heart of thorns Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Just Wait it Gets Good

July 13, 2023 by Belghast

There will be some potential Guild Wars 2 story spoilers in this post so be warned.

Hey Folks! I have been busy this week with work and finishing up all of the assets so that I could make the Blaugust 2023 announcement yesterday. When it comes to gaming, I have mostly been focused on catching up with my Ranger with the story content in Guild Wars 2 and preparing them for the expansion drop in late August. When last I talked about my replay experience I was wrapping up Lake Doric and diving both literally and figuratively into Draconis Mons. This segment of Living World Season 3 features both my favorite and least favorite aspect of this sequence and I thankfully remembered to unbind my ground targeting before doing so. This area contains the quest where you are flying around and having to bomb things on the ground… which can’t actually be targeted directly. Funnily enough, I encountered the exact same game-breaking bug on the final sequence of this area… which required me to die in order to reset something so that I could finally finish up.

From there I continued onwards into Siren’s Landing… which means back to Orr and dealing with a large number of Risen again. One of the things that has to be stated… having a Skyscale makes all of this content so much easier. I remember that Siren’s Landing was a major pain in the ass to navigate with only a glider. I think this was honestly part of the zone design, making you rely on air currents in order to get to all of the areas of the map. With a Skyscale however, I have an easy button… and the entirety of this zone was pretty quick to progress through.

Finishing Siren’s Landing also meant finishing Living World Season 3… which of course treated me to more amazing cutscenes. Something was lost when Arena Net stopped doing cutscenes in this weird dream sequence thing that they have going on. More recently they have been doing game engine cutscenes and they are fine… and honestly have more room for emotion. However, I will always find the way the visuals in these older cutscenes looked special. They match the amazingly evocative zone loading screen artwork far better. The big reveal from finishing Season 3… is the fact that we are going to the Crystal Desert and Elona… meaning of course it is time for Path of Fire.

I feel like I need to acknowledge something after having played through the content once before (some of it more than once) and now seeing it all laid out in its proper sequence. Living World Season 3 is really when this game gets good. Living World Season 1, especially in its modern incarnation taking lessons learned from years of creating content… is pretty great. The base game story and living world season 2… are not. They are fine but feel like something you suffer through to get to the good parts. Living World Season 3, and Path of Fire… are when the good parts begin. Path of Fire is just so freaking well crafted that I had to stop and marvel at that fact the other night as I begin questing through the Crystal Desert proper.

The sad thing is that once again… we are asking folks to push through a few hundred hours’ worth of content to get to the good part. This seems to be the curse of MMORPGs and we tell our friends “Just wait, it gets really good” and mean it in earnest. I’ve uttered this before talking about getting to the “good” World of Warcraft expansions or showering my friends with just how amazing the story gets in Final Fantasy XIV once you get to Shadowbringers. Unfortunately… I think few players actually get past the awkward cruft that was created while the game was finding itself… to actually push through to greatness. Don’t get me wrong… there are great moments in the moment-to-moment gameplay of Core Tyria, and with the massive zone-wide Meta events in Heart of Thorns… but the story itself doesn’t really get good until Living World Season 2.

This happens so often with MMORPGs that they have to find their footing and determine what the cadence of content releases and style of storytelling is going to look like. In Core, LW1, LW2, and HOT… Guild Wars 2 has this huge problem of either not giving us enough time with a figure in opposition to us to care bout them… or resolving that conflict in some deeply unsatisfying way. Scarlet was a cool baddie, but it feels like we never really got to know her well enough before we ultimately took her down. She felt more like a Villain of the week… and then the game spent precious time in Living World Season 2… trying to make us care about her postmortem. The death of Zhaitan and Mordremoth both felt insignificant in scope based on the great existential threat that they were narratively told to us to be. It isn’t really until Balthazar that we get a baddie with both narrative weight AND mechanical gravitas.

Everything that is to come in this play through of the Ranger is fresh enough in my memory, to know without a doubt that Living World Season 3 is the turning point for Guild Wars 2. Sure the second half of Icebrood Saga, aka the misnamed Living World Season 5, is awful. There are reasons for that… due to the direction, the studio was going at that time. However, no one can deny that they stuck the landing with the zone meta that wrapped up that expansion. End of Dragons felt a little short but was also amazing… introducing us to a whole slew of new characters that I now deeply care about and a central conflict that felt meaty. Living World Season 3 was the point the game got good from a narrative standpoint. Mechanical enjoyment… I didn’t really grok until 2017… and even then I am not sure if it was due to some change in the game or more that I finally understood the type of game Guild Wars 2 was.

