Purple Haze : GW2

From the September 18 Patch Notes:

In order to reduce visual noise, many effects displayed when players hit will no longer scale up on large targets.

 The Scene: Jahai Flats, just south of Almorra's Stand.

A purple, glowing dragon the size of an aircraft hangar swoops down out of the sky, where anything up to eighty or so players are waiting. The dragon summons a vast army of purple, glowing creatures. Hundreds of them. The two sides commence to fight.

Among the dragon's allies is a herd of centaurs. They pound around and around in circles in a tightly-packed group, stunning and knocking down anyone who can't get out of the way fast enough. Among the players allies are several dozen NPCs, half a dozen fifty-foot tall Wurms and a team of giant robots.

As the mayhem continues, another, even bigger (but, thankfully, unseen) dragon perpetually calls down lightning strikes on anyone and everyone. The lightning is purple and glowy.

Throughout the event, which lasts around a quarter of an hour, more purple, glowy mobs spawn, inexorably and endlessly. Occasionally much bigger mobs, called Rifstalkers, spawn. They are purple. And glowy.

The dragon, the rifstalkers, the lightning and many of the creatures cover the ground with red and orange circles, arcs, crescents. Certain players find themselves experiencing flashbacks to the early 1990s.

Meanwhile, every player and every player's pet and/or minion fires off any and every spell, attack and ability they can think of and/or heals themselves and/or everyone around them and/or dodges and rolls about all over the place as if on fire. Which most of them are.

Just to add to the gaiety of nations, some people flap around on griffons, swooping into the frenzy in the hope of unleashing the special attack given to flying mounts for this specific event.

The overall effect is, I like to imagine, somewhat akin to being inside The Feldman Fireworks factory the day Frank Drebin happened to drive by. On mushrooms. You or Drebin. Probably both.

Seriously, I love this fight. It's insane! Doing it as an Elementalist in glass cannon berserker build is a crazed non-stop fun riot and that's just me trying to stay alive!

If this is what happens when ANet decide to tone down the "visual noise" I can't wait for the next graphical downgrade.

Soft Kitty: GW2

No, I'm not going to talk about the story. Way too soon, although it's irritating the bejezus out of me, having to keep quiet.

Spoilers are a problem, though. Even with the story safely tucked away behind the velvet curtain of secrecy, it's still impossible to talk about the update as a whole - the new map (Jahai Bluffs) the personal instance (Sun's Refuge), or the upgradeable armor collection - without spoiling something.

Partly, that's because Guild Wars 2's A Star To Guide Us is far and away the most complex and complete update ArenaNet has given us for a very long time. In some ways it feels more like a mini-expansion than a regular episode of the Living Story.

I'll leave it to someone else (Jeromai, maybe) to look into the intricacies of the new Raid. I'm also not going to discuss the new Legendary weapon, except to say that someone in my larger guild had already finished it an hour after the update came out, or so I was told. Not sure if that's an endorsement or a criticism.

Have you ever looked at a tornado and thought "I bet I could ride that!" ?

Better I talk about things where I have at least a little personal experience. There's plenty going on that I am doing without casting my net over trivia I'll never touch, like Raids and Legendaries. A ridiculous amount, in fact. Just look at the Dulfy entry for the "Full House" achievement to get some idea of the scope.

Full House is a portmanteau Achievement for completing all the other Achievements - the upgrade paths and collections associated with the combined second home and nuclear fallout shelter, the aforementioned Sun's Refuge. At a certain point in the story you get gifted the keys to this underground bunker and it's then up to you to blow away the cobwebs (that's not a metaphor) and invite a few hundred of your closest friends and allies (most of whom you never met before) to come set up home there.

You do know there's a gaping great hole in the roof, right? And dragons can fly?

So far all I have managed to do is persuade a Djinn to move in with me (that always goes well...) and open a massive, steel vault door. Oh, and pay some random NPC five gold for no discernable benefit to me.

To get the Djinn in I had to complete a group event, something I did by accident, which is the best way to do anything in Tyria. I learned a little about Djinns in the process but not as much as I'd like. Djinns are an under-developed race and the wiki is certainly uninformative.

