Not The End: Guild Wars 2

A few things came up this week around Guild Wars 2, which I am barely playing right now. There was the trailer for the final chapter of the current Living World season, for one.

The promotional trailers ArenaNet create for GW2 vary wildly in both style and quality. This is one of the moody, elegiac ones, a tone poem of sorts. It's not up there with the best they've ever done but it's not at all bad.

The first three characters you see, not co-incidentally I imagine, are Caithe, Zafirah and Rytlock. That's the same line-up that features in the Requiem series of vignettes that followed the previous chapter, All or Nothing.

I'd forgotten about the Requiem stories. I read the first, Rytlock's, when it was published a while back. I didn't like it much. It seemed an awkward retcon of my favorite GW2 character, struggling to turn the cynical, confident Charr warrior into some kind of 90s "New Man" throwback. Uncomfortable and unconvincing.

This morning I read the second and third tales. I'd forgotten who Zafirah was. She's the Deadeye people complained about in the fourth chapter, A Star to Guide Us. Her Requiem read a lot better than Rytlock's.

Caithe's, the last, was published this week. I read that and thought it was the best of all of them. Then I re-read Rytlock's. I still don't like it. I don't like the direction it tries to send the character and I think it's the clumsiest of the three, but in context I understand what it's trying to do; what all the Requiem pieces are doing. They're giving the narrative the context it so badly needs, something it never even comes close to finding within the game itself.

Asmiroth posted recently about Plot vs Character. Most popular fiction that purports to have any lasting value whatsoever cannot afford that false dichotomy. Character is plot is character. That's so ingrained in serial media like comics, tv and prose fiction we barely notice.

It doesn't work so well in MMORPGs. The cadence is far too slow. The delivery mechanisms are incoherent and obstructive. There's far, far too much distraction going on for anyone to concentrate on nuance or subtext.

My feeling about GW2's extended narrative is that it wouldn't work at all without the ramshackle superstructure that supports it from outside the game itself. The good trailers pack more of an emotional impact than the gaming content they promote. The novels, perfunctory and workmanlike as they are, still operate at depths and across breadths the etiolated in-game arcs lack.

The Requiem fragments point up the discrepancy to an almost embarrassing extent. Reading Caithe's memoir today I felt I'd learned more about her in a few minutes than in several years of watching her often incomprehensible actions within the game.

I might not like what the writer is trying to do with Rytlock in his introspective reflections but at no point to do I fail to understand it. That's something I couldn't say about almost anything Rytlock's ever done in the game itself.

There was one other item of note this week. ArenaNet announced there would be a new voice actor for the female Charr player character. In a game where player characters express themselves out loud, that's a non-trivial change to the experience for anyone who plays that race and gender combo.

I have several female Charrs but I don't usually do Living World content with any of them. Hearing Mara Junot's vocalization, I might start. I found the short interview very revealing about the process and she impressed me with her take on what it means to be a voiceover specialist.

What the video emphasizes, perhaps more srongly than ANet might realize, is just how important voice acting is in keeping the narrative afloat. GW2 has good voicework, by and large. Together with the equally-reliable musical direction, sound does almost all of the heavy lifting when it comes to telling the story.

ArenaNet's art department is rightly regarded as one of the strongest in the genre but few of those artists strengths are best displayed in the service of story. In most Living World chapters the Player Character either fights (and all fights look much the same) or stands around and listens.

The stunning backdrops of Glint's Lair or the Durmand Priory make for amazing screenshots but they do very little to carry the narrative forward. The art department shine in the new maps but few of those have narrative significance, being remembered, if anything, for the productivity of the farms they intentionally or accidentally encourage.

As I said at the top, I'm not playing much GW2 right now. Yesterday I logged in, did my dailies on three accounts then logged out. I'm down to doing that every few days, if I remember. Even when I was logging in every day I barely did anything more for months.

The prospect of a new Living World chapter does not encourage me to believe that's likely to change. It's been a while since I was excited about another installment. When I was playing regularly and enjoying it, I tended to think of the Living World as a slightly annoying interruption to normal business. Of late I've begun to see it as a bloody nuisance.

