Tales From Topographic Jungles : GW2

I'd have loved Heart of Thorns when I was fourteen. It's Brian Aldiss's Hothouse as imagined by Roger Dean, lush, overripe, adrip with adolescent sturm und drang. At least that's the impression I'm getting from the smallish portion we've been allowed to glimpse thus far.

As expansions go it's hard to assess. It seems fragmented, a collection of features rather than a coherent whole, a sense that's exacerbated by the piecemeal reveals, the sporadic, shifty liftings of the curtain. To retain the mystery much must remain concealed yet to drum up interest some things have to be exposed. It's a conundrum.

What we're allowed to see varies wildly. The PvP map has not only been open to all, at times it's been all that was open. Later this week there's another beta test of the new Desert Borderlands for World vs World and, unlike the Beta Weekend that's happening as I write, entry to which is guaranteed by the simple pre-purchase of HoT as a banner across every log-in and map transition screen reminds you, the  midweek WvW beta is by invitation only.

I haven't been invited. No-one in WvW chat has mentioned it. No-one mentioned any of the previous closed borderland tests either. There's no NDA and yet no-one is talking. I'm driven to wonder if that's because no-one cares.

People certainly cared about the first pay-to-play Beta Weekend. Last time we had one of these events the place was swarming and chat was scrolling almost too fast to read. When I logged into Verdant Brink last night map chat was silent. There was no-one in sight. About the only person I heard in the first half-hour was someone asking if he'd come to a dead map.

Maybe he had. Or maybe it was quiet because ArenaNet opened the doors two hours earlier than the time they'd announced. Whatever the reason it was jolly quiet. And peaceful. And nice. Hold that thought. I'll come back to it.

Last time round our little corner was the eastern half of what ANet very confusingly refer to as "the jungle-floor biome". To me, a floor is something solid that you can walk on but here it seems to include yawning chasms and gulfs as well as tree branches accessible only by leaping or gliding.

It's still not very big, is it?

Everything about the open maps in Heart of Thorns seems designed to confuse, not least how much of them there really is. We know for certain that there are just four open-world, explorable maps. We also know that all of them are tri-partite - "Roots", "Floor" and "Canopy". According to details that were datamined as long ago as April, the last two beta weekends have given us access to the whole of one layer of Verdant Brink. Assuming all the layers have the same surface area if not, necessarily, the same volume, then we should have seen 33% of the full, three-dimensional map. ANet don't seem to see it that way :

"For our second beta weekend test, you’ll be landing in a different part of the map than the one we showed in our first beta weekend, and you’ll be able to explore a new area: the jungle-floor biome. The playable content will comprise about 25% of the expansion’s first map."

Since they said the same last time, I make that 50% of the "playable content" in Verdant Brink they've revealed so far, but in just 33% of the map space. Either the other two biomes are smaller or there's less going on in them. I don't know. I should probably just stop thinking about it so hard.

Don't you just hate being photo-bombed?

Much more important is whether it feels like a place you'd want to spend your leisure time. Not your character, who, as the locals will never for a moment let you forget, is The Pact Commander and therefore is On Duty at all times, but you, the player, relaxing at home.

The first beta weekend revealed a hyper-active, frenetic environment where every hard yard had to be earned with blood. When the events worked the fighting was constant. It was tiring, draining, exhausting and frenetic. I could easily imagine it being fun for a couple of full-on days but after that I'd never want to see it again.

The western half of the Verdant Brink jungle floor is not like that. Not at all. There's much more opportunity to stop and smell the orchids. There seemed to be fewer mordrem and fewer mobs in general. Whether that's a response to feedback from last time or just A Different Part of The Jungle I don't know, but I like it a lot better.

I'm not hiding - I'm ranged support I tell you!

There also seemed to be fewer events and the ones I encountered flowed much more naturally. I hardly dare say this but there was a fifteen minute period where I was having a really good time.

I'd been exploring and enjoying that very much when I happened to arrive in a cave just as a Legendary mordrem attacked. The few players who happened to be there rallied to assist the embattled Pact survivors and after a very well-balanced and enjoyable fight the mordrem was defeated.

Drops poultry meat. Must be a chicken.

After we'd picked up the fallen the entire Pact contingent decided to move to another location, requesting we players escort them, as is traditional on such occasions. If there's one thing GW2 does better than all other MMORPGs it's an escort quest and this one was a lot of fun. We fought our way up a long incline, dispatching numerous mordrem champions along the way, until the Quaggan in charge of the expedition found a nice, exposed position on the edge of a long drop and decided it was perfect for a camp, so much better than the secure, defensible cave we'd left behind.

At that point Tequatl was calling so I left them to it. I expect they're all dead now. That's what you get for putting a Quaggan in charge. The thing is, it really was exciting and it didn't feel forced. It was just a bunch of players happening on a situation and getting caught up in the moment. Y'know, the way they told us it would be all those years ago. The way it really could be, sometimes, back then.

