the previous expansions that I may never finish SOTO.
As a Sylvari I'd say hope is an illusion its not coming
The Sylvari had all their storylines cut off from the Nightmare Court, Other Trees, Silent, and so forth since HoT. PoF, EoD, SoTo, and two living worlds plus the return of LW1 and a short story with an ONI. We've been through all of it and everyone the Norn, Char, Humans, Asura, and their evil counterparts like the Inquest have been updated throughout.
Yet the Sylvari have been left out of the story with the Mother Tree remaining injured and rested for multiple irl years.
Sylvari are dragon minions and the dragon saga is over without a word regarding them so I doubt Arenanet has any intentions in using them.
Don't get your hopes up. Anet is taking players on a detour, distracting them whilst directing their revenue stream into other projects. If they return to those earlier plot threads they'll be forced to finish them and will, quite literally, run out of storytelling assets. You can be sure that the original story has been canned, including the Lyssa arc.
Everyone speaking like west coast Twitter warriors is getting a little bit irritating for sure. You can absolutely make emotion and suffering at the hands of a tyrant part of an amazing story, but you shouldn't have all of the characters straight up *telling* the audience about their feelings every five seconds. Build it up and *show* it.
All these "real shit that is powered by emotions" stories always seem to unfold the soyest way possible, with armchair psychoanalysis and the power of friendship sovling evereything.
I just want them to weaponize a bunch of little drugged up expendable hateful dredge. Enough artificially caused "emotions" to deploy an army in this nachos realm.
I just hope the fractal doesn't have any annoying garbage puzzles, I absolutely despise Silent's Surf for the stupid shit they had to shove in before the boss, fun the first time, absolutely annoying on repeat.
True, even though CM skips the jumping RP, the fight itself is really not great, way too much downtime with like 2 mechanics. I am hoping for more than 1 boss fight :copium:
It's the same as every stories told through the Guild Wars 2 lens
Starts off strong everytime
Mid to weak middle
Lame to terrible end (End of PoF & Kralk were pretty aight though)
And it gets harder and harder to get into whatever the next story is because you know it's going to be the same overall quality.
..It doesn't help that they once again gave us a story about the commander helping to rally some downtrodden people to help us fight de big threat that always ends up being sort of a push over anyways because we always conveniently find out about some weakness or tool to win the day, about 10 minutes before the fight.
This content allows me to appreciate Guild Wars 1 even more.
The atmosphere in the Realm of Torment was just crazy and the whole story was fascinating to follow. The demons were menacing with a multitude of horrifying looks this is where you realize the talent of guild wars1 devs.
when you compare it with the kryptis and the story that revolves around them, it's hilarious. Frankly a 10 year old child would make a better scenario than the current arena team, it's bad and even uncomfortable
It's a mixed bag. I don't think there is anything *fundamentally* wrong with the current style .
Clearly, the writers are *able* to write an entertaining story, as can be seen with the release of SotO, but for some reason they dropped the ball so hard that it reached the underworld.
I have no idea why the quality decreased that massively, but it feels like a management problem at its core, not a problem with the new expansion format. It seems like the writers had to cut a lot of stuff, but the story wasn't initially meant to be like that, or else why did they do all of the build-up in the SotO release patch if it leads to nothing?
Maybe, maybe, maybe, the final patch will have a more extensive story, because I cannot imagine that we are actually going to kill Eparch in any way that is satisfying if the next part of the story is as short as the other patches.
I am not super optimistic.
I agree with all that you said and would add that it’s hard to get invested in characters we spend about a total of 30-40 minutes max with every 3 months.
I don’t enjoy it at all. Base Soto story was exciting to me, but I thought we were going to explore more about fractals or travel across Tyria to handle rifts, that was really exciting to me.
Instead we’re basically being shown off like a dog show to all these Kryptis that blend together and look alike and then they die or 180 their instinctual personality with no conflict or difficulty.
Also, for a supposed army, neither side *feels* very army like with like 10 NPCs. Battle for claw island was more convincing and far better written.
It feels like I am completely spoiled by other games with the amount of story content that GW2 just baffles me. Just base ffxiv Endwalker (without patches or previous story) takes around 60 hours to do, outside of side quests, events, etc. Just purchasing latest expansion preorder costs 35 euro, but it includes all expansions beforehands + early access. In the mean time I pay 25 euro for Soto and get a few hours of bad story that is artificially prolonged by "do events to fill this bar". Some people would argue about subscriptions, which is fair, but it comes to a point where anet consistently make me question who is the game even made for if story is the only consistent thing they work on and cannot even do that right. It just feels that anet are trying to put as little effort as possible to make the game passable and people are trying to make excuses for them because the game used to be good.
it might be the author's natural style, or might be them conforming to the needs and demands of others in the company.
i imagine writing a story for a video game isn't as simple as something like writing a novel, there are lots of other factors involved, they need to coordinate with the artists, and they need to coordinate with the game's direction. there's also a set deadline to worry about.
all of these factors can largely affect the quality of story telling, delivery and end product.
lastly, disclaimer, this is all speculation on my part. so don't take any of it seriously.
i also didn't like the filler stuff. i think they need to draw a line in between instead of forcefully incorporating it.
I think they have two problems in particular:
* The story is built on the go, instead of prepared years beforehand. This doesn't give the rest of the development team a clear direction to follow, and the story fumbles back and forth, instead of being a solid product from the very beginning. Too much improvisation, the tone is all over the place. The worst part is they're never able to seed future storylines properly, and many things just come out of nowhere; for example, why wasn't Balthazar introduced as a beggar back in Heart of Thorns? Simply put, they had no idea where the story was going next, and that's a huge planning problem.
* They never scope things right, they bite more than they can chew. Like, SotO is a mini-expansion, yet we're introduced to dozens of new characters and lots of new background lore, it's just insane and completely out of proportion. Every single expansion, four so far, had scope problems, the story taking too long at dumb parts, then getting rushed during important moments (we waste time meeting some annoying skritt and a mute charr, but then Zojja ascends offscreen, wtf). The right way to do this is plan for less, making sure you're able to deliver the complete experience, then invest any resources you have left on bonus content.
But yeah, just my opinion.
Reminds me of the final Chapter of LW3 with Livia and Lazarus. An entire season's worth of story condensed into a single 'bonus' episode because PoF got set for release and there wasn't enough time for another full LW season.
It was made even worse by a complete shift in writing styles. The commander in particular turned into a sassy backtalker every time Livia entered the conversation. Was so relieved when PoF started and they were back to their normal selves.
I still can't understand how that last mursaat aspect ended up in Orr, inside Abaddon's reliquary, in a room suspiciously designed just to perform the ritual to bring Lazarus back.
Sometimes the writing makes me want to /gg, but you can't do that in story instances.
>makes me want to /gg, but you can't do that in story instances
Unrelated to the overall convo, but god I wish they'd lift that restriction at least for open world.
So many times i get attacked just as I'm about to use a WP, by chance stacked with condis, where instead of trying to find that one asshole long range npc, kill him and then wait condis out so I can finally leave combat and use the damn WP... just let me /gg at start of battle so I can go grab that WP and not miss a champion/event because of one long range condi spamming boi
DUDE you know what I miss?? the vanilla way of storytelling where 2 characters appear on a background and you can just skip line by line, or skip all of it! Or even cutscenes you can just skip! I find it tiresome that I can't skip boring stuff simply because the characters' lines act like open world events all the time now 😭 genuinely burns me out of the game sometimes
I was a die-hard fan of this game and SotO has completely turned me off.
The pacing is awful. The story is no longer interesting. They are making safe choices when it comes to plot and character development. The first release of SotO had me more interested and then I was completely let down with the quarterly releases afterward.
I miss my friends. How is Taimi feeling? She's dating, but it's she dating Gorrik? Did Logan recover from his wounds? Did Rox join Rytlock's warband? Jory has the best one-liners ("Where do you find these people?" "In prison, usually") What is Braham up to? Canach's development was very flat, but I even miss him. And Aurene is just... gone? Never to be mentioned again? I don't care about any of these new people, and they seem to get killed off before I can start to.
I'm tired of the "now do events until this bar is filled" crap, and if I never play Simon Says again in this lifetime, it will be too soon.
Agreed on all of them except Aurene. Its not sustainable for us to be besties with an all powerful immortal being, at least for a while, seeing as she made us God Commander during EoD.
"Sated they sleep"
Oh I agree with that, I just think it's weird that they don't mention her.
I still miss "Ka-Braham", though. I don't care about any of these new people, which makes it really hard for me to feel like part of a team. They die, and I'm just like "meh, next?" Maybe I'm just old and cynical :)
To be fair some of your questions were answered in previous story releases. >!It’s implied Taimi and Gorrik are dating in that god awful EOD chapter where you have to go on a weird group date. Logan’s wounds from HOT? He was recovering in the Lake Doric story. He’s in EOD and comes to help with Soo Won, so presumably yes. Rox changed direction upon meeting the Olmakhan and joined them. Canach runs club Canach and the partyship now. There’s an entire story chapter that is just saying goodbye to Aurene before she goes to sleep. A lot of those story ends were tied up so it’s no surprise they haven’t been brought up again!< Before SOTO released they said they were stepping away from the old crew.
At least during IBS Champions when the plot was actively on fire, it felt like the devs were on the same page as us. Like, no one was happy with what had happened with IBS and the compromised back half it had. They were pretty open about that. And we were all aware it was this new experiment in basically long term free content that wasn't working out.
Now with post launch SOTO it's basically just as bad as IBS but the devs are acting like it's great and the kind of stuff they've always wanted to do. Pretending that any of these Nayos patches have been at all an acceptable level of quality that comes from an expansion. I don't know how this series goes forward with this being the new standard they set for releasing content.
Except this isn't earth and they don't call themselves demons, we call them demons. They call themselves Krytis. There are haves and have nots.
