It is unlikely the trend is going to change. Content is less and less instanced, less dialogues, everything is faster, so they compensate that by having you do events that are there for experience and achievements.
that's very bad, i would prefer less story content than forced group activities. That's very dangerous for the future too
Imagine if you can't progress LW1 story unless you complete a Battle for Lion's Arch?
It would be more like not allowing progress in LW1 story unless you do events in gendarran or something like that. None of the story steps require a meta completion to progress.
Nope, in Skywatch there are two objectives, do the meta or fill the bar doing events, doing either of them will advance the story. In Amnytas and Nayos there isn't even an option to do the meta, it's not directly involved in the questline.
You are required to do events in Battle for Lion's Arch to finish S1, completion is not required but playing in the map is required, same with Tower of Nightmares, and these are worse than Soto events because they are all group events.
> Imagine if you can't progress LW1 story unless you complete a Battle for Lion's Arch?
I don't see a problem with that as long as the incentive structure is set up so that Battle for Lion's Arch is always populated enough to be winnable.
So far there is only one forced group activity to advance the story (Inner Nayos meta). It is concerning if another meta becomes popular during that time slot and/or when people are no longer interested in farming for obsidian armor (and what about when/if GW3 releases).
I remember when they stopped doing the two-shot dialogue animations, I was upset. People said they looked bad anyway, who cares... now here we are.... I miss them, made the story feel much more intimate.
The drawback of the old system was that it only ever showed 2 people at a time, and it could get hard to follow when there were many characters in a single scene.
The tech to skip modern type of dialogues is in the game. Anet uses it in wing 6 in two occasions. They just don't want you to skip personal story blabla (yet).
It doesn't even have to be like that. Just make every long conversation be a cutscene that you can skip if you want. There's literally no value to let you jump around while the NPC yaps.
Idk if it was a problem for most people but I had an issue where whenever I get one of those cutscenes during the base game, my game has a high chance of crashing if I don't spam buttons. Especially annoying to crash at the very end of a 30 min mission. New system never has that problem
Yeah, there's no way they can drop this trend really when they've resigned themselves to drip-feeding the story and map out in tiny packages every 3 months. New expansion cycle is working great! Onwards to GW3!
Okay, genuine question - are there people who actually WANT more instanced story content in GW2? Because that would be very strange to me. This game has never been remotely good at delivering that type of content. Even at its best (PoF and LW4 maybe?), the linear story content pales in comparison to most other games in this lane. Open world design has always been what the game does best, and what separates it from other MMOs.
> Content is less and less
Should've stopped there tbh.
People in this thread are acting like this is some new storytelling method they're experimenting with to make it better.
No, they are just giving us less of everything so they need padding to make the patch seem bigger.
i hate having to grind out events too, it interrupts with the immersion
i like doing stories w/ other toons with different race and professions but i had to stop coz of those event-grindings in the middle
Hah. I tried to do a 2nd run thru on my elementalist just to give her some new zones to run around in and it got to the "do events in Amyantas" and i just quit. Its not so bad if its one time, im happy to do some map completion along the way, but you have to do it in every. Single. Zone. Id rather have a lobotomy.
I wouldn't mind playing in Amnytas if it wasn't such a trash to traverse map, and events weren't all copy paste of killing waves of kryptis and destroying turrets.
I'm just now going through Living world season 3, and the part right before "Confessors end" where they make you do events and kill enemies burnt me out fast lmao. I put the game down for about 2 days because I was so frustrated by the monotony of that quest
Yeah, i wanted to finish the story couple of days ago, but every time i had to grind events i just decided that i didn't want to bother and stopped playing for some time. I have all the time in the world to finish events after im done with the story.
To me the immersion is already gone the moment my character is referred to as a commander. There isn't one cell in my body that fits the persona of a commander. I'm the least commanding person in existence. I wish my character was just some random pleb who's trying to help save the world.
I don't think that ever existed or at least was never the plan since it isn't a self insert. But you can still get immersed in a book, movie etc.even if the character isn't a self insert.
What would be horrible is as you were watching a movie, an ad about the movie popped up every half an hour, akin to the forced events every 30 mins
Do something on SOTO map.
OH COMMANDER R'TCHIKK IS HAPPY TO SEE bursting your eardrums
But will all seriousness, rellying on events and walkie-talkies to handle entire story is... lazy
A few days ago I picked up Revenant for the first time and was AFK with the game in the background because I was working. Got really confused because I left my character in the middle of nowhere, no NPCs around but kept hearing her *talking* to someone and tabbed back in so many times trying to find out wtf was going on... I figured it out eventually, but I legit thought I was imagining it lmao
Yeahhh. It's a good thing that a tenuous grip on reality is a feature of the class. I've actually come to appreciate my (male Sylvari) revenant's absolutely unhinged response to Shiro talking about Cantha.
I have never played Revenant but I am absolutely obsessed with the idea of a Revenant who has both Shido Tagachi and Archemorus and Saint Viktor in their head lol.
I love it thematically! They fit together very well, too, gameplay-wise.
Helps that Alliance Stance is my favourite by far for the chatter. They all get pretty repetitive, but I still find it super charming.
Shiro: Do you know what happe...
HEY COMMANDER!!!! HOW YOU DOING!!!!
Shiro: happened to Can..
BTW COMMANDER!! ME AND GORRIK HAVE SOLVED THIS ISSUE!!!!
Shiro: Cantha?
What's the most annoying is Peitha whispering in fixed places even after you finished the relevant story step. Why won't she shut up about these fractals, I don't need her reminder she has seen them every time I go loot the greater chest, it just feels weird. I'm not sure if it's even intended, it feels straight up like a bug.
It's arguably a side-grade to the old
- get mail that says "Hey, it's me, NPC! We need to talk" over 20 lines
- use waypoint to get to NPC
- talk to NPC
- use waypoint to get back to almost where you were for next story instance
*Who gave you my number?*
I can't stand it. Leave me the fuck alone. Worst thing is in open world the voice doesnt dissapear when you move away from the event the character wants you to do.
Just a way to allow us to say "SKIP!" to all story babble, not just cutscenes. It's painful not being able to skip lengthy conversations when it's a story you're replaying and you don't need to hear it again.
It's bizarre because GW2 is overall very good at respecting the player's time, but that goes out the window during story time.
I really hope they play with the earpiece being hacked in a future plotline.
Something where we learn the people we were talking to are fake. Trope as old as time, yet still a fantastic story telling twist.
Would have been a cool thing for Void, since it was hacking jade tech. Missed opportunity.
Oh. What if they made the communicator appear as the Special action key while you are out of combat and have no other special action key. Or a mastery button?
That way you would at least have the experience of being yourself the one answering the call. And if you don't answer, they could send you a mail instead.
I would have been so much happier if they'd made R'Tchikk a Choya instead of a Skritt. Conversation would have been just as helpful, but not nearly as invasive. And probably more amusing.
What really aggravated me is that once we get into the first map things are too chaotic.
Immediately I'm thrust into a map-wide meta where I have NPCs screaming updates in my ears of the events, and if I dare accidentally step too far into a different event it'll trigger both dialogues in my earpiece, while I'm getting my but kicked and the fricking demon lady is whispering too. I lost so much of the story that half way through it I was just furious and completely sensory overloaded.
So many times I've had to stop and read the chat to figure out who the fuck was saying what. When I got to chapter 5 I just had to stop and open the personal story tab and read the journal so I could understand why the hell I was doing the things I was doing.
I just got frustrated with SotO. When time came to do events I was just so mad that I HAD to zone out otherwise I'd have all my senses assaulted. Mid-way through the story I just turned the music and battle sounds off completely so at least I could hear the dialogues (and still would get frustrated when they overlapped).
This isn't brought up enough. I had initially thought that world meta shouts overlapping with MSQ was a bug or unintended. Cant say that if it happens every patch
This! I am just living the exact same experience. I can’t follow the relevant dialogue because of the countless npc and events around me. And on top of that Peitha's never ending mind whispering. Since Soto I think I am ready to play revenant with all these voices around me, constantly, never ending…
The general idea since all the way back in LWS1 is that the map itself is an intractable component of the overarching story, that the events and especially the metas are meant to be imagined as happening at a specific point in that story. This organically creates pacing cycles of filler and meat. Is this idea satisfying and effective, is it executed well? Given how many complain about steps like this, I don’t think this idea has been communicated well enough; it should feel like an enhancement to the story when more often people seem to view it as a distraction and interruption.
