Roll Your Own: GW2

After all that moaning yesterday, naturally I spent much of today on the new map, Domain of Kourna. What's more, having roundly disparaged the new Roller Beetle mount, what else would I do but decide to go get one for myself?

I don't want the mount but I do like a good scavenger hunt, especially when I know exactly where to go and to get the beetle you have to do not one, not two but three collections. The in-game directions aren't bad but Dulfy has the full spec, with pictures.

I was hoping to get the lot done in time to take a screenshot or two of my cat-hatted druid clinging on for dear life to the saddle of his new, nonsensical ride. It turned out to be more time-consuming than I expected, not least because I also got sidetracked a few times by events. In the end I only managed the first two sets before the ticking clock told me I had time to finish or write about it but not both.

The first collection is very straightforward. All you have to do is find nine "Secret Caches" scattered around the new map. I barely needed to refer to Dulfy's diagrams. They are mostly easy to spot from a good distance away, particularly from the air, should you cruise past on a griffin, as I did.

That took maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Or it would have if I hadn't stopped to help one Asuran "scientist" who wanted me to dance with some Choya and another who had some half-baked device for tracking mutated rats he needed testing.

Those felt quite like the kind of events GW2 built its original reputation on - daft, inconsequential, amusing. If you avoid the metas there are often a few little amuse-bouche like that scattered around.

Speaking of the meta, I did some of that while I was working on the second collection. Lognodo in the comments to yesterday's post said the new map meta felt incomplete and I agree it certainly seemed on the short  side for a meta. More like a short chain.

It'd be a lot more secret without the glaring yellow text.

The three collections are thematically coherent. The first has you finding medicines and drugs - some legal, some not so much - to fix the ailing Petey (a beetle). The second sees you collecting parts to make a saddle to ride him.

I don't really want to think about how the saddle attaches to the beetle but if that makes no sense at least all the bits that go to make it seem logical. Bits of golems, kit liberated from the Inquest, power sources from the energy-rich anomalies...

It also means a good deal of traveling, most of it in a crowd. There were so many people at Golem Mk II that my frame rate dropped to a slide show, something that hasn't happened to me at a World Boss event for years. As for the Anomaly, those events have been deserted for what seems like forever but in Gendarran Fields this afternoon there were three Commander tags and something like fifty people.

I was expecting this to be a problem but the only problem was getting there before it died.

One thing that GW2 manages better than most other MMOs is keeping elderly maps alive. It would be so easy to keep all new content in maps attached to the current expansion (and for commercial reasons most new content does require access to Path of Fire) but ANet routinely thread some of that content back through the older maps as well.

Oddly, it wasn't the older events that posed a problem. They were heaving. The one thing that slowed me down was finding anyone doing a Bounty in the new map. I hung around by the Bounty Board for the best part of an hour, on and off. I checked LFG regularly. Nothing.

I tried taking a bounty and starting it to see if people would join in but the one I chose was up on a mesa and no-one passed by. I was seriously considering popping my Commander tag and starting my own LFG squad but I wasn't keen to exhibit my complete ignorance of the mobs and their tactics, never having even seen one in action.

By contrast, a very poor turnout for the bounty. I was just happy to get it done.

In the end I went to World vs World to sell and clear my bags and when I came back there was a small squad doing the Bounty Daily. I flapped over to them on my griff and got there just in time for the kill.

With all the various parts for the saddle stuffed in my packs all I had to do was check in with Blish and Gorrick. Much to Gorrick's amusement, Petey the Beetle was having none of it. Now I have to run all over Tyria scraping up scraps to make a beetle banquet to bribe the blasted bug.

One of those delicacies comes from the Toxic Spider Queen in Kessex Hills, a vicious Champion mob left over from the Scarlet era. People have giving that thing a wide birth for years. That's absolutely going to need a good turnout.

Another is a new mob, the Alpha Beetle, deep in The Silverwastes. Dulfy warns "...be vigilant as the beetle has very little HP and dies quickly" but that was before the latest patch-to-the-patch "Updated the “Kill the alpha beetle” event to be a champion group event".

Even the sky is uninspiring.

All fine and dandy right now, when people are falling over themselves to grab the shiny, new mount, but perhaps not so much in a few months time for the late starters. Oh well, it's been tweaked once, it can be tweaked again. Not sure when I'll get around to finishing up the final part but I'll be sure not to leave it too long, just in case.

As for the new map itself, I can't say I was very taken with it. It's a scrubby tract of desert with a lot of grey rock. There are some striking orange sands and a few lush, green oases but overall it's not the kind of place I can imagine wanting to spend more time in than I had to.