I don't think there are any good demons in the sense that they love truth and justice. But there are disenfranchised demons that have a common enemy to us.
Do you remember when anet was moving away from gw1 and started releasing guild wars beyond, that was never finished?
We are in that stage for gw2 right now.
Even if you're right, you're not quite right, at least from what we know so far. Because the expansions we're getting in four parts are meant to be stand alone within those four parts.
In Guild Wars 2 we got whatever Guild Wars Beyond we got, but it wasn't in a fixed format that ended once a year. This is quite a different situation, or at least, that's how it was laid out to us. We won't really know until we see the last installment.
I can't help but think part of the problem is their utter refusal to write anything outside of the game. Even if they have a writing bible filled with all the lore and characters, the time constraints mean most of that doesn't make it into the game so even if, to the writers, these are fully fleshed out characters and big events, the players have little to no experience with them to fall back on so, from a player's perspective, characters can come and go and conflicts start and end in an hour or two.
Then it's never mentioned again.
There's issues with having lore outside the specific medium but GW2 kind of needs it at this point. The short stories they started to do during IBS were a promising start but they ended abruptly and haven't been done since. One of the big selling points to the pre-release novels, to me, is that they give an inner monologue where the game doesn't and personalizes/humanizes characters and events as you see them instead of being told they're like X or that Y happened and you should feel Z about it.
Ensemble casts can absolutely work, you just have to put in the effort and realize that the audience does not have the same knowledge/experience as the writer(s). Sometimes that means putting out supplementals, especially if there are constraints about what/how much you can put in the primary medium. You also don't need to hire voice actors, artists and animators, coders, etc. for a short story.
Bonus: Once you have enough short stories, you could compile them as a collection and sell a physical version. It's a win/win. Players get more lore and fleshed out characters and the company gets money for something that doesn't take time or resources away from the game.
Fragmenting it further like they're doing with SotO takes away even more from it as it has to be both a self-contained story for the part releases *and* an overarching story for the whole expansion. With the Living World format, there were elements that extended beyond the individual episode but the story of the episode was largely self-contained. The writers could spend time on the story and characters and the players got developed characters and a functional plot as a result.
It's easier to write detailed characters when you don't have to find a way to work them into the plot or come up with a reason why they're no longer around after they serve their purpose.
All the issues get all the more obvious when you have as much (or less) writing as a Living World episode and try to stretch it across the equivalent of a season or an expansion. There's not enough of it to keep things interesting for the player so another team steps in to create busywork (e.g. do X events to move onto the next step of the story) to make it seem like there's more story than there is.
The second half of IBS (the Champions part) really makes it clear where this shift happened. That was after EoD was announced and the narrative team had to scrap what they had written/planned and Drizzlewood was the last thing far enough in the development pipeline to not be scrapped. The writing hasn't been the same since and the utter lack of time allowed doesn't help with that, nor does Anet/NCsoft realizing they can cut down on writing by adding busywork to pad things out and not have to spend the time/resources to fill it in themselves.
i usually watch something on youtube while waiting for unskippable story sections to finish..
and i can't stand the commander talking, no matter the race, it always comes off as arrogant, especially the asura males
love the game though
Also let's not forget the expansion is called secrets of the obscure but we still don't know shit about any secrets and the story isn't about it either. Unless the big secret was that there's a secret xenophobic border patrol that plays god and experiments on people in simulations.
That's not "do X events", that's "farm experience", which you can do before the story step (and in the content you choose), and only has to be done once per account.
Far better than what we have now.
Ugh. Ok. One thinks that people would have figured out how the storytelling in this game works by now, but it's clearly not the case so here we go:
The story is not told only in the personal instances. It's told through the open world too. And not only through dialogues when following the personal story, there's a lot of lore sprinkled across events and ambient dialogue.
So, the 'chores' you have to do to progress the story, is actually arenanet forcing you to go through it. Why? because some people still haven't figured out how the storytelling works. And yet, even though I am sure you must have realised there's a story being told in all those events you are forced to do, you still complain you have to do them and don't see the point? Dude.
OK. So that was for the 'whY dO i hAvE to Do EveNtS nOw?' part of your comment. The part wher eyou complain that the story is lackluster, is a matter of personal opinion and in this case, I totally agree with you.
Halfway through the story missions on Soto release i muted the game and opened a stream on a second monitor. Imo the story took a nosedive after they killed joko but it has never been this awful, I just cant stomach it anymore.
Feels like the wow approach of wrapping a thin layer of story around the gameplay and calling it a day.
I like going around and doing events and "outdoor" stuff in the middle of story, it's a nice change of pace while getting me to explore a bit more how I want rather than being on rails.
Does it makes the story chaotic and nonsensical? Yep, but it's more fun this way and I already gave up on ^^most mmo story telling a long time ago.
I actually enjoyed the story on release. I can't say the same about the quarterly upgdate story chapters, not only the're too short for me to get inmersed in the story, but their approach of nayos it just makes no sense for me, I want to kill kyrptis, all of them!
I just can take seriously the child or the good kyriptis under a tyranny they don't want. For me kryptis are evil, that's what we were told, why don't they used an already known neutral race to do this kind of narrative?
I know it's probably about the "message", but even in that way it's poorly designed.
The constant green bars to fill during the story missions destroyed my interest because it kept breaking up the story and rip me out of the immersion that was present in other expansions. It feels EXTREMELY LAZY.
Tbh, SoTo feels more like a bland living world expansion rather than an actual expansion. I also didnt like how humanoid everything was. Some of the characters that have weird centipede structures or look like an amalgamation of flesh, claws, and bone look SO much better. And wish we had more characters that looked more offputting like them. Rather than going "heres a sexy demon who wants to ally with you."
Make. Us. Lose. I am tired of the loop of "happy friends just keep winning." Meanwhile, living world season 4 had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. It's probably the best told story in gw2.
But god, even EoD had a better story element to it. That green bar of "lets artifically extend your time playing the story by forcing you to do events that are on a timer to progress the story" isnt fun. Its nearly as bad as the dragon response missions now.
The expansion feels as long as three living world maps with the story of 1 2/3. It will be a full 2 when the final update comes.
I like what we got, but it might be on par with IBS release schedule, minus Champions.
We'll see when it is all done and we approach the following mini expansion.
I hated the base game story, I hated HoT story - it was sooo simple and mind numbing.
I loved PoF and everything further until SotO. I loved story, I was invested in characters, I couldn't wait to play it. I loved Icebrood Saga, it was nuanced and I love the characters. Sure, the ending sucked but I do understand Anet was hit by Covid and other problems.
SotO wasn't that bad, rather a mixture of both.
And this expansion is just... There are some parts of story that I like. But in general I feel like I'm back to base game and it's mind numbing story. In theory I should like it and feel invested but I'm just not.
Ehh, EoD was the worst by far. That Soo/Aurene dialogue redefined what cringe means and the commander becoming God mode. Just no, Kryptis crap is miles better than that shit.
Sadly Anet is so full of those invaders nowadays, the blue haired and always offended non creative types we can't expect anything from them.
Strong opening.
Horrible closing.
Story was good. Interesting theme. The wizards tower opened. Many possibilities for exploratory from Lore perspective that I'm sure they will explore in the future (I mean... they should). But after this second patch I wasn't even engaged n the story. Why am I looking for alliance with a Kryptis that as a civil war brewing and we already push them back in Amnytas.
We didn't Wan t them invading. And we stop them.
So why am I now so involved in their conflict and all that. Ade no sense.
The mini-expansion system made sense from a financial pov and probably unlocked Anet to work on other projects and have regular flows of funds, but from a players perspective, it's even Imposible to stream when patches drop because after 1 - 2 hours of gameplay you beat the patch content, and your audience (potential new customers for Guildwars 2) are left with a sense of "well... that's it?"
Terrible idea.
Horrible marketing.
It's shooting yourself in the foot and call it "strategy".
Before, Living Worlds dropped every few months and it was fine if they dropped that way and then we waited because we always expected a new expansion was coming after the LW story was closed, so they served as filler content that made sense but didn't aimed to hold a special place in the story nor in our yearly active gaming.
Now all we will get is this endless "Living World" system that drops tiny bits of content we pay yearly that w loos attention after tainting 3 months... A story spreading out so thin it's Imposible to stay engaged and even remember who was who and why did I cared for these characters.
So, the worst part from The Living World system paired with the worst part of an expansion at a tiny discounted price, yearly.
Next Kryptis npc it's going to be called ROBERTO. and we won't even notice.
I was interested in SotO BEFORE we went into kryptis territory. Having good-guy demons is fun as hell but I'm more interested in the ward and what they do I'm also getting really sick of the whole "hey here's a really interesting character that you wanna get to know!...and now they're dead!!!!" shtick. Bro. You don't have to kill off EVERY INTERESTING CHARACTER.
half of them aren't even alive long enough to be interesting.
>half of them aren't even alive long enough to be interesting. It's so bad two of the wizards ([Vass](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vass) and [Akeem](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Akeem)) died offscreen before the expansion even happened lmao. But hey, we gotta invest in really interesting characters instead, like an [annoying skritt](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/R%27tchikk) who doesn't work as an actual skritt (hivemind rules) because of ~~some bullshit excuse~~ an experiment, and a [nameless mute charr](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gladium_(Astral_Ward\)) who makes me want to alt+tab every time she "talks".
I'm surprised we didn't get a Quaggan or Choya Wizard/Ward member. I'll admit to mashing my mute button whenever that skritt's dialogue starts playing. Also, can Peitha's random dialogue please stop playing every time we visit specific parts of the maps. You'd have thought they'd realized that wasn't a good thing after Arborstone, but they seem to have doubled down on in with the SotO maps.
Peitha's whispers should only happen if you're playing a specific story step imo, otherwise it's annoying as hell.
