Cyberpunk 2077: Multiple Solution Side Gigs

60 hours in Cyberpunk 2077 and counting.

Probably 10x that many crashes, but eh, DirectX12 game on Windows 7, that it even runs at all is pretty nice, so you don’t see me complaining. Much.

(I sit around and stare at local computer parts shop catalogues and keep sighing at the current price of the RTX 3070s and 3080s. Low supply, high demand = not paying for that yet.)

My one compromise is that I’ve stripped ARK from the SSD and moved the entirety of Cyberpunk off the HDD and onto the SSD instead. Load times are considerably improved, so at least it’s quicker to get back in once the inevitable crash happens.

Appreciation of the game in many ways reminds me of Guild Wars 2’s open world.

A lot of straightforward nose-to-the-grindstone follow-the-mission-quest-text-markers-and-objectives game players are likely to miss a ton of the subtlety baked into much of Cyberpunk 2077.

It is always possible to speed through the game as a berserk maniac committing mass genocide every step of the way. It is, dare I say it, even rather fun to consider in a power fantasy kind of way and one or two of my future playthroughs might go the corporate guns-blazing Rambo route (I’m sure some corpos think nothing of the poor anyway) or a blunt-weapon berserker just smashing things into non-existence.

But, much like Guild Wars 2, the game is even more rewarding for players who take the world seriously, read all the lore bits, give space for NPCs to do their thing or poke around in unmarked and unlabeled corners just to see what’s there.

Pretty much every encounter, even the side jobs and gigs from fixers, are all hand-crafted and contain their own unique stories. Many, through their level design, will allow for multiple solutions, based on your characters’ skills and your own player ingenuity.

Take for example, this small side gig: Fixer, Merc, Soldier Spy.

(Minor spoilers for this side quest follow, but chances are, you’re unlikely to do it the exact same way I did it.)

Your local Fixer, Regina Jones (she of the incessantly calling, relatively good-hearted fame) needs your mercenary V to do a bit of thievery. Stealing a datashard from the Russians, and preferably doing it so quietly that no one even knows it’s gone.

Strolling casually by the hotel in question, I can see the telltale gleam of a camera over the counter.

Me being the paranoid, sneaky sort, I push myself up against the glass to look in, and see a receptionist at the counter, and two Russian bodyguards watching TV in the hotel lobby.

I scan the area with my Kiroshi optics cyberware and tag all of them, their red outlines showing up like a wall hack. Then I hack into the camera, and use that camera to look around and check for other cameras or other potential threats. Once done, I send the camera another remote signal to turn itself off. All from the outside of the hotel with no one the wiser.

I circle much of the perimeter of the hotel, looking for alternate entries and ways in. I attempt hopping and climbing the fire escape, and leapfrogging from neighboring buildings with my double jump cyberware. (Unfortunately, this particular hotel is quite impregnable to such casual reconnaissance – I didn’t do -that- much serious building climbing though – for all I know, it’s possible to find an accessible building and hop in that way.)

Temporarily giving up that option, I save the game and stroll in to see how the receptionist reacts.

He’s on the phone for a brief period of time. The guards watching TV, thankfully, don’t react at this point. There’s a shiny elevator access pass sitting on the counter. If you grab it at this point though, they will all turn hostile and begin shooting at you (because, after all, that’s suspicious as f–k.)

There are a number of different conversation options once he gets off the phone and attends to you, “the customer.”

You can get a hotel room to gain elevator access. It’ll cost you $4500 to do so. (Yeesh, I don’t think my Fixer is going to pay that much for the job; it’s unlikely I’ll recoup -that- expense.)

If I was a little bit more intelligent than I was (4/5), I could conceivably distract him. I’m guessing that would let me swipe the access card once he was distracted.

My Streetkid background lets me pretend to have a delivery for the Russian VIP.

What kind of delivery? Illicit goods perhaps, or illicit good (singular).

Either way, the receptionist offers up some tricky resistance. He’ll try to call up the VIP to see if he’s expecting anything or anyone. If you stay silent, the VIP will pretty much give him a earful over the phone and you get rejected. So much for social engineering.