Guild Wars 2 is the sort of game where you can absolutely jump around and do content out of order if you choose. So I find myself confronted with the question… should people just jump ahead to Living World Season 3 and be done with it? I don’t really know. I am not sure if LW3 is the point at which the game gets good because it is standing on all of the information that I now know about the game up to this point… or if the experience stands on its own independent of all of that information. Similarly, I am enjoying this replay of the game so much, in part because I know where we are going and how we get there having completed all of this content before one or more times. I will say though… having done all of the content effectively out of order in the past, seeing it laid out in the manner it was meant to be played does improve the entire experience.

So once again… I find myself in the position of being that stereotypical MMORPG player. I still feel like while it is rough around the edges… and downright hamfisted at times… the content from the first parts of the game is important to feeling like you care about the characters and setting. So I found myself again saying to a friend the other day “Just Wait, It Gets Good”. This is the core problem that we can’t seem to rid ourselves of when it comes to an MMORPG. Deleting content and removing it feels awful, but the more content that stacks up over time… the harder it is for anyone to ever feel like they have truly caught up. I’ve never read the Wheel of Time series, even though I know it is supposedly amazing… because I am staring down the barrel of fourteen core books. If we accept Living World seasons as what they truly are… full expansions to the game… a new player is staring down the barrel of the base game and eight expansions worth of content to really feel like they are up to date.

But… Just Wait… It Gets Good.

Ranger vs Mordremoth

July 5, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! This weekend I fell out of my ARPG grind and back into some Guild Wars 2. Diablo IV was largely a disappointment and while I got lots of hours out of the game, I can’t say that most of them were really enjoyable. I am still very much engaged with Honkai Star Rail, but there is only about an hour’s worth of play that I can get out of that game on a day-to-day basis without spending additional money or banked resources. I got my Spriggan in Last Epoch up to Monoliths but I can only handle so much of that at once because they end up feeling very repetitive in their current state. With the announcement of the Secrets of the Obscure expansion, it has stoked my desire to get back engaged with Tyria. While my Necromancer has completed all of the content but Living World Season 2, I spend way more time on my Ranger and I am using that character to complete all of the content in the order of release.

Over the weekend I finished up Living World Season 2 and completed all of the Heart of Thorns expansion. I have to say, it is a much more enjoyable experience having played through all of Living World Season 1 then seeing the characters evolve in Living World Season 2… and finally having the major events play out during Heart of Thorns. It all has so much more impact because when I did the content initially… I had no real clue what I was doing and at the same time kept trying to treat Heart of Thorns like a traditional MMORPG expansion pack. I also have a much more stable grasp on the lore of the world thanks to having completed all of it once before. Having already unlocked most of the Heart of Thorns zones through gameplay on the Ranger, it also meant that I could largely focus on only completing the story missions.

The other huge benefit of this playthrough is that I now have access to a SkyScale, which means that most content becomes trivialized by significantly greater movement ability. I thought maybe it would make Tangled Depths more palatable, but that isn’t really the case. I have come to love the zone for what it is, and I greatly enjoy doing the Chak Gerent event… but it is still a nuisance to try and figure out where the quest marker is actually sending me. I still do not feel like games in general do a great job of visualizing the Z-Axis when to quests, and there are many times that I just sort of had to rely on previous knowledge of the game to get me in the vicinity of where I was supposed to go. That said… there are some really cool areas of Tangled Depths like this cavern with glowing mushrooms.

Another thing that greatly enhances my enjoyment of the game has been having BlishHUD turned on. For example, in the Roots of Terror map, I came across this chamber filled with Chak. There was a handy Blish HUD reminder that I could get achievements for killing 1, 10, and 50 Chak… so I spent the next bit of time exterminating every single Chak in the chamber until I got the Mastery achievement. There have been a few cases where I was already doing one thing… that seeing how close I was to completing another achievement caused me to press on and go for it. I generally enjoy playing the Ranger more than I did the Necromancer, and as a result, I feel like I am way more likely to go back and retry some of these maps later to pick up the remaining mastery achievements as a result.

Last night I started Living World Season 3 before deciding that sleep needed to happen. I remember this season really fondly, at least in part because the map designs were so good. Bloodstone Fen is a bit of a butt, but with maxed-out gliding and access to a Skyscale, it should be pretty trivial. This is part of why I am excited about Secrets of the Obscure and giving everyone an easier path to the Skyscale. It just makes everything so much more enjoyable when you don’t have to fiddle around with frustration mechanics. Guild Wars 2 does this amazing job of adding different layers to the map, and then also makes it a bit of a slog to move between them based on Mastery mechanics alone. The Skyscale is admittedly a bit of an easy button, but for me personally, it is making my enjoyment of the content so much higher.

