Yeah, Thomas Wolfe! What Do You Know, Anyway?

Guild Wars 2's Living World, Season One is back, kinda-sorta, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. There's no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the first season was far and away the best but there are so many contributing factors to that assessment it's very hard to be sure whether I'm basing it on the objective quality of the material or the subjective manner in which I experienced it.

For a start, Season One unfurled in something approximating real time. It was the era of GW2 when ArenaNet believed they could roll out new content, consistently, on a two week turnaround. 

It seems like hubris now but at the time it was meant to be the future of the genre. GW2 would blaze a trail of continuous development that would provide the players with all the entertainment they'd need. No biannual Expansions or quarterly Updates, just a never-ending, steady flow of quality stories, events and activities that lasted for a couple of weeks before disappearing forever, to be replaced immediately by the next episode.

There's a long and analytical post to be written about just how well those expectations were served over the course of the first season. This is not that post, for the very good reason that it would take hours of research, checking dates, reading patch notes, going over all the posts I wrote about each episode at the time. Hours and hours of preparation, followed by more hours working it up into readable form.

I'm not even sure this portal was from the new Season One. I just know it was bugged.

I don't have hours. I have about fifty minutes before I have to stop for the night. Consequently, I'm not going to discuss how very slowly Season One began, how impatient we were, how cynical and dismissive, or how over time many of us became invested and immersed in the admittedly confusing storyline.  

I'm going to leave any conversations over whether Scarlet Briar was the best villain GW2's ever seen or an excruciatingly embarassing Mary Sue for another day. The various highs and lows of the year-long epic (Or was it longer than that?) will have to wait.

Even if I did have time enough to dwell on all the subtle implications, to unpick the threads of intent and execution, to pass judgment on the success or failure of the original project before comparing and contrasting it with the current reiteration, topped, tailed and tidied as it is, this is only Episode One. It's too early for all that.

Take this as a First Impressions piece about the echoes of something that happened a decade ago, if you will. Because that's all we're getting: echoes.

It was good to see the naive, uncynical Rox again.

As anyone who's listened to their voice bouncing off distant mountains or reverberating from a deep well can attest, however, echoes can be very affecting. Also evocative, eerie and impressive. I found playing through the first few sections of the new Season One all of those, on occasion.

There's a huge nostalgia card being played here and it's all the more effective for the lack of hype it's received. It's not been a hard sell, big deal like WoW Classic, more "here's a cool thing you might enjoy". I fell into playing it this afternoon more out of a sense of duty than excitement but I was surprised how many buttons it pressed.

For a start, I wasn't expecting to see any of the original open-world content again. I always preferred the parts of the Living World that actually took place in the living world of Tyria, the bit where everything else happened.

It was always going to be relatively simple for ANet to revive the instanced content. I imagine the problem has always been how to string the relatively small number of instances together without the much more numerous open map events.

On the evidence of what I saw today, it seems to have been easier than you'd imagine. When you think about it, the things that happened in open maps tended to fall into two simple categories: extremely questlike content that doesn't impinge in any significant way on the events already running or massive zerg battles that dominate and disrupt everything else.

Those big zergs come later. In the early stages it's all fixing signposts and finding refugees' belongings in the snow. I did both of those things today and the memories came flooding back. I found myself thinking I'd like to get a few of my other characters out and run through the simple, satisfying steps just for the fun of it. Maybe even my free account, since Anet have very generously made the content available to absolutely everyone.

The two instances, Nolan Hatchery and Cragstead, those I was somewhat less enamored by. It's not that they're bad. They aren't. At the time, though, they felt considerably more challenging and they were released some distance apart. That's probably why I didn't notice at the time how incredibly similar they are.

They're not far off being the same instance, reskinned, to be honest. It's almost painfully obvious when you play through both one after the other. In each of them you follow an NPC (Rox, Braham) along a linear path, fighting wave after wave of regular and veteran mobs so as to retake territory and protect citizens (Or warpets in training in the case of the Hatchery). 

I like the colors of these achievements.

In both you have to hold a ring against mobs that spawn from portals and in both the whole thing ends with a Champion coming through a final portal placed at the extreme end of the map. It's not so much that it's a formula, more that it's formulaic.

I'm not complaining, even if it sounds as though I am. I know what came later. I'd take a hundred simple, formulaic instances like these over any of the supposed innovations that made the later Living World seasons such a royal pain.

In that sense the whole thing did feel very nostalgic indeed. Nostalgic for a simpler, less pretentious GW2. One where a bunch of veterans piling out of a portal felt like challenging content. And it did, too, back then. I can prove it.

Here's what I said about Nolan Hatchery, first time through, back in March 2013:

"The nursery instance was exactly the right degree of hard. I completed it without dying but I was downed a few times and it looked touch and go for a while."

This time around, playing my junior Elementalist, I was never in any serious danger. She wasn't downed even once, nor came close. I did have to swap in and out of Water to lay down healing fields and I used the Earth Elemental several times to tank but the whole thing felt calm and measured, never frenetic or threatening. 

When I was on the final Champion at the end of Cragstead, Mrs Bhagpuss came in with the puppy to ask me if I wanted scrambled egg on toast. I was perfectly comfortable having a conversation with her about it, looking back over my shoulder, while I carried on fighting. That is not Challenge Mode.

I even had time to take a screenshot of the final boss. Not that you can see him.

Which suits me. I can only hope the same applies when I get to the next stage of the episode, the Molten Weapons Facility. I have a clear memory of taking a very long time to beat it first time around, including a lot of deaths and an absolutely epic PUG, which I recorded in detail here on the blog at the time.

Re-reading that post confirms my memory of the exhausting, attritional afternoon I spent trying to finish the fight. What I had completely forgotten was that I'd not only already beaten it, but done so on the first attempt in another PUG on the very night it launched, when "no-one knew what to expect and we had no strats to follow". What's more, "Mrs Bhagpuss did the run on both of her accounts in PUGs during the first couple of days and had no more trouble than I did."

As I so often say, this is why I have a blog. So I can correct myself every time I remember things wrong. I have thought of that instance for years as nightmarishly difficult whereas in fact it seems I just had one nightmarishly difficult experience there. 

