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.

And So The Story Goes

Following on from yesterday's post, where I took a thousand words to explain how I wished I could keep to the point once in a while, today I thought I might try a five-finger excercise on that very theme. There's a topic going around, kicked off by Aywren but generally following in the slipstream of Final Fantasy XIV's growing success, concerning the necessity or even advisablity of hanging mmorpg gameplay on the hook of a strong, linear narrative.

Naithan sums up the situation perfectly in the title of his post on the problem (if problem is what it is): "FFXIV May as Well Not Be an MMO". Couldn't have put it better.

Of course, FFXIV isn't just an mmorpg, it's an instalment in a long-running series of JRPGs. It's a hybrid.

And it's not the first. A decade ago (what, has it been that long already?) all the attention was on an upcoming mmorpg set in the Star Wars universe, Star Wars: the Old Republic. Produced by BioWare, a developer famous for story-driven, single-player and co-op RPGs, what we were being promised was a collation of two forms: the massively-multiple theme park mmo experience of World of Warcraft underpinned by the nuanced storytelling associated with games like Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect.

Much was made of the "Fourth Pillar", the term BioWare liked to use for Story. Anyone remember what the other three pillars were? I didn't. I had to go look it up and it wasn't easy to find.

"Traditionally, massively multiplayer online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars - combat, exploration and character progression", said "BioWare boss Ray Muzyka" in an interview with Eurogamer back in 2008. (Yes, it really was that long ago). His contention seemed to be that until then mmorpgs hadn't bothered telling stories, but that was okay because now BioWare were around to make things right. 

I suspect that plenty of writers who'd been making a living putting words in the mouths of NPCs for the previous ten years might have looked at that interview a little askance. I'm pretty sure Blizzard and SOE thought they'd been telling stories set in their imagined worlds and I'm damn sure Turbine did in the one they'd leased from the Tolkein estate. That was kind of the point, wasn't it?

BioWare were widely seen to be riding in to battle against an enemy that didn't exist but time has proved them right about one thing: story has become that fourth pillar, at least in the minds of some players and developers. 

In the early years of the genre, narrative and story were gameplay elements but they weren't the focus of the experience. I played the EverQuest titles for years without ever having more than a vague idea what the overarching story was. But I always knew there was one.

Because those games attempted to replicate the experience of being in and of a world not as the "one, true hero", just someone who saw things happening around them and joined in as best they could, story was everywhere. Not just the personal stories of the players themselves, as touted by the advocates of the sandbox, but crafted stories, written by writers and given to NPC actors to tell.

The quests told stories, the incidental, ambient dialog told stories, the books and the statues and the ruins told stories. The worlds told stories and they were as real as stories ever are, which is as real as real gets. And you never heard them all.  

You heard fragments, sections, pieces. You heard rumors and legends and myths. You puzzled and figured and discussed and out of all of that came stories with frayed edges and loose ends, tales to tell over camps and at guild meets, stories to argue and maybe even duel over.

Then along came the serious writers, the adults in the room, ready to tidy up the toys and put them neatly back in their boxes. A story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It has to have a hero and a moral. It has to follow the rules.

Why did it happen? I have a theory. The games, the genre itself, began with explorers. Explorers are the ones who go out and make the maps. Explorers, though, don't stay behind to hammer in the signposts or manage the map concession in the town square.

There's always been a tension, a competition, between the four archetypes, the Explorer, the Socialiser, the Killer and the Achiever. The people who tell you where to go are the achievers and the importance of story in mmorpgs grows alongside their ascendency. Almost by definition, the one archetype that has to come out on top is the Achiever.

And so it was. Achievers gained their ascendency, in the games and in the studios, years ago. Almost all the mmorpgs we play now are box-tickers, first and last. Everything must be codified, accounted for and scored, including exploration, socialising and killing. All those boxes have to be ticked.

And that's just what the current incarnation of Story in mmorpgs does. It ticks boxes. The new, big, important stories are unified and linear. They may contain many digressions and sub-plots but like those in a novel they all serve the central narrative. You start at page one and you read to the end. Every page turned, evey cut scene watched, is a box ticked. 

Stories, of course, are infinitely more than box-ticking excercises. In a good story, the characters become friends, their actions, memories. Stories become us. We're made of stories.

There's nothing wrong with a good story, of course there's not. There's everything right with one. I love a good story. I'm not saying I want the stories in morpgs to be not good. That would be crazy. I'm not saying I don't want mmorpgs to have stories in them. That would be crazier still.

But there's a place for these particular kinds of finished, complete, linear stories. From everything I've seen so far I'm not convinced that mmorpgs can, let alone should, be that place. 

Mmorpgs are places where stories happen, of course they are. That's the whole point of an mmorpg: it's a place where anything can happen. It's a world, or it can be. Stories belong in mmorpgs as they belong everywhere. But stories can't be mmorpgs. Mmorpgs can't be stories.