I think my ultimate goal is to get caught up on all of the content on my Ranger before Secrets of the Obscure drops on August 22nd. That is going to be a bit of a rapid pace to go through the content, but I think if I am ONLY focusing on the story… it might be doable. It would also serve as a bit of a nice refresher before the new content drops as well. I get that the new content is supposedly not going to require you to have completed any earlier content to understand, but it would still be nice to have everything unlocked fully on the character I am enjoying playing the most. I mean that might change when I can swap things up with new weapon options in the expansion, but for the time being… I like being a longbow/greatsword dude.

Enjoy the Path

August 23, 2017 by Belghast

The first image of the evening is what happens when you catch the daily completion bonus train. I am still floored by the sheer number of people actively participating in events. One of the cool happenings of the night though is that I organically crossed paths with @vbarreirojr who was one event behind me in the progression. I sort of love the concept that happens in this game of the commander… because you can see the telltale icons on the corners of your map and generally speaking are a reasonable indicator of where some manner of activity is going on. I’m also starting to learn to get a bit better at watching chat. Often times as new events are starting up someone will link a waypoint to allow folks to jump to it relatively quickly. Through a combination of follow the catmander and waypoint jumping I managed to knock out the daily completion bonus in what felt like record time. I think part of it as well is I am starting to develop a little ancestral memory, as to which are the best areas to harvest resources and which are the easiest vistas to view to get completion and such. It’s funny how I almost look forward to the daily completion bonus because it ends to give me some focus… and from there while participating in it I come up with some other game play for the evening.

Early in the day I was talking to a friend who is contemplating trying to restart the game, and was questioning what sequence of things she needed to purchase. Firstly I think Guild Wars 2 is either something that feels good or doesn’t… and lord knows it took me five years of trying it to finally figure out the secret to being able to enjoy it myself. You can scan back through the history of this blog and you are going to find a bunch of posts that are pretty negative about this game. I wrote one in particular where I called it one of my five biggest MMO disappointments just so you have an easy reference. You are going to ultimately have to decide if the game works for you or not, because it absolutely did not for me for a very long time. However the truth that I finally landed on is that you have to forget everything you know about how an MMO works to ultimately make Guild Wars 2 work. What I mean by that is for the most part MMOs are very task oriented and involve you completing a sequence of objectives in order to move on to the next sequence of objectives. The quest is the most common version of this and that least to more quests and ultimately provides a ladder for you to traverse a given zone with. When you attempt to play Guild Wars 2 in this fashion… your brain rebels against you. There is no quest structure and the concept of hearts are what I tried to latch onto as the replacement. The end result felt like this grindy busywork as I attempted to complete my way across a zone so that I could then move to the next area, making sure to 100% everything in my path. In doing so I kept getting frustrated each time something took me off path or off whatever my current task was, and as a result I bounced exceedingly hard off of the game.

Instead I personally find Guild Wars 2 works better if you view it like an ocean that you happen to be floating in. If you allow yourself to move along with the current you get to experience all sorts of interesting things that happen along the path. Instead of staying focused on some large overarching goal… I find it works best to focus on whatever is presented in front of you. If there is an event spawning near you, go over there and participate because it often times leads its way to other events in the same zone. Instead of trying to traverse things in an A B C D E F manner… I find it just feels better to let the zone explore itself almost. Sure you end up often times going from A to F to G to C to E and eventually back to B and D… but it is done so in a more organic manner. The only negative to this approach is that I find it completely impossible to stay on task. Ultimately I started playing Guild Wars 2 like I play Skyrim or Fallout… just letting myself wander off into the horizon and check out the next shiny object in my field of view. If there is a commander on the far side of the zone… then I should probably head that way to see what all is going on. Sometimes this has lead me to zone events that I didn’t even realize existed. To some extent at times it feels like the game is playing you… but I think in this case it is probably perfectly okay. This game is full of these extremely intricate micro objectives and feedback loops to keep you caught in their gravity and constantly doing stuff. The fact that everything scales… means that you are never going to be doing stuff that isn’t potentially valuable or lucrative. Basically my advice to learning how to enjoy Guild Wars 2 is to stop focusing on the goal… and start enjoying the path.