I'm very curious to see how it turns out this time. If it's unchanged from nine years ago it's going to be an absolute cakewalk. If it's been brought up to current group instance standards it will be a lot tougher than I'm used to any more. Been a long time since I did a serious PUG.

Something to look forward to!

A Window On The Future: ArenaNet's Plans For Guild Wars 2

 

Oh, isn't that just typical! Couldn't have released this yesterday, could you, ANet? Thanks a bunch!

If the massive "Studio Update" (Seriously? Can't call it a "Producer's Letter" like everyone else?) had dropped a day earlier I could have incorporated much of it into my "Guild Wars 2 is World of Warcraft wearing a hat" post. It would have stood up nearly every point I was trying to make. Also, why did I not think of that title yesterday? It's so much better than the lame one I went with.

Let's leave that in the dust for now in favor of ripping through the massive screed to see if there's anything in there worth talking about. Gotta be something. Oh, hey, here's one... 

"The number of active Guild Wars 2 players has more than doubled over the last three years."

Weirdly misreported by MassivelyOP, in quotes, as "the last two years." I wonder if they got it wrong or it's been changed at source? Either way, it's a very interesting statistic. As a regular player, the game always seems very well-populated although the megaserver tech makes it hard to be sure. I was a little puzzled when Belghast described GW2 as "a game that deserves way more attention than it receives." It always seems to get plenty to me. Now I guess it's going to get even more.

 At first it seems like a trend-bucking stat. We're used to mmorpg populations declining inexorably over time. Then again, these have not been normal times. I wonder just how many mmorpgs have populations that increased during the pandemic and how many of those new or returning players are still hanging around as the panic winds down. Maybe it matters more than I thought, whether that growth happened over three years or two.

Let's have another quote. How about this one? 

"We need to prioritize delivering consistent updates for our players...specifically, how we provide regular content updates to our players and what those updates contain."

Ya think? Ten years of whiffling about cadences and here we are, almost a year on the far side of the last new non-expansion content. Yeah, I'd say you need to prioritize that. Also make your minds up on a delivery schedule and fricken' stick to it.

"This means continuing to tell compelling stories that expand the world of Tyria while providing a better experience for those who enjoy game modes such as World vs. World, Player vs. Player, and endgame group content."

I find that worrisome. Not so much because I don't think all those interest groups deserve service, more because I doubt ANet's ability to keep that many balls in the air at once. There's been precious little sign of them being able to do it over the last ten years. Arguably (And I'd be one to argue it.) all these groups have the opposite of synergy. They fight each other for scraps like a pack of starving dogs and there aren't enough scraps to throw to keep all of them from tearing each other apart. Good luck keeping them all satisfied.

What next? Oh yes, Steam launch!

"You only get to launch on Steam once, and we want to make sure we do it right... We’re not ready to commit to a hard date for Steam quite yet, but our hearts are set on launching this year. "

Kicking it down the road for now. Fair enough. I wonder just how big a deal it would be anyway? Obviously it's a whole new potential audience but there are quite a lot of mmorpgs on Steam these days and none of them seem do great numbers. Okay, Lost Ark. Still, better to be on Steam than not.

And now the BIG SURPRISE..."Living World Season 1 Returns."

Oh ffs! You're kidding me, right? I only just got finished banging on about how so much better than all the rest Season One was, because it was a one-off, never to be repeated, live game experience that managed to convince us that playing a video game somehow mattered! It wasn't memorable for the story, that's for sure. 

Sticking the key plot points into five instanced chapters of the Living Story isn't a horrible idea. It'll be nice to have the option to see some of the events again, not to mention Scarlet Briar. Don't begin to kid yourself it's going to be like "being there", though. If they do a really great job it'll be like watching the Woodstock movie compared to, y'know, having been at Woodstock. If they do a bad job, I guess it'll be like being at Altamont.

How about World vs World, the game mode that was "a cornerstone" last summer but which, for End of Dragons, got... fishing. And even that doesn't work. 

"Now that Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons is released, we can further increase our support for WvW."

That's nice. What are you going to do for it? 

"Our priorities for WvW are largely unchanged from what we talked about in our “Future of World vs. World” blog post in September of last year."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't those the same priorities you talked about in the previous two major statements, going back several years? We've been waiting on the Alliances remodel since at least 2018. Forgive us if we don't take the roof off cheering when you tell us you're still working on it.

This paragraph, however, I found much more intriguing:

"As we mentioned last year, once population balance and rewards are addressed, our theory is that WvW gameplay will see a significant shift. At that point, we intend to look very hard at core WvW systems (upgrades, scoring, siege, etc.) and balance them to ensure that the WvW experience is still reflecting our vision."

The original "vision"for WvW was as a massive PvPvE battle for territorial advantage and possession. Over time, as more and more PvE players bounced and more and more RvR players boiled away. WvW has moved significantly towards being all about the fights.The people who care what the fights are about are in a minority now and have been for a while.

My interpretation of the paragraph above is that ANet want to get a lot more PvE players into WvW, as was originally intended. That means making the scores matter because PvE-oriented players like that kind of structure. Just running about looking for people to kill isn't going to do it for them.

If the changes successfully bring back casual WvW players from the PvE game in large numbers I foresee a lot of conflict with the self-defining "WvW Players". Could be a bloodbath, especially if certain factions organize, something the Alliance system is pretty much designed to facilitate.

Coming to the end now....

"We’re happy to confirm that we’re working on the next story update for Guild Wars 2, including a new map set in the Cantha region."

Kinda figured we'd be hanging around there for a while. Is that story update in addition to the Season One highlight reel or do we have to wait for that to roll out before we get something that's actually new? Oh, wait, there's a timeline... let's see... nothing before the end of June, by when we'll have had just two of the first five S1 chapters. If that's the cadence, expect nothing new until the autumn at the earliest, then, I guess.

And finally...

"We’re happy to confirm that there will be a fourth expansion for Guild Wars 2!"

