GW2: Coda

This time, Ravious and Bhagpuss have beat me to it with their thoughts on the Living Story’s end. (For Season 1, that is.)

As much as I’ve been wanting to say something about the story since the Escape turned into a Battle that led us to an Aftermath in the wreckage of Lion’s Arch, the truth is that I feel that there isn’t much to discuss, nor much to talk about.

That is not to say that I don’t like the story.

Since the Queen’s Jubilee, as the story writers have started to find their stride, and as the boring talking heads have metamorphed into cinematic cutscenes, discounting the odd miss here and there, on the whole…

I have been… content.

It’s an MMO. It’s never going to be fine literature.

The plot pacing improved, ever so slightly. We started to learn more crucial clues and actually understand whatever point the writers were trying to tell us, rather than get strung along with cryptic words and empty promises.

The focus on likable characters and conversational dialogue and humor has been the highlight, as far as I’m concerned, as it seems to be where our crop of GW2 writers shine the most. So it makes more sense to concentrate on that as a strong point.

I find the consequence and impact of the Living Story has been made more meaningful and lasting since the Kessex Hill and Lion’s Arch changes, though I especially appreciate the forewarning so that we can actually spend time recording and documenting how it was before and appreciate the changes better without having to rely on exceedingly faulty memories. A flashback system would be good here, and I think we’re seeing some of the beginnings of that through items or NPCs that play certain cutscenes for us.

If you read the forums and Reddit, it can oftentimes be a cesspool of negativity and criticism where the Living Story has been concerned, full of conviction that such-and-such is lore inappropriate, or that they could write the story better, or that such and such plot point or clue should have best been included so that everything makes more sense. (Sometimes, they’re even right.)

I guess, I’m finding it hard to make topics like that into a point of discussion anymore. Ultimately, it seems to boil down to opinion and preference. I like this. I don’t like that. You like something else. You hate this thing over here. The writers in charge of the story like this other thing.

We’re still going to end up with the story the writers decide they want to tell us.

At the moment, I enjoyed the quiet little interlude at the Dead End Bar, for the most part. Though some of the laughter seemed forced, we got a little conversation time with all our Living Story NPCs, developing their character slightly further, and even had a new character introduced.

I still didn’t understand the whole plot point that included Scarlet in it, especially this crazy little doozy here:

Leylines are currents? Wha? That doesn’t explain anything, just sounds like a hocus-pocus hand wave.

I kinda preferred the Reddit explanation, the drill disrupted the leylines somehow, and that alerts a jungle dragon that happens to sleeping close to one of them, nomming away at his midnight snack.

Some other people hated all the lovey-dovey talk.

Well, that’s life. You get bits you like and bits you hate. Some parts you understand, and some you don’t.

The overall theme of the hints seems to be pushing us towards Maguuma and the jungle for the next season, anyhow, what with talk of the bandits in the Brisban Wildlands (encamped so cozily in a fortress guarding an exit deeper into the wilderness), and more stuff with the sylvari (the racial prejudice after the disaster being a nice echo to the real world, I thought.)

And well, we’ll see where and how things develop from there.

I trust that ArenaNet has learned some lessons about pacing out the story from the first season, and I am generally content to see where the story takes us.

Other people whine bitterly that they want a new expansion. I sit around thinking that what they want is really a new class, a new race, a new (permanent) zone or maybe a new (persistent) story. All of those can be requested without having to have an expansion.

I dunno, maybe it’s my City of Heroes non-World of Warcraft background showing again. We got regular Issues and updates that gave us new and interesting things, whereas the expansions CoH had never seemed to do much except split the playerbase further across many zones (albeit the new archetypes and new stories were fun) and WoW expansions to me just mean an ever-increasing max level and gear tiers that everyone races to, invalidating all old content in the process.

And here we come to the crux of why I feel it’s pointless trying to turn these things into a conversation point:

All these MMOs are different games.

Different people prefer different things.

We choose MMOs that give us these different things. If people like how WoW does things, they probably have already gone back to WoW. (Or ought to, instead of trying to make all other games resemble WoW.)

It’s been 1.5 years. To me, Guild Wars 2 has already matured. I find very little need for hype or insecurity concerning how the game plays.

I don’t think we have “a large shard of sandbox in a themepark.”

For better or worse, what we have is a mutable themepark (with a veneer of sandbox in the leveling game and in the lateral progression options – which I like, mind you) that is determined to change with the passage of time.

And I’m okay with that.

I like that, actually.