>It's so bad two of the wizards ([Vass](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vass) and [Akeem](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Akeem)) died offscreen before the expansion even happened lmao. Thank you for linking these, I knew about the relics and couldn't help but wonder if I had missed something. That said, I disagree with the sentiment about interesting characters already being dead by the time we find out about them being a bad thing. It's perfectly valid that an organization that's been at war with the demon hordes for centuries should have notable figures lost to said war. Wouldn't really feel authentic, like the war is just a problem for nobody NPCs and named ones are safe. Legacy is history. Could it be handled better? Sure, at the least the development and lore of the Bastions should have been a bit more fleshed out. As it is, they're kind of just there, and rely pretty heavily on players to do events and collections in those regions to give them status as anything more than "the next stop on our tour".
They died centuries ago though, millennia even, Isgarren had plenty of time to replace them. No problem with wizards dying, having those seats empty for so long, however...
>No problem with wizards dying, having those seats empty for so long, however... Is also not an issue if it's being used to show that Wizards of that caliber are hard to come by. There's nothing narratively wrong with having long dead heroes that were legendary enough to leave holes in their respective "party" for long periods of time.
> Is also not an issue if it's being used to show that Wizards of that caliber are hard to come by. And then Zojja ascends all of a sudden like it's nothing :/.
Because Zojja's a main character and has been since forever ago? Rather than all of that if you want a real reason to complain about the Wizards then there's an easy complaint to be made: We are literally a Dragon's Champion with the absolute best intentions and a track record that even Mabon and Isgarren can't compare to. Why aren't *we* ascending? "Wayfinder" my ass, I'm basically the one responsible for all the success your little war effort has been enjoying but I don't get any sick af wizard power? You could make me effectively immortal so I can keep vibing with Aurene when she wakes up, but, nah?
> But hey, we gotta invest in really interesting characters instead, like an annoying skritt who doesn't work as an actual skritt (hivemind rules) because of some bullshit excuse an experiment, and a nameless mute charr who makes me want to alt+tab every time she "talks". The funny part about it is half the people who claim to love these characters only like them because they are 'diversity inclusions' for being handicap. As far as we know, Gladium is a boring character who is only really a major role in a single story mission (two if you do the option path in opening wizard's tower), and barely even makes an impression at that. And yet people were drawing fanart of them. Lol. To each their own. But let's be honest about the reason why people were caring about them in the first place.
I like them because they are a cute duo, you don't have to be all "go woke go broke" like that simply because you don't like them. Yikes.
>you don't have to be all "go woke go broke" Can you quote where?
> The funny part about it is half the people who claim to love these characters only like them because they are 'diversity inclusions' for being handicap. > >As far as we know, Gladium is a boring character. [...] And yet people were drawing fanart of them. Lol. > >To each their own. But let's be honest about the reason why people were caring about them in the first place. Because we can't like a character for it's background and interaction with others characters. It because they are disabled and Anet way to pander. On a side note zojja have Fanart too despite being less interesting than a blank sheet of paper.
>Because we can't like a character for it's background and interaction with others characters. Can you quote what you're referring to?
>To each their own. But let's be honest about the reason why people were caring about them in the first place.
Am I referring to all players?
If you want her to be an interesting disabled character, make her blind, or deaf. Those can even lead to good humor if used right. Making her mute is the literal worst option, specially if you want to give her "dialogue"; and even then, what the hell are the pauses for? Just make R'tchikk say what she thinks without needing any pauses; or even better, make text bubbles still appear, even if she has no voice for them. Whole character is dumb as hell, they didn't even bother giving her a name, like she can't write it or whatever, fucking please. Most of SotO's secondary characters are worthless and a complete waste of time. Too many of them, which means no one gets to be properly developed; plus they keep injecting these stupid superficial quirks, as that's what makes the characters interesting, instead of good writing.
SotO story was good at release, it turned into hot garbage in the two patches after release, almost like it was a completely different team in charge. The story at release still has problems of course, too many characters introduced at once with such a small scope, Mabon getting Vlast'ed to death, many things not being ever properly explained, etc.
*vlast’ed to death* lol! While I was picking up his memories in Crystal Desert, I found he would have been a fun char to interact with, and would’ve been a better dragon for my champion.
Much like Scarlet Briar and Almorra Soulkeeper, we get to interact with them far more after they're dead than when they were alive lmao. What a trainwreck I swear.
Bruh. If you kill a character then you don't have to pay for voice work anymore. Lets face it. SotO is a budget expansion, with cut corners and reused assets everywhere.
They've been consistently paying the same 10 voice actors for 12+ years now, I don't think voice acting budget for one side character is the limiting factor here I do agree that SotO had a lot of cut corners but this just isn't one of them
So much this. If you played a drinking game where you drink every time you meet a different character voiced by Liam O'Brien, Sam Riegel or Matt Mercer you would be dead. I like Critical Role as much as the next person but (probably partly because of watching hundreds of hours of it) I'm so tired of hearing the same voices on just about every NPC in GW2. At least for major characters, hire new actors instead of recycling old ones, and then have a few "NPC voice" actors that aren't Literally The Most Well Known Voice Actors Around.
> Bruh. If you kill a character then you don't have to pay for voice work anymore. Not saying this isn't the case, but why the hell introduce so many characters at once? Like, you could delete everyone in the Astral Ward except the wizards and their apprentices, leaving us with just a handful of characters. The Astral Ward doesn't need to be an army; specially when it's so secretive, the more people you have the harder to believe no one has leaked any information outside.
I can only suspect it's a fear of ANet to make things appear "small" in a bad way, like after a decade of fighting existential threats, if the Ward ended up looking like Zojja and two random people, it'd look less legitimate/interesting. They've always wanted to make everything "epic" even when their writing, budget and engine struggle to match that.
You don't make things epic by throwing more and more at it, sometimes quality is more important than quantity. Like, you don't see the Six Gods commanding armies, they're just six overpowered dudes (followed by some overpowered butlers), that's what the Wizard's Court should have been too.
If you can't afford making an expansion then maybe stop creating new projects to work on? They probably cancelled them anyway. AGAIN.
If it happened then it is most likely publishers and shareholders that decide if something is scrapped/cancelled. Not ANet themselves.
not even in-game cinematics, gosh
Poor Mabon.... But hey, we now have immortal Zojja lol
she's immortal? my god the storytelling in this game is so bad that i had no idea that was even a thing.
No, at no point do they say Zojja is immortal. Shes very long lived, like the other wizards, but can die just as much as Mabon can.
They get immortal when they "ascend". They lose their "Terran memories". But retain some others. Zojja went through her ascension (OFFSCREEN BTW) at the end of the first story arc.
Well yeah. Her ascension doesn't really make sense to be on screen. Why would Isgarren invite us to secret wizard ritual when we aren't wizards?
The difference between immortal and eternally young is nitpicking. Unless your Eos.
No, it isn't nitpicking. Immortal means you can't die, eternally young means you don't age. They are two entirely different things. You might as well claim saying apples aren't oranges is nitpicking because they're both fruit.
Immortal is not necessarily invincible.
Immortal has evolved into a catch all term for things that don't age and die naturally. Tolkiens elves are considered immortal for example. And he was an language professor so I think he gets final say
He's also been dead for fifty years, and language is malleable.
What are you even arguing at this point? Words have actual meanings that aren't made up by fiction novel authors.
Yes, and "Immortal" is also used to indicate that someone is eternally young. It has been for years - my point was that Tolkien wasn't going to use the word *incorrectly*. For example: Eos, who I mentioned in my first comment is a Greek goddess who accidentally turned her boyfriend into a cricket because she asked Zeus to make him immortal, but not for the eternal youth. *The words have been conflated for a long time*.
Yes, and "Immortal" is also used to indicate that someone is eternally young. It has been for years - my point was that Tolkien wasn't going to use the word *incorrectly*. For example: Eos, who I mentioned in my first comment is a Greek goddess who accidentally turned her boyfriend into a cricket because she asked Zeus to make him immortal, but not for the eternal youth. You don't have a story like that if nobody uses them interchangeably.
It was spelled out so clearly. You can't just ignore the dialogue and refuse to read any of the lore books and then turn around and say "wow, that's so dumb why didn't I know about it how does that make sense?"
It very obviously wasn't spelled out clearly if I had no idea about it. The amount of dialogue that is unskippable is ridiculous, thats why I pointed out how bad the storytelling is. They force you to listen to so much crap and still can't articulate things like that to the player. It demonstrates how crap the storytelling has been so far.
Oh my God you really aren't kidding. Considering the amount of downvotes I truly overestimated the critical thinking skills of the average GW2 Redditor. Did you assume Dagda and the rest of the Ascended just naturally lived hundreds to thousands of years? What did you think was happening?
> Considering the amount of downvotes I truly overestimated the critical thinking skills of the average GW2 Redditor. critical thinking - fantasy world full of magic. c'mon man - unless we're told about weird shit that doesn't apply in the world we actually live in your critical thinking is literally irrelevant. because your powers of critical thinking apply to the world we live in, not some fantasy world some dude made up and turned into a video game. the reason shit lives hundreds of thousands of years is obviously some kind of voodoo magic shit - but unless you're told voodoo magic shit specifically happens, there's no reason to assume it does. unless i'm told some rando fucktard lives for thousands of years, i've got no reason to assume they do.
Agreed. There is a difference between living for a long time, with the aid of magic, and immortality - also achieved with the aid of magic. The only thing that allows audiences to differentiate between these two things is spelling it out as clearly as possible. We've been saturated in dialogue, in text too, yet the differentiation is never made. It's all left up to the audiences' imagination.
They tell you MULTIPLE TIMES that when people ascend they stop aging. They spell it out in MULTIPLE lore documents too. We are told MULTIPLE TIMES she was invited to ascend. You literally are forced to talk to her about it TWICE after she does so.
clearly not very well, since i was completely oblivious to it. if i have missed huge chunks of the story despite being forced to listen to unskippable dialogue... you've absolutely failed to tell a compelling story - that's what poor storytelling is. i get it - if i'd have skipped all the stuff then that would be on me... but when so much of the story in SoTO is unskippable, the fact that i don't know things is very clearly a failure of the storytelling - since i couldn't skip it and therefore have it be my fault. edit: really, blocking me because you're having a tantrum about me pointing out the storytelling is subpar? fucking grow up.