Oh thank the lord! No more of this "Will they, won't they?" nonsense. No more saying "Probably not happening" when you're already working on it. And yes, ANet, we know "Expansions take a very long time to develop" but most companies manage it in about half the time End of Dragons took to cook. I don't expect an expansion every year - I mean, it's not like you have Daybreak's resources after all - but an expansion every other year ought to be within your grasp.

I think that's everything I wanted to mention. There's some other stuff in there but those are the bones. I'm very happy to hear the game's picking up players. Let's hope it can hang on to them. 

I'll be staying. A couple of months back I wasn't so sure I'd be saying that come the spring. End of Dragons has restored some of my affection for the game. We'll see if it lasts.

Guild Wars 2 Doesn't Matter And That's Fine With Me

I had a couple of ideas for posts for today but then I read Jeromai's excellent semi-rant on the cluttered, jumbled, messed-up state Guild Wars 2 finds itself in these days. It's a lengthy read but I recommend it to anyone interested in how the game works, or mostly doesn't, these days.

There's a ton of stuff in there that I've been thinking about for a long time but frankly could not summon up the willpower to turn into a post. As a very long term and very committed GW2 player - I believe it is now the mmorpg I have played both longest and most - the irony is that, although there is an almost inconcievable amount of "content" in the game, I still feel it's one of the thinnest, lightest, most repetitve and on far too many occasions flat-out tedious mmorpgs I've ever stuck with for the long-term.

As Jeromai so terrifyingly explains, the problem is never not having anything to do. Oh, ye gods no! If you limited yourself to nothing more than the basics, it would be quite literally impossible for a human being to work through all of the one-a-day, repeatable options in a single twenty-four hour period and also find time for sleeping and eating. Actually, probably even without that. There are probably bots trying it right now but honestly I'm not sure even a bot could do it. You'd probably need a team of them.

My problem isn't lack of content, then. No-one's problem in GW2 is lack of content. My problem is lack of interesting content. Fresh content. Content that I'm excited to do. There are thousands of things I could theoretically be doing but there aren't all that many I ever wanted to do more than once, not even when they were new. 

I'm not going to re-write history and pretend I never enjoyed any of the myriad of maps, dailies, collects and story snippets that have trundled off the end of the Living World/Living Story conveyor belt over the last nine years. A skim through the hundreds of frequently quite upbeat, positive posts on the game here at Inventory Full would soon punch a hole in that kind of retcon. 

The thing is, for many years that content was designed to be consumed and forgotten. The first season of Living World played out in real time. You were there or you missed it. Even now, much as they'd like to, ArenaNet can't bring those moments back, neatly packaged and sold for two hundred gems a pop.

Waiting for the Veteran Warg to spawn in WvW for the Veteran Creature Daily. It's a 10 minute spawn and we're going to stand here 'til it comes. That's entertainment.

 

Subsequent seasons were designed to be resellable and the addition of awkward, fiddly Achievements was supposed to make them replayable, too. Still, that was something for a niche audience. Completists, late-comers, obsessives. The general design continued to favor periodic content drops intended to bring everyone together in a feeding frenzy that would soon be overtaken by the next one on the content assembly line.

It seemd like a good idea at first. Dry Top and particularly Silverwastes kept us occupied for months. As time went on the prospect of a new map (or at least part of one) every couple of months took hold. Became expected. A Living Story drop without a new map was seen as an admission of failure, a sign of the game falling into decline.

What to do with all those old maps, though? Keep using them, of course. GW2 has the best record bar none in the genre of keeping all older content continually in play. It's a laudable goal and a considerable achievement. We certainly complain enough about the opposite in other games so it seems more than churlish to criticize ANet for doing what we so often say all mmorpgs should do. 

I'd be the first to applaud them for bringing back good repeatable content, like the Marionette. I complained about the waste of taking that away, plenty of times. In GW2's nine year history there hasn't been a surfeit of set piece events as strong and well-liked as the Marionette. Certainly not so many the game can afford to discard them after a few weeks and never let them be seen again.

I can think of a handful more good ones that could be brought back but here comes the inevitable corollary: be careful what you wish for. Open that door and who knows what might shoulder its way past? I certainly don't want to see Joko in the game ever again, or Balthazar.

But of course those two never really went away, unlike Scarlet. With years of experience the developers have become more adept at designing maps and content for continuous use, albeit at the expense of logic and possibly sanity. We have an officially-stated position now that time works differently in Tyria. Everything exists simultaneously and all these maps are somehow timelocked in a hand-waving fashion I don't remotely begin to understand because magic, I suppose. Or more likley because just go with it.

Fine. Fair enough. It's a problem no theme-park mmorpg I know of has ever managed to solve, even World of Warcraft, where no-one really seems to mind ripping out whole chunks of the game and throwing them away with every expansion.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of content GW2 has added over the years was never intended to hang around forever. It was meant to excite people for a few days, occupy them for a few more, then be replaced by something new. That was the original Living World model and for my money it worked. Unfortunately for ANet's money - real money - it didn't. It was too expensive to keep producing content that only lasted a few weeks and anyway most players hated it. Mmorpg players are very uncomfortable with content that goes away. 

I cared about these people, once. Well, some of them.

I'm not. I'm uncomfortable with content originally designed to be permanent  getting removed but very comfortable indeed with content that arrives with an expiry date attached and especially with content that comes with an appointment to view. I really like one-off events in mmorpgs. I'd go as far as to say I think one-off events are what mmorpgs are for.

Apparently that's a minority view. It's certainly commercially unsusutainable. Everything has to be permanent and reusable for everyone, always, or someone's going to kick off. Which is a problem when you also have a sales structure that relies on doling out chunks of monetizeable content week after week.

It might be sustainable if there wasn't such an obvious formula to it all, I guess. We'll probably never know. I doubt there's the imagination or the budget in any mmorpg studio to make it happen but it's a theory. In the case of GW2, the best we've been trained to expect with every new map is a meta that can be farmed and some pretty new scenery to look at while we're doing it.

Oh, and a new currency and some new dailies to do to get it. As Jeromai so vividly describes there are always more dailies...

