Mordremoth

Just Wait it Gets Good

by

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

by

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.