It's not that I've lost interest in the plot. I still want to know what happens next. Nor is it that I've fallen out of love with the characters. I'm still very fond of Rytlock and Taimi and increasingly interested in Caithe. And I really want to know what's happened to Zojja.

I'm just beginning to think I'd get all of that and more just from watching edited highlights of the in-game material on YouTube and reading all the ancillary material. I'm not sure what I gain by grinding through the mostly tedious, occasionally deeply annoying, combat.

Of course, I'll end up doing it anyway, just because it's there, but it really is a terrible way to try and tell a story, not just for GW2 but for MMORPGs in general. It barely works in Star Wars: The Old Republic, where it's the entire focus of the game. BioWare had to hide (or remove) the rest of the gameplay to accommodate it.

That last line in the trailer, though. They do know how to set a hook...

With One Bound They Were Free : GW2

It's all been a bit of a rush. Didn't get to the Heart of Thorns beta until a couple of hours after it started. First we were doing Tequatl and someone or someones unknown didn't notice the Vigil Megalaser was rapidly melting. That didn't end well.

Then I spent almost an hour (!) trying to finish the worst set of dailies evs on my third account. In the end I had to camp the Veteran Warg on Fort Aspenwood's borderland like it was 1999. That led right into the late evening Maw/Jor, as the back-to-back twofer featuring The Frozen Maw followed by Claw of Jormag is known in our house (by me at least).

By the time all that lot was over I had to get a snack. It was gone ten by the time I flipped through Beta character creation to come up with the most gormless-looking Asura in Tyria (and there's heavy competition for that title). Little time left to get a look at Verdant Brink and bang out a blog post before today's Blaugust deadline expires.

I guess there's no point worrying about spoilers. The major question from the end of Living Story 2 is answered in the first five minutes of the opening episode of our new Personal Story. Look away now if you don't want to know that ...

Destiny Edge did not die in Mordremoth's destruction of the Pact Airfleet. No, of course they didn't. Who ever thought they did? In classic pulp novel style they were captured and taken away for...interrogation? Execution? Breeding? Tea and crumpets?

That we don't know but if anything's even less of a surprise than finding them alive but held prisoner by The Bad Guys it's discovering that we're the suckers who have to go find them and get them out of the mess they've gotten themselves into.

The first episode then proceeded almost exactly like almost any episode of last years Living Story, albeit one of the easier ones. I managed to complete the entire thing as an Elementalist without dying although I was downed twice towards the end. The fights were as tedious as usual although the mini-boss seemed fairly ineffectual and the threatened Giant Plant, who got a big cut scene and looked like he'd be a total pain, never actually appeared in the instance at all.

I strongly hope this is the difficulty setting at least for combat in the Personal Story. Any harder would be painful. It's not like the fights in these instances have ever been interesting.

The plot, however, is a rollicking good adventure. It could have come from a 1930s cinema serial of the Flash Gordon ilk. The final set piece sent literal shivers down my spine. Cheap emotional manipulation by use of cliched tropes it may be but  it flipping well works!

When Rytlock appeared over the top of a ridge like Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone I cheered out loud.

I took photos of him. Lots of them. Including this unfortunate pose in which he appears to be trying to give my Asura a run for his money in the gormlessness stakes:

The whole thing wrapped up with a Mastery Point. Too tired to make much of what that means right now. Something to do with gliders or frogs I think. All in all it was fun and it made me realize how much I've missed having this daft story and these ridiculous characters around.

So far, so good. Let's see how things go tomorrow. Just let's no-one tell Rytlock I said he was daft. He's a bit scary. Scarier.

By Their Deeds Shall Ye Know Them : GW2

*** BEWARE SPOILERS ***

Living Story Episode 8 "The Point of No Return" dropped yesterday. In keeping with tradition I will begin by observing that, once again, it's short. It took me maybe a couple of hours and that was speaking to everyone, poking my nose into everything and making quite unnecessarily heavy weather of the final fight..