To me, the prospect of returning to those old maps and grinding those old events for those old currencies is about as attractive as watching re-runs of an old sitcom you never found all that funny to begin with. If you're lucky it might raise the odd, wry smile, once or twice but more likely the best you can say for it is it kills half an hour when there's literally nothing else you can think of to do.

The whole game is a bit like that although, for my own personal tastes, I'd have to say that revisiting many of the original maps and most of Heart of Thorns is more like happening on an episode of a sitcom I used to like a lot and finding out to my pleasure it's still as funny as it always was, only now the humor is layered over with a patina of familiarity and recognition.

Maybe other people get that from all those increasingly faceless maps that came with later seasons of the Living World. If so, I'm happy for them.

Like Jeromai, I was working my way through the old episodes and chapters ANet have been re-promoting as a quite clever and exceptionally cheap run-up to the next expansion, End of Dragons. I have to say that as a marketing excercise it's a good  one. It got me to do things I would have sworn I'd never do, like replay old story content and revisit old Living World maps.

I could beat this thing with my eyes closed.

 

Also like Jeromai, though, what I've noticed as I've been doing it is just how shoddy and ramshackle much of that older content is and, by implication, always was. It's a little disturbing how much of a pass all content in all mmorpgs gets just for being new. I'm certain I enjoyed a lot of this stuff a lot more at the time simply because I hadn't seen it before.

And that's fine with content that goes away. As I said up top, I'm good with seeing it once and never again. A lot of popular entertainment is throwaway for a reason. Much of it is smoke, mirrors and flashing lights. And that's fine.

What you get when you go back to visit it again a year or two later could be magical. It could be nostalgic, emotional, bittersweet. It could be fun. Or it could be like the circus the day after the last show. Sweaty men smoking roll-ups, heaving dull, heavy flats onto a lorry. A threadbare lion yawning toothlessly at the back of a filthy cage. Clowns with their make-up off sitting on the steps of their ricketty caravans, shoulders slumped, looking worn and tired and old. You can see how it all works, now, and you wonder how you could ever have found it so entrancing.

And that story. Oh, boy. If there's one thing in Guild Wars 2 you do not want to revisit it's the storyline. Jeromai really skewers it and rightly so:

"The story started to dry up as the NPCs talked at each other for 5 minutes or longer each instance, before progressing on to the next scripted step, that produced even more talking, until maybe there would be a quick fight (utterly destroyed by a power-creeped spin-to-win reaper shroud) and then even more talking. Oh, and a gimmick fight or two which takes FOREVER"

The thing is, when this was new, I wanted more of all that talk. The talk was the best part. It was why I played through the stories in the first place. 

It wasn't that I thought it was well-written, even at the time. As Jeromai points out characterization is wildly inconsistent, the plot is driven by the needs of the cash shop and the whole thing has the unmistakeable stamp: "Approved by the Storyline Committee". It's not just pulp fantasy soap opera - it's mediocre pulp fantasy soap opera - at best!

Did someone ask for a golem?

 

And yet at the time it was new I was sufficiently invested in the plot and the characters to care, at least while it was happening. And so, I believe, was Jeromai, from what I remember from his commentary back then. It's just that none of this stuff was built to last any more than the latest episodes of East Enders or General Hospital or whatever modern-day soap you want to slot in for a less-dated example. 

You're meant to watch this stuff once then never think about it again. You just need to retain a vestigial memory of the main plot points so the next episode at least seems to follow on. As anyone who's ever re-watched a sopa opera knows, the more you remember about the plot, the less sense it's going to make.

So, after all that, why do I still play GW2 every single day without fail? Why, yesterday, did I play for an hour and a half longer than I intended, even while I was wanting to play Bless Unleashed instead?

Becuase as Jeromai says there's an "inherent freedom" to the game that isn't found in many of its competitors. You really can do whatever the hell you want in GW2 and it really doesn't matter. No-one else cares. There's no one thing you "ought" to be doing. Saying "nothing matters in the game" sounds like a damning criticism but say it in a different tone and it's a ringing endorsement.

I spent most of my GW2 time yesterday defending our EBG Keep from SoS's ROSE guild and their hangers-on, fifty-plus of them with a bunch of golems coming back again and again, to be wiped by our thirty or so PUGs and a great tag. There's a bunch of acronyms and jargon you don't need to understand. All you need to know was it was in-the-moment fun that mattered a lot in the moment and for not for one second after.

Ditto my dailies. I do my dailies every day and I love it. I have no reason to do them. If I missed a day or a week or a month it wouldn't matter. It just pleases me when I get them done. And when I say "my dailies" I mean exactly that. As Jeromai says "every single GW2 player knows how to pick and choose what dailies they want to do." 

In Bless Unleashed there are certain things I feel I need to do every time I log in. They matter or for now it feels as though they do. In GW2, hey, who cares? 

Nope. You got me. I don't remember this one.

 

It's freeing. It's the upside of playing a game where even the developers clearly have no real idea where things are going and never have. Yes, it makes a lot of the narrative and most of the activities feel objectively meaningless but that can be a good thing. 

The plot in Bless Unleashed is far more coherent and followable than anything I've experienced in GW2. That's great. I'm really enjoying it. It's pulling me through the game like an engine. I played GW2 for something like seven or eight years before I bothered to finish the original Personal Story that was there at launch.

If the GW2 story had been as clear and compelling as BU's I'd have wanted to know how it ended. It wasn't and I didn't care. I still don't care. But I'm still playing GW2 nine years later. I have over twenty characters there and that's in large part because I've never felt I had to repeat any content I didn't want to do again.

I want to play another class in Bless Unleashed but I'm already wary because I know I'll have to go through the story again. It's a good story but I've seen it. Do I want to see it again? Want to place a bet on how many years I'll be playing Bless Unleashed? Or how many characters I'll have there?

That's not a dig at either game. They are, weirdly, very similar. In fact, Playing Bless Unleashed feels closer to playing GW2 than anything else I can think of. Maybe I will still be playing both of them, years from now. 

If so, that will be because nothing much in either of them matters or at least doesn't matter too much. It's important things in video games don't matter too much. Things mattering in video games is a problem not an advantage. That's why people burn out or get angry or addicted. Mmorpg's "mattering" is not a goal for which we should be shooting.