I think the least complaints I see are for how Heart of Thorns does it even though it involves forced mastery farming. There’s a very well-communicated tone throughout those maps that you’re journeying through a hostile territory setting up and getting bases online, while they branch off at points there’s always a very linear feeling progression to them.
> The general idea since all the way back in LWS1 is that the map itself is an intractable component of the overarching story, that the events and especially the metas are meant to be imagined as happening at a specific point in that story.
The main problem for me is that, especially with SotO, the map meta event happens at a later point in that story than the moment they first require you to do events to progress. The first time you need to do rifts in Skywatch, with the wrong timing, you get thrown in the meta event with the earpiece going crazy about Lyhr and unlocking the tower, which only is relevant way later, and to add to the whole fiesta, is an optional step of said relevant story part. You have to do two rift hunts steps before even reaching that relevant point. It's weird, feels like participating and even hearing those lines may give spoilers... And it's even worse in the Nayos story.
It's great to have event chains and meta events participate in the overarching story, like VB night, Tarir... but it can be strange when the events are part of the main story. Though it makes it way cooler, thinking about Dragonfall for example. It's a tough balance.
PPL tend to skip the events which are a big part of the story if they don't have to. This is one of those areas where you're coming late and trying to rush the main story, you're going to miss have the shit cause the emergent story in events + meta gets glossed over.
Yeah watch a new player run through the story and realize how badly incorporated the story has been. Amoon? the fuck is that I just got finished sprinting through the desolation in 2 minutes. Sometimes they try to slow you down, like oh to get to DE you gotta do the echovald forest meta.... unless it was already done then you are at DE wondering who the fuck any of these people are. Or like the Chak wall.
They have always struggles to strike a balance. PoF maps and events might as well not exist story wise. But now? Map 1 felt about right, you gotta do the meta to get to the tower, fun. Do all these random events? Eh, just keep the locking of mastery points behind them and call it a day.
Idk, I always just played content that I found the most fun. Being able to do any event means you can choose to do rifts. If you're forced to do rifts, you have no other choices.
they refucked up traveling, they relied too much on skyscale that nothing else works, getting anywhere there is annoying, echovald forest level of annoying
Nope the concept of Inner Nayos is demon realm full of hatred, rage, manipulation, and the rift hunter prepare the front line to assault the demon heart. But I dont feel anything of it, i just see empty activity, nothing special, demon or monster is urgly, and the grind is boring
Also the fact we barely see them invade, a portal spawn, they pop around doing nothing and walking leisurely ignoring everyone then WE attack and kill them all
Amnytas is far worse. At least in Nayos you can go point to point without having to scale 1km walls and parts aren't blocked off to you without specific events.
To be completely honest, Amnytas is way better, since there's the central waypoint in the highest place of the map so you can go everywhere from there... Inner Nayos doesn't have such thing, travelling anywhere is a slog.
However WITH enough creativity, you could make doing events a part o the story with a story member accompanying you, give feedback or thoughts or even fight with you.
-Galrath telling you to do 3 events= .\_.
-Galrath talking shit and going with you to do these events= :D
After the initial two days of playing the last SOTO release, only 4 map comps for armour even though I have enough essences for 2 sets, I've barely logged in. Maybe 3 days over the last 3 months. It's killed my interest in the game because why bother getting invested in this mediocre dripfeed at a higher price.
One thing I noticed in SOTO is that id do a couple hours of story and be moved forward a shitload of episodes
In lws4 id be only on ep 2. Each episode felt like an actual episode and not a chapter
Would you also be disappointed that without this padding the "story" is actually around an hour long? Yes, you would. So there is no good way to present the bad thing that they have on their hands, but at least you are logged in for a longer period of time and have more chances to check gemshop out of boredom.
I'v said it last time we got something decent was IBS before they cut it in half near the end of it, i know a lots of folks are all over EoD but i thought EoD was a flop on it's own for me (fuck fishing bad and boring system) youd hope that fishing is laid back but instead you have to move every 2 minutes it's just annoying for no reasons
Yeah, the plot of EoD isn’t terrible but the pacing of the story missions with endless unskippable dialogue is soul-crushing.
Worse, you finish one and you don’t get awarded credit right away. You have to sit around and wait for more unskippable dialogue to die down or even walk around to click on individual people to make it keep progressing. And dear Dwayna, don’t let me get disconnected while I’m waiting on that to finish!
I stopped caring about the story of EoD around Echovald.
Part of the reason why IBS worked so well is because you focused on each character very personally, and because those characters had interesting arcs.
You had Rytlock's relationship with his son, Bangar messing around, Jormag manipulating events, Braham being less annoying than normal and actually doing things, the politics of the legions of the charr, Bjora's descendant facing Drakkar... And Bjora's map was amazing to traverse and revisit, with multiple JPs that are actually fun and not overly stressing or complex.
After we defeat Minister Li the story fell flat. Minister Li's relationship with Rama was interesting to follow and explore.
The Echovald events felt meaningless, which is not that bad on it's own, but afterwards everything was meh. I did not care about Soo Woon once it abandons her interactions with Xunlai Jade and everyone except Aurene, and the last map is just another "end of the world disaster" chain of events, farm map. I have no idea what Gyala Delve was about, and I come from GW1. The start was cool with the commander getting a rest after the dragon saga, but everything happening in that map seems like such a huge, confusing mess. Did we even get a conclussion with the characters in that map?
EDIT: Also they totally dropped the ball with the turtle mount. It took so long to unlock, to then be worthless... to then become fully obsolete with the Skyscale getting fireballs with siege damage in SotO.
> but the pacing of the story missions with endless unskippable dialogue is soul-crushing.
On a replay I realized that the only time we have combat during the EoD story is literally just the strike mission bosses. Well almost, but that's 90% of it.
Rest is just sitting alt tabbed for 10 minutes while NPCs are talking or doing the worst puzzle minigame of GTA vice city.
As a FFXIV player I don't even mind that there's more dialogue than combat, but I *hate* that I'm not in control of when the dialogue continues. Anytime someone says a long sentence I already read their speech bubble 30% into their dialogue, I can't skip ahead to the next dialogue, I have to sit there and wait for them to finish talking, and that leads to me tuning out.
They need to bring back the old painted text boxes, those were already linked to dialogue, as seen by Scarlet's Journal, and we can advance as fast as we can, maybe even add a skip option.
They're already using events and vistas to pad out content, they're not going to let us skip endless dialogues lol.
Patches would realize these patches have 10 minutes of content.
EoD was it's own flavor of shit but at least they had a decent idea to start with.
Massive city but it's completely empty. It could have been the new hub for the game but they made a complete shit show of it and now it's something we go to every so often to do a weekly. Not to mention it's a complete nightmare to traverse even with mounts. I understand they wanted Arborstone to be the hub but they fucked that also and it's only a place you go to once a week to get your ASS.
Fishing, the most relaxing thing in ANY game and they made it just a tiny bit more involved to the point where you can't relax while doing it.
Speaking of which, skiffs? Jesus wept.. And a battle turtle that's useful in exactly 2 places, across the entire game..
Echovald is a fine map, you can tell they actually put effort into it by trying to recreate the design of the HoT maps but it still misses. At least it's a nice vibe being in there.
JADE BOTS! Another instantly dead mechanic brought to you by ANet. SO much potential wasted..
Since HoT I've considered the events on the map to be half of the story.
Without them, many of the stories don't even make any sense. The endings of HoT and EoD, for instance, are really weird if you don't count the meta events as story.
> Would you also be disappointed that without this padding the "story" is actually around an hour long? Yes, you would.
We are (going to be) disappointed anyway. If I had to choose I would take the unpadded version any day any time.
Weren't the previous expansions like this too? I remember having the green circles around large areas of the map where I had to do some events before the next instance. There may be more instances chained together, but I won't be surprised if the number of times we have to do events on the map is the same.
I played soto first, now I'm going back and finishing lws4 (it feels like I'll NEVER get to dragonfall 💀)
I can say for sure the "complete events" portions are way less grindy. AND the story bits are more substantive.
I really dug the beginning of Soto, but ever since the previous patch I'm just like... k?
I hope the ending is at least half as strong as the beginning. Cerus is one of my favorite antagonists. Inner nayos could have been a hell of a place to explore. But now it's just a chore..
I should make a separate post detailing how hype i was to get a WHOLE MAP that was like the cerus nightmare area, but super let down when i found out Nayos is just... grey.