I'll be very glad when we're done with the desert altogether. Ironically, I wanted to go in the direction of Crystal Desert after Heart of Thorns but I've had more than enough of sand and rock now.

I hope when we're done doing whatever it is we're going to do to Kralkatorrik we head off to the Far Shiverpeaks to sort out Jormag. Or, after the recent revamp of underwater water weapons, maybe we could go hunting for Steve the Sea Dragon. I could go for a subsea expansion.

Just please don't let's go underground into the magma tunnels looking for Primordus. I've seen enough lava to last a lifetime.

Summertime Sadness : GW2

I very much agree with UltrViolet, who, when he briefly reviewed the latest Living World episode,  wrote

“See all previous comments regarding Guild Wars 2. There’s no need to write a new post. Nothing has changed. Whatever they spent extra time to work on is not evident to me.” 

Exactly so.

On the other hand, Jeromai, who very much knows what he's talking about when it comes to GW2, takes a different view :

"There’s a lot of what seem like under-the-hood tweaks to improve storytelling: from better NPC AI that form formations, in-instance object changes and scripting and zone phasing that are mostly remarkably used well in the service of telling a story, possibly over-fancy tweaks to the UI to indicate new status conditions..."

I have to confess I missed all of that. ANet did allude to some background changes when they were warning that the latest episode would be late:

"...we had an opportunity to make some adjustments to how we approach developing each episode..."

but in keeping with their usual hyper-cautious attitude to secrecy they gave not the slightest hint of what those changes or adjustments might be.

Well, they probably need to do something. Or maybe they don't. Who can tell? Megaserver technology makes it impossible to assess how well GW2 is doing by any of the usual means. You can't count the servers or make any meaningful judgment on  how busy the maps are. World vs World should be more quantifiable but that game mode is currently in such a deep, prolonged malaise pending the supposed root-and-branch revamp, that it's pointless even trying to take its temperature.

NCsoft’s first quarter 2018 report has GW2 performing tolerably well as part of the overall portfolio. I did initially interpret the table that had ANet's game neck-and-neck with Aion as evidence of a serious slide in profitability but in fact it turns out to be mainly due to a surge in monies coming in from Aion.

"Every other game saw a slight dip...with the exception of Aion which saw a big jump which NCSoft attributed to a “change in monetization scheme”"

All the same, the feeling in-game is one of drift. I find it more than peculiar that ArenaNet, with its 300+ employees (as reported in 2016) appears to struggle to produce four quarterly content updates, each of which provides  - at best - a couple of weeks of fresh entertainment for a very casual player, plus a full expansion only every two to three years.

Many - I would say most - moderately successful MMORPGs do considerably better than that. Even those that don't do a significantly better job at providing bread and circuses to keep the players entertained between major releases. ANet don't even seem to feel they need to work up a full year's calendar of holidays.

Jeromai mentions an upswell of feeling on reddit concerning GW2's lack of a genuine end-game, a problem that's ironically compounded by the game's horizontal sprawl:

"On the GW2 Reddit, there are threads bemoaning the lack of an endgame right alongside threads in which new and returning players profess their utter overwhelm and confusion with what to do next."

It's a problem ANet appear no nearer to solving than they were six years ago, when they trumpeted their mold-breaking manifesto. Over the running time of the game so far many solutions have been trialed and tried. Some have stuck, most have faded. The result is an ill-fitting, ill-seeming mish-mash of old and new.

Raids and fractals sit in their silos alongside the failing, fading original alternative game modes, sPvP and WvW. GW2's goal of becoming a popular platform for professional eSports is long forgotten. The supposed end-game equivalent, realm versus realm competetion in The Mists via what was once known as WorldvsWorldvsWorld languishes in deep decline, played by few,  cared about by fewer. A plan to revitalize WvW's fortunes lies somewhere in the future, maybe next year, maybe never.

Meanwhile the game limps along on crutches of cosmetics and collections. In the absence of anything comparable to vertical or linear progression the developers lean heavily on increasingly time-consuming busywork, leading to increasingly purposeless rewards.

What once seemed an outrageous shopping list for the original Legendary weapons now looks like a trip to the corner store in comparison to the requirements of the new batch. Jeromai considers his options:

"I’ve just come off the really long term goal of making a second set of legendary armor (heavy and light now done, medium to go… at some point far far into the future); am still eyeing Astralaria with temptation but utter trepidation (second gen HoT legendaries are intensive); and settled on the more medium term goal of repeating a easier first gen legendary..."

