I know this might sound harsh, but that isn’t really that difficult. LW5 was the weakest of recent seasons for a lot of people, including me.
Thanks. Yeah I watched the mastery tree video and it looks like there are a bunch of things to be unlocked for Jade Bots before they become really useful, unlike, say, a level 1 raptor. I guess I’ll get one eventually! (Unless they suddenly add Jade Bot skins, in which case I’ll skip ahead no matter what!)
Oh, for me as well. Living World season 5 was barely comprehensible to me because I broke away from the game for huge stretches it was so painful to play. But EoD is a return, it feels, to the way the previous expansions played.
My main Sylvari Daredevil did have way more Hero points than needed to unlock the third Elite specialization, but I’m not going to switch to it. Once I invest in a character build, there’s very little that would make me switch it up (aside from moving to an Elite specialization in the first place).
Speaking of those Hero points, I still wonder why there are so many in the game when I can unlock the entirety of a new Elite and have a hundred or more points still left over without a use, and more to gain in Cantha. It keeps feeling like they mean them to be used for something but it never materialized.
It feels like you should be able to level up and unlock a new specialization without having to 100% every aspect of the game.
But that’s the classic progression problem in a lot of video games: Either you have extra points that you can’t use for anything, or you collect all of the points and then get a reward that you can’t really use since you’ve already completed the game.
I unlocked Jade Bots and, well, the most heavy-hitting buffs are deep into the mastery track, and for passive bonuses you need to farm “chips”, so I don’t think it’s worth doing the first few missions of EoD just to get that, since it will see little use in other areas until you’re further into the mastery/expansion. So I’d say, don’t bother.
That said, the maps I got to see so far are huge. New Kaineng City in particular is quite striking. The story is going to some interesting places, too.
I like how the story is all “Hey this next chapter is going to take place in the cyberpunk city of New Hong Kong” and people are like “Okay!”
What are the zones like? Other than big. Are they a nightmare to navigate like all the tangled web zones and heart of thorns? Those zones really soured me on the game and hating the characters in that story didnt help though i can always live with bad characters.
I’m not far in yet, but they don’t seem anything like HoT areas. They feel open and varied.
Okay, I played through the fun intro chapter, and it unlocked the Fishing mastery track. It looks like you can fish anywhere in Tyria, so that’s something! Hopefully it’s as fun as fishing in…well, every other game!
Edit: After fishing for a while, I got a message saying, “Overfishing has drawn something dangerous to this area!” I have no idea if that means a killed hermit crab is about to attack, or if I just generated a new Elder Dragon that’s going to destroy the city. I’ll let you know what I find out.
I reinstalled and logged back in and it felt like slipping on a comfortable pair of socks. It was almost enough to pull me out of Elden Ring. :)
Uh-oh, I kinda wish you hadn’t told me that because there’s no fishing in Elden Ring. That I know of. Yet.
-Tom
Well, you can fish for crabs in Elden Ring, but the bad news is that you’re the bait. ;)
Well, the two zones I visited this far are big and impressive but (mostly) easy to navigate. It’s nowhere near the navigation nightmare of the Tangled Depths, and these zones do have more verticality than most areas in Path of Fire. ArenaNet learned their lesson, apparently.
Ok, so I want to get some thoughts and feelings out of my chest, and this is the only place I can do so in any proper way, so here it goes.
So, I’m in the final chapters of the End of Dragons expansion, about to enter the fourth and last new area. I’ve played a few of the meta events and all, and I’ve experimented with most of the new elite specializations (except for Willbender and Bladesworn).
And the thing is… I’m kind of… underwhelmed? Some of the new specs are fun (Harbinger is a lot more fun than I thought it would be; Vindicator, Specter and Mechanist are the other highlights in the expansion), but some left me wanting (Virtuoso is so-so, didn’t care for Untamed, Catalyst is interesting but clunky). Anet has fixed elites before (Scrapper wasn’t good for a long time, but recent updates made it really fun), so chances are the elites will all be fun at some point, so I’m not really all that worried about that.
Areas are… ok? They look pretty good (New Kaineng City is particularly striking), but they feel somewhat emptier than previous areas for some reason I can’t really pinpoint. While playing in the new areas, sometimes I would feel the kind of magic GW2 always evoked for me, but it was no longer anywhere near a constant thing. Areas felt all over the place, unfocused, in a way I don’t remember feeling before.
But the real problem for me is the story. GW2 has never been super stellar in terms of story quality (or quality in storytelling), but it had its highs. But here… I enjoyed the occasional humor, and some character related tidbits. I like Taimi, I like Gorrik, and the voice acting is adequate to excellent (the human male voice actor for the player character is still as amazing as ever) — quality of the script notwithstanding. I liked the nods to GW1 lore, including a couple places where I thought they were smartly used.