Meanwhile all that Dry Top/Silverwastes timed objective twaddle was ticking away in the top-right corner of the screen. No doubt the events I was caught up in were contributing somehow but I cannot emphasize enough how much I do no give a flying monkey's cuss about that. In fact, if ANet would like to raise my enjoyment of HoT by an order of magnitude, all they need to do is make that map event timer optional. I'll switch it off and we never need to speak of it again.

Chocks away!

Other than get my wings and explore that was about all I did. The glider was another positive. It only takes three mastery points to complete first stage of the track and one of those points to buy it. It was very intuitive and easy to use; much more so than the glider in ArcheAge, for example, or the gliding mounts in EQ2. Any apprehensions I had about the efficacy or user-friendliness of gliders was quashed the moment I unfurled my wings.

The Mastery system itself I quite like. It's very similar indeed to the AA system in Everquest or EQ2 in that it's not really much more than an alternative set of levels. That suits me. I love leveling. The points seem easy to get. You simply gain Mastery xp as though it was ordinary xp by doing whatever you normally do, filling out the same bar that used to be your xp bar. You also get whole points at a time for doing specific things. I got one for killing the Legendary mordrem for example. Again, that is identical to how AAs work in Norrath.

Aw, c'mon! Don't be such a tease!

While exploring I found a map portal in the extreme south-west corner of the map so I know at least one way we'll be going. What the other maps are like we won't know until October 23rd. I hope there's a bit more variety than trees, lianas, cliffs and more trees but apart from that I'm feeling a tad more hopeful than I was. If nothing else it'll make a bit of a change.

How durable these environments are long-term is something I'm still very dubious about. There are only so many treefrog villages and jungle clearings I can take. If the entire future development of GW2 during the lifespan of this expansion is going to be tied to the Maguuma Wastes then I think we may have a problem.

Who knows, though? Perhaps it won't be three years until the next expansion takes us somewhere else. It might only be a year. I think I could handle that much jungle. Even without going raiding.

Show, Don't Tell : GW2

Guild Wars 2 has been around for almost three years now. It promised to break the mold but in the end it broke itself. A mere nine months after launch I had already given up on the promises they'd made. It was easy. I never believed them anyway.

In March 2013, in a post titled Direction of Travel I wrote:

"GW2 for me has turned into a still-new, still-shiny version of every other MMO. There's an increasingly big part of the game, the part the developers seem mainly focused on and to which players are expected to aspire, from which I have largely opted out...As for where the game is going, I suspect ArenaNet are painting themselves into a corner with an increasingly restrictive, coercive, hardcore end-game bolted onto a free-wheeling, roistering, genuinely casual-friendly open-world leveling game. Unless they have better solutions than anyone else has come up with so far this is a road that can only lead to a fractured, dislocated playerbase where different interest groups lobby hard for their individual, incompatible aspirations."

Two and a half years later I think I might just be able to make out the faintest glimmer of one of those "better solutions" in this weekend's Heart of Thorns beta.

Not, for sure, in the fundamentally compromised version of The Manifesto under which we now operate. Remember "It all gets back to our basic design philosophy. Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward" ? Such delicious irony.

Back in 2013 I was puzzling, as many were, over the addition of Ascended gear and the apparent willingness of GW2's core audience to accept grind-based, acquisitional gameplay, even to welcome it as aspirational. That's now embedded into the framework and here we are, anticipating eagerly the addition of new timesinks in the form of precursor crafting and new, account-bound Legendaries. If that's not the very definition of "preparing to have fun" and "grinding for a future fun reward" I don't know what is.

Then there's Verdant Brink. Good luck not "preparing to have fun" there. If you're the explorer type you'll certainly want to rush straight in and get on with it. It's visually stunning. It also has a war going on, a vicious day/night cycle, psychotically aggressive wildlife and a three-dimensionality that lets you see everything without being able to get to anything. Yet.

The peace and quiet that I lauded previously turned out to be largely unintended. A major event chain on one side of the map had stalled. On Sunday I found myself in an instance where the frogtown sequence wasn't bugged. All hell was breaking loose. That, naturally, was the time I chose to show Mrs Bhagpuss, deeply unimpressed as she was by then with the "Now! Now! Now!" action-oriented frenetic pace she'd experienced so far, that Verdant Brink does have its quieter side.

No it doesn't. It has a few quiet spots, like the Temple, with its magnificently atmospheric lighting or the oddly empty caverns, with their suspiciously climbable fungal outgrowths that don't seem to go anywhere, but pretty much anywhere you might want to go you can expect to fight all the way there and fight all the way back.

We fought. We ran. We died. Often. The novelty outweighed the frustration this time but that can only work once.