To bind the mmorpg form to the yoke of narrative is to set hard restraints on its limitless capacity to change. A linear narrative is a corridor passing countless doors that will never be opened, a train on a track that arrows straight to the horizon. It's a wasted opportunity.

We already have so many ways to tell those kinds of stories. Mmorpgs offer a chance to tell the old stories in new ways, maybe even to tell new stories in ways that have never been seen before. For a while that seemed like it might happen but the signs and portents aren't good. Mmorpgs are being assimilated in the old narrative tradition, when they should be in the vanguard of something new, something non-linear, fragmented, chaotic, alive. 

It maybe already be too late. The damage may already have been done. Story sells, or so it seems. And, of course, it's the winners who get tell the stories.

Their stories, not ours.

Fodder For The Cannons : GW2

I finally finished the original "personal story" in Guild Wars 2.  It only took me eight years. 

It wasn't entirely new to me. I had seen the ending before. The original ending, that is. 

Back at launch, Mrs. Bhagpuss was far more diligent about completing the narrative than I was. It's hard to imagine now but in the first few months the personal story was considered by many to be quite challenging. There were plenty of complaints about the difficulty on the forums and it was common to hear people venting about it in general chat.

The accepted solution to getting over humps back then was to invite a friend into your story instance to give you a leg-up. Even while my own progress lagged far behind, I experienced several flash-forwards as I jumped into various scenarios to lend someone a hand. 

ArenaNet invested very heavily in story from the beginning. There's a complicated, branching structure to the narrative that allows for a wide number of beginnings based on choices of race, class and several other factors. 

Ok, Princess, you take that cannon to the left...

 

Over the years I've done quite a few of the openings but to see every possible variation you'd need to be a true story obsessive. According to the extensive wiki entry, there are three hundred and eight personal story missions in total and because of their mutually exclusive structure it would take thirty unique characters to play through all of them.

Here's the breakdown of how that would go:

• Thirty characters have to play through the chapter I and II missions.
• Fifteen must play through chapter III.
• Nine must play through chapter V.
• Six must play through chapter VII.
• Three must play through until the last mission prior to Against the Corruption, in chapter VIII.
• Two must play through the two missions after that one.
• And, one must play through the end of the storyline.

Until now I've always given up at the end of the infamous Battle of Claw Island which concludes Chapter VI. I think I've done that five or six times, at least a couple of which were in full groups. 

After that the narrative moves to Orr. Orr was originally designed as the PvE endgame for GW2 and a lot of players used to be nervous about it. Even though, in its original conception, grouping wasn't required until the final showdown with the elder dragon Zhaitan, a mandatory five-person group instance, it was accepted practice to do much of the final act with other people.

Reservoir Dogs has a lot to answer for.

 

I did much of it that way then, helping other people to complete their characters' stories. It suited me to jump in and provide muscle or healing or just be there to revive someone when they fell down. I didn't have to follow the tedious, poorly-written plot or make any of the dull, uninvolving choices. I just accepted the invite and followed along like an NPC.

Mrs Bhagpuss eventually made it to the final battle with Zhaitan. I remember it being chaotic, loud, confusing and stressful. It must have made quite an impact because I have a surprisingly detailed, if fragmented, memory of it nearly a decade later. 

My chief recollection is a lot of running, a lot of explosions, a dragon you see but never really get to fight and having to spend most of my time firing a big cannon without getting killed. The whole thing has remained in my mind ever since as almost the very definition of an anti-climax. You put in all that effort, weeks of plowing through interminable, plodding missions and that's the payoff?

It's not surprising I never bothered to finish it up for myself. Or perhaps it is. I ground my way grudgingly and bitterly through season after season of the dismal Living Story, didn't I? Okay, the first two look pretty good in retrospect and all of them had their moments but the third and fourth, with those increasingly drawn-out, over-fussy boss fights and any internal consistency the storyline ever claimed to have spiralling out of sight...

Zojja! Where've you been hiding yourself? We missed you!

 

I always had it in mind to finish the dumb thing up one day, though. And it was always going to be on my first character, the Charr ranger. He started it all. He can damn well finish it!

And now he has. On his own. Personally. Like the name says.

Yes, someone at ANet did finally acknowledge that something called a "Personal Story" should probably be able to be completed by that person alone. At some point, I forget when and the wiki is suprisingly silent on the subject, the whole final battle with Zhaitan was revamped to be completable solo. Well, solo and with the might of the entire Pact, naturally. But NPCs don't count, even if there are thousands of them.

I imagine you can still take a group in if you want to. There are plenty of cannons. You could have one each and there'd be some left over. You certainly don't need the help but it might be nice to have someone to talk to during the longeurs.

The difficulty of the whole of Act Three seems to have been toned down a lot since last I did any of it. Either that or power creep has taken the sting out of it. GW2 doesn't really do power creep the way other MMORPGs do, though, so it's probably not that.

