Zhaitan

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.

Defeating Ranger Personal Story

by

Good Morning Friends! Over the last week, I’ve found myself fading away from Path of Exile more and more and diving further into Guild Wars 2 again. I am sure the tables will flip when the new Diablo III Season 28 rolls out or the Last Epoch Multiplayer patch drops in March, but I am primarily mainlining Guild Wars. For a while, I have been focused more on my Longbow Soulbeast Ranger as opposed to my far further progressed Pistol/Staff Harbinger Necromancer. I just find the Ranger much easier to drop in and out of content, and the extreme ranger of the longbow means that I can cheese a lot of world boss mechanics by simply standing out of the range of attacks. I still enjoy the Necromancer, but there is just something that I enjoy about the bow-style gameplay as opposed to the much shorter-range pistol I use on Harbinger.

So as a result I have been working a bit on catching up with that character and starting to finally chew through the story content. Essentially my goal in doing this is to be able to unlock all of the content that I don’t currently have access to and in theory, begin doing things like strikes and later zone metas as a Ranger. Last night I pushed through the rest of the personal story and started the beginnings of Living World Season 1. My intent is to burn through all of the story content in the order that it was intended, and while I know I won’t be caught up for a long time it is at least some forward momentum. I’ve been slowly chipping away at upgrading to ascended gear, and the biggest obstacle standing in my way at the moment is leveling Huntsman from 425 where I currently am to 500 so I can craft myself a bow.

I’ve also been logging in every day on the Necromancer and farming some of the zone currencies that I can use to complete a few of my accessory slots. At the moment I am farming Winterberries in Bitterfrost Frontier each day and Blish HUD makes that a trivial process. Essentially it marks the location of every Winter Berry Bush, and you just run around until you have made all those icons disappear from your viewport. In total it takes me maybe fifteen minutes given that you often have to fight a veteran monster at each spawn point. The thing that is a major pain in the ass is just how expensive leveling from 425 to 500 in any trade skill is. It is enough of a pain that I even contemplated just going for the Legendary Kudzu instead given that I have crafted a lot of the sub-components that it would need already.

In Guild Wars 2 your “home instance” serves as this game’s version of housing, and every major city has a home instance that you can access themed around that particular setting. My favorite of these is the one in Rata Sum only because the nodes you can farm every day are much more conducive to quickly gathering them. I’ve started to collect cats for my home instance, and a few days ago when I zoned in… they left me a present by the portal. On the ground was a “Dead Bird” that I could interact with and ultimately clean up after them. Growing up the cats we had used to leave us offerings of crawdad claws on the front porch to show what a good hunter they were. If I was not already in love with this game, this dumb feature would have been the thing that tipped me over.

I also recently had to pick up a microtransaction at the shop. As part of the End of Dragons expansion, you gain access to a fishing skiff and there are various skins you can buy to give it a different appearance. I periodically browse the store to see what new items have been released, and when I saw this Viking Longboat-themed design, I had to pick it up. My two primary characters are both beefy boy Norns and this just feels more natural than the lithe skiffs that I normally see. Not that I use my skiff a ton, because generally speaking the skimmer mount is a much better way to travel across the water. At some point, I might get engaged with the fishing mini-game, but as of yet it really has not grabbed hold of me.

Other than chewing away on story content, I am still periodically dropping into the odd world boss kill. My favorites are Tequatl, The Shatterer, and Drakkar because they are the most epic feeling. Generally speaking, I try and get in on the 6 CST server reset Tequatl kill each day, and then depending on how long it takes me to do my daily quests and farm the home instance and guild halls, I will drop into whatever other bosses sound fun to me at the time and are currently available. For those who are uninitiated, the World Bosses in Guild Wars 2 spawn on a rotating schedule and there are a number of resources you can check to see what is up currently. If you are willing to spend some shop currency there is a World Boss Portal Device that I use which will teleport you to the portal nearest the boss (even if you don’t have it unlocked) and tell you what fights are coming up shortly. This only works on the Tyria fight, but a lot of the heavily farmed ones are on that rotation including all of the ones I mentioned.

I am happy to be back in the swing of Guild Wars 2. I honestly thought it would be Final Fantasy XIV that caught my attention first since I did get a house over there. Right now I just seem to be more into the action gameplay style, and combat in FFXIV feels sluggish. There is also not really a game mode that I can drop into as easily as I can in Guild Wars 2, which also feels like forward momentum. At some point I will catch up on the story there as well, but since I am listening to Audiobooks while playing… I am not sure I can handle the FFXIV story right now.