Short does not mean bad though. It may not have taken long to play through but I thought this was one of the best LS episodes so far. It had well-balanced and engaging gameplay throughout, there were some good exchanges of dialog here and there and the voice acting was solid. The atmosphere was palpable and also varied, from the spooky beginning through the urgency of the Silverwaste battles to the elegiac despair of the final sequences.

The format is very familiar. We begin with another visit to Durmand Priory and a further consultation with Ogden. There's another book hunt among the stacks and another ritual to complete during which some fighting ensues. Then it's back to the pact camp in The Silverwastes to consult with Logan and the rest of Destiny's Edge.

A number of forum posters and Redditers read a lot into the exchange between Eir and Braham before everything goes to code red as the mordrem attack. My irony meter is very finely calibrated, to the point where it tends to give false positives for Ironic Foreshadowing better than 50% of the time, and yet I took Eir's promise to go hunting with her son in the Shiverpeaks when it was all over at face value. I feel a bit of a mug now.

Once the camp has been secured a scurry through the skritt tunnels to the Far Shiverwastes sees us back at that sealed door in the cliff. Only this time we have the key in the form of a king-sized matchstick.

Behind the door lies a very dark tunnel leading to a very light cave. This sequence I found particularly impressive. The moving pool of light cast by the torch is convincing and atmospheric and the vista-like reveal of the glowing cave works very effectively to create the intended sense of awe.

Once the scenery has been duly admired it's time to find a spot to plant the last of Caithe's memory seeds. As we play the hot/cold game to find the right location we pass an interactive bush. Naturally I interacted and the information learned from doing so plays directly into the upcoming cut scene with Caithe, Wynne and Faolain. I found that a very effective use of the narrative tools available and it certainly helped me understand Wynn's urgent desire to have Caithe kill her before Faolain can get to work.

The cut scene confirms the suspicions many, myself included, have been nursing since even before the game began: the Sylvari are tainted. Now we know how and by whom. I'm more glad than ever that I didn't create my new elementalist as a walking plant. I played an Iksar in Everquest when Kunark launched. I know what it feels like to play a character that every NPC in the world would like to kill. It's a hard road.

The episode concludes with a boss fight: Mordremoth's lieutenant again from the fight that nearly killed The Pale Tree. Compared to just about all the previous LS boss fights this one is very straightforward although I managed to make it ten times harder by missing one simple mechanic. It was only after I'd died about six times that a quick visit to the forums told me what I should have noticed for myself - the nasty, invulnerable shadow critters that kept putting out the fires can be killed with a simple application of Divine Light.

With that figured out the rest of the fight passed without difficulty. Dead dragonnette. High fives all round. The end. Only it's not.

At this point we are treated, and I mean that quite literally, to not one but two cinematics. Both are absorbing, thrilling and disturbing. Also spectacular. There's a great deal going on but the main themes appear to be the failure of The Pact's aerial assault on Mordremoth and the complete destruction of the airship armada, the turning of the Sylvari to dragon minions and the death of all the members of Destiny's Edge except Rytlock. Oh, and we're getting an expansion and it's called Heart of Thorns.

It's a lot to take in. Luckily Vigil Warmaster Wylliam at Camp Resolve replays the video. Which is unsettling because he also gives the welcome new recruits speech all about preparing for the days ahead. In fact the whole of Camp Resolve seems to be locked in a timewarp, still hard at work building the airships we just watched crashing in flames. I'm no fan of phasing but this really is a hefty jolt for the old suspension of disbelief to soften.

Still, that's a minor cavil. Overall this was an excellent conclusion to Living Story 2. In addition to the advancement of the plot and the visual feast I felt the combat was much better balanced for the expected audience. For the most part we get to fight as our own characters, using our regular abilities on regular mobs, which is exactly how it should be. There are very few new mechanics to learn and those there are are very straightforward. The final boss fight is blessedly short with just two phases rather than the usual three to six.