I’m happy with enough freedom of choice that I don’t feel obliged to spend every logged-in hour working towards the next tier of gear, or having giant signposts telling me “HERE IS WHERE YOU GO NEXT, everything else is NOT YOUR LEVEL and NOT WORTH YOUR TIME.”

I don’t want to be playing a holy trinity game where my role boils down to TANK THIS NOW TAUNT TAUNT TAUNT -or- HEAL YOUR LIL TITTIES OUT -or- MOAR DPS. If you failed, it very well could be your stats and gear not being up to the challenge, GO GRIND MOAR to get exponentially better at the game.

I’m okay with MOAR DPS, MOAR BUFFS, DODGE YOU FOOL, MOVE CORRECTLY and even occasionally, OH MY GOD I HAVE TO ACTUALLY THINK AND READ / SWITCH MY SKILLS and USE THE CORRECT ONES TO COUNTER THE ENCOUNTER. (Though more of the latter, in a solo setting, would be preferred. GW1 background showing…)

Where GW2 is concerned, I’m happy to not be in a complete sandbox where you have to make your own story, make your own bloody house from materials piece by piece, level your skills percentage point by decimal percentage point, and then lose it all when some bugger comes over the horizon and ganks you in FFA PvP.

There are other games for that.

(Some of ’em I like – A Tale in the Desert, Don’t Starve and Minecraft all come to mind, and others that I’m not so keen on – Wurm Online, Darkfall Online, Eve Online, fer instance.)

I am perfectly okay to log in and think, “Hmm, what do I feel like doing today?”

Ok, today I’ll do some dungeons – cue the LFG tool because I lack friends who get the urge for dungeoneering at the same time I get these odd whims.

Or today I’ll do a raid – log into TTS Teamspeak and see what they’re up to.

Or today I’ll WvW – see if my guilds are running anything / log into Tarnished Coast Mumble.

Or today I’ll be a hermit and wander some of my favorite mid or high-level zones solo, hunting every mob in sight and collecting every node because I find it incredibly appealing and fun to hit these little waypoints of achievement/collection/loot get/mini-dings.

Or today I’ll experience the next part of the Living Story, or work on the accompanying achievements. Or today I’ll craft. Or play the TP in a misguided attempt to get rich.

Or today I really have to clean up my inventory and bank because stuff is a colossal mess from all the above activities.

Or all of the above.

I don’t want to -have- to be climbing an endless ladder to feel better than everyone else around me, or feel stuck on a treadmill running in place going nowhere.

Attending a carnival or an amusement park – visiting all the booths and rides at least once and then repeating my favorite mini-games (real world sidetrek: did anyone else like Skee Ball as much as I did in my youth? I’d do a pirate ship ride once, and then use up my entire stack of arcade coins hurling a tiny ball at some targets with points inscribed on ’em) until I’m done for the day or the carnival’s gone – is okay by me.

There’ll be a new carnival or another trip to the amusement park in two weeks.

If you don’t like carnivals, the WoW gym where you can compare your pectorals and how much weight you can bench is over that way.

GW2: Wait, Why Did We Want to Run Away Again?

They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our city!

O… Wait…

Dem feels.

Remind me to get a second round of screenshots sometime this week.

Already went for a quick pass because I’m a paranoid story speculator, but this about cinches it.

This just in: Beachfront property values take a nosedive…

Bout time, though. Bout time for real consequence, and hopefully, gradual reconstruction some day.

The poor lion’s days are numbered once more…

Regret: The Video Game

So am I the only one who has trouble getting through The Walking Dead?

Yes, it’s a nice narrative. Yes, I like the idea of having choices and consequences and branching result on paper.

But then I run into a choice in Episode 2 that sets the tenor and tone of things to come, and I really can’t decide on what kind of person I want Lee to be.

I could take the pragmatic gore-splattered option which I personally feel would be more realistic in a zombie apocalypse survival scenario. But the idea of holding carefully to morals in a world where few hang on to theirs is also attractive in a thematic story sense.

And so I sit, stalemated by not knowing which story I’d prefer to experience first and refuse to let the rest of the scene play out.

Next moment, I’ve quit the game and am scanning through walkthroughs, knowing very well that either choice is a perfectly valid option that actually changes -nothing- in a gameplay sense, and -everything- on a literary level.

At this rate, I’m never going to even make it to 400 days, let alone Season 2.

GW2: Tree Falls in Forest, No One Around To Hear?

If constant, gradual change happens and no one can even remember how it was before, is it still a Living Story?

One man zerg of a now-ignored dynamic event.

I’ve been taking advantage of the very subtle living story prompt to wander Kessex Hills on my necro alt.

