Size Isn't Everything: Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet have problems. The recent introduction of the much-ballyhooed "Build" system has been received extremely poorly by its target audience. The only demographic that appears to have anything pleasant to say about it are those, like me, who never had any interest in builds in the first place. And even I'm not as happy about it as I was, now I've had a chance to experience some of the drawbacks for myself.

ANet have retreated behind the barricades to think again. Not for the first time, a structural change to the game has had a destabilizing and demoralizing effect.

Never mind, though. Here comes the first full instalment of the revamped Living Story/World, rebranded this season as The Icebrood Saga. That'll take our minds off the build crisis. But wait! What's that? There it goes! Did you miss it? Well, you shouldn't have blinked, should you?

The shortness of episodes has been something of an issue for many years. The average time to complete the story part of any update in Seasons Two, Three and Four has been around four hours or so. Not impressive for a quarterly delivery.

For the longest time even that duration was padded with increasingly tedious and frustrating boss battles and an annoying insistence on adding new skills and tutorial sections for every episode. The very good news is that The Icebrood Saga, so far, has avoided those pitfalls. The less good news is that, without the time-wasting filler, "Whispers in the Dark" takes about two and a half hours to finish.

And that includes map completion of the new zone, the oddly-named Bjora Marshes. Not that map completion is required, per se. Nor are there any of the repeatable "Hearts" that formed such a significant component of releases in the last couple of Seasons, helping to spin out the storyline for an hour or so more.

There is a story requirement to participate in and complete several map events, which feels a lot more organic than the "help the locals" trope Hearts offered. The events are all at least approximately part of the storyline.

Completing those got me so close to having the whole of the map open I thought I might as well finish the job. It was easy because, in keeping with the rest of the episode, the new map has to be one of the smallest we've ever seen.

It's also another glorious tribute to the never-failing strength of ANet's art department, who also contribute some gorgeous interstitials as well as some fabulous, frost-rimed frames. Bjora Marshes, one of the least marshy zones imaginable, is by some margin the most convincing winter landscape yet, in a game that does cold weather exceptionally well.

Most of Tyria's snowy areas feature blinding white snow and a great deal of arctic blue. Bjora Marshes has none of that. The scene is unrelentingly grey. The sky is perpetually overcast, flickering with boreal light. It's a land locked in endless twilight.

When snow falls it feels desultory, hopeless. There's no sense of wonder or delight, just a grim, cold emptiness. The forest is a wasteland of broken, lifeless wood. The snowfields are barren wastes of grey, studded here and there with the ruins of a civilization long ago driven into retreat.

The whole place is one of the most convincing replications of winter I've seen in a game. I have walked through woods that felt like these (minus the Aberrant wildlife, naturally). The quality of the light feels familiar. The eerie, muffled soundscape rings true.

So, I liked the new map as an aesthetic experience. As for the gameplay, I'm not sure I'll ever know what that's like. There are a bunch of events and a meta as always. From what I read it's a short and easy meta, which would fit the rest of the episode perfectly.

There's a new currency and a vendor with stuff I don't care about, like there has been in every new map for years. I haven't spent any significant time in one of the new maps since Season Three. Other than for their brief appearance in the story itself, most of them might as well not exist as far as my time in GW2 goes.

Ah yes, the story. The supposed reason we're here. How's that going? Other than quickly.

It's... okay. If anyone reading this hasn't done it yet and plans to, perhaps it's time to skip ahead. Don't look at the pictures after this, either. There will be spoilers. Come back when you've played through it. You could go do it now. It's not like it'll take you very long...

A good test of how engaging and well-handled the story is could be how much of it I remember. I'm writing this three or four days after I completed the whole thing. Let's see...

It begins with a rather good set-up, a suspiciously distorted call for help from a supposed ally. I thought it had "trap" written all over it but of course we have to go find out for ourselves. There's a brief meeting with the extended "family", in this case Rytlock and Crecia, the ever-bickering exes, Braham, once again slipping into post-adolescent angst, and Marjory, seemingly herself as always. That won't last.

I do like the characters. Affection for them is just about the only thing that carries me through some of the unconvincing, incoherent plot twists. It irks me more than somewhat when the characterization slips.

I can just about cope with Rytlock's conversion to guilt-ridden 90s New Man Charr, emotionally scarrred by relationships past. I'm teeth-grittingly inured to the way Braham lurches from brash, drunken frat boy to viking warrior to emo soul-searcher. The days when I expected continuity and contact with all of my character's extended family are long over.

Even by those standards, Marjory's breakdown in the Labyrinth stands out as poor writing. It happens during the heart of this very short episode, a puzzle-based trip through a maze once used to test potential followers of the Norn Spirit, Raven.

It's a decent segment. The puzzles are intuitive and the Labyrinth limited enough that I was able to move through the whole thing with reasonable facility. There was no point when I even thought of stepping out of the game to look anything up.