To cut ANet a little slack, it really isn't very fair to judge either Verdant Brink or Heart of Thorns on this limited exposure. It's not just unfair in the usual way that first impressions of MMOs are always unfair but more particularly because the whole zone has very clearly been tuned around the acquisition and possession of Masteries. With enough mastery points we'd be gliding past many of these fights, or bouncing on springy mushrooms, crossing the zone in seconds instead of slogging through it on foot, battling for every yard. Or so we imagine, anyway.

Masteries, clearly, will not be optional, not if you want to explore beyond the original game or, as we are now apparently calling it, "Pact Tyria". Without gliding and bouncing there will be parts of The Heart you'll never reach. Well, not until a Mesmer pops in to portal you. And mesmers do love to portal, bless 'em. But on your own? Not going to happen.

It sounds elitist, restrictive, dirigist and my natural inclination is to take agin it but I confess to being swayed by this explanation of why it's being done the way it is:

"We want our in-game progression to be about earning abilities that actually make a difference to what you’re doing in the game by opening up more of the game for you...the things you’re getting with the mastery system are very contextual and impactful for what you’re doing in that region by opening up new content and abilities that are more meaningful than numbers going up. We want you to see the gliding stuff and think, ‘I wanna do that!’

(Source MOP interview ) 

That does make some kind of sense and I can attest from personal experience that it's working. A few hours before I read that quote I was hopping about on a tree branch over what looked like a mile-long fall when someone swooped past me on a glider and disappeared into the depths below. And I found myself thinking "I want to do that!".

Until then I'd been looking at Glider Mastery as a bloody nuisance. It was an injury to need the glider in the first place and an insult to have to waste my time grinding points to be able to use it. In that one moment gliding went from imposition to aspiration.

So, maybe they do have some idea what they're doing after all. Hard to believe, I know, especially on previous evidence, but maybe it will all work out for the best. After all, some of us even came to appreciate Scarlet, in the end. 

One beta weekend isn't much to go on but on balance I would say I'm cautiously optimistic. Very cautious and only mildly optimistic but even that's more than I expected.

With One Bound They Were Free : GW2

It's all been a bit of a rush. Didn't get to the Heart of Thorns beta until a couple of hours after it started. First we were doing Tequatl and someone or someones unknown didn't notice the Vigil Megalaser was rapidly melting. That didn't end well.

Then I spent almost an hour (!) trying to finish the worst set of dailies evs on my third account. In the end I had to camp the Veteran Warg on Fort Aspenwood's borderland like it was 1999. That led right into the late evening Maw/Jor, as the back-to-back twofer featuring The Frozen Maw followed by Claw of Jormag is known in our house (by me at least).

By the time all that lot was over I had to get a snack. It was gone ten by the time I flipped through Beta character creation to come up with the most gormless-looking Asura in Tyria (and there's heavy competition for that title). Little time left to get a look at Verdant Brink and bang out a blog post before today's Blaugust deadline expires.

I guess there's no point worrying about spoilers. The major question from the end of Living Story 2 is answered in the first five minutes of the opening episode of our new Personal Story. Look away now if you don't want to know that ...

Destiny Edge did not die in Mordremoth's destruction of the Pact Airfleet. No, of course they didn't. Who ever thought they did? In classic pulp novel style they were captured and taken away for...interrogation? Execution? Breeding? Tea and crumpets?

That we don't know but if anything's even less of a surprise than finding them alive but held prisoner by The Bad Guys it's discovering that we're the suckers who have to go find them and get them out of the mess they've gotten themselves into.

The first episode then proceeded almost exactly like almost any episode of last years Living Story, albeit one of the easier ones. I managed to complete the entire thing as an Elementalist without dying although I was downed twice towards the end. The fights were as tedious as usual although the mini-boss seemed fairly ineffectual and the threatened Giant Plant, who got a big cut scene and looked like he'd be a total pain, never actually appeared in the instance at all.

I strongly hope this is the difficulty setting at least for combat in the Personal Story. Any harder would be painful. It's not like the fights in these instances have ever been interesting.

The plot, however, is a rollicking good adventure. It could have come from a 1930s cinema serial of the Flash Gordon ilk. The final set piece sent literal shivers down my spine. Cheap emotional manipulation by use of cliched tropes it may be but  it flipping well works!

When Rytlock appeared over the top of a ridge like Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone I cheered out loud.

I took photos of him. Lots of them. Including this unfortunate pose in which he appears to be trying to give my Asura a run for his money in the gormlessness stakes:

The whole thing wrapped up with a Mastery Point. Too tired to make much of what that means right now. Something to do with gliders or frogs I think. All in all it was fun and it made me realize how much I've missed having this daft story and these ridiculous characters around.

So far, so good. Let's see how things go tomorrow. Just let's no-one tell Rytlock I said he was daft. He's a bit scary. Scarier.