The secondary purpose is very leisurely map exploration (since the checkpoints are there) and seeing if I get any lucky colored key drops, but primarily, I’m doing it because I like trundling along in the open world with a minion zerg going glompglompglomp, killing anything I see and denuding the place of any gathering nodes.

Given that the number of people I see doing something similar can be counted on one hand, on Tarnished Coast – reputed home of PvE crowds, I can only conclude that this activity is about as popular as street-sweeping was in City of Heroes.

Oh, the crowds are on the map, all right.

[Viathan Waypoint] [Gap Waypoint] goes my mapchat every so often.

They’re running in a little triangle between the wurm queen, the alchemist and the two possible spider queen locations. Chasing champion bags, keys and Living Story achievements.

It’s so crowded that getting the wurm queen shockwave jumping achievement is tricky because she only gets off maybe a few shockwaves before falling over dead. The best advice I got was to go guest to a less crowded server to do them.

(I went to Fergusson’s Crossing during offpeak, and was amazed to find only 3-5 souls having the run of the map and the champions. We get zergs of 15-30+ bumrushing every Nightmare is Over event – if you aren’t already waiting there, there’s not much hope of getting to it before it dies. T’was much easier to do the achievements when you have a chance of actually getting damage credit.)

But I digress.

The point is that I haven’t seen much comment on the more subtle changes to Kessex Hills that address the fallen tower’s aftermath.

Quaggan refugees are all over the various havens and outposts. This batch is the cutest, the calves rearing on their hind legs and staring in amazement at the big village and the magic snow.

The Moogooloo village waypoint was staved in by collapsing debris. Overheard conversation: Quaggans getting a relocation effort underway. The lake can no longer supply sufficient security, non-toxic food and clean drinking water.

Spillage from the collapsed tower appears to have made all the fish in the southeast outflow toxic. (Ok, so the stuff spewing from my necromancer probably isn’t helping either.)

And what of Triskell Quay, where fishermen make their living? Many villagers have been sickened by toxin, in a new revision of the heart, which was originally to rescue them from kidnapping krait, iirc.

In Kessex Haven, a fisherman tries valiantly to offload his *hem* perfectly edible catch.

Much to a sharp-nosed charr’s frustrations…

How do we interpret this lack of reaction?

Is it that the changes are so small and atmospheric that no one thinks they’re worth commenting about?

Is that the changes are so small that they’re hard to notice?

Is it simply because no one is even around to notice them because they have no reason to walk around all of the Kessex Hills again?

Or is it the vagaries of memory putting a damper on the idea that we can have constant gradual change in an MMO that will be appreciated by players?

To be honest, even I don’t remember how it was before.

Overheard: Lionguard clarifying their stance with centaurs, and distinguishing themselves from Divinity’s Reach. Was this conversation always there?

I feel like there’s more ruins exposed on this bandit hideout… but I suspect they’ve always been like that?

I can only highlight places where I think there was nothing before, but now have something.

Well, besides the honking obvious changes…

…the Consortium is busy hassling quaggan refugees while the Lionguard are wondering where on Tyria is safe to put them all… (while the idea of quaggans in tropical Southsun paradise sound great on paper, one can’t help but think we may as well grind them up and put ’em in a can labeled karka chum)

Other atmospheric conversations abound. I suppose this is why asura invented baby bottles and golem nannies very quickly, rather than suckle their young for long.

And the big question is, should the bulk of players care?

On one hand, no matter how the scenery changes, as a player, I still have a Kessex Hills to run around in. Metagame-wise, there’s always going to be mobs in my face to kill. Maybe a new dynamic event replaced an old one, or maybe the old one is still around as well. NPCs changing around me? Not part of my story, not on my attention radar.

What’s in it for me? The champions drop loot, the green names just spew endless text of one kind or another.

Inflict consequence, you say? Have players lose something for good? Something important that would hurt in its absence? Ah, then the crying starts. Wut? I never got to exploit this while the going was good! Unfair! The older players had an advantage I didn’t have!

Then again, if it wasn’t important, if it didn’t hurt, if there was something else in lieu of the other thing that went away, won’t we just run into the scenario of a big ol’ player shrug?

I frankly don’t know which way I’d want it.

Story and consequence-wise, one makes sense. Gameplay and convenience-wise, the other is a lot more attractive (and spares my bank from hoarding all kinds of stuff on the offchance it may disappear one day.)

Pretty much everyone but me camping the shit up there.

Obviously, a minority cares about the tiny details. I’m running around taking screenshots and forgoing goodness knows how many champion chest drops in an hour.