Or you can interrupt his call and say it’s a special surprise for him… in which case, the damnable receptionist wants a bribe for turning a blind eye to this. A $1100 bribe. Cheaper than the hotel room, but sheesh.

Yeah, you know what, I’m a gonna go with the first option.

I mean, there’s a reason why my current first playthrough character is so gosh darned stupid. I had decided to pump stats into Body (melee, athletics, strength stuff), Reflexes (ranged, guns, dexterity stuff) and Cool (stealth, resilience, composure, sneaky stuff) and save the intelligence and technical know-how for another smarty pants netrunner playthrough.

Basically, a female cybernetic Agent 47.

Convinced there was another way around this (I refuse to be ripped off), I tested the limits of my sneakiness and tried to skirt around the receptionist as far as possible, into the elevator hall.

The Russian bodyguards remained completely oblivious. (The VIP should really fire those guys.)

Turns out, it was very possible to, and the receptionist didn’t bother raising any alarm. When I hit the elevator, I figured out why. Because the elevator requires the access card. (Dang it.)

There is a side door off the elevator lobby though. It leads to a back room behind the receptionist’s counter. In it, is a spare elevator access card.

(I know this, because in one of my scouting attempts before reloading a save, I just broke out my mantis blades, hopped the counter, turning everyone hostile, and just went cyber-berserk on them all while opening the door behind the receptionist to see where it went. I was hoping for an actual access point from the outside. No such luck.)

Unfortunately, opening this particular side door requires a level of Technical skill that I, once again, do NOT have because I’m busy pretending to be Agent 47 in 2077.

Grrrrr…

… what would Agent 47 do? (in a game that unfortunately does not allow disguising oneself.)

I attempted a bunch of “Distract Enemy” quickhacks on the electronics around the receptionist, but unfortunately, a lot of them weren’t connected to any system, and he refused to take the bait even when I hit “Distract Enemy” on the computer directly in front of his face.

Then I said, to heck with it, the Russian bodyguards look really oblivious anyway.

I triggered the “Reboot Optics” quickhack on the receptionist. This blinds them, preventing them from sounding an alarm for the critical few seconds it took me to sneak up behind that arrogant ass, press F to grab him, and be offered a Kill or Non-Lethal finisher.

Because I am a nice person *ahem* (just stingy), I non-lethally knocked him out and then yoinked his body into the back room with the two TV addicts none the wiser.

Let this be a lesson to people who think they can get some cash off Agent 47.

He actually has an elevator access card on him, so you can take it off his body, or from the table in the backroom. The backroom has a computer terminal where one can fiddle with the cameras, as well as read some background lore on this comatose gentleman (an email exchange where you learn he’s pretty open to shady dealings, hence the request for a bribe, I suppose.)

Getting up the elevator is not the end of the story though.

One side of the hallway leads to a bunch of inaccessible doors and a cleaner who doesn’t really give a f–k.

The end of the hallway leads to a glass door and a balcony just one floor below the penthouse, and a climbing route with some convenient ivy-covered railings that lets you access the first floor of the penthouse – almost directly under the noses of two Russians having an interesting conversation – one is the VIP, the other seems to be a female corporate businesswoman.

You can pretty much sit and listen to their entire conversation for more lore. Except there’s cameras that may detect you, and the first floor of the penthouse is full of floor-to-ceiling glass so one has to skip really fast between parts of the wall that obscure the NPCs’ view. The Russian VIP will also walk out from time to time for a smoke on the balcony, conveniently separating them for sneaking past or even a sneak assassination (if one was so inclined, one presumes, though that -might- just trigger alarms.)

OR one could take a right turn in the same hallway and walk through a stairwell. (If one has the technical ability, there’s a door in the stairwell that leads into the penthouse also.)

There’s also roof access from said stairwell. With a convenient forklift.

The lowered forklift provides a really convenient platform for checking out the penthouse at a distance, including taking control of the surveillance cameras and looking through the cameras’ eyes and basically, getting it turned off before even strolling over to said penthouse.