It still takes a good old while to churn through the missions to get to the ending but not only did my ranger never die, he never even got downed. Not once. And I certainly wasn't playing him particularly well. I was barely paying attention half the time.

Who reads dialog like this? Who even writes it?

 

For the final battle you have to get yourself to the entrance of the Ruined City of Arah dungeon. Back in the day, that in itself was a fairly difficult proposition. It's right at the very end of the third and hardest of the Orr maps and ownership changes hands between players and Zhaitan's minions, the Risen, depending on the outcome of the meta event.

I remember having to fight my way up there a few times and not always making it. I know it was never a straightforward click of a waypoint. Well, not until now. 

I don't know if I was just lucky with the way the meta was going (amazingly, after eight years the Orr metas are still routinely, if sporadically, contested) or whether there's been some change made to make it easier to access the final story instance. Whatever it was, I had no problem just waypointing there when I needed to get started.

The final battle, when I eventually fought it, was pretty close to what I remember from all those years ago. There was a lot of running. There were plenty of explosions. I spent much of my time manning various artillery pieces. 

Zhaitan, when he finally appeared, was more impressive than I remembered. I'd always thought you didn't get a really good look at him but I think that probably had more to do with the ongoing chaos of the group instance and the fact that I was always trying to keep up with what other people were doing.

 

Gusher!

Left to my own devices I had plenty of opportunity to gawp at the ludicrous and repulsive patchwork of bones and gristle stitched to gether by Anet's excellent art team to represent the motive force capable of raising an entire continent of zombies. And take a whole folio of screenshots.

I'd not realized just how disturbing the final fight is. Based on the dialog I think we're supposed to feel joyous and triumphal at the end but I felt kind of nauseated. 

Zhaitan flies to and fro, somewhat ineffectually, for a while before a shot from the mega-cannon Zojja's been charging up nails him somewhere in the lower spine. The rear third or so of his brittle body breaks off and a huge gout of green fluid jets out into space. 

The critically-injured dragon manages to make it to a tower of some kind, where he clings desperately like an injured gecko while you as the player character pump round after round of energy bolts into him from a deck cannon until eventually he loses his grip and spirals, screaming, into the abyss.

It's more like a messy day at the slaughterhouse than a grand battle. If it was a superhero comic or movie it would also betoken an absolutely inevitable Return of Zhaitan, becuase you neither see him die nor find (or even search for) his body. If it wasn't that we haven't heard a whisper from any of the dragons we've killed over the eight years the game's been running, I'd definitely be expecting a rematch. Maybe in GW3.

Hey! I think we're just about to get to that! Thanks for waiting.

 

The immediate ending is extremely anti-climactic, just as I remembered, with everyone standing around with nothing much to say. That's not the finale, though. Back when I did it in a group I made my excuses and left once the dragon was down so I missed the coda, a victory celebration that takes place back at the Pact headquarters in Fort Trinity.

To be truthful, there's not much to that either but at least there's some cheering and a few fireworks. Plus the rewards, of course, some Exotics that were probably pretty good in 2012. And there were a few skins I hadn't unlocked. Not that I'll ever use any of them. I also now understand just why everyone's so down on Trahearne. Geez, that guy's a wet blanket.

Anyway, it's over and at least I can say I've done it. Finished the personal story, that is. Well, one of them. Only three hundred and seven to go. 

Nah, I don't think so.

I guess what I probably should do next is map completion, the other achievement that supposedly marked having "beaten the game" back in the day. That would be down to the Charr ranger, too. He's gotten further than anyone. He's currently at 72%.

Yeah, I'll get right on that. Probably only take me another couple of years.

We're All Stories, In The End : EQ, EQ2, GW2

Somewhere back in the dawn of time I played tabletop RPGs like AD&D, Golden Heroes and Swordbearer. In an eerie pre-echo of my much more extensive MMO experience, during the four or five years our gaming group lasted we tried out a dozen or so games. We'd pick them up, give them a shake, then drop them. It wasn't unlike the "three-monther" phenomenon that ripped through MMO-land for a while.

Those RPGs varied wildly in content, style and systems but one thing they all had in common was the structure. Every one expected a gaming group to follow some kind of narrative arc or storyline.

Oh, there would be adventures along the way; some scripted, some created on the fly, randomly generated or out of whole cloth at the wit or whim of the GM. Regardless of sidebars and discursions, however, the accepted and understood purpose would always be to reach some goal, known or unknown and, eventually, to find out what the heck was going on.

When I eventually arrived in Norrath, well over a decade after I'd rolled my final D20, I found myself in a world with none of that certainty.  RPGs had been all about the story but MMOs seemed to be all about the world.

No graphics engine has ever been created that could match the power of imagination. Even with Virtual Reality probably none ever will. EverQuest's late-90s era 3D visuals, seen on a 14" CRT monitor, more than half of which was obscured by the UI frame, clearly had no chance of competing with the wonders I conjured up in my mind. None at all.

