Good Morning Friends! This is me… officially in Cantha and having legitimately gotten there through the story. This means that I have now finished all of the available story content in Guild Wars 2 prior to the release of the most current expansion, End of Dragons. So far Cantha seems to be a massive leap forward in the way the storytelling takes place, but we are not going to talk about that this morning. Instead we are going to talk about Living World Season 5, or what is otherwise known as the Icebrood Saga. Season 5 featured some of the best content I had experienced to date as well as some of the worst. Largely it was a season that felt like it was developed by two wildly different teams… and given the way layoffs hit ArenaNet in 2019 and 2020… that might be literally what happened.
The entire adventure spans the course of three zones: Grothmar Valley, Bjora Marches, and Drizzlewood Coast. Each of these is extremely well built and features some of the most interesting gameplay to date, especially Drizzlewood which is effectively a PVE only version of a WvW map. The story that unfolds is effectively one of a Charr civil war, as an entire culture of warriors is not quite certain who they should be fighting. It also furthers the character arc of the Norn prophecy and more specifically the evolution of the character Braham Eirsson. He has honestly turned from an insufferable ass of a character that I hated… to someone that I actually enjoy taking along on missions. The content is divided into a prologue and five chapters for a total of six parts. Everything but that last chapter is expertly crafted and deeply enjoyable… however it is in the end that the wheels fall off the cart.
It is in “Episode 5: Champions” that we are introduced to a new type of activity in Guild Wars 2, the Dragon Response Mission. At face value these are actually somewhat enjoyable, and reminds me of something akin to a Destiny 2 strike. You entire an area of an existing map, are given story dialog over coms, and asked to complete a sequence of tasks. They follow a very predictable pattern:
- You Zone into the Map and are given 5 minutes to complete three different tasks. You will not have enough time to do all three but this is effectively the “matchmaking time” while it searches for additional players. Doing any effort seems to award you gold participation.
- You are given a new task which is usually either escort someone to a place, or kill a bunch of things scattered around the map.
- Upon completion of this task a Champion will spawn somewhere around the map. You will need to kill it and the standard “boss” rules apply, in that at some interval it is going to do a thing that makes it invulnerable… which will require you to perform some gimmick to begin dealing damage to them again.
Again this mission construct in itself is pretty enjoyable, and would have been a great addition were it sprinkled in sparingly or just something you could do on the side. However the ENTIRETY of Episode 5 is doing these missions… ten of them. Every couple of missions you are going to get a brief story interlude where you are asked to go talk to Aurene… where some member of your entourage is going to interrupt you and tell you that you need to do more Dragon Response Missions. This is something that I more or less had to grit my teeth and just grind out, and it felt awful.
The finale of Episode 5 is effectively doing a story mode only version of the Dragonstorm event. This is also exceptionally good and I really enjoyed experiencing the full story version. However it in no way makes up for the slog that the player has had to go through in order to get here. It is my understanding that when they were released they were doled out two Dragon Response Missions at a time. MAYBE playing it in that manner would have felt a bit better, but having to do ten of them in a row without coming up for air… just is the worst. As a result I deem the Icebrood Saga both the best expansion content to this point in Guild Wars 2, and also the worst.
I hear there are challenge mode versions of the Dragon Response Missions, but I am not sure if I want to set foot in another one. There are a few where I was so dead set on burning through them that I missed checking whether or not there was a mastery point I should be getting. I need to revisit these and at least pop in long enough to get those. Otherwise I maybe never want to see that content type again until I level another character through the content. I am greatly looking forward to digging into End of Dragons because so far… it has been delightful. I do want to take a quick moment to note that Kalidris Sparrowhawk is maybe one of my new favorite characters and I am hoping at some point… she joins Dragon’s Watch.
DRMs felt even worse the second time going through them for the Return To… achievements. I had to stagger them out over days; there was no way they could be chained together for any length of time.
It’s sad, because on paper, one to three DRMs made available across updates separated by months might have been a nice soloable change of pace. But chaining them together like that in one update quite ruined the concept by basically overloading players with a blatant cut-and-paste job TEN times, with barely any semblance of story holding them together either.
It’s “Oh, Commander, Zone X is being attacked, go there now!” and “Eeep, Commander, I’m getting reports that Zone Y is in trouble!” Here, mix and match some random factional help like random fractal instabilities, because variation! Players will never see through this!
If they’d exercised a bit of judicious editing power, and just cut it down to 5 (or 6 DRMs for an even number to balance Primordus and Jormag missions), I think it would have gone over a lot better.
It felt too much like “we made these zones, we want to make sure all of you are forced to play them”
“MAYBE playing it in that manner would have felt a bit better”… Nope. It did not.
For me, some of the instances in LS3 and LS4 were worse than the Dragon Response Missions, but only in terms of the attritional boss fights that ANet finally learned most people hated. Other than that, yes, DRMs are probably the low point of the whole LW project.
I would agree with LW3 especially since it had so much “do the unclear gimmick” fights that took me forever to learn what I was supposed to do to stop dying.
Scooter and I didn’t even start Ep. 5 and the DRMs. I think we did finish the Drizzlewood Coast stuff. But there’s always something else to do in that game. We’ve finished at least one run-through of the EoD story, but only half of the newly released LW1E1. I do want to finish IBS, but not looking forward to it if it’s as you have described.