The Past Is A Different Country: GW2

Ravious has a very positive post up about the latest Living Story installment, Seeds of Nightmare. I'm not quite as impressed as all that but I liked it too. Well, what there was of it.

Adrian observed in the comments yesterday " It was shorter than the last one and not a whole lot happens." That about does it. I would guess there's maybe 10-15 minutes of dialog and cut scenes. There is a lot of really quite intriguing back-story and lore but the main storyline comes to a dead stop.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that after completing the entire episode I have no more idea why Caithe took Glint's egg, where she went with it or what she might be about to do next than I had two weeks ago, when she ran off with the dam' thing in the first place. I do, however, know a lot more than I did about the Sylvari in general and several of that race's featured players in particular. If I was asked to sum up what I now know I think something along the lines of "they're a race of sociopaths" would probably cover it.

Take my word for it - you don't want to. Not this lot.

Of course, that description fits the Asura pretty tightly too. It's hard to say which sequence in the current chapter is the more unpleasant - the Inquest and their vivisection lab for sentient races or the Sylvari runaway-slave-recovery/ethnic cleansing squad. Either would sit a lot more happily against the relentless grimdark of The Secret World than the watercolor wash and neon rainbow backdrop of Tyria.

Safe to say there aren't a lot of laughs in this episode. The only one of either Destiny's Edge or the Biconics to make an appearance is Marjory and she's never a barrel of laughs at the best of times. Even less so now she's carrying her dead sister in the form of a six-foot sword and brooding on fantasies of revenge.

She and your character visit The Pale Tree, who is not best pleased when she learns you let Caithe get away with the egg. She's positively snappy in fact. She reminded me of a mother who just found out her son "forgot" to deliver a note from school. I never trusted her anyway and not one thing I have heard her say thus far gives me any reason to change my mind.

Pwincess! Come back from the edge!

After that it's the usual traipsing about to find this or that location, before entering an instance, where you have some fights. The McGuffin this time around is a handful of Memory Seeds that let you relive significant events in Caithe's past, the idea being that you might thereby get some handle on her future, viz and to wit where she went with the egg. Well I can't say that worked for me. Don't have a clue.

The traveling is done as yourself with Marjory tagging along. There's a nice new widget that uses a "...warm, warmer, now you're getting cold..." routine to locate the exact spot and then it's into Caithe's memories you go. Marjory stays outside, presumably guarding your inert body, while you get to spin and leap about in the form of Caithe.

Caithe is a thief. I have a level 80 Thief but I rarely play her. Leveling up I pretty much used the bow and spammed Heartseeker and that was it. Shadow Refuge if that didn't work. Whether Caithe's skills bear any resemblance to a player-thief's I can't say, partly out of ignorance and partly because I didn't bother to examine them. I followed the tried and tested method of spamming everything all the time whenever it wasn't on cooldown, dodge included.

Look, I've told you once. You'll be going in the bag if this carries on.

This had me throwing myself around like Batroc ze Leaper on amphetamines but it seemed to get the job done. I died once, thereby discovering Caithe has no downed state and the health of her enemies resets so I made sure not to die again, which wasn't difficult. Normally I'd say I'd rather play my own character but frankly anything that gets these obligatory fight sequences over faster is worth a try.

There's a bug in the Inquest Lab section where Caithe can get stuck in perma-stealth, meaning she can't fight or interact with objects - game over, start the instance again in other words. That happened to me but luckily Faolain was already in combat so I just sat back and watched while she cleared the room. She's unkillable but she has the DPS of an elderly armadillo so it took a while.

Oh yes, Faolain. Wherever you go in Caithe's head Faolain is sure to be there. She's Caithe's quondam lover and current leader of The Nightmare Court, a bunch of bona fide, full-on psychopaths who broke away from The Pale Tree a couple of decades ago so they could be free to act like emo teenagers. And kill people. Most of this chapter is effectively their origin story.

Canach shows his softer side. I think he's over that now.

It's also Canach's origin story and Trahearne's origin story. It's like a Secret Origins Annual! They come out of things about the opposite of what I'd have guessed. Trahearne acts like a stubborn, bigoted ass while Canach is empathic and sympathetic. I wondered if someone swapped a Post-It on someone else's desk back in the writers' room. Can't deny I found it intriguing though.

On it goes like that. Lore, backstory, characterization, no plot progression. Having riled up The Fans throughout Season One by seemingly turning their faces against anything that happened in Tyria prior to 2012 Earth Time, the writers appear to have done a one-eighty and decided the past is where it's at. Or The Fans are where the money comes from and long-term future of the game, if it's going to have one, has to be curated to their satisfaction. Both, probably.

I played a bit of Guild Wars. Origins around launch, Eye of The North and Origins again much later, when I was warming up for GW2. A smattering of the rest - I own all the expansions. I am no kind of GW lore buff though. About all I know of Abaddon or The White Mantle are the names. Consequently I am beginning to feel slightly at sea. I have to wonder how appealing this stuff is to the GW2 players who only know GW2.

Pwincess! Pwincess! I'm sorry I yelled at you. Oh, where did she go?

I imagine that's the demographic that wasn't quite so gosh-wow over the books in the Durmand Priory Library; the players who'd quite like the story to be more about the big dragon we're fighting now and less about things that happened twenty years ago. There are rumblings of dissatisfaction on the forum to this effect although that proves nothing. Rumblings of dissatisfaction is the forum.

It'll all lead somewhere. Most probably to an expansion in the Spring or early Summer. All will no doubt be forgiven and forgotten then. Meanwhile we'll take our story in drip-feed form and like it. It's not like we have a choice.

What's more, the story formed only the most minor part of this update. There was a big revamp of the PvP game, a small addition to the overland map and a humungous new jumping puzzle. To no-one's surprise more than my own it's the jumping puzzle that looks like being the highlight. It may well be getting its own post here, when I have time to explore it further. I spent a very enjoyable hour there today, mostly taking screenshots of my Charr Ranger in heroic poses (see above).

Charr ranger is categorically the worst class/race combo for jumping puzzles so next time I'll be taking an Asura. That'll mean a lot of screenshots looking up. As for that story about a big dragon...next year for that I guess. Hope he's the patient type of dragon.