Merry Eclipsemas

August 21, 2017 by Belghast

Friday I was apparently smoking something and I decided to attempt to participate in one of those internet meme quiz things. I was planning on doing it my own way where I just made a giant blog post about it. However thankfully I did not get enough likes to actually trigger me to release the post. Side note… I did actually write it and it is sitting in my saved drafts bin but I am somewhat relieved that I didn’t hit the threshold needed in my mind to make that post. In other news today is in fact the Eclipse and while I am not anywhere near the totality… it should still be interesting. There is a big of a gathering happening on the roof of the parking garage next to work in order to celebrate it, but my meeting schedule will ultimately determine if I can attend. The only negative is that I don’t have any way to view it safely. I remember watching one as a kid, that had to be the one that happened in 1979 and my grandfather who was a welder by trade had me wear his welding hood. I have no clue how best to really watch this one… I mean I guess in theory I could do the pinhole camera thing. The awesome big is that this time we have the internet and live streams… and in theory can get a much better view sitting at the computer than we can outside. It is extremely unique though to have the feeling that it was daytime minutes before and now you are standing in darkness. There have been many warnings about not pointing your camera directly at the eclipse, but I was going to attempt this using my old phone’s front facing camera as a sort of way to know when it is safe to look at not safe to look. Dealing with the eclipse always sort of reminds me of Perseus and Medusa, and trying to use a shiny surface to get a glimpse without turning to stone… or in this case completely wrecking my eyes.

I spent most of my weekend playing Guild Wars 2 and attempted to make further progress in the Living Story Season 2 content. Before I get into that however I want to make another side note about just how damned active people are in this game. It is really hard to get the scale from a single screenshot given how much people in general move around avoiding mechanics… but I was needing to do an event in Frostgorge sound for one of the steps in the quest chain. While waiting for it to kick off I noticed a significant number of people gathering… and by the time we actually started there were a good fifty plus players participating. Over the weekend I discovered Dulfy’s boss timer thanks to my friend Solaria…. and I spent a good deal of time bouncing around and doing world boss fights. The weird thing about the Frostgorge Sound event though is that this isn’t on the timer… it is just something that happens occasionally and apparently there are enough players out there wanting to complete it that we end up with the numbers that we had each time it runs. When I first got to the zone I caught the tail end of the event and did not participate enough to be able to get credit. However during that running there were still a significant number of players participating in the content. It just floors me that there are enough players in the game that you can pretty much show up at any single event timer… and know without a doubt that it is going to happen. Now maybe during the wee hours of the morning this might not be the case but over the course of the weekend I kept hitting various encounters and each time we had more than enough to make sure it was a success.

Another big happening of the weekend is that I managed to get my Ranger to level 80. I managed to get him pretty close through the use of a bunch of Tome’s of Knowledge but I still needed to pour on the last five levels the old fashioned way. Right now I think I am pretty happy with the combo of Greatsword and Longbow for this character, and have tweaked my spec to emphasize both of these weapon selections. I cobbled together a set of gear once I dinged and am now out doing a secondary mission with the character… and that is popping between zones and taming animals. For the most part I seem to have the best luck with my traditional Arctodus and River Drake combo… but the longer I play the Drake seems to keep pulling ahead in most departments. They just seem to be universally good… reasonable dps and excellent survival. All of that said it does nothing to stop my desire to tame all of the things and have a completely filled out pet window. I’m extremely torn as to which character I should be spending most of my time on… and this is one of those moments when I wish the map progress was shared. On my warrior I managed to 100% a few new areas and am continuing down that path that I will ultimately need for the Legendary weapon madness. As far as gambling for weapons… I’ve decide more or less to stop that nonsense until I can actually craft the weapons myself. On that front though I am now in Mithril territory as far as leveling goes and considering how much of that I have in my vault it should go pretty quickly. I am however going to have to focus any of the zones that mine Orichalcum because I am severely lacking in my reserves of that metal.

The other big take away from the weekend is that I am pretty sure the designers of this game intended you to be grouping up for the Living World content. I say this because I just finished the second part of Chapter 4 and towards the end of that mission I had died so many times my character was completely naked. The thing is… it hasn’t just been that one encounter because the last few major fights have taken a significant amount of time and put me up against some extremely hitpoint spongey bosses. I am not going to go into specifics for the sake of spoilers… though I guess the above image is in its own way a little spoilery. I should in theory be grouping with friends to complete this content, but on some level I am getting a sense of pride in being able to do it all solo. Sure sometimes it hurts, and I always have to repair afterwards but it is also forcing me to actually deal with the mechanics which I am hoping will make adjusting to the later fractals all that much easier. I also in truth really need to spend some time optimizing my gear on the Warrior because right now other than the few ascended items I have… it is a little all over the place. I am hoping to push up my weaponsmithing and armorsmithing in part to help fill out some of these gaps as I am already sitting on quite a few patterns that would be useful. Long story short… still having an awful lot of fun in Guild Wars 2 and still finding tons of casual activities to accomplish.