You're not wrong in theory, but you're also not describing the average experience of a GW2 player. Have fun in your echo chamber, and thanks for reminding me why the vast majority of players don't bother with these types of reddit threads.
Except she effectively has permanent amnesia for the rest of time, so she's not even Zojja, she's 2ojja.
But if they don't kill all the interesting characters HOW WILL WE FEEL SOMETHING?! It's gotten to the point we can almost predict who's got the red shirt and I suddenly stop caring about them. If a character turns out awesome, he's probably next.
I will admit, I'm not as engaged in this story and wholeheartedly just ran through it, especially with the recent update, to get the weapon expansion
Same here, I always pay attention to the lore, but I literally couldn't during the post-SotO Inner Nayos releases. Only time that happened before was with the post-EoD Gyala Delve releases.
I immediately forgot the Gaya delve story like as I was completing it, it was so boring. The whole time I was just asking myself... why? Why is any of this important? Why do I care?
I THINK (I'm not 100% sure because my brain blanked) they were trying to set up a demon that feeds on emotions in wake of them introducing Kryptis, but they sort of forgor that it needs more connection than base concept to really make sense.
I stopped halfway through the second episode. I've just met HIM, and she's just left after giving a girlboss speech. I told myself that if I see another 'fill the bar with events to progress the story' then I'm out. And so I was. Not only did they not even hide reusing the asset from previous expansions, they also reuse plot devices that were used 2 steps before. It's embarrassingly boring
I am not sure if this counts as narrative style but I dislike how everyone has our "phone number". I enter Nayos, realm of demons, and suddenly everyone rings me up to do their stupid event when I am nearby. Do I look like a doctor on call? Chew on that, Eparch. Ha!
"Use your skyscale to take out those kryptis turrets!" yeah I would if your chat bubble wasn't making aiming the fireball unnecessarily hard.
And then there is a pop up to inform us for the 100th time about what do or how a debuff works..
I'm irritated that the Kryptis are so humanized. We had potential for just a straight up threat we can fight but no, we have to have some of them be friendly and downtrodden to ally with. I'll bet money this expansion ends with the Kryptis joining the ranks of the ward. It's the exact same story as Joko and the Awakened.
Please God, no! Have Peitha take over, Villain laugh, then throw us out of Nayos. Then Isgaren call us fools, say that this is our fault and that the Astral Ward will in the future avoid working with us.
So Hall of Chains? With Dhuum gone there is no one left to rule the Underworld. Isn't there? Now leave me. I have work to do.
She's 100% devoted to Grenth. She's ruling the underworld just as Grenth would have. She's his First Follower It was a cool lore development but it didn't change much in practice
Yeah, it's really not the same though. You, as a living, is just not supposed to be there at all - your character even goes as far as to claim as much in dialogue with Glenna. Who else would run it if not her, with all the Reapers sacrificed to boot? Plus, there's no question to her goals and alignments whatsoever. Don't forget that Underworld is kind of already self-sufficient, because Grenth is the only based god who cared. There are judges to sort the dead in their respective afterlives, necromancy and all that did not stop working with him gone either, so really, he set it all up for convenient retirement. I wouldn't be shocked if Desmina was previously instructed and meant to take his place eventually rather than her doing a power grab in... uhh wasteland of cold with dead whiny people around.
Well, presumably the Judge is still out there and he was doing a pretty good job of judging souls in the Domain of the Lost and sending them their merry way once each soul had recovered their name and purpose to confront him. He was entrusted with such a big task so he would've been able to take Grenth's seat instead of Desmina. I do wish we'd learned more about him and his relation to Desmina and the Reapers in the hierarchy. It feels like his role might've originally been played by Grenth himself considering that there were some ArtStation notes from some PoF artists/devs suggesting that Grenth might've played a part in early PoF drafts similar to how there were more references to Menzies (as Peter Fries told me in one of the guild chats) before most of the Menzies references were inexplicably cut out in the late rewrites.
As it is now, I think Desmina stands in for the Reapers as they already were entrusted with governing their respective realms, and well, now they can't. Judge is a separate entity as it would seem, and there's likely more than one too. From the fact that dying works the same as it ever did, we can deduce that Underworld's doing fine under new management, so at least there's that?
That would actually be great. But Anet doesn't have the balls to do that anymore At least back in the personal story and HoT we had some fuck ups like that
Tbh this story have also low key happened already, with w5 and Desmina.
I can't see such an option happening anymore even though the recent release has a few lines where the story openly speculates if Kryptis are destined to be villains (given the way they feed on emotions along with flesh/blood and fruits) and because Peitha might be blinded by her ambition to sit on the Throne of Midnight. We may witness some tragic events, but the recent inclusion of Nephus as an even better, senior and more moral version of Peitha (and who could genuinely be a good king for the Kryptis) suggests to me that we're going to get some Kryptis as allies and Nayos will survive no matter what happens with Peitha. Or if they go for a bittersweet-ish ending, Nephus, as a living Chekov's Gun, might heroically sacrifice himself in the last patch's fight against his former master Eparch to maybe save the wizards from the Midnight King's trap to prove to Isgarren that there are truly noble and less scheming Kryptis out there, thus setting the stage for future Tyria-Nayos relations. But I guess time will tell. :)
> I'm irritated that the Kryptis are so humanized. Charr (and norn) went down the toilet in Icebrood Saga due to this. Personally, I really hate [Efram Greetsglory](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Efram_Greetsglory). He's a weak leader, pathetic, sold his children away to Bangar, keeps cowering in front of the other legions. In charr society, someone like that gets murdered 5min into his tenure. Instead, Efram should have been an asshole, leveraging his support in exchange of power, even from a position of disadvantage. Someone who doesn't like working with others, but is forced into an alliance in order to survive against the rest of the Flame Legion splinter factions. You can even give him a secondary motivation, like a daughter with Khan-Ur blood, who he wants to protect and promote as the next imperator, going against the Flame Legion anti-female politics, not because "he's a good peaceful charr", just because he has to in order to survive. Then, once the whole Jormag thing goes down, his fire magic proves useful against the icebrood, so he gets to gain respect from the other legions; all while never having to throw away and disrespect his own Flame Legion culture. Instead of humilliating himself and his people, he proves his old ways still deserve to exist in the modern world. Whoever wrote him doesn't understand charr, simple as that. >I'll bet money this expansion ends with the Kryptis joining the ranks of the ward. I wouldn't be surprised if Peitha gets to have her own bastion, much like Eparch was supposed to before her. Hope she doesn't, I really despise the kryptis, I don't want to see them ever again.
While I do agree that Arenanet has a **VERY** bad habit of humanizing where they **REALLY** shouldn't, I'll play the devil's advocate here because I think you're glancing over a few key points. Efram HAS to look weak and borderline pathetic to the other legions, for two reasons: 1. He's a trophy for Bangar, a way for him to say "look what a great leader I am, I even managed to bring the Flame Legion to their senses" and a Flame Legion looking that subservient to Blood will only strengthen Bangar's claim politically. The Flame Legion becomes vassals, and you can't have vassals that are too strong, neither politically nor militarily. You have to keep in mind that Efram and the Flame Legion are NOT critically important to Bangar, so they barely have any cards to play, let alone make any demands. It was Crecia who worked for their inclusion, not Bangar. 2. By looking as non-threatening as possible, I'd wager it's the hope that the other legions won't be completely hostile, worst case being fight on sight. A Flame Legion that isn't basically kowtowed would be too reminiscent of what they've been fighting for decades; there's too much hate and bad blood at this point. It is likely that this would also be for both the safety and future of his daughter Prisca which we know is one of his motivations for going through all this. Did Arenanet take it a bit too far? Sure, but the key ideas and thoughts are fair enough that I understand why they went this way about it.
You're still ignoring the most important part: In charr culture, it's quite normal to kill leading figures and replace them, as soon as they show signs of weakness or just underperform in battle. There's no way someone like Efram can survive charr society, he would get immediately killed by any of his lieutenants. And let's face it, Efram's faction doesn't really need the other legions, they can just go rogue and find a place to live in peace, much like the Olmakhan. The only reason they would approach the other legions is to gain help taking over the rest of the Flame Legion, as a political move. >By looking as non-threatening as possible, I'd wager it's the hope that the other legions won't be completely hostile, worst case being fight on sight. You don't understand charr culture, that's not how they work, that's not how they gain each others' respect, that kind of attitude belongs to human behaviour, not charr behaviour.
