Postcards From Ember Bay : GW2

The second Episode of GW2's Living Story 3 hit the servers yesterday. As usual it's very hard to discuss it in any detail without dropping spoilers all over the place. Even the opening paragraph of the official Patch Notes came under fire on  the forums for spoilerizing the previous Episode, which, of course, many people who haven't bought Heart of Thorns already own but have yet to play.

I'm kind of wary about discussing the entire storyline myself. If you're even marginally invested in the plotline that's been meandering through GW2 for the life of the game (and which digs its roots increasingly deep into the lore and story of the original Guild Wars) there are quite a few *gasp* moments and a lot of laugh-out-louds. I enjoyed all of them and I wouldn't want to weaken their impact for anyone else with a few off-hand references.

Sticking to safer ground then, I am very pleased to report that Episode 2 is at least as good as Episode 1 and that they're both better than any episode of Living Story 2. The writing seems tighter, sharper, more focused and less mawkish than it sometimes became in LS2. There's still the odd spurt of self-indulgence but I found those quite forgivable.

The voice acting is especially noteworthy. I've been listening to a lot of MMO voice acting of late, particularly in DCUO and WoW and I have a whole post on the topic mulling over in the back of my mind. Let's just say for now that GW2 has the lead on either of those by some distance when it comes to intonation, expression, appropriate matching of voice and visuals and, most especially, in line reading.

Back in the summer I played through Episode 1 on my female Asura Elementalist. She's 85% Berserker specced which made for something of a white-knuckle ride through the fighty-fighty parts. Bearing that in mind, this time I went with my Charr Ranger.

I was somewhat apprehensive to hear him speak because the voice actor who did all the male player-character Charr voicework from launch to the end of LS2 wasn't available to do the new stuff. I don't generally like my characters being voiced, preferring the Silent Protagonist model of The Secret World, but I'd gotten very used to how my Charr Ranger, the first character I made after launch and my first Level 80, sounded.

Well, the new guy did a great job. At worst it sounds as though maybe my Charr had a bit of a heavy night of it - he's a bit gruffer and a bit deeper - but it's very comfortably the same character talking. Rytlock, of course, remains the star of any show he's in and Taimi is her usual amusing, insufferable, endearing self.

It was a great pleasure listening to all of them along with the other regular supporting cast and new faces but any more detail would be running into spoiler territory. The strange thing about spoilers is that even saying something doesn't happen or someone isn't present can be a spoiler in itself so best just not mention it.

Away from the main storyline there's the not-insignificant matter of a whole new explorable map. And it is a whole map! Not a quarter of a map, like the first installment of Dry Top, nor a bijou maplet like Bloodstone Fen. No, Ember Bay is a full-on, full-feature, full-size full new map in the tradition and scale of the maps that launched with the game.

I spent several hours last night exploring it and I haven't opened it all yet, let alone achieved map completion. It's primarily a volcanic zone (every MMO has to have at least one) but there's some biome diversity, with an extensive littoral and some green foliage areas. Travel is possible by land and air (and sea if you really want, although the undersea seems to be mostly undeveloped) but gliding is definitely favored.

There seems to be a ton of things to do in Ember Bay. Hearts (the original GW2 quest hub analog) make a somewhat controversial return. I really never thought we see them again and I was surprised by how nice it felt to have them back. I hope this means they'll be a part of the next expansion too.

There are umpteen dynamic events in the classical style and some chains that end with big ticket  fights. I did two of those that concluded with a huge Ancient Chest ground drop similar to what appears at the downing of a core Tyria World Boss and they did feel a lot more like that model than the Marionnette/Vinewraith open raid style we've been educated to expect.

Indeed, if anything, a return to basics appears to be the theme of this new map. It doesn't discard the innovations and directional shifts of the last couple of years but neither does it ignore the game's heritage and established successes. So far I like it a lot.

There's a fair variety of creatures to fight and interact with. Skritt and Asura feature strongly, which is always a bonus. There are Karka, which generally isn't.

It was very interesting fighting all the various kinds of creatures solo with the same character. The storyline (extremely mild spoiler coming up...) goes quite strong on the toughness and danger of the new creatures to be found in Ember Bay but I found those to be pretty straightforward. As usual it was the blasted Karka that posed a serious threat.