Then I hear for the umpteen time on mapchat, “Where is the tri-color chest?” and I have to wonder about the many players who can’t even bothered to look for a chest icon on their map and just demand their instant answers from the populace instead.

It’s enough to make a lore writer cry.

GW2: Shaping History With Your Vote

So, all the latest excitement both in-game in Lion’s Arch and in the Guild Wars 2 Reddit is the discussion about whether one is in #TeamGnashblade or #TeamKiel for the upcoming update of Cutthroat Politics.

Before we get partisan here, I’d just want to point out that this is an exciting development in player involvement with the Living Story. It harkens back to when one was given the choice to vote for Dwayna or Grenth in Guild Wars 1 in order to get a shiny hat, but a lot deeper.

Players get to both control the story and the direction of the game with their vote.

Players are making lasting history.

Whatever way we choose, we are giving up something in order to get something else. Choices and consequences. Meaningful decisions in gameplay.

Now for the analysis:

The hardcore in the Guild Wars 2 Reddit and the GW1 old guard appear to be all over Evon Gnashblade. The Fall of Abaddon as a fractal is a very tempting lure because it’s a link to both old GW1 lore (one of the major strengths of GW2 is being able to tie back into a long established history) and all bets are likely that it’s going to be gorgeous to have a look at Old Orr and the City of Arah before the Fall. There’s Gods and shit. How epic would that be?

As for Black Lion Keys, well, they’re a side benefit, but no one really gives a toss.

The fear of #TeamGnashblade is that Ellen Kiel may promise the ‘casuals’ and the not-interested-in-lore (the unspoken feeling is that it may in fact be a majority over those who prowl Reddit) decreased waypoint costs for a month.

How freaking tempting is that? Gold is always hard to come by and waypoint costs are a sneaky goldsink that affects everyone playing the game.

Finding out more about the Thaumanova Reactor explosion seems less appealing a fractals choice than the former as familiarity breeds contempt and a lot of people see the fire elemental in the reactor remains every day. Though again, some of the fear is that the new GW2 crowd who doesn’t appreciate the past may vote for it out of familiarity with the name. Others argue that we know a lot less about the reactor explosion, and that it may be an important crux point of recent GW2 lore, what with all the dealing with the fallout and chaotic portals and magic going awry that has been established in various zones in the game.

—

I just want to point out something that may be overlooked in all this fractals-focused excitement.

Let us not forget that this is part of the active and ongoing Living Story storyline.

We’re familiar with Ellen Kiel. She’s been established as a key ‘good guy’ type of character – a Lionguard who has worked with us since Southsun. She seems to have fairly good relations with Magnus and she now owns a frigging’ Aetherblade airship.

On the other hand, she is just a grunt out of nowhere and may not have the political acumen to last a day on the Captain’s Council. Then again, she managed to balance the pressing demands of the Consortium and still cater to refugee needs and be a good person on Southsun. She appears to be keen to work for fairness and balance, a reasonable deal between Lion’s Arch and the Zephyr Sanctum.

Evon Gnashblade seemingly comes out of nowhere, cast in the light of the greedy profiteering merchant owner of the Black Lion Trading Company and looks a little typecast as the ‘bad guy.’ Then again, most Charr look like bad guys, and you can’t really hold genetics against them, eh?

He’s an established citizen of Lion’s Arch and claims to be looking after the interests of Lion’s Arch first and foremost. He may end up doing a cutthroat deal with the Zephyr Sanctum to put LA (and/or himself and BLTC) first. He has no doubt plenty of backstabbing political experience to survive well on the Captain’s Council. And if he’s in charge of the Black Lion Trading Company and the Consortium are its competitors, that’s probably okay, right?

What are the things being left unsaid?

The most pressing question is why the hell Evon Gnashblade? Why him, just popping out of nowhere? Is he just a new unheralded NPC?

Except…

In the Molten Alliance denouement, the only thing known of the figure behind the alliance of dredge and Flame Legion charr, is that he or she came from a city and was a persuasive talker.  The dredge prisoner curses out a ““Lying, silver-tongued, snake-nosed trickster.”

At the end of the Aetherblade Retreat dungeon, Mai Trin says that someone else was also behind this, and that “Scarlet is going to have my noggin for screwing up.”

LOOK AT THE COLOR OF THE CLOTHING EVON WEARS.

You don’t fool me.

Thank you, I rest my case.

I’ll be voting for Ellen Kiel.

And if the worst happens, well, there’s a cool fractal as a consolation prize.