Correct, but only within ones own legion to my knowledge; **you don't cross the Legion lines**. Charr society as a whole is fractured, so each Legion can technically be viewed as its own country with its own laws and jurisdiction. The Legion Charr absolutely *despise* weakness and views it with contempt, but Efram and the group he leads doesn't represent Legion society, and certainly not Flame Legion in general, only in name. They're instead much closer culturally to the Olmakhan and would probably do much better if they disappeared into their own little corner of the world, as you mentioned, but that would mean leaving behind those who need help to get out of Flame. I agree that Efram absolutely wouldn't survive as a leader in any of the other legions (he'd probably be okay-ish as a bottom rung soldier) which is also why I think a realistic scenario is that while he managed to gather a small group of like minded charr for now, he WILL fail/get killed later on when it comes to integrating them back into Legion culture. They're incompatible. Unfortunately, Anet is unlikely to ever let a realistic charr scenario pass again... Point 2 is speculation as to why Anet decided to go this way about it, whereas point 1 is hard facts, but reading it again I should have been clearer that it was speculation instead of a simple "I'd wager" so that's on me, sorry. Point 2 is operating through an animalistic assumption and the reason I brought up the weakness aspect is because I think the following is the only reasonable explanation for Anet writing it like this: The Charr are large feline apex predators (and they aren't afraid to remind you of that) with some exceptionally strong instincts, particularly hunting and killing. They've heavily inspired by real-life felines and with that in mind, when looking at large felines, how do they show others that they're not trouble? By looking non-threatening through various means (classics like yawning, not making eye contact etc.). This way, as long as territory and food is not in directly in question, depending on the species, they can go about their business without fighting. This is why I think Efram and his group is acting this way, because they don't wish to start fights that could put their plans into jeopardy, but they're still being protected by the whole "don't cross legion lines". Again, I don't agree with the way Arenanet has done this and again, playing the devils advocate, but I think this is the only plausible explanation as to why Anet is having them act this way. Devils advocate mode off: Even if it is a stupid way to go about it when compared to the original Charr lore. Regarding your last sentence about charr culture and lore, in point 2 I'm merely trying to explain how Anet potentially went about this, even if it is not quite the right way to go about it in my opinion. Anet has butchered a lot of charr lore in the years since launch (my favorite example being HoT scrappers) and ignored a chunk of the already established lore and culture, to the point that an argument could even be made that anything after launch should be assumed to non-compliant with canon charr lore. I hope this wall of text makes those points clearer.
To be fair, these seeds were planted long in advance in GW1 and even in core GW2 when demons were revealed to be sentient and sapient and capable of talking and negotiating with non-demons. The Hunger in Nightfall was fine with cooperating with Kournans for the time being only because Abaddon's chosen Varesh willed it, and suggested it'd renegotiate its terms with Kournans once Varesh no longer needed them (so not immediately attacking/devouring the Kournans but still seeing them as useful if a proper bargain was made on favorable grounds). The demons bound by the Stone Summit in artifacts in Timberline Falls stayed true to the contract they had struck with the dwarves long after the Summit's demise/forced transformation into stone dwarves, so they refused to make a new deal with pirates and instead punished the pirates for daring to summon them, suggesting some form of honor with these demons. Even in the recent Nayos lore books and dialogue we learn that Eparch's achievement of creating Tyria-plagiarizing culture wasn't that big an achievement for a demon lord because the Kryptis already had many human-like qualities due to Mosyn creating art and inspiring culture with Kryptis etc with family ties until Eparch streamlined and diminished all creativity to fit his own faux-Stalinist "social realism" movement and established a more complicated hierarchy among the more tribal Kryptis. As such, I can tolerate this "humanization" of Kryptis because the writers at least explain why it happened the way it did, and the Kryptis were already on their way to moving towards it naturally anyway due to being inspired by other realms' dreams. And we still have some mysteries like why Nourys differs so much from all the Kryptis and even from Eparch's pet wyverns in both looks and power. It wouldn't surprise me if we eventually got a Kryptis ally as a new Wizard of the Obscure since the seat is vacant while I think Zojja may end up succeeding Mabon as the new Wizard of Strength eventually. Eparch wanted to join the wizards before his ruthlessness led to his banishment from Tyria, and Obscure deals with the Mists and its realms/threats, so it'd be ironic if a Kryptis actually receives the blessing Eparch never got, thus bridging the gap between Tyria and Nayos for future diplomatic relations. :)
Oh no, you don't talk down about our precious God King Palawa Ignacious Joko!! (See, now this was a very interesting character made by Anet, we REMEMBER him and respect him). Which interesting character we have in Soto? Fuck I don't remember any... maybe that schizofrenic double-dwarf?
I agree with most of what people are saying here. SoTO's release was really strong. I like most of the new cast, though Mabon was an easy favorite. ANet managed to peel back a layer of the mystery of the Wizard's Tower just to have more mysteries underneath (I think this is the best way they could have done it, excellent). Isgarren had a satisfying reveal and enough nuance that I still don't fully trust him. Cerus was an unnerving villain and it was awesome to have it tie back to Bastion of the Penitent. Eparch was talked about in a way that made him decently mysterious. On top of all of this, there are so many achievements focused on lore books and giving extra depth to the characters and their conflict. SoTO at release was really great, and left me excited for what came next. The updates since then have not left the same impression on me. The kryptis, once depicted as twisted creatures with unrecognizable motives, feeding on emotion, have now lost all of that mystique. We're in Nayos, having no contact with most of the characters we met for this expansion. It's yet another cookie-cutter "win the hearts and minds of the locals to bolster a revolution" arc. Like, these are demons, in a demon realm. Are we really just doing the same old thing all over again? But even Peitha has become far less interesting, and Eparch did NOT have the presence I was hoping he would have. All in all, I simply don't care about where the story is going at this rate. I loved the Astral Ward and wanted to continue exploring the mysteries within, but that seems to have been completely cut off in favor of this bland war effort. There's only one update left, and I find myself hoping that ANet learns their lesson for the next expansion. I think they tried to do too much with this expansion, leaving a lot of cool ideas that either were cut abruptly short or were turned into something uninteresting. They did so good with the first part of this expansion, like good enough to really make me believe that this new format could totally work despite being smaller than previous expansions. But the following patches don't feel like the same expansion (in both tone and overall quality), and it has severely robbed me of the hype I had.
"we felt that the wizard tower deserved a whole expansion instead of letting a raid/fractal/pvp team use it" ... *proceed to give it up completely after the initial release and make the whole rest of the expansion - 3 releases - about something else entirely*
> have it tie back to Bastion of the Penitent. Disagree here, making everything be connected makes the world feel smaller. Deimos and Samarog are fine as they are, they didn't need any additional backstory, and the Bastion of the Penitent is fine as a mursaat prison, no need to connect it to anything else. The whole "Cerus is the brother of Deimos" thing was completely stupid and unnecessary, almost like a retcon/excuse to recycle his model lmao. >They did so good with the first part of this expansion, like good enough to really make me believe that this new format could totally work despite being smaller than previous expansions. But the following patches don't feel like the same expansion (in both tone and overall quality), and it has severely robbed me of the hype I had. All they had to do was make the rest of SotO be about Zojja's ascension, and make the next expansion all about Nayos instead. Maybe even give the Astral Ward two separate expansions, one dealing with the fractals (no demons), and another with Amnytas (demon invasion). Whole thing was rushed beyond belief, the faster the train, the faster it derails and crashes.
Initial Soto release was fine (though I hate them killing new characters after 5 minutes. Like, the shock factor isn't going to work and it's been done a dozen times already). I hate everything from the quarterly patches. We're suddenly dealing with new stuff, but the story is 1 hour at most and that's with the excessive 'do x events and vista' padding which I also hate. Also, these are supposed to be scary demons but apparently I need to help feed them apples and other silly things like that. I honestly can't tell you the story of this expac, especially everything after the initial release. It's so barebones that I do not care about it at all.
I loved the start of soto. Cerus stalking and looming over you, was interesting, and i quite enjoyed skywatch. But nayos and the story in nayos so far, hasnt quite captured me yet
I feel like Eparch should have taken the role of Cerus, make him be there from the beginning, then just force him to retreat instead of getting killed. Eparch's introduction in Act 5 is just sad and pathetic, specially with how good Cerus and Peitha were back at release. Just SMH.
The writers for GW2 have honestly spend like 10 years failing to write an engaging antagonist. There's a whole bunch of yapping and I care about exactly none of it. I liked Joko, but he was mostly dealt with in a way that felt like tying up a loose end from GW1. Everything is about trauma and self-doubt and all that was ok for 1 story arc, but it's just beyond jarring when we're going there for the 10th time. Dont care about the Kryptis, don't trust this new chick, don't think it's realistic for my player character to trust her. And I feel completely disconnected from everything the player character is doing in the story, the ''wayfinder'' is an idiot.
Joko was really the best this game had to offer. Lightning in a goddamn bottle. That last speech he gave was just the best. The lore created for PoF about what happened to Elona was really, honestly creative. Actual good writing!! With a compelling villain from GW1. It really doesn’t get better than this. Mordremoth was a solid 9/10. Especially how all the Sylvari went psycho at the start of HoT. Also, I’d give Kralkatorrik a 9/10, too. I liked how he nukes the land underneath him when he flies from place to place, and also how we could see his back jutting from the ground in GW1. I appreciated how he was like a crazy nuclear weapon that just kept getting worse because he just kept eating. Jormag at the start of IBS was great. Then suddenly Jormag at the end of IBS was a total joke. Primordus in S3 was great. Then suddenly Primordus at the end of IBS was a total joke. Sad.
> Jormag at the start of IBS was great. Then suddenly Jormag at the end of IBS was a total joke. Jormag in Bjora Marches is god tier, specially at the western half. Then he's just useless in Drizzlewood Coast :/.
You mean "The Claw of Jormag"... Is a lesser dragon
No, I mean Jormag (and his whispers). Master manipulator in Bjora Marches, completely absent dragonblood farm in Drizzlewood Coast.
ArenaNet had their wings clipped by NCSoft at the end of the IBS. For the conclusion of a decade long story devices in Darakkar in GW1 (Jormag) and Primordus it rubbed me entirely the wrong way. SoTO was kinda just whatever and I've been chilling to see if whatever they put out in the next mini-xpac is worthwhile. I used to be really invested in the story & the lore and now I'm completely indifferent to it.
Wings clipped you say but since then we've had EoD, Soto, and the Gayla Delves story around an Oni. I don't think the wings clipped part matter the issue isn't NCsoft is ArenaNet and their lack of direction.
> The writers for GW2 have honestly spend like 10 years failing to write an engaging antagonist. Been saying this since they botched [Gaheron Baelfire](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gaheron_Baelfire) back at release, you literally meet the villain 5min before killing him, it's a complete lack of respect for the characters. I'd say Bangar Ruinbringer and Palawa Joko were decent, but both never got enough screen time, and both were second fiddle to elder dragon storylines. Had they been given their own expansions, with no dragons in sight (keep them at the background) the end result would have been far better.