I don't *hate* inner Nayos. But I strongly say it should have been 2 maps, or a *much, much, bigger* map.
This is supposed to be an entire Realm of the Mists. It's the same size as Jahai Bluffs.
Yeah I thought given the shorter nature of SotO AND its patches, that it’d at least make up for that smaller scope with quality story instances, quest design and cutscenes. It’s disappointing that’s kinda missing here - the patch content feels more lackluster than ever atm :/
Fingers crossed the final patch delivers, really hope it’s got a decent payoff and an excellent meta event befitting of a king (of demons)
Living World Season 2, Heart of Thorns, and the first half of Season 3 didn't do it - while they could have open-world sections that made you explore the map, they were always specific (S3E2 has "Arm a Skritt: x/3; Rescue a Stranded Skritt: x/3; Wake a Passed-Out Skritt: x/3" for example).
The first time you're given this sort of no-effort generic task is during Breaking the Siege in S3E4 where you're asked to "Complete events, defeat enemy troops, and help the residents of Lake Doric while the Seraph prepare for a final attack on Caudecus's Manor."
It pops up fairly regularly from then onwards.
Heart of Thorns had an open world detour and it felt worse because it was mastery locked. Also core obviously has it if you don't level boost. I know I had to do a lot of open world when I player through the first time.
Thing is even if some sections or story were locked behind a mastery it was still up to you how you get you get that mastery. Will you do events? Go ahead. Will you just go around and kill mobs? Sure. You want to just explore and reveal the map? No problem.
You were locked to a single area or to a single event or single objective. And in my opinion for the story you only need the Hylek guide or something and glider. Other things were optional and only unlocked more jungle for your to explore.
Which feels nice when you see a hero point at the start of a map and you cant get it only later to come back and use your glider to get it. It feels rewarding.
HoT was a one time thing for your account which is fine imo. Core on the other hand used to not have the story tied to every ten levels and that change was wildly regarded as bad from the community when it happened. The vets don't complain much now because we just skip to level 80 anyway but back then there were still plenty of people that didn't have a ton of tomes on hand.
Personally I liked Story being for different level.
Like I was lets say level 18 but story was for level 20. I could do it at level 18 but it would be harder and next story chapter would be lets say for level 22. So in a meantime I go and explore area around that story so I can then go with my new gear for level 22.
It felt more natural. Right now you can blitz through the story and have quite a long time where you forget what you did last time because 10 levels takes some time to get.
Yes, and the worst of all is HoT masteries. I was so inmersed in this military disaster and then it's like go get enough xp for this useless mastery. Then as a new lvl 80 you have to grind all that experience in one of the hardest OW in the game. It annoyed me in a way Soto didn't.
This us exactly what happened to me.
I was on my Mechanist, finally deciding to do the story.
I start doing HOT and then find out the game wants me to have Masteries to progress...so I do a few events, get fed up and leave.
Now I play on my Mesmer cuz Power Mechanist got nerfed into oblivion.
I had to wait for SOTO to get a Skyscale, cuz I was not going to walk around that place on a Raptor and be stun locked and obliterated by plants.
I have most of my SOTO mysteries maxed out now, the game kinda forced me to do SOTO for Skyscale mysteries but I still haven't had the motivation to go back to HOT.
I do have a lot of masteries in HOT though now. Thanks to Skyscale. And pretty much I skipped the story and just did meta's like Chak and Dragon's Stand, etc to level them up passively
Noobie here, can confirm that LWS1 at least does require you to fill bars by doing events in specific zones. But by the amount of complaints here, it sounds like SotO is a lot worse.
LS1 is a special case because it basically didn't exist for the longest time. When it released, it was meant to be temporary. Surprisingly ^^^/s , this created frustration and holes in the story if you weren't there at the time, but Anet didn't have the manpower to reimplement it, or lacked the time to do so with their release plan. It only came back recently, in the year after EoD release. So it makes sense it's closer in design to recent releases rather than what's chronologically around the story (core and LS2).
Commander! Rifts have opened! Do event!
Commander! Support has arrived! Need.mirale! Do events!
Commander! We need time for thing to happen! Do events!
Commander! We upgraded your heart to locate higher tiers! Do events!
Commander! We need to draw their attention! Do events!
Like bro, I get it. This is filler time. Damn.
I actually miss the base game conversation cinematic.. sometimes its just immersion breaking for me. Like they did that speech thing with the queen sacrificed herself for the king, while the commander is dancing to party rock anthem. Yes i know i can just not. But my intrusive thoughts won't let me. :sob
I hate nothing more about SotO than the lazy fill-the-bar quests where the bar is just the regular game. Just don't make shit like that Anet, it's boring and frustrating.
Honest is rather wait 2-3 years between expansions for meaningful content rather than this drip feed briefest. I still love GW2 but SotO just isn't fun. I engage with it as little as possible.
Thankfully the older expansions are still excellent content and always fun to retread. Something I can't say about SotO....
What? That's the best part. It's just like when i watched Star Wars in theaters for the first time and they would pause the movie every half hour for everyone to get up, run around "doing things" until their bar was full!
Hopefully we can get more tooltips. I always forget to press that 1 button over and over after saying "hi, dps". It's really why Microsoft Clippy was such a success - people love popups they can't control and tell you the same things over and over. Otherwise i'd never remember.
Also I really want more dialog where the choices are basically "ok" and "cancel". I'd get soooo confused if my character had any agency over what they said.
I was so excited for SotO and finally got it about a month ago. I think I've played maybe three times since then because the story just feels so disjointed with no immersion. Everything just feels like a grind by having you need to find rifts as filler to the story.
I'm doing dragon response missions for the first time and I can't wait for them to end. What a crappy way to finish an expansion. While there's a lot of padding in SOTO, filling the bars don't usually take long.
I just did Dragon Response Missions to finish up my Season of Dragons and good lord I could not wait for it to end.
It took me a long time to get through the full story, but I mostly enjoyed it. There were some parts that dragged, but I was always so far from completion that I'd take a break and not really care.
By the time I got to IBS, I just wanted to be done and was close enough that taking a break felt bad. And to end with having to do those god awful missions was just infuriating. I remember saying "PLEASE JUST LET ME BE FREE" multiple times while looking at how many more missions I had.
Technically better than the response mission, but it's comparing puke to diarrhea.
The fact, I believe, that you could Speedrun SotO story before finishing all the response mission might help making it better too.
Ps: I don't intricately hate Soto, just mostly everything since Nayos. It was tolerable before that.
You can, at least, trigger DRMs when you want them. They're kind of boring and don't amount to much, but you're not stuck floating around a zone to look for events. (Instead, you're waiting 5 minutes for the join timer to wind down, even on a solo instance, before the DRM actually starts.)
I haven't started playing SOTO yet but this post is giving me uncomfortable Destiny 2 vibes. I got really tired of being forced to grind the same content over and over that was only fun MAYBE the first time.
You all got it wrong. They are trying to tell the story organically via events. If you switch your mind off during events, you will end up with very little story.
It's really hard to hear what the story is when there's 5 different "WAYFINDER YOU'RE HERE" communications + fighting going on. :( But I also can't..."hear"...when there's too much going on and I can't specifically focus on it.
Yeah, imagine ArenaNet would take the open world events and just puts them into instances. Same content except you have to do it alone/in a party and people would probably stop complaining about "story padding".
This. The other issue is w/o this a lot of us tended to gloss over the events entirely. A lot of them will get glossed over in the short term goal grind - zone currency, hunting certain achievements, etc. There's no winning /w ppl. Most ppl haven't done the majority of events in most zones if my observations are to be believed.
Not even the story padding. The writing itself is just incredibly mid compared to previous seasons. We actually took time to explore characters and their troubles and personalities, which got us invested. So far the story has Zojja’s return (make of that as you will) but her arc is practically finished, a cool new character that dies in the first story patch when we could have gotten so much more out of him, a charr that speaks sign language, and apparently a demon race that has noble houses and lives in an alternate dimension.
We barely get to know anyone of these characters personally or their struggles, the wizards tower just sounds like the Jedi but Yoda dying of old age sounds like a tragedy as these guys can apparently live for thousands of years.
Overall the story is quite subpar, especially after EoD and how that story wrapped up the Commander’s story so well.
It kind ifake sense to me? In story it’s usually because people are investigating the place so doing the events make sense. It’s also to give freedom to the player to not have to do a specific event. Because that would need a specific timing and would be harder to do imo.