Yet, almost from the first moment, Norrath was the experience that felt more intense, more visceral, more real. Thrusting a rusty sword in the general direction of shapes barely-identifiable as bats as they flapped against a backdrop of muddy textures, - yellow supposed-to-be sand and blue supposed-to-be sky - I was there.

Seventeen years later and I'm still there even though, after all that time, I scarcely have any clearer idea why than I did when I began. Whatever the story has been I couldn't summarize, much less explain it. Most likely every MMORPG has some kind of storyline and yet, for me at least, most remain ineffably obscure.

Over the years MMO developers, designers and most especially writers have made all kinds of moves to foreground the narrative, drive the attention of the player towards the why as well as the how, the what and the where. From SW:ToR's infamous "Fourth Pillar" to TSW's enigmatic throughline to GW2's Personal and Living Stories, everybody's got a tale to tell.

Only, in the patchwork, makeshift, hotch-potch world of massively multiple roleplaying games, that narrative has to fight for interest and attention with everything else. In a tabletop game, no matter how unruly, anarchic and undisciplined the players, all activity must eventually lead back to the story - or else to the break-up of the group. An MMO can persist indefinitely, successfully even, although almost no-one playing pays any attention to the plot at all.

That's why I can have seventeen level 80 characters and thousands of played hours in Guild Wars 2 and yet never have completed the official storyline on any of them. There are people in my WvW guild, who've been playing since launch, who claim never even to have seen their Personal Story beyond the compulsory five minutes that makes up the Tutorial.

In GW2 I have, at least, seen the entirety of the original storyline, albeit only while helping Mrs Bhagpuss finish hers. And I've done all of the Living Story arcs at least once, right to the end. In EverQuest my knowledge of the storyline effectively ends at the understanding that yes, indeed, there is one.

For the first few years I played I'm not sure I even knew that much. In those days the story advanced almost exclusively through the high-level content added in each expansion, which, let's not forget, at that time SOE was pumping out at the astounding rate of twice a year. That meant raiding and I was never a raider so I never saw any of it.

I think the first time I can remember actively following, let alone understanding, the plot was with the arrival of the sixth expansion, Lost Dungeons of Norrath, in 2003. It was an expansion aimed largely at groups rather than raids. Prior to that, with the appearance of the The Nexus in Shadows of Luclin (2001) and the Plane of Knowledge and associated Books that came with Planes of Power (2002) all I really knew or cared was that I had new travel options for this almost incomprehensibly vast and mysterious world.

LDON had a relatively defined pre-expansion storyline involving the appearance of a new organization called The Wayfarers. Not only did they have some quests for you to do but they contacted you directly and suggested you might want to get on with doing them. As a direct result of that pro-active approach I found myself actively preparing for the launch of an expansion for the first time.

When Lost Dungeons landed it changed Norrath for me in a way no expansion before had managed. I would contend it changed EQ itself, and quite profoundly, if only for a while. There's a whole post in that. I must write it some day. For now let's just say that before LDoN I was a solo player who liked to group and after LDoN I was a group player who soloed while I waited for my group to fill.

For six months Mrs Bhagpuss and I did LDoN dungeons back to back, day after day, week after week. I already knew how to be a good group member, how to main heal, tank, pull, control crowds - the basics - but it was in LDoN that I refined those skills until they were so automatic I didn't need to think, just act. I came to appreciate and understand all the roles in a group and all the abilities of classes I didn't play. I learned tactics and strategies and most importantly I learned how to create, fill and lead a group.

It was, in the most fundamental sense, a formative experience. And yet, for all that, by the time the infamous Gates of Discord expansion arrived and broke up our happy gang (with the help of EQ2 and WoW, of course) I had scarcely any more idea who The Wayfarers were or why I was running six dungeons a night for them than I had when I started.

In a couple of weeks or so EQ2's thirteenth expansion, Kunark Ascending, will arrive. I pre-ordered it soon after it was announced and this week  I've been prepping. Not by doing the pre-expansion Public Quests; I haven't even seen one of those yet and looking at MJ's account I don't particularly care to. I've been following Feldon's To-Do List.

So far I have completed everything apart from the Greenmist Heritage Quest, which I started last night. My Berserker already knew Goblish and he did the Underdepths Saga back when Terrors of Thalumbra came out last year so those came pre-ticked.

The two colored tome language quests, Black and Red (although Red has now been removed from the pre-req as not req'd after all) were short and simple but To Speak As A Dragon is a famously time-consuming proto-epic that I've been avoiding for fourteen years. Well, I've done it now and all I can say is thank Brell I waited until I had a level 100 character with 150% flying speed and a wealth of instant travel options. Even without any fighting it took me nearly six hours!

To Speak As A Dragon deserves a post of its own. In fact that was the post I sat down to write this morning until my opening thoughts got away from me. I wandered off the path, forgot the storyline I was meant to be following. That's just how MMOs are.