But there’s so much that feels so… “juvenile”, maybe? Like this isn’t a mature story, told by mature individuals, made for a mature audience. The main plot is “fine” (if derivative and uninspired - they could have gone to a lot of other much more interesting places), but the script and dialog is… well… it’s so preachy and shallow so often — and even outright dumb and cringeworthy at times — that I’m actually not enjoying my time with it at all. And there’s so much squandered potential here; a lot more could have been done with the setting and the lore, and you see some glimpses of that in the notes or books you find here or elsewhere in the new areas, but they hint at awesome things that were relegated to footnotes. Agh, it’s infuriating at times.
I don’t know. Maybe GW2 was always like that and what happened now is that I played Final Fantasy XIV and it ruined other MMO’s storytelling for me forever. But I feel that, while that might be a (big) factor, it isn’t the only factor here. I think the GW2 team is telling a story in a way and with a tone that I don’t really care for anymore. Maybe it’s at the same level it’s always been, but I’ve changed. Maybe I’ve outgrown that. Maybe I’m now an old dude screaming at kids to get off my lawn. Or maybe not, since I enjoy FF XIV perfectly well. Be that as it may, as it stands, the story in End of Dragons feels like a tale told by children, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And not in the shakespearean kind of way.
I can’t comment on the latest expansion’s writing because I’m still very slowly playing through season 5, but I can comment on the above. Human guys are voiced by Nolan North, which I always thought was kinda funny. Most people think of him as Nathan Drake, but to me he’ll always be My Main from GW2 😛
(And Sylvari ladies are voiced by Jennifer Hale)
Don’t have a gaming PC and want to play Guild Wars 2? Nvidia’s gotcha covered!
I will say the free tier is particularly ill-suited to a MMO with 1 hour time limits, so you’re gonna need to pay.
I’d argue the GW2 storytelling has always been at a fan fiction level rather than mature professional storytelling. They have employed fan fiction writers in the past as writers and narrative designers for the game, most infamously the writer who came up with Scarlet in Living Story 1.
Anet has posted about plans for GW2:
A stat I was not expecting:
This long-term focus is paying off—we’re seeing incredible growth in the community. In fact, the number of active Guild Wars 2 players has more than doubled over the last three years. This growth has helped Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons outsell our previous expansion, Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire . Not bad for a game getting ready to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
That dormant Steam page is going to get some love:
Now that Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons is released, one of our top priorities as a studio is getting Guild Wars 2 ready for release on Steam and introducing the world of Tyria to an entirely new audience of gamers.
I figured this expansion would be the last until GW3, but I was wrong:
One last update before we go: we’re happy to confirm that there will be a fourth expansion for Guild Wars 2!
Whoa, coming to Steam seems like it would be really big. I wonder why that was so long in coming?
At any rate, this is great news! Lost Ark got me to re-install Guild Wars 2, but I haven’t jumped back in yet. Glad to hear it sounds like there’s no hurry and Guild Wars 2 is going to be around for a long time yet.
-Tom
As an update, I finished the story in GW2 and my impressions above are still accurate. The story was ultimately disappointing, and the writing was mostly average to bad. There are some nice - even pretty good - moments, but those are often unmade by absolutely stupid choices in dialog and exposition and character “development” (or lack thereof). If this is the kind of story Anet wants to tell, and how they want to tell it, I’m not sure I’ll even care about the next chapter.
Gameplay wise, it’s fine. Most of the new maps are pretty “empty” of events (compared to previous maps), and the final meta is balanced horribly, but there are interesting things to see and do. I really liked the Harbinger and Mechanist; Vindicator is a lot better than I thought it would be, and Spectre is pretty cool. Catalyst is nice but terribly underpowered for what it is. The rest is (at this point, at least) “meh”.
That said, Anet can add more events and they will most certainly iterate on the specializations to improve them, so I’m not too worried about the gameplay - which is and always has been the forte of GW2. That might keep me around, because unless there’s a major change, the story won’t.
While the storyline since the beginning has been, at least, something to hold the world together and guide the player through many of the areas, it never has felt like the focus of the game. Since being gifted GW2 as a win from Tom here, the game’s always held more fascination for its expansive world and exploration, for me.
I’m always happy to have new places to visit. GW2 is approaching 1000 hours of playtime, the tops of the games that can be tracked on GOG Galaxy. I’m not sure if there are a few games in the last couple decades that could match that number, if any at all, which really says something about the game.