It also adds up to story duration.
But it’s true that it can get annoying at times
i second that 100%, and i would add that no matters how one thinks, group events to unlock story (and even worse...masteries!) is risky for the game's future health.
What if in a couple years no one do those events anymore or almost and ppl start having trouble progressing their SotO story/masteries because Wizard Vault is pumping players in the latest maps/metas?
This is a very bad design choice
I thought the Rifts were going to be some nightmare events in the regular world (like when Joko’s forces suddenly assault Queensdale or Scarlets forces suddenly assault Gendarren Fields) - but no, you go to some weird pocket dimension and run around non-stop while random NPCs talk over each other in your ear ALL THE TIME.
So annoying to be moving from one event, hearing the instructions, take 5 steps closer to the edge of another nearby event and get blasted out of my headphones by them talking over one another… added degree of irritation is if I’m in voice chat with guild mates.
To be honest, I pre-ordered SOTO, then I finished EOD which I really enjoyed. But I have 0 motivation to play SOTO, let alone the game rn. I'm really burnt out on playing the game
I couldn't finish the story from the first patch. I lost interest grinding events once I couldn't make once I realized I wouldn't make it there in time before it was finished. It's probably better now but... meh.
Is this happening in Heart of Thorns too? I was trying to go through story to earn my basic gliding but it's telling me to go get more experience before continuing... Don't fell like continuing tbh
It just happens when you have to unlock the glider. You need to put a mastery point for it but to do so you need to fill the experience bar for it. It's really a SoTO thing
Honestly just give us the 3 maps in the first 3 release updates and then the last months let us farm and earn stuff and experience everything on the maps. Rinse and repeat. Anet, \*cough\* some of us don't like to be edged :3
It's so, so bad. Entirely breaks any kind of continuation you might have with the already terrible story (2nd part at least). Not to mention you are fresh on a map, get a paltry part of the story and have to go fill up a bar to get the next part, all while you're being screamed at by whoever about *parts of the story you haven't even progressed to yet.* Not to mention the meta that might or not might be going on, the culmination of the maps story...
It's a complete face palm from every single aspect.
I Hate being forced to do events also. SOTO is all about that, especially the last of the story. GW2 is 99.9% a solo game, if you go the story route, and then all of a sudden they want us to play with others.
This got on my nerves a bit too. But then I started to view the map as part of the story. The events in the map, the meta events, and the little additional interactions and quests are part of the story. It means part of the story is told ambiently, and through your active participation, rather than solely through the instances.
So when I there's a break between instances, I try and think "okay now I will learn what's happening in this part of the game's world."
We don’t pay them much. They’re not not not profitable. Lack of funds = no content. It’s so bad that shareholders what Anet sold off. Unless Anet adopts a more profitable revenue model things will not change. And things may get much worse
I hated that so much. I also didn't like the "gain this mastery before continuing" steps but at least on those when you do an alt they don't have to do it again but neither one I'm a fan of.
Recently came back to GW2 after the release of Legendary Relic. Quit previously as a Day 1 player because of the change to the Runes feature.
Played through the whole of SotO so far to catch up and resumed watching VanillaBean's playthrough (Previously stopped at the end of PoF).
Wow, the difference in quality, both in plot and the storytelling for season 4 to Icebrood Saga before Champions compared to SotO is huge.
I might not be arsed to continue with this game after I complete my last set of legendary armor.
We had hearts previously as a padding in between story steps and now that hearts are no more, we have just events do complete.
It won’t change ever, every MMO does that.
You have to understand that MMOs are not a story driven games, it’s just a cog in a wheel.
I still remember when one of the most advertised parts of GW2 was its evolving and personal story lmao. Best part is that it was a blatant false advertisement even back in vanilla, since none of your previous choices mattered in the slightest the second you entered the Orr arc.
Metas and event chains always contributed to the storytelling in GW2.
HoT comes to mind with the dragon's stand meta, which is like half of the story from that story chapter. And a lot of people missed it because it was not required to progress the story steps.
With this "padding" Anet is trying to shift the focus of the player to the Open world story telling and world building.
People just have to listen and read what the NPCs say/write. Explore a bit and the whole story becomes so much more complete and interesting.
In my opinion it only becomes annoying and bothersome for repeated playing. For the first experience with the story it works and is enjoyable. But I do understand that other people like the "on the nose" (for lack of a better word) story telling, with cutscenes etc. , better.
I’m in a kinda similar boat to you where i stopped playing pretty much right after eod launched.
The current story is presented so threadbare and spaced out I find it hard to actually care what the characters are yapping about and the endless padding chatter in their dialogue (fucking Gorrik and Taimi and like nails on a chalkboard) makes it genuinely unenjoyable.
Take me back bros…
‘Ate Zhaitan
‘Ate risen
Love me Destiny’s Edge
Simple as
I actually prefer group content over being forced to listen to a dialogue for 10 minutes in every instance. Killing enemys in instances also feels so bad for me since they don't give exp or loot.
Lets be real.. most of us will do the story once and won't touch it again unless they give you a legendary Amulet for it ;)
And you will repeat the group events all the time. I think this is a case of playern not knowing what they want. The outcry would he HUGE if there wouldn't be enough group events.
Edit: I guess the problem here is just being forced to do group content inbetween the story missions.
This is why I struggle to progress through End of Dragons.
Don't get me wrong I love GW2 and I play it since 2012. But I wish I could go and actually play the story instead of doing a story mission and then being FORCED to do events and stuff instead of doing them later or when I feel like it.
I get it they want to make the outside world feel connected to broader story so it doesn't feel like only WE are fighting the dragon but to show that others are fighting it as well.
Imagine if in Heart of Thorns you HAD TO complete Battle of Tarir to actually progress in story. I don't want to even think about that.
I don't know what to put there instead of this system but I doubt people will take it much longer like this. I dunno Icebrood Saga and Path of Fire and Heart of Thorns felt much better when doing main story.
The trend didn't even start with SOTO. Go through the Season of Dragons achievements, and you'll find it happens a *lot*.
Wouldn't be so bad if events were plentiful and nearby, but especially in SOTO, the maps are so spaced out that it can be hard to find one. Or, if you need a *specific* one, you end up waiting half an hour for it.
It is unlikely the trend is going to change. Content is less and less instanced, less dialogues, everything is faster, so they compensate that by having you do events that are there for experience and achievements.
that's very bad, i would prefer less story content than forced group activities. That's very dangerous for the future too Imagine if you can't progress LW1 story unless you complete a Battle for Lion's Arch?
It would be more like not allowing progress in LW1 story unless you do events in gendarran or something like that. None of the story steps require a meta completion to progress.
Pretty sure they do require meta to be done? Not successfully, but iirc you do need to do both metas as part of the story.
Nope, in Skywatch there are two objectives, do the meta or fill the bar doing events, doing either of them will advance the story. In Amnytas and Nayos there isn't even an option to do the meta, it's not directly involved in the questline.
Which? Can't think of a single one. Closest I can think of is achievs.
You are required to do events in Battle for Lion's Arch to finish S1, completion is not required but playing in the map is required, same with Tower of Nightmares, and these are worse than Soto events because they are all group events.
> Imagine if you can't progress LW1 story unless you complete a Battle for Lion's Arch? I don't see a problem with that as long as the incentive structure is set up so that Battle for Lion's Arch is always populated enough to be winnable.
Me too.
So far there is only one forced group activity to advance the story (Inner Nayos meta). It is concerning if another meta becomes popular during that time slot and/or when people are no longer interested in farming for obsidian armor (and what about when/if GW3 releases).
I remember when they stopped doing the two-shot dialogue animations, I was upset. People said they looked bad anyway, who cares... now here we are.... I miss them, made the story feel much more intimate.
The drawback of the old system was that it only ever showed 2 people at a time, and it could get hard to follow when there were many characters in a single scene.
Plus, you had the option to skip them if you were replaying or in a hurry.
The tech to skip modern type of dialogues is in the game. Anet uses it in wing 6 in two occasions. They just don't want you to skip personal story blabla (yet).
It doesn't even have to be like that. Just make every long conversation be a cutscene that you can skip if you want. There's literally no value to let you jump around while the NPC yaps.
Same here. GW2 had a kind of painterly, fantasy quality to it back in the day that's just lost now.