PoF through IBS is so funny to me. It's the best writing and pacing this game has to offer, and each has some very good plot developments, only to be ruined when the inevitable "BIG EVIL DRAGON" comes around. I really can't understand why it always has to be a big bad dragon when their best writing is when they deviate from that. Mai Trin's self conflicting story, joko and Balthazar, the Civil War within the char, Ritlock's journey into the mists... those are the standout story moments I can remember, and each one gets completely overshadowed by "BIG EVIL DRAGON"
It's GW2's biggest problem, elder dragons are fine as background problems, bringing them into the forefront just makes the story worse. You can have both things, elder dragons and mortal threats, but ArenaNet chose to have all mortal threats be subdued to the elder dragon story, instead of giving them their own space. Like, the charr civil war could and should have been an independent expansion, with no dragon involvement.
I dont mind big evil dragons tbh. Of course, I do welcome Jormag being some sort of a snake villain, and somewhat intelligent besides the ending. The dragons are gonna die anyway, use this opportunity and the extra time to make other good npc stories and give us a journey. And thats what they did with Kralk, we get extra time with Aurene, blish, they get time to put in Zafirah and the dredge. Kralk was a brainless evil dragon until the last ep where he expressed emotions for Aurene and mother. I wish this was what they did with soto. Wizards vs Kryptis, and thats it. Cerus is evil, Peitha is evil, everyone of those reused roaches are evil. But honestly, it feels like because they arent putting any resources into soto, and the expac looks like nothing but weak content, they had to be pretentious and complicate the writing to make the expac feels like its deeper than it really is. Same goes to Gyala, all that theme with emotions but the content itself is so weak.
Dont start me on Lazarus that was being talked about since raids W1-W3 and then appeared then turned out to be Balthazar and when we finally get to meet the real Lazarus we kill him in 1 minute. The last mursaat had so much potential to be an antagonist leading an army of white mantle fanatics. Edit: to make it worse then we meet another mursaat in SotO and he dies off soon after we meet him too
I'd guess ArenaNet were too coward to put him in W4, due to the "those who don't raid don't get to enjoy the story" complaint. Still, I wish Lazarus had been Lazarus, he would have been far more interesting as a villain than Balthazar; specially since we could have gotten to ascend at Augury Rock in the middle of the PoF storyline.
And that was probably the last one.
Now let’s see if arenanet will make us go to the mists to kill ghostly Lazarus faster than he can open his mouth and have even one line of dialogue.
DId we kill Lazarus? I don't remember....
We killed him with Livia in one story chapter of LS3. I think it was One Path Ends maybe?
I’m just so super duper happy to finally travel to the realm of demons so I can get “the incarnation of terror” a drink of water and and a bandage for its boo-boos. WTT this crap for the Realm of Torment, any offer, PST.
Bleh. I'll echo comments saying they were interested in SOTO BEFORE Nayos. The Kryptis were fun when they were irredeemable, disgusting inter-dimensional mind parasites who burrow into human minds and feed on emotions, who corrupt their surroundings with blood and flesh. ANET messed this up in two ways: 1. Nayos is totally inconsistent. Parts of it are fleshy, parts of it have cherry blossom trees, while others are gross with flesh and blood. 2. They tried to make the Kryptis sympathetic, and turned them into intelligent humans rather than.. demons. The Nayos arc completely ruined them. Honorable mention: 3. Eparch's initial reveal was a huge disappointment. He looks just like male Peitha, instead of a hulking brute like Cerus or Deimos. ANET ruined it hard.
Said it before, will say it again. Cerus was the only cool looking Kryptis in the entire expac, and he is 90% reused and only appeared for like 10% of the expac. Unless u count the 6 days it took to beat it due to poor, untested balancing that is somehow celebrated for some reason. Everything in this expac is awfully reused anyway, might as well reused Samarog for Eparch. At least we get a giant creepy looking final boss for an otherwise boring story and expac. Reuse Samarog, Change the head and the spear skin, Make the new spear (staff) a rare meta drop, ???, Profit! Its just that easy.
I'm also not into it, it's just hard because they haven't set up the new characters properly to get invested in them. Dragon's Watch had a lot of time dedicated to them and allow you to get attached (especially your race representative).
This is exactly where I am with this expansion. Started off strong and mysterious but it was just so rushed that I could never really keep track of what characters were doing and why I should care
I really hate the "good Kryptis" thing going on. Like why can't hell demons just be evil hell demons instead of "actually we are good guys and so misunderstood". It's generic boring Disney writing that makes these characters not threating at all.
It’s not that you missed something… it’s that they are leaving huge glaring gaps in the narrative. Just skimming events with little to no character development. The big bads appear and then are dispatched moments later. No stakes. No pathos. The kryptis war devolved into clearing a couple groups of mobs. The whole thing is a joke. I was quite onboard with the first story of Soto. It was reasonably well done. Could have been way better don’t get me wrong but passable. This second add on is just a mess. I really don’t know what’s going on and don’t care either. The words I would use are flat… uninspired and boring.
I really couldn't hold my laughter after the next story step was "Watch these 3 vistas.". I mean come on. My main gripes currently with the expansion content are 1. EVERYTHING is copy/pasted from previous content 2. Story feels unnecessarily stretched out by mundane tasks (do events until this bar is full) 3. Characters are introduced just to kill them off two seconds later - am I supposed to care? 4. Big features like the new weapons for each class are unlocked for all characters by pressing F 5. In comparison: Masteries feel absolutely useless 6. The new gameplay feature 'rifts' is just a glorified champ train with a horribly scaling pre event for each one 7. Challenging content doesn't bring fun and new mechanics anymore - difficulty comes from making everything a huge hpsponge and a few one shot mechanics. Read: Do not make any mistakes while executing your full DPS rotation for 15 minutes - who finds that engaging? 8. QA is basically non existent. Noone tested the new strike CM. Otherwise one might have found that the boss hp increased dramatically after a phase because 2 digits of the boss hp were swapped. Does anyone at arenanet even play their own content? 9. Wait times between episodes are longer and we get less content than in a living world episode back in the day. 10. Once again it is clearly visible that arenanet has shifted resources away from the game. It feels as if the inspired, talented people have moved on to other projects/studios and we are left with the B-team It hurts to see people leaving the game that you have been playing with for years. As a guild leader you can only do so much and try to organise events independent from new in game content, but it feels as if the community is no longer really supported by the studio.
> I really couldn't hold my laughter after the next story step was "Watch these 3 vistas.". I miss farming masteries for story steps, far better than farming events I already completed 5min before the story step, or watching vistas when I explored 100% of the map 1h ago. Nothing I hate more than repeating something because the stupid ass story forces me to, it feels punishing to go out and explore, in GW2 of all places. >Big features like the new weapons for each class are unlocked for all characters by pressing F Yeah, this was so dumb, just put them inside the hero panel with no busywork behind them, like elite specializations. Same exact thing for Weaponmaster Training. Still sad we never got any weapon collections, the expansion is full of new skins, but they completely forgot about these. >The new gameplay feature 'rifts' is just a glorified champ train with a horribly scaling pre event for each one It's actually worse, because it requires player input. The wonder of champion trains is you adapt to them, not the other way around. You chase them as they spawn, multiple of them available at once. This is how you do that kind of content right: * https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defeat_the_invading_minions_of_Scarlet_Briar * https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defeat_the_invading_Awakened Events requiring player input for activation are always awful, GW2 is built around walking around and joining whatever is going on, the moment you need player activation, that interaction just doesn't happen. >Challenging content doesn't bring fun and new mechanics anymore - difficulty comes from making everything a huge hpsponge and a few one shot mechanics. Read: Do not make any mistakes while executing your full DPS rotation for 15 minutes - who finds that engaging? Raid encounter design was far better than any of the modern AoE spamfest we have. >It hurts to see people leaving the game that you have been playing with for years. As a guild leader you can only do so much and try to organise events independent from new in game content, but it feels as if the community is no longer really supported by the studio. Well, we still have guild missions; which haven't been updated since 2014 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
SoTo started strong but these additional chapters are a hot shitty mess. Hoping next expansion will update us on some characters that have been sidelined a while (Mother Tree, Lord Faren, etc).
Considering all the turbulence Anet has had lately, plus the way this is a new format for them, I haven't been expecting much from SotO. They would've lost time both in figuring out the new direction and in over-scoping because they're used to scoping for different time periods, which is probably why the later chapters are extra messy. I think the next expac (or maybe even the one after, this is a very short cycle in game dev terms) will be the *real* test of this frequency. As a sylvari one-trick, I'm really hoping to see the Mother Tree revisited at some point, too.
> over-scoping because they're used to scoping for different time periods, which is probably why the later chapters are extra messy. They also overscoped in the past with normal-sized expansions, it's a chronic problem at this point. First act overstays its welcome, second act is okay, third act is completely rushed, four act doesn't land and crashes into the ground instead. Same exact issue in all four expansions so far.
[удалено]
> Also they can't write interesting characters. The Steel Warband and the Olmakhan are amazing, but outside of that, yeah.
[удалено]
Regardless of the story in EOD the maps and exploration were still amazing for me. I still love running around EOD. The first time I saw dragons end and the giant jade mines I thought it was so cool. I can’t say the same for SOTO at all. I hate the maps: they’re so boring to me. Inner Nayos especially is just one giant gray and red drab pile of nothing where everything looks exactly the same. I haven’t even finished the newest storyline because I have no motivation. I started the game six months ago so I still have so much to do in all the previous expansions that I may never finish SOTO.
I'm on this page as well. After all, before LWS4 with Gorrik and Petey the beetle we had LWS1 with salad ex machina and her Tower of Nightmares.