In this event there are two, with a rivalry going back centuries or maybe millennia. I turned up in the middle so I was a little lost on the plot but I found the dialog engaging and involving. Like much of this episode it was also a tad on the bleak side with an effective mood change towards the climax. Whoever's writing this stuff must have shares in Kleenex.

Grief affects people differently.

The event also raised more questions than it answered, pretty much the signature trope of GW2 for six years now. I've long ago given up expecting clear answeres to 90 per cent of anything. I quite like not knowing. It allows for a lot of speculation and pondering, which is a kind of player-generated content, in a way.

In this case, the unanswered question is how a Djinn came to be Branded by the Elder dragon Kralkatorrik. Djinns are supposed to be immune to that effect. It does suggest that, having acquired the powers of two other Elder dragons (I think that's right - he got something from both Zhaitan and Mordremoth, if I'm remembering the plot correctly), the crystal dragon is beginning to break the physical laws of his own universe.

The event ended successfully and I hung around for a while, partly becasuse I was curious and partly because someone said in map chat "if you haven't got the Djinn for your instance, go talk to him". This, incidentally, this right here, is why it's impossible to go back to single-player RPGs once you've experienced online games with other players. Or it is for me.

Waiter! Waiter! There's a hare in my soup!

As it turned out I didn't even need to speak to the Djinn. He spoke to me and I gladly accepted his offer to come join my not-so-merry little band of grim survivalists in our heavily fortified hole. Once installed, naturally, he had some projects he wanted my help completing. Don't they all?

One of the first things I did after I took possession of my firelit cavern was to go round and interview everyone with a symbol over their head. In other MMORPGs this would be called "getting the quests" but we famously don't have "quests" in GW2 because we're all humpty dumpties here.

Whatever we call them, there are a lot and they are all on the lengthy side. There are eight separate, substantial quests to upgrade the instance plus another enormous to-do list that comes attached to the new, upgradeable armor set.

Is it just me or are things getting a little HoT around here?

 
The good part is that, having scanned the walkthroughs, they all appear to be eminently doable. They mostly ressemble previous quests I've enjoyed such as the Cadalbolg, Roller Beetle or Griffon, rather than the interminable, gated grind of something like Mawdry or the new-style legendaries.

At first I couldn't find the armor quest. I could see the correct NPC but she wouldn't talk to me. Apparently you have to exit the instance and come back. When I returned later she was more communicative. And also extremely depressed. With very good reason.

Tell me who did it and I'll get 'em for you!

She'd learned that the shrines she'd built to commemorate her dead lover had been vandalized, because GW2 is nothing if not a barrel of laughs right now, as I might have mentioned. By chance I had already happened upon the vandal in the very act.

I'd had strong words with them but the game offered me no option to do what I wanted to do, which was to boot the bastard off the cliff where we were handily standing. It seemed odd at the time but now I understand why. I didn't have the right quest.

GW2, with its dynamic events and invisible, hot join grouping mechanics, does a better job than most MMORPGs of presenting an organic, living world but quests, whatever you call them, are quests. If you're not on the right step then it's not going to happen.

 
In stark contrast, opening the vault door had no pre-reqs. It required nothing more than five random drops. Runes, no less. I forget if we've had runes before in GW2 but we have them now and they fit in the slots just like you'd expect.

At first I thought they came out of the chests you get at the end of events so I went and did the New, New Shatterer several times. I call him the New, New Shatterer because we already have the New Shatterer, who replaced the Old Shatterer ages ago.

Dragon down!

The New New Shatterer is tough. Most of the attempts failed. He clearly needs an organized map or at least a good guild at the core of the zerg. We did get him once, though, which popped a bunch of achievements for me.

The runes, as it happens, don't drop in the big chest anyway. They're random drops off anything. I got my last one from a grawl. What grawl are doing on the map beats me but Jahai Bluffs has a bit of everything, from a gorgeous, pocket Heart of Thorns zone to a chunk of another planet that might possibly be Haight-Ashbury circa the Summer of Love.

The colors, man!