When Kunark Ascending descends I'll be as ready as I can be; level 100, well-geared for Advanced Solo, all pre-reqs done. Of course, if I actually wanted to go for an Epic 2.0 weapon I'd have to go and do my Epic 1.0, something else I've studiously avoided until now. Maybe I will.

The way things are these days, I'll also have a rough idea of the plot. Only a rough one, though. The last half dozen or so EQ2 expansions have told a linear story and made it - mostly - available in solo instances as well as via group and raid. Even though I did the Terrors of Thalumbra Signature Questline, still about all I can remember is that Lanys T'Vyl is Up To Something and we don't like it

Like the ongoing, really quite interesting, storyline in GW2, in the end it's always going to be more set dressing than substance. In MMOs story always is. Your character might have to do some storyline work to get the gear or the titles or the zone access she wants but chances are you'll go on playing her long after that story's over and all the fine plot points are forgotten.

For all they share a common ancestry, MMOs aren't online RPGs. In a tabletop RPG, or even their CRPG pale shadows, the end of one story merely clears the stage so another can begin. In an MMO, finishing up the story frees up the stage for you to tell stories of your own.

I like it better that way.

A Simple Tale, Well Told : Blade and Soul, GW2

Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert!

Okay. That's the warnings out of the way. Let's talk story.

Yesterday was something of a story day. It was almost four years ago that Mrs Bhagpuss first went to Clown School during one of the early GW2 beta weekends.That was one of the things that sold her on the game. It made such an impression back then that when we were playing The Secret World  a couple of months later, as we waited for GW2 to launch, our Cabal's message of the day was "This isn't Clown School!"

Ever since, I've been meaning to get around to going myself but something always got in the way. Race, mainly. To go to Clown School you have to be Human, you see, and that's never been a favorite choice of mine, when I'm rolling up a character in any game. In GW2 Human comes before Norn but behind everything else. It used to come ahead of Sylvari, too, but Scarlet changed all that.

Then there's the branching narrative. In GW2 you have to pick certain traits and characteristics at character creation if you want to get specific paths in the early storyline. Fortunately the Circus plot is heavily signposted, unlike some, but I still managed to miss it on both my previous human characters.

I'll never be able to fill your shoes...

I was paying attention when I made my new thief, though, and yesterday I slogged through the opening narratives that I'd done on a previous character (also a thief as it happens) until I finally got invited to join the Circus. Okay, not so much invited as told. And not so much "join" as "put out of business". Close enough.

The entire plot and all the characters appear to have been "borrowed" from Marvel's "Circus of Crime", an unconvincing bunch of would-be not-very-super villains I remember clearly from my readings of The Hulk, Daredevil and Spiderman back in the '60s. Granted, every traditional circus has a Strongman and a Clown but when you also throw in a Snake Charmer and a Ringmaster who uses a whirling device to hypnotize the audience into attacking the heroes I feel the boundaries of coincidence and cultural congruence have been breached.

For heavens sake, even The Human Cannonball turns up at one point. We were only missing a couple of acrobats for the full set. Let's be generous and call it "homage". It was fun, and I'm glad I finally got to fulfill my character's childhood dream of joining the circus but emotionally involving or well-written it really wasn't.

Unlike the unfolding narrative in Blade and Soul. I really wasn't expecting this but the storyline in B&S is getting quite interesting. The characters are developing a modicum of personality. It's turning into a bit of a page-turner.

Oh, cry me a frickin' river, Namsoyoo.

Oh, it's nothing remotely original. Let's not get carried away. It's the same ropy old genre fantasy nonsense I've tabbed through in a score of MMOs before. What's more, most of the voice acting is so flat it must have been ironed. That's when it isn't labored or hysterical. 

It's a shame the acting is so mediocre and hammy because, while the concepts may creak with age and familiarity, the writing itself is often spry and supple. The incidental side quests are not infrequently amusing and the characters who hand them out manage to convey more personality than the average MMO NPC.

Good luck dodging an arrow, pal.

The plot itself lumbers along as these things do. After almost twenty levels I'd come to expect the "twists", all of which had been telegraphed long in advance. The spies turn out to be exactly who you thought they were. The supposed allies and good guys that raised my hackles the first time we met did indeed turn out to be Bad Hats in the end.

None of which prevents the whole farrago from feeling surprisingly interesting and, yes, satisfying. I'm not a great fan of having a central, through-line narrative structure in MMORPGs. I prefer an accretional back story that builds up imagistically as your character follows his or her own concerns. Given that we're going to have a backbone to this skeleton, though, I've certainly seen flimsier bones.

Trouble follows her. It's not her fault.

In any case, I tend to wander off-piste quite early in MMOs, so following a narrative doesn't come naturally to me. Although I had been paying due diligence to the main story arc for once, it came at the cost of another supposed essential plot element. I'd completely neglected my extended Class Tutorial, which turns out to be a major pillar of the developing story as well. 