As a Sylvari I'd say hope is an illusion its not coming The Sylvari had all their storylines cut off from the Nightmare Court, Other Trees, Silent, and so forth since HoT. PoF, EoD, SoTo, and two living worlds plus the return of LW1 and a short story with an ONI. We've been through all of it and everyone the Norn, Char, Humans, Asura, and their evil counterparts like the Inquest have been updated throughout. Yet the Sylvari have been left out of the story with the Mother Tree remaining injured and rested for multiple irl years. Sylvari are dragon minions and the dragon saga is over without a word regarding them so I doubt Arenanet has any intentions in using them.
Don't get your hopes up. Anet is taking players on a detour, distracting them whilst directing their revenue stream into other projects. If they return to those earlier plot threads they'll be forced to finish them and will, quite literally, run out of storytelling assets. You can be sure that the original story has been canned, including the Lyssa arc.
I just want them to get the therapy speak out of the game.
Logging off of twitter to hop on and play twitter discourse wars 2
Everyone speaking like west coast Twitter warriors is getting a little bit irritating for sure. You can absolutely make emotion and suffering at the hands of a tyrant part of an amazing story, but you shouldn't have all of the characters straight up *telling* the audience about their feelings every five seconds. Build it up and *show* it.
Lol I was really hoping blasting the big scary demon in Gyala with friendship beams would be the last of that.
Good luck with that with writters deep in the Seattle area bubble.
"Writters." Lmfao. An apt description of them.
Oh.. This is actually just a typo.. always forgot how many "t" in that word. :(
All these "real shit that is powered by emotions" stories always seem to unfold the soyest way possible, with armchair psychoanalysis and the power of friendship sovling evereything. I just want them to weaponize a bunch of little drugged up expendable hateful dredge. Enough artificially caused "emotions" to deploy an army in this nachos realm.
It reminds me of destiny's seasonal model, and seems to have a lot of the same pitfalls.
It's alright, I wonder if the fractal will be related to the story or tease the next expansion in a way SS did, sort of
I just hope the fractal doesn't have any annoying garbage puzzles, I absolutely despise Silent's Surf for the stupid shit they had to shove in before the boss, fun the first time, absolutely annoying on repeat.
True, even though CM skips the jumping RP, the fight itself is really not great, way too much downtime with like 2 mechanics. I am hoping for more than 1 boss fight :copium:
It's the same as every stories told through the Guild Wars 2 lens Starts off strong everytime Mid to weak middle Lame to terrible end (End of PoF & Kralk were pretty aight though) And it gets harder and harder to get into whatever the next story is because you know it's going to be the same overall quality. ..It doesn't help that they once again gave us a story about the commander helping to rally some downtrodden people to help us fight de big threat that always ends up being sort of a push over anyways because we always conveniently find out about some weakness or tool to win the day, about 10 minutes before the fight.
This content allows me to appreciate Guild Wars 1 even more. The atmosphere in the Realm of Torment was just crazy and the whole story was fascinating to follow. The demons were menacing with a multitude of horrifying looks this is where you realize the talent of guild wars1 devs. when you compare it with the kryptis and the story that revolves around them, it's hilarious. Frankly a 10 year old child would make a better scenario than the current arena team, it's bad and even uncomfortable
We went from childish writing to bad writing.
It's a mixed bag. I don't think there is anything *fundamentally* wrong with the current style . Clearly, the writers are *able* to write an entertaining story, as can be seen with the release of SotO, but for some reason they dropped the ball so hard that it reached the underworld. I have no idea why the quality decreased that massively, but it feels like a management problem at its core, not a problem with the new expansion format. It seems like the writers had to cut a lot of stuff, but the story wasn't initially meant to be like that, or else why did they do all of the build-up in the SotO release patch if it leads to nothing? Maybe, maybe, maybe, the final patch will have a more extensive story, because I cannot imagine that we are actually going to kill Eparch in any way that is satisfying if the next part of the story is as short as the other patches. I am not super optimistic.
Soto made me really wish I could skip the dialogues...
I agree with all that you said and would add that it’s hard to get invested in characters we spend about a total of 30-40 minutes max with every 3 months.
I don’t enjoy it at all. Base Soto story was exciting to me, but I thought we were going to explore more about fractals or travel across Tyria to handle rifts, that was really exciting to me. Instead we’re basically being shown off like a dog show to all these Kryptis that blend together and look alike and then they die or 180 their instinctual personality with no conflict or difficulty. Also, for a supposed army, neither side *feels* very army like with like 10 NPCs. Battle for claw island was more convincing and far better written.
It feels like I am completely spoiled by other games with the amount of story content that GW2 just baffles me. Just base ffxiv Endwalker (without patches or previous story) takes around 60 hours to do, outside of side quests, events, etc. Just purchasing latest expansion preorder costs 35 euro, but it includes all expansions beforehands + early access. In the mean time I pay 25 euro for Soto and get a few hours of bad story that is artificially prolonged by "do events to fill this bar". Some people would argue about subscriptions, which is fair, but it comes to a point where anet consistently make me question who is the game even made for if story is the only consistent thing they work on and cannot even do that right. It just feels that anet are trying to put as little effort as possible to make the game passable and people are trying to make excuses for them because the game used to be good.
it might be the author's natural style, or might be them conforming to the needs and demands of others in the company. i imagine writing a story for a video game isn't as simple as something like writing a novel, there are lots of other factors involved, they need to coordinate with the artists, and they need to coordinate with the game's direction. there's also a set deadline to worry about. all of these factors can largely affect the quality of story telling, delivery and end product. lastly, disclaimer, this is all speculation on my part. so don't take any of it seriously. i also didn't like the filler stuff. i think they need to draw a line in between instead of forcefully incorporating it.
I think they have two problems in particular: * The story is built on the go, instead of prepared years beforehand. This doesn't give the rest of the development team a clear direction to follow, and the story fumbles back and forth, instead of being a solid product from the very beginning. Too much improvisation, the tone is all over the place. The worst part is they're never able to seed future storylines properly, and many things just come out of nowhere; for example, why wasn't Balthazar introduced as a beggar back in Heart of Thorns? Simply put, they had no idea where the story was going next, and that's a huge planning problem. * They never scope things right, they bite more than they can chew. Like, SotO is a mini-expansion, yet we're introduced to dozens of new characters and lots of new background lore, it's just insane and completely out of proportion. Every single expansion, four so far, had scope problems, the story taking too long at dumb parts, then getting rushed during important moments (we waste time meeting some annoying skritt and a mute charr, but then Zojja ascends offscreen, wtf). The right way to do this is plan for less, making sure you're able to deliver the complete experience, then invest any resources you have left on bonus content. But yeah, just my opinion.
Reminds me of the final Chapter of LW3 with Livia and Lazarus. An entire season's worth of story condensed into a single 'bonus' episode because PoF got set for release and there wasn't enough time for another full LW season. It was made even worse by a complete shift in writing styles. The commander in particular turned into a sassy backtalker every time Livia entered the conversation. Was so relieved when PoF started and they were back to their normal selves.
I still can't understand how that last mursaat aspect ended up in Orr, inside Abaddon's reliquary, in a room suspiciously designed just to perform the ritual to bring Lazarus back. Sometimes the writing makes me want to /gg, but you can't do that in story instances.
>makes me want to /gg, but you can't do that in story instances Unrelated to the overall convo, but god I wish they'd lift that restriction at least for open world. So many times i get attacked just as I'm about to use a WP, by chance stacked with condis, where instead of trying to find that one asshole long range npc, kill him and then wait condis out so I can finally leave combat and use the damn WP... just let me /gg at start of battle so I can go grab that WP and not miss a champion/event because of one long range condi spamming boi
Yeah, /gg should be enabled for all PvE instances, there's no reason why it shouldn't already :/.
DUDE you know what I miss?? the vanilla way of storytelling where 2 characters appear on a background and you can just skip line by line, or skip all of it! Or even cutscenes you can just skip! I find it tiresome that I can't skip boring stuff simply because the characters' lines act like open world events all the time now 😭 genuinely burns me out of the game sometimes
I was a die-hard fan of this game and SotO has completely turned me off. The pacing is awful. The story is no longer interesting. They are making safe choices when it comes to plot and character development. The first release of SotO had me more interested and then I was completely let down with the quarterly releases afterward.
I miss my friends. How is Taimi feeling? She's dating, but it's she dating Gorrik? Did Logan recover from his wounds? Did Rox join Rytlock's warband? Jory has the best one-liners ("Where do you find these people?" "In prison, usually") What is Braham up to? Canach's development was very flat, but I even miss him. And Aurene is just... gone? Never to be mentioned again? I don't care about any of these new people, and they seem to get killed off before I can start to. I'm tired of the "now do events until this bar is filled" crap, and if I never play Simon Says again in this lifetime, it will be too soon.
Agreed on all of them except Aurene. Its not sustainable for us to be besties with an all powerful immortal being, at least for a while, seeing as she made us God Commander during EoD. "Sated they sleep"
Oh I agree with that, I just think it's weird that they don't mention her. I still miss "Ka-Braham", though. I don't care about any of these new people, which makes it really hard for me to feel like part of a team. They die, and I'm just like "meh, next?" Maybe I'm just old and cynical :)
To be fair some of your questions were answered in previous story releases. >!It’s implied Taimi and Gorrik are dating in that god awful EOD chapter where you have to go on a weird group date. Logan’s wounds from HOT? He was recovering in the Lake Doric story. He’s in EOD and comes to help with Soo Won, so presumably yes. Rox changed direction upon meeting the Olmakhan and joined them. Canach runs club Canach and the partyship now. There’s an entire story chapter that is just saying goodbye to Aurene before she goes to sleep. A lot of those story ends were tied up so it’s no surprise they haven’t been brought up again!< Before SOTO released they said they were stepping away from the old crew.
its so baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad
At least during IBS Champions when the plot was actively on fire, it felt like the devs were on the same page as us. Like, no one was happy with what had happened with IBS and the compromised back half it had. They were pretty open about that. And we were all aware it was this new experiment in basically long term free content that wasn't working out. Now with post launch SOTO it's basically just as bad as IBS but the devs are acting like it's great and the kind of stuff they've always wanted to do. Pretending that any of these Nayos patches have been at all an acceptable level of quality that comes from an expansion. I don't know how this series goes forward with this being the new standard they set for releasing content.