When we reach a point where players are working on their third set of "end game " armor and further "end game " weapons (all of which offer no practical character improvement other than convenience) just to have something to do, it's clear that we have a game whose appeal is going to be limited.

There are, it's true, a lot of players who like that sort of thing. Collecting all the things because all the things! has long been a recognized behavior. It's my feeling, however, that such an audience is dwarfed by the demographic that likes to see their characters become more powerful, more effective, better. Not just better-looking and easier to dress.

GW2 has become the poster child for that old saw "be careful what you wish for". We wanted an MMORPG with no vertical progression and no end game and this is what we got. I don't believe such a game has to look like that but this one does and I'm the poor sod stuck playing it - although I do at least play it my own way, most of the time.

I was, for a long while, invested in the narrative. It reels and lurches like a drunken sailor in a force ten but I've always found it entertaining and still do. In this, as in so many things, I seem to be out of step with the current audience. In game or out, few seem to care any more. Time was when each new twist and turn in the plot would spawn frenzied speculation in map chat and on the forums. These days all people seem interested in is where to go farm on the new map and how quickly they can get the mount.

I'm not going to say my time with GW2 is drawing to a close. The open-ended payment model means a GW2 player can never really quit, only take a break. I'm playing less, though. Much less. These days I just do my dailies and my Krait on each of three accounts, then I log out and play something else.

That's becoming an established pattern. With the new LS chapter I played a couple of sessions on the story but once I finished I haven't been back to explore the new map. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't even logged in since the update. WvW is in freefall. Neither of us do much there right now. Maybe the proposed conversion to an Alliance system will change that, maybe not.

I suspect everyone who cares has already left and most won't come back, or rather they will, but they won't stay long. Old names crop up all the time but few hang around. Nothing much has changed over the last four or five years to make anyone who stopped playing feel they made a bad choice.

Then again, it is summer. People have other things to do. Maybe that's all it is. With World of Warcraft gearing up for an expansion launch a lot of MMOs will be retrenching, hunkering down to wait out the storm. Maybe come the autumn things will look different.

Oh, who am I kidding? In Tyria nothing ever looks any different and never will. Not now Scarlet's dead. I miss her. If only this could be true. Just the first bit, obviously.

Enough whining. Maybe I should go look at the new map after all. I might find something interesting. Someone did. Don't click on this if you don't want spoilers. If you've finished the storyline, though, seriously, CLICK ON THIS!

I'm not even kidding.

I'd Tell You, But Then I'd Have To Kill You : GW2

Yesterday I guessed I was about halfway through the current GW2 Living Story episode, Long Live The Lich. I was wrong. Turns out I was more like two thirds of the way in. I finished it this afternoon.

It took me about another ninety minutes, give or take, meaning the whole thing - just the storyline that is - lasts something like three or four hours. Living Story chapters have been clocking in around that length pretty much since the beginning of Season Two, when they moved to the current, instanced format from the open world settings of Season One.

It's no secret that I'm very much in the camp that believes the first season was by far the best. It's not even nostalgia. I offer my many blog posts as evidence that I was invested and involved with the storyline and appreciative of the mechanics at the time they were in play.

Not that Season One didn't have its problems. It had many. Scarlet Briar, who I came to appreciate and even like as I learned more about her and her backstory, was a deeply divisive arch-villain. Even now there are those who spit when they hear her name mentioned.

Extreme Close-Up!

The narrative of the first few weeks and months seemed episodic to put it politely. The pacing could be funereal at times. The open world events frequently started out buggy and didn't always work properly until days after launch. Even when they were up and running smoothly they were open to widespread abuse by players, who swiftly discovered how they could be farmed for profit.

For all that, Season One had a dynamism, a fervor that has never been replicated. The knowledge that most of what arrived with each update would leave with the next, coupled with the much-maligned (not least by me) bi-weekly cadence, gave the whole game an urgency that seems hard to imagine now.

Moving to the current instanced system allowed ANet to monetize the Living World and also to ensure that no GW2 player need miss out on any aspect of the hard (and presumably expensive) work that went into creating it. Many, probably most, players appreciate being able to play the content at a time of their choosing.

One of the biggest complaints about the content of Season One (and again it's a complaint I made often myself) was the complete lack of any new overland maps. Other than the two, small non-combat instances that served as introductions for Rox and Braham, it wasn't until we began to receive Dry Top in instalments that the explorable land mass of the base game increased.

Some Random Fight!