Over time I hope things in Bless Unleashed come to matter to me less than they do now. That's as it should be. I also hope the developers there can keep adding things that seem to matter, for a while, when they're new. That's also as it should be.

What happens to all that stuff when it doesn't matter so much any more, that's the question GW2's been wrestling with all these years, along with every other mmorpg developer. The solution ArenaNet have come up with, problematic though it can appear, seems to me to be about as good as we could hope for. 

At least, if anyone's found a better way, they're keeping it to themselves.

Truce

It's a bit of a tradition here at Inventory Full to write a review, of sorts, every time I finish a Living Story episode in Guild Wars 2. I've posted something after just about every Living Story/World/Saga update since the game began but I can't remember ever having less to say about one than I do about yesterday's "Champions: Truce".

No-one seems especially stoked this go round. Time was, when a new episode or chapter was looming, you'd hear people talk about it in game. There'd be multiple forum threads speculating on what might be about to happen and I'd read (and write) blog posts fueled by nothing more than the trailer and a heady sense of anticipation.

For a long while now it's been entirely possible to log in and play a full session without hearing even a passing mention of the latest update. It's true I don't hang out much in the metas but there was a time when people in the starting maps talked of little else on patch days and I'd hear commanders in World vs World complaining they couldn't defend a keep because everyone was off doing the Living Story. 

Those days are long gone. All you hear now, if you hear anything, is the odd derisive comment. As for the forums, gone are the multiple discussion threads that Gail Gray used to have to consolidate. Gone too are the official feedback threads that once ran for several pages and had to begin with an official request for posters to keep things brief.

Instead, when I went to the forum today to check if anyone else was having the same trouble with one of the events I was, I had to look twice before I found any threads at all. There's one called "What do you think of the new Living World: Champions? (Spoilers inside)". It has sixty-six comments and it's been viewed thirteen hundred times, which I guess isn't all that bad for an update that hasn't been live for twenty-four hours. Or it's not until you read it.

Not in my house!

 

If I had to summarize the opinion most commonly expressed in the thread in a single word, that word would be meh. Or maybe bleh. 

"About what I had expected. I figured that they had pulled their living world teams to work on the expansion so this was a low effort way to provide content until it releases."

"All in all, I'm actually surprised it's even more bare bones than expected... The only good thing is I can commit my time to other games now this isn't going to demand anything from me."

"I didn't expect much and at least it was not disappointing in that regard."

"It is as bad as we feared... Luckily Shadowlands is right around the corner".

"It's okay. It didn't blow me away and it didn't disappoint me."

"Good idea, bad execution, too tedious."

"...it's underwhelming, even with my expectations low."

Those are probably some of the more positive ones, too. There's a widespread assumption that anything we get between now and the launch of End of Dragons is going to be the work of a skeleton crew trying to cobble something together while ninety-nine per cent of the teams work on the third expansion. We can't expect much and not much is what we're going to get seems to be the general feeling.

There's also a fairly commonly expressed opinion on the forums that the Icebrood Saga has been generally poor in comparison to previous seasons. I'd take this with several buckets of salt because you could have heard a similar sentiment being expressed during every one of the five seasons to date. (It is five, isn't it? Hard to keep track since they keep changing the name).

What does puzzle me is what seems like a growing tendency to compare the Icebrood Saga to Living World Season One. I've read this a number of times, almost always couched as a criticism, but I'm not clear whether the supposed similarity is in the story or the gameplay. 

I can't say I can see much of a correlation in either. I wish I could. I liked Season One well enough at the time, as my contemporary commentary demonstrated, but if I'd known what we were going to get next I'd have positively raved. Scarlet's War seems like a golden age, now.

Is there something you'd like to tell us, Jormag?

 

Perhaps the two seasons do have something in common, even if I'd struggle to articulate exactly what it might be. If I was going to put the seasons in order of preference I'd have Season One at the top but the Icebrood Saga would come next, which does suggest they at least both pander to my personal tastes. 

Does that mean I like this episode, then? Champions? 

Eh, well... I guess... It was... okay. Y'know?

It was surprisingly good to have voice acting back. When we got the first silent episode, courtesy of the pandemic, I quite liked just reading the text but I found I was hearing the familiar actors' voices in my head anyway. The novelty wore off fast. 

I'm not sure I'll go back and replay the last two episodes just to hear the dialog out loud but I definitely will watch it on YouTube if someone edits it all together. A few years back you could have counted on someone doing that. Not so sure anyone's got the motivation any more.

The plot's quite interesting. Some people don't like the very idea that we might be about to team up with an elder dragon, specifically Jormag, but a lot more don't like the way it's being handled. The rationale behind it certainly is vague and confusing but I think that's deliberate. 

Jormag, as Braham points out, is the master of lies. I can't think of a non-binary term for that or I'd have used it. And Taimi, lest we forget, is living with a terminal diagnosis. If she's being less rational than usual... well, come to think of it, how rational is she, ever?

That's sarcasm, right? Just so we're clear.

 

I had more of an issue with the ease with which just about everyone accepted Ryland's assistance. Isn't he subject to some kind of war crime tribunal? Does being Jormag's Champion give him a pass on that? Yeah, well, I guess it does, at that.

The plain fact that I can sit here and discuss this (with myself) a few hours after playing through the episode suggests the story is working better than it has in the past. Sometimes I get to the end of a chapter and can't even remember how it started, let alone how it fits in with what came before. The Icebrood Saga, though, I feel I could write a coherent precis for, if I had to.

Other than the acting and the story, Champions doesn't have much going for it. There's some fairly desultory combat in the early sections and some exceptionally tedious and long-winded slog to get through at the end. Full disclosure, I haven't even done all of that yet.

The episode concludes with three missions using the not very popular "Private/Public" instance format. I tried to do the first solo, supposedly an option, and had to give up due to sheer boredom. There was no risk of me not being able to finish it - it was just going to take me about an hour to kill the boss and I couldn't bring myself to do it.

That, I should add for anyone who might have been reading the patch notes, was after they fixed the bug that made the mission bosses far slower to kill than they were meant to be. What they must have been like before, I don't care to imagine.