There are still enough loose threads to darn a dozen socks of course. Caithe skips off with Glint's egg yet again. Mr E doesn't get a mention. Taimi doesn't even make an appearance. The two cinematics seem to contradict each other over what happens to Destiny's Edge (and if they are really all dead I will believe it only when we find their corpses while exploring the Maguuma jungle - and probably not even then).

Where we go from here will be very interesting to see. There seems to be some confusion over whether or not this is the final episode of Living Story 2. I would anticipate some kind of coda or epilogue in two weeks time, right after the Big Announcement on the 24th. Whether there's a third season of the Living Story is uncertain. I'd bet against it.

One thing at least does seem beyond question: ArenaNet have succeeded in getting our attention once again.

Oh, Hey! Destiny's Edge! Didn't You Guys Used To Be Famous Or Something? : GW2

I had something of a GW2 epiphany this week. I was reading the Edge of Destiny novel and  suddenly I understood just why so many players really hated Season One of The Living Story.

Sure, it was episodic and fractured and all over the place, I knew that. Sure, Scarlet was a deeply unconvincing villain and the plot, in so far as there was one, made no sense at all. I got all that, even as we were playing through, but none of it particularly bothered me at the time. It was like the buffet at a wedding - you pick out the bits you like and leave the rest, don't you? And if that turns out to be most of it, well, it doesn't really matter because the food's hardly the reason you came, right?

Well, maybe. There's another way to look at it, though  Try turning that analogy on its head. It seems some people hadn't come expecting a big, flashy wedding at all. They'd come for a satisfying meal with some old friends and that hastily thrown-together buffet left a lot of them feeling very hungry. I was a bit puzzled by that but now I think I understand.

Edge of Destiny isn't great literature. It's not even great genre literature. It's fluent and professional but somewhat perfunctory, something Ravious picked up on in the review he posted back when the book came out, some two years before GW2 . Despite being over 300 pages long it often feels more like reading notes for a novel than the novel itself. In part  that's down to the minimalist prose style, which uses a lot of short, declarative sentences and one-line paragraphs, but mostly it's because of the vast number of fight scenes. Detailed descriptions of fights and battles probably make up almost two-thirds of the word count.

Nevertheless it zips along. I've read a lot worse. If I'd never played GW2 I'd probably still have finished reading it. Of course, if I'd never played GW2 I would never have started reading it in the first place. Edge of Destiny exists only as an adjunct to the game. Nothing unusual about that. Lots of successful enterprises in many forms of entertainment have spin-offs in other formats. That's fine.

It's fine, but it's not what's happening here. Not all of it by a long way. Having read the thing at last, I'd say that far from being just a bit of ancillary fluff or deep background for lore obsessives, a reading of Edge of Destiny is pretty much required if you hope to engage emotionally with the whole Elder Dragon storyline. They should have included the eBook with the game purchase. It's that essential.

MMOs always have an awkward, difficult, relationship with narrative but GW2 is even more problematic in that regard than most. For a start there's the vast iceberg of the original Guild Wars looming ominously below the surface. GW1 was a narrative-driven rpg that over many years produced several lengthy campaigns and a number of smaller expansions. The plots, characters and stories of many of these feed directly into the lore and storyline of GW2.

GW2, then, does not come clean to the table and neither do its players. Depending on their previous level of involvement with the franchise they will have highly varying degrees of both pre-existing emotional commitment and knowledge and understanding of the ongoing story and the world in which it takes place. But it doesn't end there.

ArenaNet chose to use a highly divisive Personal Story format, in which not only does each of the five races get served a different piece of the narrative cake but the slice they get is divided at least twice more, first according to the somewhat arbitrary and uninformed choices the player was forced to take at character creation and then again depending on his or her choice of Order in the game. Although everyone comes back together for the bulk of the storyline, a player's understanding of what is going on, why and what it all means will necessarily be highly colored by that point, depending on her race and the choices she has made.