That last one also features both the update's most quoted line of dialog and its greatest tease. (The line comes in the story so I won't spoil it, although you'll be lucky to dodge hearing it several times in map chat as you explore Jahai, not to mention in the title of this post...). As for the tease, well, as I suggested last time, nothing is forever. I'm taking Scarlet's cameo here as a hint if not as a promise.

Something's not right here...

With the runes all slotted, the vault door swung open. I was hoping, somewhat prosaically, there'd be an actual bank inside but what I got was a lot more interesting, if less pragmatically useful. Behind the battleship steel doors lies a foliage-filled room, strongly reminding me of other enclaves of nature hidden in obscure corners of Tyria.

The walls are studded with plaques, some readable, others not. The place is evidently sacred to some god or other. My knowledge of the Tyrian pantheon is woefully incomplete but if this were Norrath it would certainly be a shrine dedicated to Tunare.

There's also a Splendid Chest at the back, just like you'd find at the top of a jumping puzzle and with just as underwhelming contents. Mrs Bhagpuss tells me the runes vanish after a while and the door closes again. I'm guessing this is something that resets daily so you can do it over and over.

Before I opened the door this had been a sealed, pitch-black room for hundreds of years. And yet it's filled with plants.

When the door first opened some NPC behind me expressed a concern that I might get trapped inside and suffocate. That didn't happen but it did remind me of the strange thing that did happen to me in a hole in one of the cliffs on the main map.

There's a very large unbound magic node in the cliffside cave. You can see it from miles away. Unbound magic is a currency so everyone heads straight towards any obvious conglomeration to grab it and stuff their pockets. When you grab that particular stash the entrance instantly seals with rock, leaving you trapped in a 10x10 room with no discernable exit. Just as well we have waypoints.

That apparently meaningless but oddly immersive incident is emblematic of the attention to detail lavished on the entire map. So far I feel I've barely scratched the surface of Jahai Bluffs, let alone the whole update. There's enough content here to keep me busy for a week or two if I were to go at it hard and a month or two if, as I most likely will, I just pick away at it when I'm in the mood.

In the words of Donna Summer, could it be magic?

There's not only a lot more here than usual that I could do, there's a lot more I'd like to do. Chances are I'll wander off and get distracted before I finish most of it (I still have plenty of unfinished content from Heart of Thorns...) but at least it's there to begin with. That's a huge improvement over what I've come to expect in the last year or so.

Is this really the best place you could find to hang your washing?

And that's quite enough praise for now. I'm off to look for more children's books to fill my bookcase. That's what I call an adventure!

Sunday In The Park: GW2

Over many years, on many forums and in the comment threads of many long-suffering blogs, I have banged on about my belief that any MMO can be either sandbox or theme park depending on how you choose to approach it. For all that I hold this to be self-evident, however, I have little in the way of personal experience to offer to back it up. The plain fact remains that I don't really know what a Theme Park is. In fact, before I learned the term through its use in gaming, if it meant anything to me at all it would have been something like this.

Such a lack of personal experience of the original has always left me at a disadvantage when the term gets thrown around in relation to MMOs. I could dimly apprehend its relevance but nothing resonated with my own playstyle, which tends towards the chaotic. I act often on whim and sometimes on whimsy. I create my own goals, pursue them for as long as they interest me then drop them without a second thought.

I am not, nor have I ever been, in the habit of slavishly pursuing any path set out for me by a game or its developers. The concept of moving from ride to ride, waiting patiently or impatiently for each to start, whirling around and around until the music stops then staggering off towards the next is alien to me. Well, it was until yesterday.

Last Friday my Thief dinged 80, the sixth of my Guild Wars 2 characters to reach that milestone. Rather than jump straight back on the horse with my Mesmer or Guardian I thought I'd goof around for the weekend. I spent all Friday night and Saturday morning sorting the bags and bank vaults of six characters. Then for an encore I organized the guild bank.

There were a lot of weapons and pieces of armor strewn around and in the course of tidying it all up it became apparent to me that I had a lot of level 80s dressed in level 50-70 gear. At best. I spent most of the rest of Saturday on the Trading Post, buying and selling. People will buy anything. I was amazed. Throw any old rubbish on there and it's snapped up in seconds.