Second time around I took the "Public" option and completed the first of the three missions relatively painlessly in about fifteen or twenty minutes. It was still tedious but it was bearable. Put that on the poster!

You noticed?

 

There are two more missions to complete before the chapter can be considered finished and from what I've read they're functionally identical to the first. I'll get them done eventually but I can't say I'm keen. After that I imagine I'll never see them again, even they're supposed to be our repeatable content for the next couple of months.

I believe ArenaNet have done a better job than most of their competitors at keeping older content in play but I suspect we may be reaching a point where they're becoming the victims of their own success. GW2 has a staggering amount of repeatable content now, all of it with its own metas, currencies, dailies and achievements. It's almost self-defeating. If no old content ever goes out of date is that any different from if all of it did?

One thing you don't hear too much of is people complaining about being ripped off. The general feeling, as expressed in some of the forum comments, seems to be that this is about what you can expect for nothing, which is, after all, what we're paying:

"I'm... fine logging in every 2 months or so to check out the story progression"

"I am unsatisfied but on the other hand it was for free, so hey..."

"I've pretty much stuck with logging in on release days and then disappearing till the next. It's honestly more enjoyable that way".

I'm not sure that kind of lack of engagement is what any developer wants to hear but, honestly? It does kind of work for me, too. Sure, I'd love to be swept up and blown away by an mmorpg, the way I was by GW2 itself eight years ago. I just don't expect it any more. 

It's actually quite convenient to get occasional content drops that pique my interest for a day or two - maybe a week if it's really good - then for the game to go on the back burner again. It's not how this hobby used to be but then I'm not the person I was when I discovered it, either. I'm twenty years older for a start.

Maybe we don't get the games we want. Maybe we get the games we deserve. And I'm not sure how many of us have the capacity for engagement we had when the genre was new. Maybe meh is about all we can handle. I mean, when was the last time you heard anyone yell "Woot!" ?

A Piece Of Lost Dead Past

One of the featurettes included with Guild Wars 2's latest update, Visions of the Past, is the option to replay four instanced scenarios originally released during the first season of the Living World. I remembered the quartet quite well.

The North Nolan Hatchery was, I thought, the very first Living Story instance although looking back it seems Braham's retaking of Cragstead were both part of the March 2013 update, Flame and Frost: The Razing.  Back then I was quite complimentary about the Rox vignette, saying "The nursery instance was exactly the right degree of hard. I completed it without dying but I was downed a few times and it looked touch and go for a while".

That's quite instructive, isn't it? I very much doubt anyone's going to get downed in the Nolan Hatchery this time around. I did the instance yesterday and it was distinctly on the easy side. I brisked through it with only half a mind on what I was doing. We've all come along long way since 2013, not least Rox.

Before you get to relive the glory days there's some paperwork to complete. I was expecting one of ArenaNet's patented "Collects", GW2 code for quests, but it turned out to be a lot simpler than that. All you need to do is visit each of the orignal locations where the instances took place and find a "memento" of the occasion.

The hatchery and Braham's village, Cragstead, were both turned into permanent zones in the game when the Living Story moved on. You've been able to visit them, walk around and chat to NPCs there for years. I guess that dims the nostalgia a little but it makes finding the mementos very straightforward. Just go into the instance and keep heading deeper until you can't go any further. There you'll find a sparkling ground spawn with a big label atached. Can't hardly miss it.

The other two are very slightly harder to spot. The two instances in question no longer exist in the game so the mementos are just lying around outside where they used to be. I had a bit of trouble with the one for the krait tower, now lying in pieces across much of Viathan Lake in Kessex Hills, to the point that I eventually cracked and went to YouTube to watch a video made by someone with better eyesight than me.

Not only was the damn thing in pretty much the first place I'd tried, I'd actually looked right at it, seen it, wondered what it was, then left it lying there so I could spend ten minutes swimming about in toxic waste. Somehow I missed both the sparkles and the sign. Go me!

The last one is definitely the "hardest" to grab, although that's not saying much. It's pretty straightforward to find but karka are annoying even now. and it's down a coral run close to the jumping puzzle on Southsun Cove that's teeming with the infuriating little crabs..

Each pick-up completes an achievement and allows you to access the related instance from the Scrying Pool in the new Eye of the North. I did them all before I went back so I'm not sure if you can use them piecemeal or wehther you have to collect all four to make anything happen.

The four instances you receive access to are:

The only one I've done so far is North Nolan Hatchery. Cragstead I remember as being fairly dull and the toxic tower/krait tower as annoying but Canach's Lair I must have liked well enough because I wrote a guide for it. I might do that one again if I'm stuck for something to do some day.

Other than that, I'm not really all that fussed. It's nice to have the option, sure, but I can't honestly say I've thought about any of these instances even in passing these last six or seven years. Now, if it was the Marionette...

The decision to make the instances uniquely available via the Scrying Pool is very interesting. Anet could have chosen to place the zone-ins at the original locations or even through a UI element but instead they made sure we'd have to travel to the Eye of the North each time.

There's a clear intent to turn the Eye into something more than just another service hub. As well as the season one missions you can also access all the sub-raid "Strike" missions from there. It has something of the feel of one of the lobby zones from the original Guild Wars, particularly with the Xunlai storage chests lying about by the wall.

Eye of the North is described as an "upgradeable instance", which is true if what you understand by the word upgrade is "pay a one-time fee to use our services". I really can't see any point in this but I guess it's harmless enough.

Why anyone would want to access these services in this location sufficiently often to justify the effort and expense involved in setting them up beats me. I'd just hit "B" and go to the WvW hub for banking and broking, then hit "B" again to be returned to the Eye. I certainly wouldn't pay fifty gold for the privelige although I imagine some GW vets will think it's worth it just for the nostalgic frisson of banking with the Xunlai again, even if the Xunlai themselves are long gone.

As for crafting, I suppose you could just about imagine someone needing to make something urgently before a Strike mission but it's a bit far-fetched.

And that's about it for the Visions update. I quite enjoyed some of it.

Next!