All of that is the past, buried and forgotten. In 2018 our Living World arrives quarterly in tidy packages that always include the same things: a multi-part narrative that takes place mainly in instances, a set of achievements encouraging us to replay those instances, a new map, a new currency, a new vendor with something designed to be worth farming the new currency to buy.

It's indicative of the extremely formulaic, repetitive nature of this process that I now usually feel I've done with the latest Living World update somewhere between a day and a couple of weeks after it arrives. I no longer even bother to open the entire new map, far less complete all the events or spend weeks farming them. I believe I've made these observations in previous posts about other episodes of the Living World but what can you expect? They are all the same.

Part of the reason I'm rehashing history is that, having completed the narrative of the latest update, I find there's almost nothing I can say about it. That doesn't mean there's nothing I want to say about it. Ye gods, no! I have plenty to say. Anyone would, had they seen it. I just can't, because spoilers.

At this stage just about anything I might say would be a spoiler. I took a bunch of screenshots and I can't use most of those because they are all spoilerific too. About all I'm prepared to say about the story is... it's really going to annoy some people - but I'm not one of them.

Irony! Or maybe Sarcasm!

Of course, I long ago gave up expecting consistency or quality from ANet's writing team. That way madness lies. I'll settle for getting a good laugh, a jump scare or something that I wanted to happen. This time I got all three.

I can be a bit more descriptive about the mechanics. This is an area where I've been hyper-critical in the past. I detest ANet's innate belief that the only reason casual players don't love hardcore boss fights is that they aren't exposed to them often enough.

Even more than that I loathe the designers reliance on the Rule of Three (Boss does something weird at 75%, 50% and 25%) and the The Other Rule Of Three (introduce three new gimmicks separately then use all of them at once). Without these two old standbys the Annoying Boss Fights that last 20-30 minutes would last 5-10 minutes instead and I would be done with them that much faster. Who knows, at a quarter of the length I might even enjoy one, once in a while.

Sadly, this episode is not going to be remembered as The One Where Anet Broke The Habit Of A Lifetime. It is, however, one where the gimmicks are more straightforward, easier to grasp, easier to use and less idiotic than usual. Also, I don't think it's a spoiler to confirm that, yes, there is a final boss and yes, you do have to fight them, but it might be if I tell you that the fight in question is less annoying than most of its kind and takes up less of your valuable time than you probably expect.

Title Card!

Other than that, I would only say that the whole production reminded me of one of those Shakespeare plays where there are lots of battles that the audience gets to experience only through various Lords urgently discussing the action while peering into the wings. I'd also say that I've always held that even telling someone there's a surprise ending is a spoiler, no matter that you refrain from telling them what the surprise is.

So, did I enjoy it? Well, yes. I guess so. It was rubbish but so are lots of things I like. I didn't really get any deep emotions poked. Nor too many shallow ones, come to that. Then again, I finished The Banner Saga this week and my main emotional reaction was mild puzzlement. If I had to sum the ending of that one up, "Is that it?" would probably cover it. It might be me, is what I'm saying.

Next, I guess I should go see what's on the new map, do the Hearts, check the vendors and look at the Collection for the Roller Beetle Mount. Or I might just do my dailies and go play something else until September.

I'm not entirely sure that was the reaction ANet were looking for. It certainly wouldn't have happened in Season One.

This Joko Isn't Funny Any More : GW2

This afternoon, I finally got to play "Long Live the Lich", Episode Three, Season Four of GW2's Living World. Just shy of a full day after it supposedly launched. Along with almost everyone else, I couldn't get stuck into the (no doubt thrilling) storyline right away, due to major bugs.

They supposedly fixed the worst while I was sleeping although as I write there's still a caveat on the forums warning they haven't found, let alone stomped, all of them. Supposedly the disconnection issues that made me go play EQ2 instead had been fixed (it was those pesky Fractals) but the first three times I attempted to log in today - post-fix - the game was still giving me a network error.

Oddly - or perhaps not so oddly - I was able to log in my two accounts that don't have the Path of Fire expansion without any issues. I did my dailies on those. I also went round all ten chests for the repeatable Sunken Treasure Hunter achievement, the first time I've been able to open them for nearly a month.

Most of the new map doesn't look like this. The rest is boring old desert.

That's how long ANet took to fix that particular bug. There's a sixteen page thread on it on the forums. They also forgot to mention the bug fix in the update notes. If anyone's missing the glory days of SOE's MMOs of a decade and a half ago I strongly urge them to come play GW2. Every patch breaks something and no-one seems all that bothered about fixing most of it.