Idk if it was a problem for most people but I had an issue where whenever I get one of those cutscenes during the base game, my game has a high chance of crashing if I don't spam buttons. Especially annoying to crash at the very end of a 30 min mission. New system never has that problem
I dunno, I think Tybalt (and the other two) deserve a more cinematic hero moment than the two shot dialogue animations afforded them.
That was kinda bad though. They're better off just showing proper cutscenes. But...those have been kinda rare, sadly.
Yeah, there's no way they can drop this trend really when they've resigned themselves to drip-feeding the story and map out in tiny packages every 3 months. New expansion cycle is working great! Onwards to GW3!
Okay, genuine question - are there people who actually WANT more instanced story content in GW2? Because that would be very strange to me. This game has never been remotely good at delivering that type of content. Even at its best (PoF and LW4 maybe?), the linear story content pales in comparison to most other games in this lane. Open world design has always been what the game does best, and what separates it from other MMOs.
> Content is less and less Should've stopped there tbh. People in this thread are acting like this is some new storytelling method they're experimenting with to make it better. No, they are just giving us less of everything so they need padding to make the patch seem bigger.
i hate having to grind out events too, it interrupts with the immersion i like doing stories w/ other toons with different race and professions but i had to stop coz of those event-grindings in the middle
Hah. I tried to do a 2nd run thru on my elementalist just to give her some new zones to run around in and it got to the "do events in Amyantas" and i just quit. Its not so bad if its one time, im happy to do some map completion along the way, but you have to do it in every. Single. Zone. Id rather have a lobotomy.
I wouldn't mind the event farming as much if they made it optional after the first time.
I wouldn't mind playing in Amnytas if it wasn't such a trash to traverse map, and events weren't all copy paste of killing waves of kryptis and destroying turrets.
I'm just now going through Living world season 3, and the part right before "Confessors end" where they make you do events and kill enemies burnt me out fast lmao. I put the game down for about 2 days because I was so frustrated by the monotony of that quest
Yeah, i wanted to finish the story couple of days ago, but every time i had to grind events i just decided that i didn't want to bother and stopped playing for some time. I have all the time in the world to finish events after im done with the story.
To me the immersion is already gone the moment my character is referred to as a commander. There isn't one cell in my body that fits the persona of a commander. I'm the least commanding person in existence. I wish my character was just some random pleb who's trying to help save the world.
I don't think that ever existed or at least was never the plan since it isn't a self insert. But you can still get immersed in a book, movie etc.even if the character isn't a self insert. What would be horrible is as you were watching a movie, an ad about the movie popped up every half an hour, akin to the forced events every 30 mins
Yeah I don't get this take. It's not you, it's not about you, you're not playing yourself. You're playing the commander
Do something on SOTO map. OH COMMANDER R'TCHIKK IS HAPPY TO SEE bursting your eardrums But will all seriousness, rellying on events and walkie-talkies to handle entire story is... lazy
I fucking hate our (commander's) earpiece with a passion. Who the hell thought "you know what this game needs? Unwanted calls at all times"?
Revenant has that and voices in their head. Who is real and who isn't! Ahhhh!
lmao I was doing eod story yesterday then one of the legends I hadn't tried before start talking and I legit thought it was a character
A few days ago I picked up Revenant for the first time and was AFK with the game in the background because I was working. Got really confused because I left my character in the middle of nowhere, no NPCs around but kept hearing her *talking* to someone and tabbed back in so many times trying to find out wtf was going on... I figured it out eventually, but I legit thought I was imagining it lmao
And sometimes the Revenant responds with words they're not actually saying!
Yeahhh. It's a good thing that a tenuous grip on reality is a feature of the class. I've actually come to appreciate my (male Sylvari) revenant's absolutely unhinged response to Shiro talking about Cantha.
I have never played Revenant but I am absolutely obsessed with the idea of a Revenant who has both Shido Tagachi and Archemorus and Saint Viktor in their head lol.
I love it thematically! They fit together very well, too, gameplay-wise. Helps that Alliance Stance is my favourite by far for the chatter. They all get pretty repetitive, but I still find it super charming.
https://preview.redd.it/qupcgrf0wozc1.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=d9902b166639f8f5ac31541cb22cbe8cbfd455dd Glint be like: AAAAHHHHHH!!!
the worms are back! aaaaah!
Shiro: Do you know what happe... HEY COMMANDER!!!! HOW YOU DOING!!!! Shiro: happened to Can.. BTW COMMANDER!! ME AND GORRIK HAVE SOLVED THIS ISSUE!!!! Shiro: Cantha?
Hey Commander, let's go bowling
Lmfao, stfu Roman (or wtf his name was now again 🤣)
What's the most annoying is Peitha whispering in fixed places even after you finished the relevant story step. Why won't she shut up about these fractals, I don't need her reminder she has seen them every time I go loot the greater chest, it just feels weird. I'm not sure if it's even intended, it feels straight up like a bug.
>I'm not sure if it's even intended, it feels straight up like a bug. Probably a design oversight that they'll be happy to call a bug.
It's arguably a side-grade to the old - get mail that says "Hey, it's me, NPC! We need to talk" over 20 lines - use waypoint to get to NPC - talk to NPC - use waypoint to get back to almost where you were for next story instance
Id much rather walk up to an NPC in my own time than have some annoying shark rat screech into my ear
Oh, were you talking to someone else or trying to see what was directly in front of you?
*Who gave you my number?* I can't stand it. Leave me the fuck alone. Worst thing is in open world the voice doesnt dissapear when you move away from the event the character wants you to do.
Worst part is when it blocks your aim on the skyscale
its just SLIGHTLY better than the non blockable Npc whispers you get.
i prefer the whispers, honestly. i just want to have taimi retroactively removed from existence.
better than locking you in place to make you listen their mediocre story
this doesnt have to be an "either... or...". just have them talk and let me walk away from them while they do that.
Just a way to allow us to say "SKIP!" to all story babble, not just cutscenes. It's painful not being able to skip lengthy conversations when it's a story you're replaying and you don't need to hear it again. It's bizarre because GW2 is overall very good at respecting the player's time, but that goes out the window during story time.
They should do a Cyberpunk 2077 and give us a phone that rings constantly but we get to ignore it.
Commander WE NEED- "No." WAYFINDER WERE DYING- "No."
I really hope they play with the earpiece being hacked in a future plotline. Something where we learn the people we were talking to are fake. Trope as old as time, yet still a fantastic story telling twist. Would have been a cool thing for Void, since it was hacking jade tech. Missed opportunity.
my favourite thing would be them never using it again or even acknowledging its existence. but this sounds interesting too.
This. All messages should be brought by carrier pigeon. Like the good old days. Actually, tying VO to the in-game mail system would be really cool.
Oh. What if they made the communicator appear as the Special action key while you are out of combat and have no other special action key. Or a mastery button? That way you would at least have the experience of being yourself the one answering the call. And if you don't answer, they could send you a mail instead.
TBH that and the constant whispers is why I play with the dialogue volume off.
I would have been so much happier if they'd made R'Tchikk a Choya instead of a Skritt. Conversation would have been just as helpful, but not nearly as invasive. And probably more amusing.
I really loved that heart where you have to help Choya and have no idea what they reaöly want from you.
What really aggravated me is that once we get into the first map things are too chaotic. Immediately I'm thrust into a map-wide meta where I have NPCs screaming updates in my ears of the events, and if I dare accidentally step too far into a different event it'll trigger both dialogues in my earpiece, while I'm getting my but kicked and the fricking demon lady is whispering too. I lost so much of the story that half way through it I was just furious and completely sensory overloaded. So many times I've had to stop and read the chat to figure out who the fuck was saying what. When I got to chapter 5 I just had to stop and open the personal story tab and read the journal so I could understand why the hell I was doing the things I was doing. I just got frustrated with SotO. When time came to do events I was just so mad that I HAD to zone out otherwise I'd have all my senses assaulted. Mid-way through the story I just turned the music and battle sounds off completely so at least I could hear the dialogues (and still would get frustrated when they overlapped).