It's All Good: GW2

This morning was... surprising. I logged in after breakfast with no particular plan in mind. My mouse pointer dithered over the EverQuest II icon for a moment as I thought about doing the new panda quest, then moved on.

What I wanted to do was play WoW Classic but if I knew if I started before nine in the morning I might end up playing for twelve hours straight and I wouldn't want Tobold to worry. I considered getting a blog post out before playing anything but the ones I have in mind are likely to be epics and I wasn't quite ready for that level of effort.

As I often do at this point, I decided to run my Guild Wars 2 dailies while I let my thoughts settle. GW2 dailies are predictable and generally quick, plus I hate to miss out on that two gold per account per day.

I logged my primary account in and found the dailies were exceptionally easy. I'd finished all three in not much more than five minutes. Since I was on the account that had opened the new map I was raving about the other day, I thought I might as well go and have a wander around.

Four and a half hours later I logged out for a belated lunch, having completed the entirety of the Bound by Blood Prologue. It's too early for any kind of detailed review because spoilers but my capsule review is this:

Best "Living World" episode for as long as I can remember.

I really have almost nothing negative to say about it at all. Let's have some bullet points about why that is, without spoiling the extremely good plot.

• It's paced very well


• There are absolutely no horrible, tedious extended fights.


• At no time do you have to learn a set of fatuous new skills that replace your real ones.


• Nothing requires you to do a thing, then do it again, then do it a third time to be absolutely sure.


• The story is genuinely interesting, especially if you like the Charr race and their politics.


• Not only is it interesting but it's coherent and it makes sense!


• A couple of regular cast members make a long overdue reappearance.


• At no point (that I noticed) does anyone say anything wildly out of character.


• The voice acting is good to very good.


• The dialog is significantly better than it used to be (although it has generally been improving since the big shake up last year).


• There are a bunch of new characters, all of whom appear to have actual personalities.


• Every location is visually sumptuous. I know GW2's Art Dept. always knock it out of the park but this time that tired re-used assets feel is wholly absent.


• The new map doesn't just look good - it plays well. It doesn't have the stale "Only here for the Meta" feel of so many recent LS maps.


• There are two dozen Events and they vary widely in style and kind. You can easily complete the number necessary for the story by doing only the ones you like.

Other than the sudden leap in quality, perhaps the most surprising thing about Bound By Blood is that, despite being promoted as a "prologue" to the real first instalment of the "Icebrood Saga", it seems to have more content and take longer to play through than many recent Living World full episodes. I did take a lot of screenshots (over 60 this morning, most of which I can't use because of spoilers) and did a fair bit of exploring, but even so I'm absolutely certain Bound By Blood is at the very least no shorter than the average LS4 entry.

I'm aware that my enthusiasm is in part driven by the change of location and focus. I find Ascalon and The Shiverpeaks a clear order of magnitude more appealing than anywhere we've been sent since before Heart of Thorns four years ago. I also find the Charr the most interesting of all the races. Only the Asura come close and they are definitely in second place.

Bound By Blood (a very clever title, as it turns out) goes all in on Charr politics with a hefty side-order of Charr culture. I loved it. Rytlock, my favorite GW2 character, has a starring role and, as always, makes the most of it, but all the other Charr with speaking parts are memorable characters too.

For non-Charr fans, there's quite a lot of Braham, mostly in his comedy sidekick persona rather than his spoiled brat mode. He's arguably a little over-used but I enjoyed his routines. Gorrik has a smaller but also quite funny supporting role, with a key scene that had me genuinely worried for his safety - not to say survival. Fortunately the "kill a much-loved character" trope, over-use of which by previous writers has drawn a good deal of criticism in the past, stays in the locker this time. I guess that's a spoiler. Sorry!

By the time the prologue came to its unexpected conclusion I found myself very much on board with the new direction. For the first time since... well I can't remember exactly when, but it could conceivably be as far back as the death of Scarlet... I find myself actively looking forward to finding out what happens next.

My only worry is that Bound By Blood is so good compared to most LW episodes precisely because it's a "prologue". That the writers have deliberately slowed the pacing and concentrated on the lore and the characters rather than the set-piece boss fights (which I loathe) only as a beat before a return to relentless, mindless "action".

I'm going to choose to believe that's not the case. That lessons have finally been learned. That we at last have a writing team that knows how to write and developers who know how to fit the necessary action to the limited skills of what is probably the most casual playerbase in major MMORPGS.

How long we have to wait to find out very much remains to be seen. ANet are keeping their cards very close to their breastplates this time. No talk of bi-weekly updates like Season One or three month cadences like Season 4. This time we get a "saga", not chapters or episodes. That could be any format - or none.

I just hope when the next content drop arrives I can come back here and be as positive about it as have been today.

Playing Dead : GW2

Let's get this straight from the start: this post has SPOILERS. If you haven't played Guild Wars 2's latest Living World episode, War Eternal, and you don't care to know what happens then LOOK AWAY NOW!

Never Satisfied: GW2

When I decided to throw a quick post together about Guild Wars 2's latest Living World update (Season Four, Chapter Six for those keeping score), I was going to do the usual thing of avoiding spoilers but when even the name of the new map gives most of the game away it hardly seems worthwhile worrying.

The map's called Dragonfall and Jeromai has some great widescreen shots of it. He's also very enthusiastic about what he's seeing. I'm... less so.

Yes, the art department has done its usual superb job. This is top notch scenery. It's also the same scenery.

It's a bit cavalier to complain about consistency, isn't it?. After all, I'd be just as likely to complain if the pieces didn't fit together, wouldn't I? And isn't one of GW2's strongest suits the way the worldmaking manages to avoid the pitfalls of so many MMORPGs by maintaining coherent and geologically believable transitions? 

That's not really what I mean, anyway. "Consistent" and "same" aren't synonyms. And the new map is beautiful. Stunning, even. I particularly love the verticality that brings back such good memories of Heart of Thorns.

I don't mind the kitchen sink approach that grandfathers in every previous movement system - bouncing mushrooms, lava tubes, whirlwinds, ley lines, updrafts, even those vines that turn you into Spiderman. Although, as I worked my way around the strikingly different subdivisions last night, I did get the distinct impression someone wanted to show off every tool in the box.