Anyway, by late Saturday evening all six 80s were in what I would consider to be basic level 80 starting gear with upgraded Masterwork or better in every slot, but between the lot of them they could barely muster an average of one Exotic each. Now, I don't believe I they need Exotics to do anything I'm likely to ask them to do but I was enjoying playing Barbies so I decided I'd spend Sunday farming Rares to convert to Globs of Ectoplasm so that I or Mrs Bhagpuss (who has all craft trades maxed) could make whatever I fancied. That's how I came to see the true horror of the MMORPG Theme Park Experience in action for possibly the first time in my life.

GW2 has a number of open-world events that conclude with the dropping of a chest the size and appearance of a commercial freezer. Inside this chest can be, but rarely are, Rares. Not counting the Temple events in Orr there are six of these chest-droppers. Three feature lieutenants of the Elder Dragons: Claw of Jormag, Tequaatl the Sunless and The Shatterer. The other three are The Frozen Maw, Shadow Behemoth and Fire Elemental. They keep to a strict schedule which you can find handily recorded, tabulated and regularly updated at the Guild Wars Temple website.

People use this like a railway timetable. Each event has a margin of error, presumably in an attempt to create some spurious sense of spontaneity but in practice all of them pop at numbingly regular intervals. If you keep an eye on the timers you can waypoint from Frostgorge Sound in the Far Shiverpeaks to Sparkfly Fen in the Steamspur Mountains before bouncing back up via Queensdale to Wayferer Foothills and you won't be alone.

On a busy Sunday the resemblance to what I imagine a real Theme Park to be like was unmistakeable. A few minutes before the earliest point at which an event could begin people would begin to gather and mill around, becoming increasingly fractious the longer they had to wait.

With the exception of Tequaatl, who just appears at the ominous cry of "There's something in the water!", all the events require some chain of pre-events to be completed. If these are right at the main location, as they are for The Claw and The Maw, the whole zerg sets to with a will. If they happen somewhere out of sight, as at The Shatterer or Shadow Behemoth, everyone shuffles around where they stand, complaining that someone ought to be doing the pre-events.

Someone always is, and they are the ones who often miss out on the main event because of their public-spiritidness. By the time they hoof it over to the where the action is, the action isn't. The ride has stopped and everyone has has moved on.

The dragon driven out, the Maw quiet once more, the air is filled with the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the disappointed chest-openers. "Nothing but blues" is the common refrain. In Frostgorge you could get crushed in the scrum at the nearby vendor as everyone rushes to unload their worthless rubbish. Anyone lucky enough to pull a Rare out of the box is honor-bound to link it in Map chat, mostly to prove it really can happen. Sometimes the class clown will throw in a link to a Legendary. How we laughed.

I did this most of the day. The only event I didn't do was the Fire Elemental. Never done that. I did the Shadow Behemoth for the first time (the first several times) thanks to reading The Egg Baron's recent fine walkthrough. It's been bugged as long as I can remember but it's working fine now. I did The Maw, which pops about every 30 minutes or so, many times; Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer a couple and Tequaatl once.

I got half a dozen or so Rares, a couple of which were upgrades that I used. I blew the rest up for Ectos. It was a fun way to spend Sunday, but it really brought home to me how mechanical and gamelike GW2 can be. This morning I read J3w3l comparing the open world of Firefall to GW2 "...every time I try to level in GW2 it is just ticking off the check list of stuff to do so I can progress to the next zone. Fill in that heart, see that vista", she says. "It could have been an amazingly large, open and complex world but now it feels entirely compartmentalised."

It certainly can feel that way. Usually I don't even notice it but yesterday was a true glimpse into the Dark Side. ANet have said they intend to add more events so that any given event is seen less frequently. I would suggest they also remove Chest rewards from events completely. Increase the chance for better quality loot from any event instead. Encourage people to do events because they are interesting, intriguing, odd or amusing, not for the slim chance of a yellow weapon to destroy to make an orange one. Make it more about the park and less about the rides.

Still and all, I did have fun.