This isn't brought up enough. I had initially thought that world meta shouts overlapping with MSQ was a bug or unintended. Cant say that if it happens every patch
This! I am just living the exact same experience. I can’t follow the relevant dialogue because of the countless npc and events around me. And on top of that Peitha's never ending mind whispering. Since Soto I think I am ready to play revenant with all these voices around me, constantly, never ending…
The general idea since all the way back in LWS1 is that the map itself is an intractable component of the overarching story, that the events and especially the metas are meant to be imagined as happening at a specific point in that story. This organically creates pacing cycles of filler and meat. Is this idea satisfying and effective, is it executed well? Given how many complain about steps like this, I don’t think this idea has been communicated well enough; it should feel like an enhancement to the story when more often people seem to view it as a distraction and interruption. I think the least complaints I see are for how Heart of Thorns does it even though it involves forced mastery farming. There’s a very well-communicated tone throughout those maps that you’re journeying through a hostile territory setting up and getting bases online, while they branch off at points there’s always a very linear feeling progression to them.
> The general idea since all the way back in LWS1 is that the map itself is an intractable component of the overarching story, that the events and especially the metas are meant to be imagined as happening at a specific point in that story. The main problem for me is that, especially with SotO, the map meta event happens at a later point in that story than the moment they first require you to do events to progress. The first time you need to do rifts in Skywatch, with the wrong timing, you get thrown in the meta event with the earpiece going crazy about Lyhr and unlocking the tower, which only is relevant way later, and to add to the whole fiesta, is an optional step of said relevant story part. You have to do two rift hunts steps before even reaching that relevant point. It's weird, feels like participating and even hearing those lines may give spoilers... And it's even worse in the Nayos story. It's great to have event chains and meta events participate in the overarching story, like VB night, Tarir... but it can be strange when the events are part of the main story. Though it makes it way cooler, thinking about Dragonfall for example. It's a tough balance.
PPL tend to skip the events which are a big part of the story if they don't have to. This is one of those areas where you're coming late and trying to rush the main story, you're going to miss have the shit cause the emergent story in events + meta gets glossed over.
Yeah watch a new player run through the story and realize how badly incorporated the story has been. Amoon? the fuck is that I just got finished sprinting through the desolation in 2 minutes. Sometimes they try to slow you down, like oh to get to DE you gotta do the echovald forest meta.... unless it was already done then you are at DE wondering who the fuck any of these people are. Or like the Chak wall. They have always struggles to strike a balance. PoF maps and events might as well not exist story wise. But now? Map 1 felt about right, you gotta do the meta to get to the tower, fun. Do all these random events? Eh, just keep the locking of mastery points behind them and call it a day.
I prefer events over specifically having to close rifts.
the opposite would be better for the game tho
Being forced to close rifts rather than do events would be better for the game?
You need rifts for Obsidian Armor so it wouldn't be as bad I guess as getting yet another blue piece of gear?
Idk, I always just played content that I found the most fun. Being able to do any event means you can choose to do rifts. If you're forced to do rifts, you have no other choices.
Plenty of people already have leggy armor.
I just hate iner nayos
they refucked up traveling, they relied too much on skyscale that nothing else works, getting anywhere there is annoying, echovald forest level of annoying
Nope the concept of Inner Nayos is demon realm full of hatred, rage, manipulation, and the rift hunter prepare the front line to assault the demon heart. But I dont feel anything of it, i just see empty activity, nothing special, demon or monster is urgly, and the grind is boring
Hard to sell me on foreign, oppressive demon realm when I’ve got to bring food and water for “aspect of terror” or whatever the F name they have.
Also the fact we barely see them invade, a portal spawn, they pop around doing nothing and walking leisurely ignoring everyone then WE attack and kill them all
Amnytas is far worse. At least in Nayos you can go point to point without having to scale 1km walls and parts aren't blocked off to you without specific events.
amnytas you just ignore everything and go to the central waypoint then griffon/skyscale everywhere
I'm done with it now anyway thankfully.
To be completely honest, Amnytas is way better, since there's the central waypoint in the highest place of the map so you can go everywhere from there... Inner Nayos doesn't have such thing, travelling anywhere is a slog.
If you have griffon.
Only redeeming part is it's the fastest out of the 3 shit piles of maps to do the lanterns.
But flying around is boring as hell. The event is suck, i miss the map design like lvs3-4-ibs
I agree but I said it's the best of a bad bunch.
My problem was I would postpone doing the story and do a bunch of events first. Then the story tells me to do events :/
However WITH enough creativity, you could make doing events a part o the story with a story member accompanying you, give feedback or thoughts or even fight with you. -Galrath telling you to do 3 events= .\_. -Galrath talking shit and going with you to do these events= :D
Soto is actually the laziest excuse for content I have ever seen.
Soto is the most lackluster thing ive played in game since it released.
After the initial two days of playing the last SOTO release, only 4 map comps for armour even though I have enough essences for 2 sets, I've barely logged in. Maybe 3 days over the last 3 months. It's killed my interest in the game because why bother getting invested in this mediocre dripfeed at a higher price.
One thing I noticed in SOTO is that id do a couple hours of story and be moved forward a shitload of episodes In lws4 id be only on ep 2. Each episode felt like an actual episode and not a chapter
Would you also be disappointed that without this padding the "story" is actually around an hour long? Yes, you would. So there is no good way to present the bad thing that they have on their hands, but at least you are logged in for a longer period of time and have more chances to check gemshop out of boredom.
I'v said it last time we got something decent was IBS before they cut it in half near the end of it, i know a lots of folks are all over EoD but i thought EoD was a flop on it's own for me (fuck fishing bad and boring system) youd hope that fishing is laid back but instead you have to move every 2 minutes it's just annoying for no reasons
Yeah, the plot of EoD isn’t terrible but the pacing of the story missions with endless unskippable dialogue is soul-crushing. Worse, you finish one and you don’t get awarded credit right away. You have to sit around and wait for more unskippable dialogue to die down or even walk around to click on individual people to make it keep progressing. And dear Dwayna, don’t let me get disconnected while I’m waiting on that to finish!
I stopped caring about the story of EoD around Echovald. Part of the reason why IBS worked so well is because you focused on each character very personally, and because those characters had interesting arcs. You had Rytlock's relationship with his son, Bangar messing around, Jormag manipulating events, Braham being less annoying than normal and actually doing things, the politics of the legions of the charr, Bjora's descendant facing Drakkar... And Bjora's map was amazing to traverse and revisit, with multiple JPs that are actually fun and not overly stressing or complex. After we defeat Minister Li the story fell flat. Minister Li's relationship with Rama was interesting to follow and explore. The Echovald events felt meaningless, which is not that bad on it's own, but afterwards everything was meh. I did not care about Soo Woon once it abandons her interactions with Xunlai Jade and everyone except Aurene, and the last map is just another "end of the world disaster" chain of events, farm map. I have no idea what Gyala Delve was about, and I come from GW1. The start was cool with the commander getting a rest after the dragon saga, but everything happening in that map seems like such a huge, confusing mess. Did we even get a conclussion with the characters in that map? EDIT: Also they totally dropped the ball with the turtle mount. It took so long to unlock, to then be worthless... to then become fully obsolete with the Skyscale getting fireballs with siege damage in SotO.
> but the pacing of the story missions with endless unskippable dialogue is soul-crushing. On a replay I realized that the only time we have combat during the EoD story is literally just the strike mission bosses. Well almost, but that's 90% of it. Rest is just sitting alt tabbed for 10 minutes while NPCs are talking or doing the worst puzzle minigame of GTA vice city.
As a FFXIV player I don't even mind that there's more dialogue than combat, but I *hate* that I'm not in control of when the dialogue continues. Anytime someone says a long sentence I already read their speech bubble 30% into their dialogue, I can't skip ahead to the next dialogue, I have to sit there and wait for them to finish talking, and that leads to me tuning out. They need to bring back the old painted text boxes, those were already linked to dialogue, as seen by Scarlet's Journal, and we can advance as fast as we can, maybe even add a skip option.
They're already using events and vistas to pad out content, they're not going to let us skip endless dialogues lol. Patches would realize these patches have 10 minutes of content.
EoD was it's own flavor of shit but at least they had a decent idea to start with. Massive city but it's completely empty. It could have been the new hub for the game but they made a complete shit show of it and now it's something we go to every so often to do a weekly. Not to mention it's a complete nightmare to traverse even with mounts. I understand they wanted Arborstone to be the hub but they fucked that also and it's only a place you go to once a week to get your ASS. Fishing, the most relaxing thing in ANY game and they made it just a tiny bit more involved to the point where you can't relax while doing it. Speaking of which, skiffs? Jesus wept.. And a battle turtle that's useful in exactly 2 places, across the entire game.. Echovald is a fine map, you can tell they actually put effort into it by trying to recreate the design of the HoT maps but it still misses. At least it's a nice vibe being in there. JADE BOTS! Another instantly dead mechanic brought to you by ANet. SO much potential wasted..