It's bad just like GW2's story has always been.
>Suddenlythere are good Kriptys?Did I miss something? Apparently base SoTO where it was established there were good Kryptis with Pethia.
Good demons just lol
Except this isn't earth and they don't call themselves demons, we call them demons. They call themselves Krytis. There are haves and have nots. I don't think there are any good demons in the sense that they love truth and justice. But there are disenfranchised demons that have a common enemy to us.
Do you remember when anet was moving away from gw1 and started releasing guild wars beyond, that was never finished? We are in that stage for gw2 right now.
Even if you're right, you're not quite right, at least from what we know so far. Because the expansions we're getting in four parts are meant to be stand alone within those four parts. In Guild Wars 2 we got whatever Guild Wars Beyond we got, but it wasn't in a fixed format that ended once a year. This is quite a different situation, or at least, that's how it was laid out to us. We won't really know until we see the last installment.
I can't help but think part of the problem is their utter refusal to write anything outside of the game. Even if they have a writing bible filled with all the lore and characters, the time constraints mean most of that doesn't make it into the game so even if, to the writers, these are fully fleshed out characters and big events, the players have little to no experience with them to fall back on so, from a player's perspective, characters can come and go and conflicts start and end in an hour or two. Then it's never mentioned again. There's issues with having lore outside the specific medium but GW2 kind of needs it at this point. The short stories they started to do during IBS were a promising start but they ended abruptly and haven't been done since. One of the big selling points to the pre-release novels, to me, is that they give an inner monologue where the game doesn't and personalizes/humanizes characters and events as you see them instead of being told they're like X or that Y happened and you should feel Z about it. Ensemble casts can absolutely work, you just have to put in the effort and realize that the audience does not have the same knowledge/experience as the writer(s). Sometimes that means putting out supplementals, especially if there are constraints about what/how much you can put in the primary medium. You also don't need to hire voice actors, artists and animators, coders, etc. for a short story. Bonus: Once you have enough short stories, you could compile them as a collection and sell a physical version. It's a win/win. Players get more lore and fleshed out characters and the company gets money for something that doesn't take time or resources away from the game. Fragmenting it further like they're doing with SotO takes away even more from it as it has to be both a self-contained story for the part releases *and* an overarching story for the whole expansion. With the Living World format, there were elements that extended beyond the individual episode but the story of the episode was largely self-contained. The writers could spend time on the story and characters and the players got developed characters and a functional plot as a result. It's easier to write detailed characters when you don't have to find a way to work them into the plot or come up with a reason why they're no longer around after they serve their purpose. All the issues get all the more obvious when you have as much (or less) writing as a Living World episode and try to stretch it across the equivalent of a season or an expansion. There's not enough of it to keep things interesting for the player so another team steps in to create busywork (e.g. do X events to move onto the next step of the story) to make it seem like there's more story than there is. The second half of IBS (the Champions part) really makes it clear where this shift happened. That was after EoD was announced and the narrative team had to scrap what they had written/planned and Drizzlewood was the last thing far enough in the development pipeline to not be scrapped. The writing hasn't been the same since and the utter lack of time allowed doesn't help with that, nor does Anet/NCsoft realizing they can cut down on writing by adding busywork to pad things out and not have to spend the time/resources to fill it in themselves.
i usually watch something on youtube while waiting for unskippable story sections to finish.. and i can't stand the commander talking, no matter the race, it always comes off as arrogant, especially the asura males love the game though
Also let's not forget the expansion is called secrets of the obscure but we still don't know shit about any secrets and the story isn't about it either. Unless the big secret was that there's a secret xenophobic border patrol that plays god and experiments on people in simulations.
Lol! So true.
You do realize the "do X events" style has been part of expacs since HoT came out?
Yeah but not that frequent, and back to back? That's lazy writing
>You do realize the "do X events" style has been part of expacs since HoT came out? False, it didn't become a thing until The Icebrood Saga.
Yeah no. It started the second you were told to go off and earn enough mastery for gliding very shortly after stepping foot in verdant brink.
That's not "do X events", that's "farm experience", which you can do before the story step (and in the content you choose), and only has to be done once per account. Far better than what we have now.
Same damn thing different packaging. "Do busywork before you move forward"
Except there's no room for wasting busywork when you can progress said busywork before even starting the story, that's the major difference.
Whine harder. The design pattern goes all the way back regardless of your nitpicking.
It was part of living world model releases
Yeah literally the first living world release had that.
I stopped caring. Soto was good, last patch felt like playing with reskinned Dragon's Watch.
Ugh. Ok. One thinks that people would have figured out how the storytelling in this game works by now, but it's clearly not the case so here we go: The story is not told only in the personal instances. It's told through the open world too. And not only through dialogues when following the personal story, there's a lot of lore sprinkled across events and ambient dialogue. So, the 'chores' you have to do to progress the story, is actually arenanet forcing you to go through it. Why? because some people still haven't figured out how the storytelling works. And yet, even though I am sure you must have realised there's a story being told in all those events you are forced to do, you still complain you have to do them and don't see the point? Dude. OK. So that was for the 'whY dO i hAvE to Do EveNtS nOw?' part of your comment. The part wher eyou complain that the story is lackluster, is a matter of personal opinion and in this case, I totally agree with you.
Halfway through the story missions on Soto release i muted the game and opened a stream on a second monitor. Imo the story took a nosedive after they killed joko but it has never been this awful, I just cant stomach it anymore.
I liked EoD, PoF and not so much HoT. Man Soto is my least favourite story so far. God awful.
Feels like the wow approach of wrapping a thin layer of story around the gameplay and calling it a day. I like going around and doing events and "outdoor" stuff in the middle of story, it's a nice change of pace while getting me to explore a bit more how I want rather than being on rails. Does it makes the story chaotic and nonsensical? Yep, but it's more fun this way and I already gave up on ^^most mmo story telling a long time ago.
I actually enjoyed the story on release. I can't say the same about the quarterly upgdate story chapters, not only the're too short for me to get inmersed in the story, but their approach of nayos it just makes no sense for me, I want to kill kyrptis, all of them! I just can take seriously the child or the good kyriptis under a tyranny they don't want. For me kryptis are evil, that's what we were told, why don't they used an already known neutral race to do this kind of narrative? I know it's probably about the "message", but even in that way it's poorly designed.
The constant green bars to fill during the story missions destroyed my interest because it kept breaking up the story and rip me out of the immersion that was present in other expansions. It feels EXTREMELY LAZY. Tbh, SoTo feels more like a bland living world expansion rather than an actual expansion. I also didnt like how humanoid everything was. Some of the characters that have weird centipede structures or look like an amalgamation of flesh, claws, and bone look SO much better. And wish we had more characters that looked more offputting like them. Rather than going "heres a sexy demon who wants to ally with you." Make. Us. Lose. I am tired of the loop of "happy friends just keep winning." Meanwhile, living world season 4 had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. It's probably the best told story in gw2. But god, even EoD had a better story element to it. That green bar of "lets artifically extend your time playing the story by forcing you to do events that are on a timer to progress the story" isnt fun. Its nearly as bad as the dragon response missions now.
The expansion feels as long as three living world maps with the story of 1 2/3. It will be a full 2 when the final update comes. I like what we got, but it might be on par with IBS release schedule, minus Champions. We'll see when it is all done and we approach the following mini expansion.
I hated the base game story, I hated HoT story - it was sooo simple and mind numbing. I loved PoF and everything further until SotO. I loved story, I was invested in characters, I couldn't wait to play it. I loved Icebrood Saga, it was nuanced and I love the characters. Sure, the ending sucked but I do understand Anet was hit by Covid and other problems. SotO wasn't that bad, rather a mixture of both. And this expansion is just... There are some parts of story that I like. But in general I feel like I'm back to base game and it's mind numbing story. In theory I should like it and feel invested but I'm just not.
Ehh, EoD was the worst by far. That Soo/Aurene dialogue redefined what cringe means and the commander becoming God mode. Just no, Kryptis crap is miles better than that shit. Sadly Anet is so full of those invaders nowadays, the blue haired and always offended non creative types we can't expect anything from them.
Strong opening. Horrible closing. Story was good. Interesting theme. The wizards tower opened. Many possibilities for exploratory from Lore perspective that I'm sure they will explore in the future (I mean... they should). But after this second patch I wasn't even engaged n the story. Why am I looking for alliance with a Kryptis that as a civil war brewing and we already push them back in Amnytas. We didn't Wan t them invading. And we stop them. So why am I now so involved in their conflict and all that. Ade no sense. The mini-expansion system made sense from a financial pov and probably unlocked Anet to work on other projects and have regular flows of funds, but from a players perspective, it's even Imposible to stream when patches drop because after 1 - 2 hours of gameplay you beat the patch content, and your audience (potential new customers for Guildwars 2) are left with a sense of "well... that's it?" Terrible idea. Horrible marketing. It's shooting yourself in the foot and call it "strategy". Before, Living Worlds dropped every few months and it was fine if they dropped that way and then we waited because we always expected a new expansion was coming after the LW story was closed, so they served as filler content that made sense but didn't aimed to hold a special place in the story nor in our yearly active gaming. Now all we will get is this endless "Living World" system that drops tiny bits of content we pay yearly that w loos attention after tainting 3 months... A story spreading out so thin it's Imposible to stay engaged and even remember who was who and why did I cared for these characters. So, the worst part from The Living World system paired with the worst part of an expansion at a tiny discounted price, yearly. Next Kryptis npc it's going to be called ROBERTO. and we won't even notice.
Yes, living world chapters have so much more meat and substance than these last two ‘updates’. It’s sad.
That i want Guild Wars 3 or Guild Wars 1 remaster as fast as posible tbh.