As well as reading the novel this week I also played through the Asuran Personal Story as far as Lion's Arch for the first time. I've never been an admirer of the Personal Story in GW2 but I have run through variants of both the Human and Charr versions up to Claw Island. Neither of those runs told me much of specific relevance to the overarching Elder Dragon narrative that forms the spine of the entire game, or at least nothing I remember.

In contrast, the Asura personal storyline (College of Statics version) confronts that narrative head on. The whole "elder dragons are waking up and eating all our magic" thing is directly addressed and examined, along with the ongoing issues of governmental cover-ups and subterfuge that seeks to keep this information from the public. For the first time I didn't just feel I understood what was going on but also why we, as players, were involved with the Orders and why those Orders were necessary.

So, we already have a narrative structure in which it is entirely possible to play several characters to the level cap and complete their personal stories and yet still have no clear idea of what it was all about. Unless we assume everyone will play all variations, that's not ideal. Unsurprisingly, many, many players complained on completing the Personal Story that it felt hollow and they felt emotionally disconnected.

Much of the blame was placed on the deeply unpopular Trahearne and the anticlimactic Zhaitan "fight" but there's also a soggy hole right at the center with the supposed "getting the band back together" sequence in Lion's Arch. Just who were these people and why should I care? My character might be understood to know and be awed by these Tyrian celebrities but as a player my only real knowledge of their history came from the three children playing "Destiny's Edge" in the plaza as I arrived.


For all its faults as a novel, Edge of Destiny succeeds admirably in introducing the reader to several eminently likeable and well-drawn characters. For that reason alone, for those who came to GW2 having read the book, meeting Eir, Rytlock, Caithe, Zojja and Logan in game would inevitably offer a greatly increased potential to achieve significant emotional impact. I had seen that sequence several times before but this time, reaching that stage of the Personal Story just a few hours after living through the downbeat, depressing ending of the novel, watching them bicker, argue, trade recriminations and finally stalk off across the Plaza in different directions came freighted with a whole, new, powerful set of resonances.

Partly it's that I feel I know these people now, in that way all readers feel they "know" characters in books they have read, a mental trick that prose finds much easier to achieve than almost any other narrative form. Partly it's that I understand, in detail, what they achieved, what they failed to achieve and what that failure cost. My pleasure and interest in GW2's storyline has been immensely enhanced as a result of reading the novel and that's a problem.

MMOs already suffer badly from portmanteauism. They have no through-line. They exist as an often disparate, even conflicting, congregate of parts that, we hope, somehow contrive to form a  greater whole. There are many voices raised against the wisdom of including narrative in the genre at all. To hold significant elements outwith the game itself seems almost reckless and yet it seems to be the trend. Just this week SOE released the latest of their series of EQNext "Lore Books". I haven't bothered with any of these in the past; now I feel I probably should, although I imagine I have plenty of time to get around to doing that.

Reading is dangerous. It gives people ideas.

In a way, though, I'm quite glad I waited until two years after launch before I thought to read Edge of Destiny. Yes, I missed out on a deal of emotional weight that the game might have had for me until now and yes I'd have had a significantly better understanding of what was going on around me. On the other hand I saved myself a lot of what I now see as entirely justified anger and frustration over the year and a half that ANet spent fiddle-faddling around with a bunch of annoying second-string characters and an aggravating Mary Sue villain instead of just getting on with the real story. I was able to take Rox, Braham and the rest at face value and get to know them without strongly wishing they were someone else.

I was lucky. I had just enough GW1 background to get by on the lore and more than enough residual affection for the franchise to give the new game a pass when it needed one. At the same time I wasn't drenched in the world and all its trappings to the point where everything that didn't feel "just so" jarred.


GW2 sold a lot of boxes and a lot of them went to people who didn't know GW1 or Edge of Destiny from a hole in the ground. The Personal Story didn't seem to grab many of those people and neither did the big, out-of-narrative, one-time, dynamic open world events. Meanwhile the established franchise fans who knew all the lore and had read and played all the things weren't happy either.