There was certainly no difficulty exploring and participating in the mayhem, not for a ranger at least. How my Elementalist will get on there remains to be seen. I was thinking of re-speccing her anyway...

On a first trip I'd say Ember Bay is a very welcome addition to the game and I hope it presages more opening of the existing map rather than the addition of previously unsuspected pockets. The story is rolling along nicely. I'm intrigued to find out what comes next.

All in all this does feel like a substantial update at last, one that compares not unfavorably with the kind of content drops other MMOs get every two or three months. If you add in the substantial changes to Fractals and a complete new sPvP map then there's really no arguing that this is a significant addition to the game.

Here's hoping for another just like it in November, where it would sit neatly between Halloween and Wintersday, giving us something to get stuck into for every month of the rest of the year. And how about some hard information on that second Expansion?

Less Isn't More. More Is More!

Curious to see how perceptions vary. For Tipa there's way too much, for Keen there's far too little. Me, my head is about ready to explode as my struggling MMO mind tries to calibrate the possibilities. If Calvin would just lend me his Duplicator...

I'd buy Gems for one of these

Rift going F2P affects me not. Storm Legion did nothing for me other than kill most of the remaining interest I had. I'm already paid up until somewhere around November but I've yet to log in this year so nothing changes there.

Still subbed to all SOE games and playing virtually none of them. Try and get at least a few hours of EQ2, DCUO, Everquest and/or Vanguard in each month but its a real struggle finding time. Thought I would be back in EQ2 for the third slice of Velious but that would really be a waste without being able to level over 92. I'm not throwing away all that xp and all the gear requires 93 at least so that's on the back burner until we decide to get Chains of Eternity, which may never happen.

Neverwinter remains that new game I like but not enough to play instead of things I like more. If this was a slow patch I'd be burning through but it's anything but that.

Sand, sun, skeletons

City of Steam is very slightly less appealing than I was expecting, largely because I preferred it when it was more of a mysterious, atmospheric setting with not all that much of a game attached rather than the very good game in a rather less-convincing setting that it has become. Also I want to be a Goblin and I don't want to do everything all over again so I'm holding some of my fire. Playing every day all the same.

Go on, jump. I double-dog dare you!

A beta I'd written off as unplayable and highly disappointing has done that thing betas rarely do and turned itself around. That's back on the menu. Another beta's in the wings that I already know I want to spend more time in and probably buy the game when it launches. A third beta I've been in for ages and hardly ever manage to play because the server's rarely open at a convenient time. All those.

That leaves the huge bulk of my game time in GW2. Loving my dailies, my meta-events and WvW still, and after that lukewarm reaction to three months of Flame and Frost I'm more than a little astonished to find myself loving the new Living Story episode as well. Probably go into more detail at some point but the short version reads "Now that's more like it!" By which I am talking largely about the presentation, not so much the content. The content of Flames and Frost was fine.

No Intentional Bumping

All of which just leaves that totally unexpected entry from waaaay over in left-field, Dino Storm. Playing every day, loving it. Great change of pace and color palette and gloriously sloooooow. Why is it that MMOs supposedly aimed at a younger audience often require more stick-at-it-ness and patience than the stuff adults get spoon-fed?

No more time. Karka to crush, ratlings to rout, dinos to ride.

Direction Of Travel: GW2

I wanted to slap Saturday's breathless, Herbie inspired gasp of approval up because it occurred to me that a lot of what I write about GW2, both here and in comments on other blogs, not to mention much of what I say out loud at home, may come across as overly negative. If so, that doesn't accurately reflect the experience I'm having in game. I'm having a whale of a time.

I woke up this morning intending to carry on in much the same vein. That was until I read this  excellent piece at Healing The Masses. It helped quite a few things fall into place and made sense of some confusion I've been having lately over why it is that I find myself disapproving of so much about the way GW2 seems to be going yet at the same time having so much fun playing it.

GW2 is turning out to be an entirely different experience than I anticipated, and indeed than the experience I was having in beta and for the first few months after launch. It's no longer the game we were "promised" or the game we were sold and far from breaking any molds or creating any new paradigms it increasingly appears to be looking back to long-established MMO tropes for inspiration.

...and over the next hill? Another hill...