You can even see me crouched on the forklift through the camera’s eye view!

Then if you activate the forklift, it helpfully raises you up to the second floor of the penthouse, where you can also find a convenient doorway of ingress.

You can prowl through the whole second floor, more or less undisturbed while the two NPCs are conversing downstairs, and look through *unfortunately* red herring shards that aren’t the datashard you need, and a computer terminal with access to the camera network and emails about how the Russians had set up their own personal VPN and camera system for security.

(If you talked to the receptionist, he mentions how the hotel cameras on the Russians’ floor have been all turned off, so you could be lulled into a fake sense of security if you trusted him. But eh, who trusts such a greedy bastard anyway, right?)

Eventually, you figure out that the shard you need is directly on the first penthouse floor, pretty much next to those two Russians.

Me, I eventually took advantage of their time of separation (smoke break and bar break) to dance through the shadows of pillars like a cybernetic ghost, keeping out of view of both of them, snatch the datashard and then duck down behind a counter and snuck out the penthouse door when they weren’t looking.

I had to use the Body stat to force open a door to get back to the elevator hallway (no problems there) and I casually strolled past the two TV watchers and the missing receptionist (serves him right, still) and left the hotel environs, no one the wiser.

Your Fixer calls then, and you can have a conversation with her about this not being her typical bleeding heart jobs (turns out, even she has favors to pay off and people with a hold over her).

You still have to drop the datashard off with the client, who is waiting some distance away in a car. Turns out, they’re the Chinese. Corp vs corp, and your merc is just a small bit player in a much larger affair.

They take the shard off you, have a short convo between themselves and drive off. Fixer calls you, relieved it’s over, and pays you. If you did it quietly, you get a bonus.

All that, for just one side gig.

That is -lavish- amounts of loving detail. Which presumably, many people are completely missing, if they don’t even bother to do this side gig.

Or if they just walked in, screwed it up and decided to charge around guns blazing.

But mind you, that’s also a different can of fun. I re-loaded a game save to just try it out, for the purposes of this blog post.

Triggering the alarm will send a carful of Russians pulling up outside the hotel to provide reinforcements. The female Russian businesswoman with the VIP turns out to be a cyber’ed up bodyguard. She’ll pull out mantis blades and charge you, while ordering the VIP to hide.

She and I went at each other, me pulling out MY own thermal mantis blades, like the world’s most insane catfight gone horribly wrong with cyberpsychosis.

(I’m a little outleveled for this area by this point in the game, so I won quite handily.)

Her body contains another lore shard – which presumably you can only read if you put her on the ground somehow – lethally or non-lethally. (Much of the game contains these sort of details, a little bit of humanising of the NPCs you may have carved up or riddled with bullets thoughtlessly while fulfilling quest objectives.)

Are we all monsters then? Ah, that’s the beauty of dystopian Cyberpunk.

After taking out all resistance, you can stroll past the Russian VIP cowering behind a sofa (whom you can choose to leave alive or put out of his misery, with no consequences except questions for your own morality) and pick up the datashard.

Then calmly walk out of the hotel with carnage in your wake, call your Fixer and pass it on to the Chinese. Whatever works. You don’t get a bonus, but eh, not that it really matters. Whatever floats your boat. Or the character you were role-playing (your V could hate corpos after all, or just be a complete psychopath.)

One side quest.

The whole city is dotted with such opportunities. Small cyberpunk stories. Mini-bites and quick looks at various characters trying to make a living in Night City.

(Many of them failing the “living” part once your V hurricane crosses paths with them. Unless, of course, you choose differently and exercise non-lethal options.

Does it matter? Not in the sense that there is some kind of moralistic Paragon/Renegade counter judging your every move and enacting a final ending consequence. Cyberpunk has never been about that kind of black-and-white Mass Effect morality. It is not kind enough to tell you straight off and label Option 1: Good, Option 2: Evil, pick one to see that story path play out.)