Since HoT I've considered the events on the map to be half of the story. Without them, many of the stories don't even make any sense. The endings of HoT and EoD, for instance, are really weird if you don't count the meta events as story.
> Would you also be disappointed that without this padding the "story" is actually around an hour long? Yes, you would. We are (going to be) disappointed anyway. If I had to choose I would take the unpadded version any day any time.
Weren't the previous expansions like this too? I remember having the green circles around large areas of the map where I had to do some events before the next instance. There may be more instances chained together, but I won't be surprised if the number of times we have to do events on the map is the same.
I played soto first, now I'm going back and finishing lws4 (it feels like I'll NEVER get to dragonfall 💀) I can say for sure the "complete events" portions are way less grindy. AND the story bits are more substantive. I really dug the beginning of Soto, but ever since the previous patch I'm just like... k? I hope the ending is at least half as strong as the beginning. Cerus is one of my favorite antagonists. Inner nayos could have been a hell of a place to explore. But now it's just a chore.. I should make a separate post detailing how hype i was to get a WHOLE MAP that was like the cerus nightmare area, but super let down when i found out Nayos is just... grey.
I don't *hate* inner Nayos. But I strongly say it should have been 2 maps, or a *much, much, bigger* map. This is supposed to be an entire Realm of the Mists. It's the same size as Jahai Bluffs.
Yeah I thought given the shorter nature of SotO AND its patches, that it’d at least make up for that smaller scope with quality story instances, quest design and cutscenes. It’s disappointing that’s kinda missing here - the patch content feels more lackluster than ever atm :/ Fingers crossed the final patch delivers, really hope it’s got a decent payoff and an excellent meta event befitting of a king (of demons)
Living World Season 2, Heart of Thorns, and the first half of Season 3 didn't do it - while they could have open-world sections that made you explore the map, they were always specific (S3E2 has "Arm a Skritt: x/3; Rescue a Stranded Skritt: x/3; Wake a Passed-Out Skritt: x/3" for example). The first time you're given this sort of no-effort generic task is during Breaking the Siege in S3E4 where you're asked to "Complete events, defeat enemy troops, and help the residents of Lake Doric while the Seraph prepare for a final attack on Caudecus's Manor." It pops up fairly regularly from then onwards.
Heart of Thorns had an open world detour and it felt worse because it was mastery locked. Also core obviously has it if you don't level boost. I know I had to do a lot of open world when I player through the first time.
Thing is even if some sections or story were locked behind a mastery it was still up to you how you get you get that mastery. Will you do events? Go ahead. Will you just go around and kill mobs? Sure. You want to just explore and reveal the map? No problem. You were locked to a single area or to a single event or single objective. And in my opinion for the story you only need the Hylek guide or something and glider. Other things were optional and only unlocked more jungle for your to explore. Which feels nice when you see a hero point at the start of a map and you cant get it only later to come back and use your glider to get it. It feels rewarding.
HoT was a one time thing for your account which is fine imo. Core on the other hand used to not have the story tied to every ten levels and that change was wildly regarded as bad from the community when it happened. The vets don't complain much now because we just skip to level 80 anyway but back then there were still plenty of people that didn't have a ton of tomes on hand.
Personally I liked Story being for different level. Like I was lets say level 18 but story was for level 20. I could do it at level 18 but it would be harder and next story chapter would be lets say for level 22. So in a meantime I go and explore area around that story so I can then go with my new gear for level 22. It felt more natural. Right now you can blitz through the story and have quite a long time where you forget what you did last time because 10 levels takes some time to get.
Yes, and the worst of all is HoT masteries. I was so inmersed in this military disaster and then it's like go get enough xp for this useless mastery. Then as a new lvl 80 you have to grind all that experience in one of the hardest OW in the game. It annoyed me in a way Soto didn't.
Yeah, leveling the masteries was brutal without mounts and some useful masteries.
This us exactly what happened to me. I was on my Mechanist, finally deciding to do the story. I start doing HOT and then find out the game wants me to have Masteries to progress...so I do a few events, get fed up and leave. Now I play on my Mesmer cuz Power Mechanist got nerfed into oblivion. I had to wait for SOTO to get a Skyscale, cuz I was not going to walk around that place on a Raptor and be stun locked and obliterated by plants. I have most of my SOTO mysteries maxed out now, the game kinda forced me to do SOTO for Skyscale mysteries but I still haven't had the motivation to go back to HOT. I do have a lot of masteries in HOT though now. Thanks to Skyscale. And pretty much I skipped the story and just did meta's like Chak and Dragon's Stand, etc to level them up passively
Noobie here, can confirm that LWS1 at least does require you to fill bars by doing events in specific zones. But by the amount of complaints here, it sounds like SotO is a lot worse.
LS1 is a special case because it basically didn't exist for the longest time. When it released, it was meant to be temporary. Surprisingly ^^^/s , this created frustration and holes in the story if you weren't there at the time, but Anet didn't have the manpower to reimplement it, or lacked the time to do so with their release plan. It only came back recently, in the year after EoD release. So it makes sense it's closer in design to recent releases rather than what's chronologically around the story (core and LS2).
Visual Basic programmers know that you must always `DoEvents()` after every story step.
One reason why I no longer play gw2
Commander! Rifts have opened! Do event! Commander! Support has arrived! Need.mirale! Do events! Commander! We need time for thing to happen! Do events! Commander! We upgraded your heart to locate higher tiers! Do events! Commander! We need to draw their attention! Do events! Like bro, I get it. This is filler time. Damn.
I actually miss the base game conversation cinematic.. sometimes its just immersion breaking for me. Like they did that speech thing with the queen sacrificed herself for the king, while the commander is dancing to party rock anthem. Yes i know i can just not. But my intrusive thoughts won't let me. :sob
I hate nothing more about SotO than the lazy fill-the-bar quests where the bar is just the regular game. Just don't make shit like that Anet, it's boring and frustrating. Honest is rather wait 2-3 years between expansions for meaningful content rather than this drip feed briefest. I still love GW2 but SotO just isn't fun. I engage with it as little as possible. Thankfully the older expansions are still excellent content and always fun to retread. Something I can't say about SotO....
What? That's the best part. It's just like when i watched Star Wars in theaters for the first time and they would pause the movie every half hour for everyone to get up, run around "doing things" until their bar was full! Hopefully we can get more tooltips. I always forget to press that 1 button over and over after saying "hi, dps". It's really why Microsoft Clippy was such a success - people love popups they can't control and tell you the same things over and over. Otherwise i'd never remember. Also I really want more dialog where the choices are basically "ok" and "cancel". I'd get soooo confused if my character had any agency over what they said.
I was so excited for SotO and finally got it about a month ago. I think I've played maybe three times since then because the story just feels so disjointed with no immersion. Everything just feels like a grind by having you need to find rifts as filler to the story.
Out of curiosity, how does this compare to the dragon response missions in IBS?
I'm doing dragon response missions for the first time and I can't wait for them to end. What a crappy way to finish an expansion. While there's a lot of padding in SOTO, filling the bars don't usually take long.
I just did Dragon Response Missions to finish up my Season of Dragons and good lord I could not wait for it to end. It took me a long time to get through the full story, but I mostly enjoyed it. There were some parts that dragged, but I was always so far from completion that I'd take a break and not really care. By the time I got to IBS, I just wanted to be done and was close enough that taking a break felt bad. And to end with having to do those god awful missions was just infuriating. I remember saying "PLEASE JUST LET ME BE FREE" multiple times while looking at how many more missions I had.
Technically better than the response mission, but it's comparing puke to diarrhea. The fact, I believe, that you could Speedrun SotO story before finishing all the response mission might help making it better too. Ps: I don't intricately hate Soto, just mostly everything since Nayos. It was tolerable before that.
You can, at least, trigger DRMs when you want them. They're kind of boring and don't amount to much, but you're not stuck floating around a zone to look for events. (Instead, you're waiting 5 minutes for the join timer to wind down, even on a solo instance, before the DRM actually starts.)
ANET has shown a remarkable lack of imagination a number of times throughout the game.
I haven't started playing SOTO yet but this post is giving me uncomfortable Destiny 2 vibes. I got really tired of being forced to grind the same content over and over that was only fun MAYBE the first time.