And I did enjoy myself. It was fun. It's good work and I appreciate it. I just didn't hear myself go "Wow!" I'm not sure I will, again, not until we go to somewhere truly new. And even then I suspect it will feel surprisingly familiar.

Wherever it is that we end up in Season Five or Expansion Three (if there is one) there'll be places that look as though they were designed by the world's most talented six-year old: sparkles and stars and twinkling lights as far as the eye can see. There will be the areas that look like the covers of prog rock albums from the 1970s, specifically the ones designed by Roger Dean and Rodney Matthews. 

There will be an immense reliance on deep hues that make every screenshot look like something from the Color Field playbook. The rest will be a mix of stuff that's on fire or dragged up out of the sea or frozen solid or baked dry, just like every other MMORPG only with seriously better production values and far more attention to detail than most. I'm finding it something of a challenge to get excited by any of that any more.

For all the technical skill on display, have any maps been added to GW2 over the last seven years that can stand comparison with the greatest cities of the core game, Divinity's Reach, The Black Citadel or Rata Sum? Does anywhere feel as timeless and true as the eternal autumn of fallen Ascalon?

I do love all the maps that came with Heart of Thorns but even I wouldn't claim they're as complex or complete as those that preceded them. A jungle is a jungle in the end, even if most of it does feel more like a forest.

There's no obvious solution to this problem, if it's even a "problem"that exists outside my head. Most MMORPGs end up being more of the same. We've seen the trouble it can cause when they try not to. Having one of the best art teams in the industry with a portfolio of immediately recognizeable signature styles is as likely to emphasize the issue as conceal it.

Oh well. There are plenty of worse problems to have.

Just ask the writers.

Goodbye, Path of Fire. Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out.

I spent most of today playing Guild Wars 2, which isn't all that unusual. What was different from a run of the mill day off work was that I spent pretty much the whole time in the new content that came with yesterday's Living World update.

I think the last time that happened was probably Season Three, Episode Five, Flashpoint, the one that introduced us to Draconis Mons. I liked that map. I spent a good while completing it and generally goofing around there.

That was all the way back in May 2017 but most significantly it was before the release of the last expansion. The long and the short of it is that I don't much like anything about Path of Fire, and that very much includes the entirety of the Living World/Story Season associated with it. I don't like the look and feel, the mechanics, the plot, the characters and I very especially don't like the mounts.

Perhaps the best thing about LS4.4, A Star To Guide Us, is that it feels, if not like the end of an era, then at least like the beginning of the end. I'm more than ready.

I guess the real beginning of the end actually came in the last episode, when Palawa Joko, one of the most tedious, cliched, derivative villains I've ever had the misfortune to have to sit and listen to, died. Really died, as in gone for good, never coming back. In case anyone's in doubt or denial (and many seem to be) the permanence of his departure gets some heavy emphasis in the narrative this time around. 

Of course, as anyone who has ever read a comic or played a video game knows, no-one ever really dies. It's kind of a feature. What's more, in this very episode, the one in which several people, my own character among them, state with absolute certainty that Joko won't be coming back... well, I'd better not say any more.

Even so, I think we're free of the pest for a while. There's a distinct feeling of decks being cleared and pages being turned. The new map feels quite significantly different to all the others that came with the PoF expansion or the previous chapters of this Sesson. It may be connected geographically but it seems existentially separate.

As I was playing today, at one point I caught myself wondering whether this was the last episode in the Season. It can't be, of course. There would have been an announcement if it was.

Still, it's mid-September. They're going to have to go some to fit another one in between Halloween and Wintersday, although last year, if I remember correctly they did allow a Living World release to overlap the midwinter festival.

Whether we get Episode Five at the end of this year or the start of the next, either way I would bet on the next one being the climax of Season Four. I think it will set up the announcement for the third expansion, which will arrive sometime in Summer 2019. There will be no Living Story Season Five until after that beds in, so probably around October/November next year.

Or I guess they could wait another year. I don't think the finances will stand that, though. You can see from the financials each quarter how heavily they rely on the uptick from expansions.

I know there was a lot of brave talk in the first couple of years about never having any expansions ever but we saw how well that worked out for them. The game is on the expansion treadmill now and it won't be getting off until it follows the original Guild Wars into maintenance mode.

ArenaNet also once claimed they weren't going to make any more MMOs after GW2, the game they planned to operate and update indefinitely. It's been running for six years now and it probably has at least as long again to go, but some players are starting to get itchy feet. I've noticed an increasing number of in-game comments lately speculating on "Guild Wars 3".

There's even a thread about it on the forum - it was on the first page for a while but the flurry of posts following the update have pushed it on to page two. I wonder if the OP there is on to something when they say "...if ArenaNet does reach the point it can develop and maintain another MMO without having to send GW2 to the curb, I believe they should start up a new story entirely. Guild Wars was great, Guild Wars 2 is great...Guild Wars 3 would be too much."

Anyway, for now and the foreseeable, GW2 is what we have and as of this update it feels surprisingly fresh again. I am even more frustrated now than I was yesterday about not being able to discuss the story here. There's a lot to discuss. Maybe I'll get back to it when a few weeks have passed. Problem is, by then we'll all be on to something new and it won't seem as urgent.

One thing I will say is that the final instance is brutal, but in an entirely different way to usual. There's no awful, dragged-out boss fight. Instead there's a timed jump puzzle that has to be done on a mount. It's also currently very badly bugged, to the point of unplayability, which is traditional.

Nevertheless, I did manage to complete it, by means of a combination of workarounds, multiple deaths and brute force. Even though it was unfair and infuriating, I enjoyed it. I don't think I could honestly say that about any Episode finale since the Living Story moved to instanced content.

What's more, the penultimate instance is also brutal and unfair and I enjoyed that one too. For the first time in a very long time I am seriously considering taking a second character through the story for my own amusement and to see how it plays with a different class.

A Star To Guide Us isn't perfect, not by a wide margin, but it's a major improvement on what we've been used to over the past year and for that we can be thankful. If it's also laying down a marker for the future tenor and direction of the game, well, no-one will be happier about that than me.