Cyberpunk is shades of grey. It is about the journey as well, and not solely the destination. It’s not as mean as the Witcher in that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But it is about trust and betrayal – who you choose to put trust in, who you choose to be honest with – some of whom will reward it and some of whom will stab you in the back.

It is about friendship and human relations, honesty and corruption, wealth and poverty, living safely or dying gloriously, freedom and control, retro and future, and all those beautiful and bitter juxtapositions that is the sum of human existence.

And that’s what makes Cyberpunk 2077 such a pleasure to play. 60 hours and counting. And no signs of stopping.

Yes, even through 600 “Gpu Crash for unknown reasons! Callstack here is probably irrelevant. Check if Breadcrumbs or Aftermath logged anything useful” crash errors. *sighs*

Path of Exile: Designed to Be Played Forever

Watched Chris Wilson’s GDC2019 talk the other day:

A lot of eye-opening insights in here:

• the standard population decline of any online game when they first launched and how they got it to spike consistently and even grow over time through their league seasons
• a quick look at their custom tool for procedurally generating interesting map levels in really short time frames
• the importance of marketing and having enough content to market to different subsets of players to make a big enough impact to prompt returners to return
• the importance of consistency and predictability to cultivate a customerbase (or else they will look elsewhere and get distracted and then you’ve lost them.)

A couple of his points I don’t necessary agree with, or think might work for -every- game out there, but perhaps are more game and population specific:

1. The idea of investing time to design aspirational content for the 5-10%, knowing full well the majority of their customers will not reach it, but creating this content for the 5-10% to feel special because no one else can get there, and those 5-10% tending to be the more hardcore influencer types who stream and thus draw in hopefuls and additional player numbers
2. Economy resets so players can start on a fresh playing field periodically
3. Layers and layers of randomness to create interesting variability
4. Avoiding day-night cycles so that assets can be re-used
5. Designing spare assets to sit around in a warehouse/library so that they can be pulled out when there is a need
6. Avoiding pipelining releases so that people aren’t distracted working on two things at once, or tempted to avoid dealing with a tough problem in favor of something easier

Point 1 always raises my hackles. My opinion is that it works for games that start out designed that way, so they attract a playerbase that accepts that premise from the get go.

Something like Warframe apparently attempted large group raids and later removed them because apparently too few of their playerbase was interested, they seem to be doing better investing effort into content that both groups and soloists can do.

As for GW2, well, their “little” u-turn and about-face during Heart of Thorns introducing aspirational raid content lost them the better part of their initial playerbase, and attracted a newer, more competitive, and hostile sort of player in lieu. Hopefully they pay more. Else it was a really really bad strategic decision, no?

Path of Exile on the other hand is built around the idea of competition, of races, of getting to level 100 and feats of getting somewhere “first” broadcast to all and sundry. It has a hardcore permadeath league mechanic for the challenge seekers. So yes, logically aspiration works for a primarily competitive, challenge-seeking, numbers-crunching playerbase that can deal with that PoE skill tree. Somehow, I don’t think playing PoE to “relax” is a majority motivation here.

The solo self-found playstyle was more of an underground subset of players who chose to remove themselves from this competitive economy and create their own fun – it’s only recently they gave a nod towards it by delineating a separate group to declare oneself that way. The stated rationale is for bragging rights, and they are very careful to assure players that you can jump back into the economy any time you want; separately I suppose it is also a way for them to keep tabs on just how large or small this hermit-like player subset is. (SSF all the way, huzzah. Fuck yo’ aspirational content.)

In theory, I really like the idea of Point 2. I was first introduced to the broad principles of resetting in MUDs that had something called ‘remort.’ You reach max level (ie. near immortality), then you ‘remort’ (become mortal once again) to level 1 and get to level up again, but with some bonuses for choosing to reset yourself that way.

For some games, this works and comes as part of the game. Kingdom of Loathing is a browser based game that uses the remort mechanic. A Tale in the Desert has an extended long reset with new Tellings. There’s that One Hour, One Life game I never tried, but the reset concept is right there in its title. You can choose to reset almost every single piece of gear in Warframe with forma and level it up again so you can cram in more and better mods to make it even stronger.