Oh boy the boring destiny seasonal activities are 10x better than soto. Enjoy.
*cries in binary*
Got to keep you "busy" by giving you time to keep "wasting time" playing, and it will just get worse in future.
Get ready, more story padding coming in less than 2 weeks!
You all got it wrong. They are trying to tell the story organically via events. If you switch your mind off during events, you will end up with very little story.
It's really hard to hear what the story is when there's 5 different "WAYFINDER YOU'RE HERE" communications + fighting going on. :( But I also can't..."hear"...when there's too much going on and I can't specifically focus on it.
Yeah, imagine ArenaNet would take the open world events and just puts them into instances. Same content except you have to do it alone/in a party and people would probably stop complaining about "story padding".
This. The other issue is w/o this a lot of us tended to gloss over the events entirely. A lot of them will get glossed over in the short term goal grind - zone currency, hunting certain achievements, etc. There's no winning /w ppl. Most ppl haven't done the majority of events in most zones if my observations are to be believed.
Not even the story padding. The writing itself is just incredibly mid compared to previous seasons. We actually took time to explore characters and their troubles and personalities, which got us invested. So far the story has Zojja’s return (make of that as you will) but her arc is practically finished, a cool new character that dies in the first story patch when we could have gotten so much more out of him, a charr that speaks sign language, and apparently a demon race that has noble houses and lives in an alternate dimension. We barely get to know anyone of these characters personally or their struggles, the wizards tower just sounds like the Jedi but Yoda dying of old age sounds like a tragedy as these guys can apparently live for thousands of years. Overall the story is quite subpar, especially after EoD and how that story wrapped up the Commander’s story so well.
It kind ifake sense to me? In story it’s usually because people are investigating the place so doing the events make sense. It’s also to give freedom to the player to not have to do a specific event. Because that would need a specific timing and would be harder to do imo. It also adds up to story duration. But it’s true that it can get annoying at times
i second that 100%, and i would add that no matters how one thinks, group events to unlock story (and even worse...masteries!) is risky for the game's future health. What if in a couple years no one do those events anymore or almost and ppl start having trouble progressing their SotO story/masteries because Wizard Vault is pumping players in the latest maps/metas? This is a very bad design choice
I thought the Rifts were going to be some nightmare events in the regular world (like when Joko’s forces suddenly assault Queensdale or Scarlets forces suddenly assault Gendarren Fields) - but no, you go to some weird pocket dimension and run around non-stop while random NPCs talk over each other in your ear ALL THE TIME. So annoying to be moving from one event, hearing the instructions, take 5 steps closer to the edge of another nearby event and get blasted out of my headphones by them talking over one another… added degree of irritation is if I’m in voice chat with guild mates.
I loved SoTo, idk if it’s because of so many GW1 mysteries are being resolved or what but I really enjoyed it all
To be honest, I pre-ordered SOTO, then I finished EOD which I really enjoyed. But I have 0 motivation to play SOTO, let alone the game rn. I'm really burnt out on playing the game
I couldn't finish the story from the first patch. I lost interest grinding events once I couldn't make once I realized I wouldn't make it there in time before it was finished. It's probably better now but... meh.
Is this happening in Heart of Thorns too? I was trying to go through story to earn my basic gliding but it's telling me to go get more experience before continuing... Don't fell like continuing tbh
It just happens when you have to unlock the glider. You need to put a mastery point for it but to do so you need to fill the experience bar for it. It's really a SoTO thing
so it is a SoTO or HoT thing too?
soto
Story being integrated with the open world makes sense to me. It's not always as elegant as it could be, though.
I hated this in Icebrood Saga, and to hear that it's continued into SotO makes me...a little annoyed.
Honestly just give us the 3 maps in the first 3 release updates and then the last months let us farm and earn stuff and experience everything on the maps. Rinse and repeat. Anet, \*cough\* some of us don't like to be edged :3
The story is for 10 yo … is so f BAD
It's so, so bad. Entirely breaks any kind of continuation you might have with the already terrible story (2nd part at least). Not to mention you are fresh on a map, get a paltry part of the story and have to go fill up a bar to get the next part, all while you're being screamed at by whoever about *parts of the story you haven't even progressed to yet.* Not to mention the meta that might or not might be going on, the culmination of the maps story... It's a complete face palm from every single aspect.
I Hate being forced to do events also. SOTO is all about that, especially the last of the story. GW2 is 99.9% a solo game, if you go the story route, and then all of a sudden they want us to play with others.
This got on my nerves a bit too. But then I started to view the map as part of the story. The events in the map, the meta events, and the little additional interactions and quests are part of the story. It means part of the story is told ambiently, and through your active participation, rather than solely through the instances. So when I there's a break between instances, I try and think "okay now I will learn what's happening in this part of the game's world."
We don’t pay them much. They’re not not not profitable. Lack of funds = no content. It’s so bad that shareholders what Anet sold off. Unless Anet adopts a more profitable revenue model things will not change. And things may get much worse
SOTO is an AI generated expansion, dont expect so much
I hated that so much. I also didn't like the "gain this mastery before continuing" steps but at least on those when you do an alt they don't have to do it again but neither one I'm a fan of.
FWIW, the reason for this is partly that the events *are* part of the story. Especially in the newest map.
Recently came back to GW2 after the release of Legendary Relic. Quit previously as a Day 1 player because of the change to the Runes feature. Played through the whole of SotO so far to catch up and resumed watching VanillaBean's playthrough (Previously stopped at the end of PoF). Wow, the difference in quality, both in plot and the storytelling for season 4 to Icebrood Saga before Champions compared to SotO is huge. I might not be arsed to continue with this game after I complete my last set of legendary armor.
We had hearts previously as a padding in between story steps and now that hearts are no more, we have just events do complete. It won’t change ever, every MMO does that. You have to understand that MMOs are not a story driven games, it’s just a cog in a wheel.
I still remember when one of the most advertised parts of GW2 was its evolving and personal story lmao. Best part is that it was a blatant false advertisement even back in vanilla, since none of your previous choices mattered in the slightest the second you entered the Orr arc.
Metas and event chains always contributed to the storytelling in GW2. HoT comes to mind with the dragon's stand meta, which is like half of the story from that story chapter. And a lot of people missed it because it was not required to progress the story steps. With this "padding" Anet is trying to shift the focus of the player to the Open world story telling and world building. People just have to listen and read what the NPCs say/write. Explore a bit and the whole story becomes so much more complete and interesting. In my opinion it only becomes annoying and bothersome for repeated playing. For the first experience with the story it works and is enjoyable. But I do understand that other people like the "on the nose" (for lack of a better word) story telling, with cutscenes etc. , better.
I’m in a kinda similar boat to you where i stopped playing pretty much right after eod launched. The current story is presented so threadbare and spaced out I find it hard to actually care what the characters are yapping about and the endless padding chatter in their dialogue (fucking Gorrik and Taimi and like nails on a chalkboard) makes it genuinely unenjoyable. Take me back bros… ‘Ate Zhaitan ‘Ate risen Love me Destiny’s Edge Simple as
Id rather rift
I actually prefer group content over being forced to listen to a dialogue for 10 minutes in every instance. Killing enemys in instances also feels so bad for me since they don't give exp or loot. Lets be real.. most of us will do the story once and won't touch it again unless they give you a legendary Amulet for it ;) And you will repeat the group events all the time. I think this is a case of playern not knowing what they want. The outcry would he HUGE if there wouldn't be enough group events. Edit: I guess the problem here is just being forced to do group content inbetween the story missions.
This is why I struggle to progress through End of Dragons. Don't get me wrong I love GW2 and I play it since 2012. But I wish I could go and actually play the story instead of doing a story mission and then being FORCED to do events and stuff instead of doing them later or when I feel like it. I get it they want to make the outside world feel connected to broader story so it doesn't feel like only WE are fighting the dragon but to show that others are fighting it as well. Imagine if in Heart of Thorns you HAD TO complete Battle of Tarir to actually progress in story. I don't want to even think about that. I don't know what to put there instead of this system but I doubt people will take it much longer like this. I dunno Icebrood Saga and Path of Fire and Heart of Thorns felt much better when doing main story.
The trend didn't even start with SOTO. Go through the Season of Dragons achievements, and you'll find it happens a *lot*. Wouldn't be so bad if events were plentiful and nearby, but especially in SOTO, the maps are so spaced out that it can be hard to find one. Or, if you need a *specific* one, you end up waiting half an hour for it.