Nothing much happens in the spooky corridors that hasn't happened to all of the characters countless times before. Being faced with phantoms from your past is par for the course in Tyria. Why Marjory should react to the spectral sight of her dead sister Belinda with a set of the vapors worthy of a Victorian melodrama beats me.

I've jumped ahead a little, though. Before the Labyrinth comes a very nicely handled horror movie intro in which the crew arrive at the military outpost where they're supposed to meet their contact, only to find it deserted. The grey light and softly falling snow play wonderfully into a sense of impending doom. I thoroughly enjoyed that part.

The camp leads to the new map, the weakest part of the episode in terms of narrative. There's a half-hearted attempt to pad things out by splitting the team up and sending the player character - sorry, The Commander - off to help each party in turn but the effect is ruined by poor design and buggy implementation. I could hear Rytlock and Cre bickering from the other side of the map!

The only other part I remember is the finale, a blessedly short boss fight of the kind that would have been sub-boss #2 back in Season Two. I can't actually remember how we got there but I do recall how the fight went.

There were no pointless new skills to learn, just a single special attack button to press at the appropriate moment with a big on-screen prompt in case you couldn't figure it out for yourself. As for the infamous "the floor's on fire, the air's full of lightning" mechanic so beloved of ANet's fight co-ordinators, there is some of that but it appears to be largely for visual effect only. I didn't bother dodging much, took very little damage. Also, if you want a break you can just back into the corridor for a timeout.

There is one celebrity death, part of the reveal that caps the aforementioned "suspicious call for help" plotline. Anyone who played through Heart of Thorns will surely have figured out the twist at the first hint of a mysterious whisper. Dragons will be dragons.

The impact of the death, which apparently upset some players quite a bit, was muted for me since I couldn't remember having seen the character before this Season. Apparently she was a key figure in Path of Fire but I've evidently blocked most of that farrago from my memory. The further we get from PoF, the more I loathe everything about it. The only good thing about not getting a third expansion is that we've been spared another one as bad.

And that's about it. As far as I can sum it up without fact-checking, Jormag is somewhere under the ice, whispering doubt into everyone's minds while promising some kind of help with some kind of threat. The Charr general and his followers, including Rytlock's son, are somewhere out there doing whatever it is they threatened to do (I've forgotten what that was) and we're no nearer to catching up with them than before.

Marjory's having a nervous breakdown, Taimi, Kas, Cannach and all the rest are off somewhere, doing something about which we don't need to know. Zojja is still missing. No one ever mentions her. She's been in rehab since Heart of Thorns. When and if we'll see any of them again seems almost entirely random.

Despite all the carping, I did enjoy "Whispers in the Dark". It's ludicrously short even by ANet's unimpressive standards, some of the characterization is threadbare, to put it charitably, and the new map is pocket-sized but I'd still take this episode over pretty much anything from Seasons Three and Four, if only for the hugely improved combat sequences, which allow me to use my character's regular abilities while fighting manageable opponents.

Perhaps the strangest thing about "Whispers" is the labelling. Described in the press release as "The first episode of The Icebrood Saga", it's much, much shorter and contains far less content than the "Prologue", "Bound by Blood". I suppose there's no reason the preamble shouldn't be several times the length of the first chapter but it's an unconventional approach.

Looking forward, Wintersday is next up on GW2's calendar. That would usually take us into the New Year. Lunar New Year follows that fairly swiftly. It wouldn't be too much of a surprise to see the second instalment of The Icebrood Saga drop sometime in February, although it could be any time, since the whole point of moving to a saga format was supposed to be flexibility.

A recent interview with a German website, as reported on Massively: OP, confirms there are no immediate plans for new Fractals, Raids or Legendaries. Even new hairstyles are nowhere in sight. None of this affects me personally, since I neither raid, run fractals, craft Legendaries or re-do my characters' coiffures on a regular basis, but all of these are matters of pressing interest to the hardcore GW2 player.

It is now almost impossible to picture ArenaNet as anything other than a studio in difficulties. The entire seven and a half year run of GW2 has been a series of badly mishandled changes of direction evidencing a complete lack of vision. The core game remains strong enough and - absolutely essentially - replayable enough to hold the attention of thousands of players but the increasingly feeble drip drip drip of new content is taking its inevitable toll.

I'll be on board for the whole trip, one way or another, but I foresee a future of sporadic visits, dropping back in for the infrequent updates then moving on to other MMORPGs where stuff actually happens. How long that can remain a viable business model is hard to judge but from waht I read, revenues don't seem to be down all that much, if at all.

Guild Wars 2 was originally conceived as a user-friendly, hyper-casual experience. Perhaps what we're seeing is a return to the game's roots. For all the drawbacks that come with this latest lurch in direction, I think I prefer the way things are going to the last couple of years.



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