In beta GW2 gave me one of the best open-world exploring experiences I've ever had in an MMO. Skeptical though I remained, it did seem that there was at least the prospect of an ever-changing world.  That optimism continued in the whirl of Headstart and through the first few weeks after launch. Looking back at my posts from that time there's plenty about exploration and the surprises it brings.

Then came the Karka and with them Fractals and Ascended gear and we all know where that went. What hadn't really sunk in with me until today was how much my own expectations have changed as a result of what happened back in November. Effectively, GW2 turned into roughly the same kind of MMO as EQ2 or Rift and my approach to playing it adapted accordingly without my really noticing.

Might have been better if we'd let them win

Most MMOs have an "end game" with which I don't engage. Usually it's raiding, usually it involves a gear grind. Before the Karka the nearest GW2 had was Legendaries, which I took to have been included merely as an ironic nod to the established obsessiveness of some original Guild Wars players. I fully expected 95% of GW2 players to ignore Legendaries completely.

That they seem to have been accepted as a rite of passage by a substantial segment of the playerbase shouldn't surprise me, given that I was there when Epics were introduced to Everquest. Epics, however, were extremely powerful weapons that made your EQ character substantially more capable in combat. Legendaries just look pretty. So, yes I am surprised. Apparently Barbie went Hardcore while I wasn't looking.

Life begins at 40

Legendaries aside, it was with the arrival of a whole new tier of gear that everything changed. It's been discussed to death so suffice it to say that no matter how many new routes to Ascended Gear may be added and no matter how accessible it can be made, the gear grind genie cannot be forced back into the bottle. J3w3l makes this point very clearly indeed. A lot of people are likely to find themselves increasingly boxed in by this one change and the prospects for players playing even the traditional Main and Alt look bleak.

Bleak, that is, if they are the kind of players who value efficiency, who want to be the best they can be, who are, for want of a more elegant term, Min-Maxers. I'm not. Never have been, never will be. And that's part of why I'm still having a roaring old time in Tyria.

J3w3l comments on leveling alts "The different classes are a lot of fun to play even if leveling them isn’t..." but of course for me it is. I love leveling and GW2 offers enormous variety and potential. My seventh run through, Mesmer, is half-way there. She dinged 40 yesterday. I'm already impatient to get her to 80 so I can start my second ranger, an Asura this time, and play him or her up through a lot of the Southern areas I don't really know very well. And since I have no intention of getting Ascended gear for any of my characters, there's no sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at the prospect of adding another to the roster.

Why would you want to?

GW2 for me has turned into a still-new, still-shiny version of every other MMO. There's an increasingly big part of the game, the part the developers seem mainly focused on and to which players are expected to aspire, from which I have largely opted out. Even though I've had very thoughtful and welcome invitations in the comments here from readers and bloggers like Ursan and Phil to join them in doing some of the content I appear to be missing out on, I haven't taken the offers up so far because I really don't feel I am missing out.

Like many MMOs before, where I had ample opportunities and offers to go raiding, for example, I find I have more than enough things I want to be getting on with already. As Calvin and Hobbes would say, the days are just packed. I still don't like or approve of the direction GW2 has taken, something I may examine in more detail another time, but I absolutely can live with it so long as I keep finding this much content that I'm both eager and able to do.

Don't need to tell me twice!

There are unexpected, possibly unintended side effects to the New Direction. I purely love the new loot changes. It embarrasses me to admit not just that my current gameplay revolves around a completely artificial, un-immersive map-hopping circuit of lag-ridden loot-fests but that I'm loving every minute of it. Everything from studying the timers to riding the event wave to the banter in map chat while we wait to the frame-rate killing firework display when the Boss spawns to the "what's in the box?" reveal - fun fun fun fun FUN!

I have a lot of max level characters to dress. Most of them were in Masterwork greens with a smattering of Rare yellows before this change. Steadily those greens are being replaced by yellows and the yellows I can't use are being converted into ectos to become exotics. Mrs Bhagpuss has looted Final Rest twice, along with a couple of other named weapons. I haven't been so lucky but I open every chest in the knowledge that this could be the time.

It's exciting, it's satisfying, it's entertaining and it's easy. I think it's time I admitted to myself that after a decade and a half that may not be all I want from an MMO but it's enough to be going on with, at least until something better comes along. And if nothing better does come along, well I'm having fun and that's the important part.