At nearly level twenty I'd last checked in with Hajoon, my irrepressible ex-classmate, friend and self-appointed tutor, back when I was about level five. The main story eventually brought me back once again to Bamboo Village, where I'd begun my adventures after being fished out of the sea like a half-drowned kitten. After an intense cut-scene (the cut-scenes in Blade and Soul vary but some of them impress) and a rather less-than-intense fight sequence, I found myself half a level short of the next stage.

This was where I began to be impressed. Hajoon's skin has developed a pallor. There are dark shadows under his eyes. His speech, usually so confident, is hesitant. Bad things are coming. I feel it. You know that old saw about "Show, Don't Tell"? Someone remembered.

Up until then I didn't even realize there were any level requirements. Since there were, I thought I'd kill two Blackram with one stone by walking back to the higher end of the map and completing all the quests I'd picked up and left hanging along the way, dinging Level 20 along the way.. 

That was how I came to do almost the whole of the class tutorial sequence in one go. It's supposed to be spread out over twenty or so levels but I did it in an hour and I'm glad I did. It didn't teach me much that I hadn't already worked out for myself but by the end I felt more bonded to my character than I'd ever expected to be in this game and I'm sensing my character's bond to her world more powerfully, too.

It's happening.

Again, I don't want to make any big claims for this. We aren't talking TSW quest levels of emotional involvement here, let alone anything you'd get from a good movie or novel. Compared to the GW2 personal story, though, which tries to push many of the same emotional buttons, this is on another level. Clown School it ain't.

It does very much help that Hajoon has the best voice acting I've heard in the game so far. It isn't particularly naturalistic but it freights emotion effectively. His character comes through consistently and coherently both in the words on the screen and the sound of his voice, whereas in too many other examples in Blade and Soul the voice acting works against the writing, diminishing its effect.

The Hajoon arc also has considerably more subtlety than the main story. For once the twist took me completely by surprise. The sudden darkening of tone in what had been a bouncy, funny, light-hearted romp worked very well indeed. It was both unexpected and unexpectedly moving. I didn't want it to happen and I didn't like that I couldn't do anything to stop it. But I believed it and I believed that was how it had to be. 

The honor was all mine, Hajoon.

Good writing. Good, simple, genre writing. It looks easy but it's harder to bring off than you'd think, which is why so much of it is so often inept. That and that no-one cares, which all too often seems to be self-evidently the case. Well, someone cared about this little story enough to write it well and everyone else cared enough to animate it and act it and direct it with sufficient attention and craft to allow such potential as it had to be fulfilled.

A small victory for quality, then, but not an insignificant one. Few of these little touches amount to much in themselves but they add up. Even when you didn't come for the story, perhaps didn't even want there to be a story, still, seeing that story well-told has its effect. 

I warm to Blade and Soul more each time I play. I like the setting, the ambiance and the characters. I want to see what's over the next hill and know what happens next in the story. It may not last but it's enough for now.

Dragon Down! : GW2

Around teatime on Sunday afternoon Mrs Bhagpuss asked me if I fancied taking a run at the final chapter of the Heart of Thorns Personal Story, "Hearts and Minds". Well, actually what she did was type "Hearts and Minds?" in party chat out of the blue while I was off doing something important, namely fiddling about in my bank vault as usual.

At first I had no clue what she was talking about. The Personal Story kind of fell off my radar around the end of the first week after launch, by which time I had run one character to the penultimate chapter and half a dozen more through the Prologue and Chapter One. It's hardly surprising I'd let it slip my attention after that, at least not when you consider that, after three years and over a dozen Level 80s, I have yet to complete the original Personal Story on any of them.

I was highly skeptical of the need for GW2 to have a "Personal Story" in the first place but we are where we are, which appears to be in some kind of bizarro world where "personal stories" have become mandatory for MMOs and not even just for the pure theme parks either. Indeed, the supposed failure of SW:ToR's "Fourth Pillar" is beginning to seem more than a touch ironic, not least since BioWare re-tooled their ailing franchise into something that looks more like One Pillar and Three Stumps.

I'm by no means as down on the whole concept of story arcs within MMORPGs as J3w3l, for example, but neither do I worship them with quasi-religious fervor. Story is just another of the rides in the park. If an MMO offers me a take on narrative that turns out to be both entertaining and easy then I'll generally give it a run; those that fail on either count join the large pile of "things I might get round to some day if I have nothing better to do".

GW2 has a checkered history with story. Actually it's more like a Jackson Pollock painting than a chess-board. We started with an ambitious, hand-crafted version, where the responses you made to a series of gnomic questions in character creation decided your forking path. I always thought it was daft. It must have been hell for completionists.

Those paths came together somewhere in the middle and from there on we all followed the same plot to Arah and the Downing of Zhaitan. I did see the final chapter, tagging along in Mrs Bhagpuss's team back when you needed a full group, but the furthest any of my own characters has made it is, I think, the first step into Orr.