For other games, I don’t know if their playerbase would recoil in garlicky vampiric horror at the concept of being set back to square one and starting anew. I understand that World of Warcraft tries to reset gear every expansion – from an outsider’s POV, it seems to be a 50/50 mix of acceptance and frustration among its populace. GW2 resets WvW in varied intervals and it seems most players have gotten numb to the resets over time, as winning means very little. Still other games are all about the collection and character/account progress, and I doubt those players would be happy with a reset – does Monster Hunter World or Final Fantasy 14 reset anything?

Point 3 I also like on a personal level, it’s a very roguelike foundational concept, and I love me a whole bunch of roguelikes that can offer me procedurally generated layouts that allows me to have a different and strategically interesting time each playthrough. Playing through City of Heroes near identical and unvarying tilesets and fixed predictable spawn size for 4 years will do that to you.

But not every game can be a roguelike/sandbox type of game where the player is expected to react with the resources available and create their own story. Some games are more linear, more dev-created story-oriented, and handcrafted, hand-placed content still has that level of uniqueness that can break the pattern recognition of players reacting to procedurally generated stuff. It’s just that handcrafted stuff takes a lot longer time to create.

Some games do try to mix the best of both worlds. Don’t Starve has handcrafted set pieces mixed in with procedural generation, and a bunch of Minecraft mods also do the same thing, sprinkling in handcrafted stand-out pieces and allowing the general landscape to be procedurally generated.

Which I suppose point 3 also covers, this idea of mixing and overlaying random stuff atop of random stuff, so that it is harder for players to discern predictable patterns.

Point 4-6 sound very much studio-specific and game-specific decisions, so I won’t comment there.

Still, it is interesting to learn what he feels works well for Path of Exile.

And I really want to sit in on a three hour talk to hear what he thinks about loot and itemization.

LFG: I Want to Talk / Silence is OK

Random thought inspired by a discussion about an LFG tool in an MMO I don’t even play:

What if our LFG finders had two radio buttons with the options

• Prefer talking
• Prefer silence

Would both see equal use? Or at least sufficient people opting for either option that both would be functional?

Would the social be able to find similarly oriented people and have great conversations as they do the group content, or would it just be full of too many chatterers and not enough listeners?

Would the group content of the talkers slow down because they’re spending additional time conversing, or would it conversely speed up because they’re actually communicating strategies and getting everyone on the same page faster?

Would the silent group gather a disproportionate number of ‘lazy’ players who can’t be arsed talking and would they gel naturally without words into a model of speedrun efficiency or devolve into an uncoordinated uncommunicative mess?

Quote of the Day

Zubon has a post up on Overwatch matchmaking, which seems to be nearly a carbon copy of GW2 matchmaking issues, from my “limited grasp on the finer issues of PvP” perspective.

I enjoyed the link he provided to Jeff Kaplan’s forum post about Overwatch matchmaking – it’s a good read – and this particular part really tickled me:

For better or for worse, we focused the design of the game on winning or losing as a team. OW is not a game where you ignore the map objectives and then look at your K/D ratio to determine how good you are. We want you to focus on winning or losing and as a result you do focus on winning or losing. We tried to make it so that losing isn’t the end of the world, but to a lot of people they expect to win far much more than they lose. I sometimes wonder if we were able to clone you 11 times and then put you in a match with and against yourself, would you be happy with the outcome? Even if you lost?

I -immediately- knew what would happen if I could clone myself 9 times and put myself in a GW2 sPvP match with and against myself.

First, there would be a little charr and asura conga line / dance-off in the centre of the arena during which a lot of *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* would be exchanged.

Then there would be a frenzy of AP whoring during which we would take turns to die for achievements where deaths were necessary, a whole lot of class-switching and strategic win-trading.

Finally, we would all get banned for match-fixing and collusion.

But we would be laughing ourselves all the way to the bank and congratulating each other on not having a competitive bone in our bodies and what a hilarious time that was.

Yep, sounds about right.