Everyone loves fireworks

As for where the game is going, I suspect ArenaNet are painting themselves into a corner with an increasingly restrictive, coercive, hardcore end-game bolted onto a free-wheeling, roistering, genuinely casual-friendly open-world leveling game. Unless they have better solutions than anyone else has come up with so far this is a road that can only lead to a fractured, dislocated playerbase where different interest groups lobby hard for their individual, incompatible aspirations.

Same place as every other MMO, then.

Lost In The Mail : GW2

To begin with a digression, I was about to rummage in the cliche bag and come up with "much-heralded" as an opening to this brief run through the first phase of Guild Wars 2's "Lost Shores" event when it occurred to me what an inappropriate phrase that would have been. Much hyped, certainly, but heralded? I haven't heard a peep from my own personal Herald for weeks. Perhaps my singular lack of enthusiasm for any of his previous proposals has led him to seek employment elsewhere. Or maybe it's just because I never paid him.

There's something in the waterrrrrrrr!

His absence hasn't quietened the flapping of my letterbox, though. Far from it, and that's my main complaint about Lost Shores so far. But we're getting ahead of ourselves again. Let's recap.

It'll be nice when it's finished

At exactly 8pm last night a very brief cut-scene signaled the Karka invasion of Lion's Arch. Given the completely unexpected, surprise nature of this attack it was incredibly fortunate that several hundred heavily-armed adventures just happened to be holding an impromptu fireworks party around the Lion Statue plinth, where rebuilding work has just begun.

Kill the babies!

There ensued half an hour or so of the kind of chaos and mayhem that I thoroughly enjoy, although other opinions are available and were indeed volubly expressed in map chat at the time by some who might have been better-employed crabbing than carping, given that the invaders turned out to be crabs. Big crabs, I'll grant you, with very tough shells, but crabs all the same.

As huge MMO events go, it was nowhere as laggy as many I've attended. I was able to move, fight, communicate, loot and follow instructions reasonably well. It fell squarely within my tolerances for playability, although those are admittedly broad. I didn't get any Karka Samples until the Asura collecting them announced he had sufficient - in fact I was barrelling towards him with the two I'd managed to hack off some baby crabling a minute before when he decided to shut up shop. After that, of course, I got dozens.

Eventually the concerted forces of the Lionguard and sundry adventurers drove the Karkan horde back into the sea and the inquiry began. After a brief examination and dismissal of the new hand-ins at the Mystic Forge, which Mrs Bhagpuss rightly identified immediately as not much more than a new item-sink, we moved to the beach where the wreckage from the boat that sank in the opening cut-scene had washed up.

I love beachcombing, me

Confusion ensued over crowbars. The ones lying on the beach appeared not to work. The server briefly hiccuped a roll-back after which I found myself next to large chest filled with the things and I had soon had the top off a barrel. Incriminating evidence led me to the incredibly annoying Blingg. If I never hear the word "CITIZENS!" again it will be too soon, that's all I'm saying.

He soon cracked under our skilled interrogation and it was off on a merry chase around Caledon Forest and Kessex Hills. Karka were fought and defeated, clues were discovered and deciphered and around midnight after a fruitless search for Lionguard Tyrro we called it a night.

Come on! He can be hurt! I just did 12 points of damage!

As events go I enjoyed it. I didn't die once, I was largely able both to follow what was going on and to participate effectively and the Karka turned out to be surprisingly convincing invaders. There were bugs and glitches but I've seen much, much worse. So far I'd give it about seven out of ten.

The one thing I really didn't like derives, I think, from ArenaNet's stubborn insistence on reinventing a wheel that wasn't broken. What follows the invasion is by any rational analysis a questline. Only GW2, of course, doesn't do quests. Consequently, where other MMOs would have a nice, neat journal entry with stages that tick off tidily when completed, what we got was a series of bizarre notes in the mail and a lot of vague hints in the Event descriptions.

Here, I'll just write it in your journal. Oh, wait...

It's a half-assed, clumsy way to deliver content of this type. It works, but in the way that tying a piece of string between two baked-bean cans worked to talk to the kid next door fifty years ago. We have mobile phones now, maybe you noticed?

That cavil aside, I thought it all went off nicely. I certainly had a lot more fun doing just that first part than anything that was thrown at us for Halloween. Looking forward to phase two tonight.