Anet changed mode once the game went live. They began to heap their all dragon eggs into one basket they called The Living Story. The first telling was a sprawling, chaotic, largely ill-received mash-up of open world zerg action, scavenger hunts, lore tidbits and instanced set pieces. I liked it at the time and in retrospect I feel we didn't know how lucky we were. I'd have that format back in a heartbeat now.

Operating on what appears to be their default mode of passive-aggressive reaction ANet gave us a very different iteration in Living Story 2. They chopped the whole thing up into tidy, re-saleable packages, front-ended in the existing maps but with the meat of the gameplay and story sealed neatly in instances.

They also upped the difficulty or, perhaps more accurately, the frustration, to one FFS! short of a ragequit. Although I struggled through it on one account I didn't much enjoy LS2 and I definitely wasn't looking forward to another, even "more challenging" version in Heart of Thorns. Luckily, for me at least, I didn't get one.

In what I guess we could call Personal Story 2 (unless it's Living Story 3?) ANet finally seem to have found a sweet spot. Bugs and gates aside the general response has been positive. I haven't seen many complaints about it being either too easy or too hard, too long or too short. I found most of it engaging and sprightly as far as the gameplay went, to the point where the prospect of repeating it on all my characters feels like a possibility not a penance.

I'm aware I'm being a little vague here. Jeromai asked recently how long we need to wait before we can discuss plot points without risking spoiling the experience for those who haven't yet gotten around to experiencing it first-hand. The answer to that is there's never going to be a point short of the game closing down or the content being removed when discussing it in open conversation won't risk revealing something someone would rather not have known. So I won't do that. Yet.

Suffice it to say that, now I've finally seen it through to the end, there's a lot I'd like to discuss where the lore and story is concerned but instead, I'll stick to a quick critique of the style and the gameplay. I'd rate the latter a big improvement but the former quite a disappointment.

In short, the fights were a lot better throughout. They were generally well-balanced, requiring attention but not expecting perfection. Crucially for me they were almost entirely gimmick-free. All my characters were able to play as themselves, using their own gear and abilities, making their own choices about how to approach and defeat each challenge. There were few coercive set pieces and those there were permitted a number of solutions. Compared to LS2 it was freedom city.

The final, big boss fight, which Mrs Bhagpuss and I duoed successfully yesterday evening without any major problems, is lengthy as you'd expect but not so much so as to outstay its welcome. It has been, infamously, some have found unplayably, buggy, to the point where I had until now deferred even attempting it, following the appalling reports of those who had.

Supposedly the worst of those bugs have been fixed but we still had to restart the final fight because one of the rifts spawned outside of the playable area. On the positive side, we had a bug in our favor where one of Mordremoth's AEs only stretched half as far as it should have, meaning as two rangers we could stand outside it and pepper him with arrows while our newly AE-immune pets hammered away in melee range, oblivious to all damage.

If the fights were, on the whole, an improvement the dialogs were at best lacklustre and the lack of player/NPC interaction was verging on the dismal. One of the strengths of the whole Living Story and, to a lesser extent, the original Personal Story, has been the considerable freedom player characters have to talk to both significant and incidental characters outside of the main narrative.

I spent a lot of time in both LS1 and LS2 chatting to NPCs, enjoying and appreciating a good deal of banter, witty repartee, moody background detail and lore snippets. I never left an instance or an area until I'd spoken to everyone. In the HoT Personal Story that just doesn't happen.

Most of the NPCs don't show any indication they have anything to say or indeed that they are aware of their surroundings at all. If they don't have a line of dialog they stand there, cycling their racial idle animations but otherwise inert. More disappointing still, even those who show the speech bubble icon when targeted, something that in almost all other circumstances indicates the presence of at least a line or two of incidental dialog, prove mute when approached.

I found that the most disappointing part of the expansion so far. It feels at best rushed and unfinished, at worst thoughtless and cheap. The scripted dialog itself isn't great, either. Without entering spoiler territory, much of it feels flat, some of it awkward. The storyline itself offers huge emotional potential but the presentation bleeds it dry.

Like a Hollywood movie, all the best bits are in the trailer. The moment where Rytlock appears for the first time, which we first saw back in the Spring, is unmatched anywhere else in the story. The hairs on the back of my neck were still, literally, standing up as late as the fourth play-through when the big Charr comes over the hill, returning like Han Solo just when he's needed most.

As for what happens next...well, that's the big question. I doubt it will spoil anything to reveal the whole thing ends with yet another cliffhanger, albeit an enigmatic one. Where we go from here I imagine we won't discover until well into the New Year, once Wintersday and perhaps another Raid are out of the way.

Whatever the future holds it's Rytlock as usual who cuts to the chase and sums everything up in a few words right at the end:

That's all we need to know right now. Bring it on!

