I Love LA

The second instalment of Guild Wars 2's revised, revamped, restored, Unlimited Edition of Living World, Season One, Chapter who-the-hell-knows? dropped in today's regular Tuesday update. ArenaNet gave it a title: Sky Pirates. Maybe I should just have called it that.

The first and last time we saw this content was the best part of a decade ago, so forgive me if I can't remember if it was called "Sky Pirates" the first time around. It wasn't, though. Possibly a part of it might have been. It's a portmanteau of the original version, several bi-weekly episodes welded together with all the loose, awkward bits lopped off.

Or I guess it is. I've only played the first part. That also has a name. A weird name. I mean, if you were sitting around a table or in a bean bag or hanging over the divider of your cubicle or however they do it at ANet Towers, a bunch of you blueskying ideas on what to call to call your opening act, would you have come up with this?

"Ceremony and Acrimony." Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Okay, yes, well, maybe it does, meliflously-speaking. It has mouth feel, I'll give you that. But it reeks of academia. Is that the first impression you want to make? 

And subtitling it "Memorials on the Pyre"? That just makes the whole thing sound even more like an essay title you'd be unreasoningly proud of until your tutor trotted out that line about killing your babies.

Whatev. I played through it. Took me, I don't know, fifteen minutes? I wasn't counting. 

I remembered it very well, once it got going. It's the one where you get invited to the inaugural Dragon Bash in Lion's Arch and get to stand there like Magnus's spare prosthetic while the one-eyed pirate introduces all his pirate pals and makes some piratical jokes that are about as funny as you'd expect. 

Then all the minor races or whatever now-unacceptable phrase we used to use back in the Personal Story waddle or stride or slither forward (No, come to think of it, no-one invited the Krait.) to throw their memorials onto the pyres.

I always found that part a little strange. I don't think you get any idea what the "memorials" are. I couldn't see them but then I was having a lot of lag. Gendaran Fields was a slideshow, thanks to everyone standing about pointlessly just outside the gate to LA. and my PC was still struggling to recover for a while even when I got into the instance.

As soon as the pyres catch fire, a whole load of pinky-purple lightning shoots out and zaps everyone. It was quite a shock the first time around but I was expecting it this time. As I said, I could remember nearly everything, much to my surprise. 

At the time it seemed like everyone either got zapped into the air or ran away or fell over but I see from the above shot that really all that happened was everyone stood there gawping as if it was all part of the show. Probably the most realistic thing in the entire episode, then.

After that there's a whole load of yelling, all of it by Ellen Kiel, at this time still some kind of officer in the Lion Guard, I think. I won't spoil the plot and tell you what happens to her later but it was one of my favorite parts of Season One... other than the result. Vote Evon!

Eventually a dolyak turns up, towing what looks like a scout tent fitted with anti-grav. You, the Commander, get drafted for escort duty as the hairy yak plods across the big bridge that goes to... dammit, I should know this... some part of the Old Lions Arch I used to visit all the time... no, it's no good, it's gone.

The main reason I was hyped to play this right away was the rumor I heard that we'd get to see the old Lion's Arch again. Not the original original, the one that was damaged by the Karka Invasion. That's gone for good, I think. This would be the one after that, with the lighthouse still in ruins and some of the wooden temporary bridges still in place.

I never thought we'd get  a free run at the whole city but I did think we might get to see the Lion Fountain again. I wasn't sure about that, either. It got destroyed at least twice and rebuilt at least once but I couldn't tell you without looking it up what state it was in when Dragon Bash came along.

Wouldn't have made any difference if I could because the Captain's Council had the thing replaced by a hologram projector for the festival anyway. I remembered that as soon as I saw the ugly Asuran contraption. (You can see it in the picture at the top of the post, if you really want to.)

You can see from the above map exactly how much and which part of Lion's Arch you get to reminisce over. From the Grand Plaza to Fort Mariner. Fort Mariner! That's the bunny! Geez, my memory...

It's not much but it gives you the sweet taste. It's a tease to be able to see the rest of the city, just out of reach. Clearly they could give us back the whole thing if they wanted. Maybe in another chapter. I seem to remember Dragon Bash itself took place right across the city.

Of course, they'll have to bring back the entire map if they plan on doing Scarlet's attack on Lion's Arch and I don't see how they could conceivably run Season One without it. By then, though, half the city's a smoking ruin so it'll hardly be the same.

I would happily have carried on with the next chapter but Beryl the Dog chose then to go completely crazy and I had to spend half an hour throwing things for her in the garden until she calmed down. It's a puppy thing. I'm working tomorrow so it'll probably be Thursday before I get to carry on.

Here's hoping we get to see more of the Old Lion's Arch, while it's still almost in one piece.

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!