(Well, ok, there might be one or two strategic “let’s play a real match for fun, and also mostly to throw off any data-sniffing algorithms” and the odd “yo, let’s collect some hard data on how much damage one class does to another using X and Y skills” experiments sprinkled in there too.)

See Keen’s post “I’m Not Competitive” for more on different peoples’ take on competition.

Low-Energy, Easy Fun

Apparently, Halvorson’s latest book “Focus” was not as objective as her prior summary, skewing more heavily towards the advantages of being promotion-focused. So I haven’t bothered to read it yet, preferring to use the ideas in the summary as more of a springboard for my own thoughts.

(Fortunately, I’m not a career psychologist, so I don’t have to substantiate my hypotheses with research and evidence, and can just play around with thought experiments and musings for fun.)

I find myself drawn to the portion on “energy.” To recap:

When your goal is an achievement, a gain, you feel happy—joyful, cheerful, excited, or, in the vernacular of a typical teenager, totally stoked. It’s a high-energy kind of good feeling to reach a promotion goal.

It’s a very different kind of good to reach a prevention goal. When you are trying to be safe and secure, to avoid losing something, and you succeed, you feel relaxed—calm, at ease, peaceful. You breathe the sweet sigh of relief. This is a much more low-energy kind of good feeling, but not any less rewarding.

…

When you are going for gain, trying to accomplish something important to you, and you fail, you tend to feel sadness—dejected, depressed, despondent. As a teen might put it, totally bummed. It’s the low-energy kind of bad feeling—the kind that makes you want to lay on the couch all day with a bag of chips.

But failing to reach a prevention goal means danger, so in response you feel the high-energy kinds of bad feeling—anxiety, panic, nervousness, and fear. You freak out. Both kinds of feelings are awful, but very differently so.

I wonder if it might not help to explain why some gamers prefer more sedate types of gameplay – be it grinding for progress slowly, or a strategic challenge, or slower overall pacing.

In other words, we’re seeking the low-energy kinds of good feelings. We want to relax, be comfortable and content, be relieved, feel peace.

(Whether this has any correlation with being prevention-focused on a particular goal, or introversion-favoring, I’ll leave it to others to figure out and do the research.)

We -hate- being overstimulated by high energy feelings, especially when they tend to be the bad kind – aka being a fearful, anxious, nervous wreck, and are liable to either run away from the situation (avoiding/escape/flight) or take constructive steps to address said situation producing the bad feelings until the situation or feelings go away. (fight?)

The spot of good news, as mentioned previously, is that one has the high-energy motivation to take action and do either of those.

Other gamers, by contrast, probably loathe the low-energy bad feelings. They feel down, depressed, de-energized, bored. They’re liable to quit if they have *horror of horrors* “nothing to do.”

They’re looking for gameplay that excites them, gives them high-energy good feelings.

Hence the litany of constant demands for moar adrenaline-pumping “hardcore challenges” where they can earn deserved rewards, racking up one gain after another, addicted to the euphoria of achievement.

(I dunno. Sounds a bit like extraversion to me.)

It’s not easy as a game designer if you have to keep both camps happy, huh?

I don’t think they’re necessarily diametrically opposed, though. The perceived level of challenge is likely to prompt different energy levels of feelings.

The trick is, how do you get those looking for low-energy easy-fun to “be better” than those looking for high-energy hard-fun, so that they can look at the same mob and the former feels “okay, I can do this, easy peasy, no sweat, I’m having fun” and the latter feels “wow, this is so hard, this is so fun!”

The nature of practice being what it is, the adrenaline junkies are liable to be more practiced and experienced than the chill hipsters… so you tend to end up in an escalating situation of the former demanding more hits, while the latter stresses right out.

(Hrm, creative suggestions / solutions welcome.)

Anyway, I find myself having a blast in the new Bloodstone Fen map.

That is, low-energy definitions of a “blast.”

I trundle around, gliding and bouncing here and there and everywhere (bonus points for recognizing the phrase), collecting and harvesting all the things.

Every so often, an orange dynamic event comes up and I evaluate, “is this node more interesting or is that event more attractive?”