ANet made several attempts to appease the uncommitted with varying degrees of success but in the end the difference is this: disgruntled fans stick around. They kvetch and complain and make everyone feel uncomfortable but it takes a lot more than a few badly-implemented game mechanics and a botched narrative arc to drive them away for good. Which, I think, is why we find Season Two playing so solidly and deliberately to the established fanbase. That's the mature market for the game.

And I guess, like it or not, it includes me. I'm contemplating starting the Sylvari Personal Story later today. No-one but a fan could possibly stomach that.

Hail, All-Powerful Hero! : GW2

Last night my Charr Ranger dinged 80 and one of those wordy, somewhat stilted letters popped into my mailbox. My mysterious Herald spamming me again.

Just who is this guy anyway and where does he get off styling himself "Your Herald"? Did I hire him at some Charr hiring fair one morning after Meatoberfest, when I was so badly hung-over I'd have put my paw-print on anything just to get him to shut up and go away? Is he some petty functionary of the Charr military-industrial complex, locked away in a windowless back-office deep in the Black Citadel, endlessly checking dispatches on field promotions and scribbling details of new deployments?

Whoever he is, he always knows how to find me and boy does he love to gossip. I've long-since screwed up and thrown away most of his missives, but re-reading the most recent ones he seems hell-bent on keeping me informed on the state of mind of a bunch of people I recall meeting just once in Lion's Arch.

Boy, what a day that was! I kept my head down and stared at my claws while they bickered and postured and rehashed old glories or poked each other's old wounds. Metaphorically that is, although come to think of it literally might have been less embarrassing.

This Herald seems to think I have some responsibility for these people, that I should be doing something to help them with their mental health issues, death wishes, personal grudges and plain lack of judgment. He tries every trick in the passive-aggressive, co-dependent book to try to get me to care. He was calling me "Mighty Hero" for a while but now I've hit eighty he's upped that to "All Powerful". He flatters me with references to things I don't recall doing: "Whatever you did at the Citadel of Flame, it seems to have taken". Was I ever even at the Citadel of Flame? Maybe it was that pub in Ebonhawke. That might explain why I can't remember anything about it.

Then he tries to press all my buttons with vague hints that Eir (who I barely know) is going to "do something rash" (She's a Norn! Tell me when she's going to do something reasonable. That would be news!). Not only do I apparently need to be guilt-tripped about this, but he's volunteered me to sort it out. "I said you would catch up with them to help Eir", he writes. Well, thanks! Now I'm going to look like an ass if I don't go.

Yes, well I'll just have to look like an ass, then, won't I? I am not dropping my plans, which include wandering aimlessly all over everywhere taking lots and lots of snapshots and randomly slaughtering everything that doesn't run away fast enough so I can see what it's got in its pockets, just so I can match up to this frankly hysterical image you have of me as some kind of Warrior Psychotherapist.

The Herald, of course, is but the most insistent of my coterie of correspondents. Living in Tyria sometimes feels like waking up inside an eighteenth century epistolary novel. Everyone writes letters all the time. They've all been so well brought-up. Even the roughest frontier guard knows the importance of a "Thank You" note. No good deed must pass unremarked, or unrecorded.

The mail system in Tyria outdoes even Victorian London, where there were up to a dozen deliveries a day. I get my mail anywhere, anytime, immediately and not only does everyone know where I am, some of them even know my name. Here am I, trying to be a cross between the Lone Ranger and The Littlest Hobo, the mysterious stranger bounding into town on all fours with a snout-hankie over his face, righting wrongs and moving on without waiting for a word of thanks, and what do I get? A neatly-written note addressed to me by name, thanking me for my efforts and with a couple of silver pieces slipped inside the envelope by way of a tip! I'd be insulted if it wasn't that I need the money.

So here I am at eighty, a trail of wrongs righted and thanks accepted stretching all the way back to Smokestead. What now? My Herald tells me it's off to Orr. Do I listen to him for once? Well, he mentions airships and I do have a thing for airships. Maybe I will go take a look, this one time. Just don't think I'm making a habit of it.