I'd been stashing the keys, which you could still get from the Kill Ten Krait Daily (it's not called that but that's what it is). I have about twenty on each account now. It took me an hour to go round all the maps using them up just on one account so I might have to pace myself. I'm only doing it because I want the breathing mask that covers your entire head with a huge bubble.

With that out of the way I tried logging in my Path of Fire account and miraculously it worked. That meant it was time for my Druid (One of my five Druids. One of my two Druids on that account. No, I don't know why, either...) to wake up.

GW2 does have pretty interstitials.

He's the Asuran who dresses like a toddler. Watching everyone trying to take him seriously as The Commander makes the dialogue of every Living Story episode seem like comedy even when it's supposed to be tragedy. I use him because when Druids were invented I specced and geared him for maximum healing and he can generally outheal most of the stupid gimmicks they put in LS instances so I don't have to bother learning how they work.

So far this time he hasn't needed to go full firehose with the healing stick. It's far too early to give any details even with a spoiler warning but I will say that up to where I've got so far, which is to the end of the story element of the new map, I'm guessing maybe half-way through the whole thing, it's a lot less annoying than most episodes.

Thus far all the fights have been easy. The first mini-boss didn't seem to have any dumb tricks. The inevitable instance where all your real skills are taken away and you have to use a whole load of new ones that the game tries to teach you in real time isn't infuriating or frustrating. It's actually - whisper it - fun. It's a long time since I've been able to say that.

Extremely minor spoiler: if you go under the deck on the ship after the fight ends you get to hear Joko being unpleasant. You might  want to avoid doing that.

The narrative so far is at least coherent and comprehensible. Original or surprising it very much is not
but you can't have everything. It also has the kind of tonal problems that could only really be solved by splitting the entire thing in two. And then preferably burning the part of the script that has all of Joko's lines in it.

I don't know how Palawa Joko was played in the original Guild Wars but here he seems to be channeling both Mad King Thorne and The Joker at the same time. At one point he sounds so indistinguishable from Mad King Thorne that I wondered if it was the same voice actor. Perhaps it is. It would explain a lot.

Personally, I don't find sadistic psychopaths amusing. When Alan Moore and Brian Bolland redefined and re-invented the character of The Joker in The Killing Joke they were making a point about how unfunny he was,  a point that seems to have been comprehensively lost over the ensuing decades.

I'd go for "Guilty but Insane"

GW2, perhaps more so than any MMORPG I've played, fails to harmonize its registers, leaving them to clash horrifically like some nightmare wind-chime made from sheet iron. It frequently interposes the sadistic with the twee in a manner that suggests, at best, a lack of professional judgment that would put most writers on the unemployment line and at worst a serious psychiatric disorder.

This tendency, always present, seems to be worsening. I'm not at all sure how much longer I'll be prepared to put up with it. I'm damned sure I'm not going to make excuses for it. I'm just hoping we finish Joko off for good and get back to Dragons. You know where you are with a dragon. (On fire, mostly).

My deep antipathy for Joko aside, I found plenty to enjoy in the first few encounters and instances. There's quite a lot of talking and some of it is amusing. I'm warming to Gorrick and Blish, who appeared full-born as Venus from the waves last episode. They seem to be bedding in nicely.

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

Gorrick has literally no empathy at all and precious few social skills but he doesn't come across as vicious, which makes his "Did he really say that?" moments more funny than disturbing. Blish, by comparison, is almost a tragic figure in some ways, even though he gets some good gag lines ("Can I have my arm back?"). Taimi's hitherto unsuspected relationship with him (with both of them, really) is more affecting and believable than it has any right to be, given our complete ignorance of their history and the way it was shoe-horned in out of nowhere.

Come off it! If you're a real Lady, I'm a real cat.

Lord Faren is on hand to play the narcissistic fop, an act he carries off so well that I suspect almost no-one believes it any more. The Lore sub-forum has been discussing not so much whether it's an act as what the act is supposed to be concealing.

I'd love to believe the writing team have and have always had deep plans for Faren but I don't. If he turns out to be something other than he seems it will be retcon. As seems to be the case with the sudden and positively mindblowing appearance this episode of a character who has been a mystery for the six full years of the  life of the game. That's it? Really??

I will probably have more to say about that in a while when spoilers are less of an issue. Suffice it to say, if and when we eventually discover the identity of the mysterious E, he'd better not be some fanboy with an autograph book and a selfie stick.

That's as much as I have to say for now. I'm anticipating the usual, tedious Boss fight to come along and spoil the party towards the end but so far, so good. I'm enjoying it. Joko always excepted.