(Usually, the node wins, for the ten seconds it takes to harvest, and then I’m running over to spam 1 and dodge orange circles until the bouncy reward chests pop up.)

Rinse and repeat.

It’s a nice compact map, with high frequency of orange dynamic events, many doable solo or in small loosely assembling groups, and that seem to be less linearly linked to pushing some overall map wide meta.

Every now and then, a big “world boss” type of event triggers, and then folks are drawn in to a centralized location, naturally congregating into a big zerg to defeat it.

Feels good. Feels like a bit more like Core Tyria (with less NPC settlements or friendly NPC interaction.)

I am greatly reminded of my relationship with City of Heroes’ Incarnate Trials and Dark Astoria zone.

That is, I was deeply uncomfortable with Incarnate Trials (to the point where I canceled my subscription, not being as motivated in CoH as in GW2 to play the raids – my ego is a lot more vested in accomplishments in GW2, whereas I was already getting bored with CoH and not at all tempted by gear-improvement rewards) and only re-subbed and tried out the Trials when Dark Astoria came into the picture.

Dark Astoria was the alternative, the philosophical recognition that people who enjoyed solo content should also have a means to earn Incarnate shards and achieve Incarnate levels of power, albeit at a slower rate than those who played the trials in a group setting.

Now, of course, if you -wanted- to speed up your rate of shard earning and could put up with a raid group, then yeah, go ahead and raid. It becomes an option, not a necessity.

We’re not quite 100% there yet with Bloodstone Fen.

The big thing GW2 is still missing is an alternative means for Legendary Armor.

Given that a normal set of armor apparently takes them 8 months to make (ie. Legendary Armor takes even longer) and that this batch of experimental Envoy armor seems to be inextricably linked to PvE raid progress (and a bit of PvP and WvW) and is still far far away in its arrival, it’s little wonder that they’re keeping very very quiet about any possibility of a second set of Legendary Armor, gained by some other means.

Maybe if we’re lucky, ArenaNet will come up with an elegant solution involving build templates and resolving the rune/sigil problem, and nip the issue of extra functionality with a set of purple-named armor and then the whole lack of an alternative will be moot.

(Raiders having prestige cosmetics is okay, bonus functionality is not okay. To me, anyway. Philosophically. Ideally. Speaking from a better part of me.

In practice, if we wanna be pragmatic about things, up yours. I’m on the side with the shinies. Don’t we love Chinese pragmatism? Embrace the Dark Side, baby.)

But I digress.

Bloodstone Fen is a step in the right direction, a step that was missing and ought to have been there as the raids came into the GW2 picture.

(Too bad the raid team works so damn fast, as compared to the rest. Or so damn slow, if both Bloodstone Fen and the raid wings were -meant- to arrive during HoT launch. If only Anet had slightly better scheduling/project management…

On the other hand, Bloodstone Fen looks like it was cobbled together using a ton of re-used assets and specifically addresses a number of reaction feedback from HoT, so it does also look like a mad iterative stopgap scramble to band-aid fix some issues. All those elder wood nodes and leather/cloth salvage reward drops are no accident, for example.)

It generally functions as the soloer’s alternative, just as Dark Astoria did.

There is stuff to do. Stuff to earn. Aerial combat skills being one of them, and apparently there are now means to get HoT stats that were previously only found in raids (big philosophical no-no, there) in Bloodstone Fen.

It helps the soloer understand the White Mantle storyline, that was previously only being told in raids.

It puts easy-ish world bosses that utilize raid-like mechanics -just less punishing ones- into the open world, so that players have the safety of a zerg (aka people around to rez them) and uses it to introduce/scaffold raid-necessary concepts – like the use of the new special action key, break bars, dodging orange circles, running to specific defined locations aka non-orange circles to achieve some objective, etc.

(It’s a start. Then certain buffed up fractals take over the teaching, by ramping up the necessity for increased group coordination and communication and personal movement/dodging ability. More on fractals in another post later.)

Bloodstone Fen gives me my “easy fun” back.

And I’m happy about that.

In a totally chill, relaxed kind of way.