A Gated Community : GW2

When I said yesterday that there'd been a bit of grumbling about the grind needed to open Elite Specializations I may have been guilty of understatement. Just a tad. The thread on the topic on the official forum is currently clocking in at fifty-seven pages with nearly three thousand comments and more than seventy thousand views.

It's not unusual for the GW2 forums to blow up over some perceived injustice, of course. More like business as usual. Even so, a rebellion of this magnitude is hard to ignore.

ArenaNet have made some effort of late to show willing when it comes to engaging with their public over contentious in-game issues. It's perhaps harder for them than for other game developers because of the strict policy of "we don't talk about what we're doing until we actually do it" that they've employed for as long as anyone can remember.

Still, even they appear to have realized that following that line with fanatical zeal causes more problems than it solves. Hence the following announcement from Colin Johanson:

"While we never like to rush and make snap decisions, in particular with a game that’s basically been out less than three days; I think there are some fair points in here for us to discuss. Much like other feedback about HoT, we’ll be discussing this as well!"

So, expect a row-back on difficulty or a reduction in requirements or possibly even the conversion of the entire system from Character to Account Based. Conceivably all three at once, I guess.

It's always a difficult balancing act. The expansion has, as Colin says, only been out for a weekend. New content in MMOs almost always seems a lot harder when it first drops than it will ever feel again in the lifetime of the game. Without making any changes at all, things that seemed impossible yesterday will most likely look manageable by next week and downright easy by Wintersday.

In some ways it might be more logical to open with a lower level of difficulty and tweak it upwards as players gain knowledge and their characters gain power but MMOs rarely take that risk. Few players respond well to having the edge taken off their swords.

It leaves developers trying to present content that isn't off-putting now yet will still have some appeal throughout the months and possibly years before it's replaced. Don't fancy that job much.

In this case, however, while the "difficulty" is part of the issue (Hero Challenges in Heart of Thorns are, by and large, not soloable) the real bone of contention is content gating. A lot of people - and judging by that thread it really is a lot of people - were under the impression they'd bought new Elite Specializations they could use right away.

They weren't planning on having to explore their way across several very confusing, and dangerous new maps to find twenty or thirty Hero Challenges before they could fire up their Scrapper or Chronomancer and take it for a run. It seems many of them were kind of planning on making that the first thing they did after HoT finished patching so having to wait hours, let alone days or even weeks has come as something of a surprise.

There are those who just power through, naturally. By Saturday word was that it took around nineteen straight hours to grind out the points for one full Elite Spec. Obsessive, yes, but at least once it's done it's done, right?

Well, not if you happen to have one of each class, which quite a few players do. Or more than one. GW2 has been famously friendly towards those who like to make lots of characters. With a level 80 of each of the nine classes just getting Elite Specs for all of them while playing a generous thirty hours a week would take something like a month and a half if that's all you did. And to add insult to injury you'd have to do the exact same content all nine times.

Clearly that's a worst-case scenario but it points up the core issue: the Elite Specs are gated behind repetitive content. That's not an image that fits GW2's supposedly open, jump in and play playstyle.

Heart of Thorns is big on gates. This is just the squeakiest. Raids, we hear, will be gear-gated, and the storyline is gated by Masteries. That's mildly annoying although it makes some kind of internal sense.

The idea is to introduce players to the various skills and concepts they'll need to explore the open maps, also gated by Masteries, by building them into the stages of the Personal Story as it crosses the landscape. That has the side-effect of predicating which Masteries a player chooses to open, which is unfortunate to put it politely.

For example, I would have preferred to train Glider to V before starting on either Nunoch or Exalted Lore but at the grindingly slow pace they unlock to do so would mean leaving the story for a week or two. Chances of avoiding spoilers by then? Slim. Not to mention that the story is actually rather interesting and I'd like to follow it to the end before I forget what happened at the beginning.

It would have been better in retrospect to have given the player character these abilities, temporarily, as they entered each instance that required them. That would have had the dual benefits of introducing the skills and creating a desire for them yet leaving it to the player to allocate his or her priorities and time outside the storyline.

I do believe these design decisions, which must be difficult to make at the best of times, have been taken with the best interests of the players in mind. Often players really don't have the clearest view of what's good for the long-term health of the game. Although it's true that there's a commercial requirement to keep people playing I don't really buy the argument that the motivation behind all this is based on stretching a small amount of content out for as long as possible.

Nevertheless, while the intention may have been to introduce people to the new movement and language skills gently and steadily and to make opening the Elite Specializations meaningful and satisfying, the effect has been almost the reverse. That's dangerous. Angry players who feel they've been short-changed or tricked don't make the best long-term customers and they certainly don't make good advocates for the game.

It may be true - I think it probably is - that there are far more players playing and enjoying HoT than posting angrily on the forums but those players aren't the ones making the news. Therefore it looks odds on that HoT will get easier sooner than the developers intended.

The Countryside Code says you should always "leave gates as you find them" but Tyria's another country altogether. Let's hope they do things differently there.