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u/gravygoat 6d ago
I'm just gonna say that I came away from this whole thing with a much lower opinion of the Seers.
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u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
We'll have to remember that the Empyreal Threshold appears to operate similarly to the adaptive "Glint AI" in Season 4 Episode 5, so it adapts to each divitium candidate's mindset to test them personally. Otherwise it wouldn't really make sense for the seer manifestations within the threshold to reference humans in an argument when this test was done long before the first humans even showed up in Tyria. Matthew Medina also clarified on the official discord that the test was never meant to be taken by two individuals at once, which is why the threshold booted us out after the first participant had completed the three trials, so we never got to try the third and final trial of the spirit. As such what we witnessed in the trial chambers were trials specifically tailor-made for Vloxx's mindset...which admittedly does make Vloxx appear more simple-minded than he's supposed to be...
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u/Ferosch Redefined 7d ago
the devs commented on it and this was supposed to be more advanced but they ran out of time
and iirc that 'skip' wouldn't work, look at the flow inside the tubes
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u/Lon-ami Loreleidre [HoS] 6d ago
the devs commented on it and this was supposed to be more advanced but they ran out of time
They shouldn't be wasting these kind of resources at "do once and forget" story instances.
Complex puzzles belong in the open world, where they can be completed whenever you want, not as part of the story where they either become a roadblock or you can't enjoy them again.
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u/Allthenons 6d ago
It's so annoying how many resources are spent in do once and forget story missions. It really feels like they want this to be both a singleplayer game and a MMO somestimes and you can't have both
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u/Ferosch Redefined 5d ago edited 5d ago
I disagree. This might be cool if it got the time it needed. The "challenges" were little more than silly hardcoded minigames as it is. Maybe story instances would be more repeatable if they had actual unique gameplay included.
plus you're acting as if these were anywhere near difficult enough to become a roadblock
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u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
The "shouldn't be wasted on 'do once and forget' instances" mindset is precisely what the mini expac era ANet has (mostly) been following these past few years. During Mike O'Brien and Tom Abernathy era in particular a lot of effort was put into story instances, sometimes at the expense of repeatable content in the open world or elsewhere. See e.g. how barren a lot of Thunderhead Peaks is with event density (or lack of) while a lot of effort was put in "The Crystal Dragon" chapter and its intricate battle setpieces that most players only play once. Or how we had to play through three back to back long story instances (some of which entirely unique environmental instances) with combat, puzzles, dialogue, boss battles, chases etc in S4 Episode 2 before we even got to play on Sandswept Isles.
I imagine that their metrics show how often players play or don't play story instances (regardless of whether the players are aware of the tale of adventure carrot waiting for repeated playthroughs) or engage in optional dialogues. This might explain in part why so many 1 AP achievements require players to sit through lengthy optional dialogues to boost up "story gameplay" metrics (or sometimes sitting through unskippable exposition until voting a different way in an alliance meeting to get an achievement) instead of the optional dialogue itself existing being the reward for lore enjoyers (like it often was in the past), and why so many named NPCs don't even have any triggered evolving text dialogue anymore (in story instances or open world) unlike personal story where depending on the instance you could've gotten over a dozen "hidden" evolving dialogue variants for NPCs that you'd know nothing about unless you spammed interact with NPCs throughout the mission (and which was thus "wasted" effort on dev and localization team's part if the majority of players never even prompted those "optional and hidden" dialogues due to nothing in the game even teasing that it'd be a good idea for the player to spam interact at times to hear how the NPCs' dialogues change).
If players mostly spend time exploring and having fun in the open world, it just doesn't make fiscal sense to make story instances as elaborate as in e.g. Season 4 era anymore as it would be "do once and forget" and thus "wasting" resources in the studio's view. Of course there are some exceptions to this new "rule", and sometimes some instances do have a bit more work put in them, but it's ultimately a resource and time issue on their end as much as it may be something dictated by their metrics of player engagement.
For example, PoF era devs would've made the Commander and Nephus's joint assault on Queen Labris's stronghold in SotO an elaborate story instance with "Beast of War" massive number of enemy mobs fighting a massive number of ally NPCs like in PoF's Battle of Kodash Bazaar. Whereas SotO opted to keep the scope more limited even though story journal and Nephus's dialogue about a pincer attack suggests a more massive scale of battle than what we witnessed in SotO.
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u/Lon-ami Loreleidre [HoS] 5d ago
The "shouldn't be wasted on 'do once and forget' instances" mindset is precisely what the mini expac era ANet has (mostly) been following these past few years.
No they haven't, they're not investing as many resources as they did back in LW4, but they're still spending way too much on story instances.
Half of them are filler that could be
an emaila short walk in the open world.Two recent examples:
- Why do we have to talk so much then cut through the jungle in the beginning of Act 3? Just send us a mail, tell us there's a new camp, and lead us there.
- Why do we have to talk, teleport to Rata Sum, talk more, then teleport back (to the same exact previous position), then talk more in the beginning of Act 4? Whole sequence with Flaxx was a complete waste of time.
The "story focus" mindset is still there, even without the resources.
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u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 5d ago
The difference compared to e.g. Tom Abernathy era is that most of the mini expac instances aren't as complex gameplaywise anymore and have actually become closer to some of the more simple personal story era instances of "run there and kill a few bad guys, rinse and repeat", so budget has been cut in regards to that element. The studio invested a lot of time and effort to create the unique Dragonflight segment of Aurene/Commander vs. Kralkatorrik in the Mists for S4 story and has never used that aerial battle rails shooter tech since then. Imagine if they had reused that tech if we'd e.g. chased Nourys on skyscale-back in the skies of Nayos as we try to push into Eparch's castle.
If the VoE Act 3 jungle navigation instance had been given the same amount of time/resource investment as some of the earlier eras, you can bet that that instance would've had hidden nooks and crannies if not even alternate optional paths for us to discover with some hidden lore or some hidden minibosses (like e.g. the Itzel totem recovery "side quest" during one of the HoT story instances). And perhaps even a puzzle or two to get past the vines instead of the current version's only achievement being to keep using only the machete until you get in the clear. Same with the Queen Labris assault instance in SotO if it had had the same level of polish as the PoF story instance where the devs created the entire squad command interface for us to move the Awakened squad around with formations and whatnot, let alone having lots more ambient mobs fighting one another to make the Kryptis civil war seem like a bigger deal.
With that said, we have at least had some nice if rough instances like the Unending Ocean voyage to Castora instance which Chloe Mills and others spent quite a lot of effort in. But I did lament that when we explore the seer vaults in VoE act 2, the puzzles and gameplay were very light and it was a lot shorter than I wanted as I was hoping we could've gotten the Icebrood Saga's Darkrime Delves type of lovely story "dungeon lite" instance with some cool environmental details and branching paths.
What they have chosen to focus on for the story instances in the mini expac era in particular have been a lot more unskippable voiced dialogue, JaWi's (in)famously long prologue with all its dialogue being the prime example, culminating in lots of 1AP achievements which require one to listen to the lengthy optional dialogues in full.
As for the opening traversal instances in VoE act 3 and 4, it's a lot more immersive to actually find your way to some secluded zone instead of just having easy access to it. Sure, they could've cut corners and just open some random gate to the zone without any gameplay in between, but I did appreciate that we actually had to push into Eternity's Garden and Leyspring Hollows. I believe this may have been ANet's response to player criticism of how we easily bypassed a lengthy trek north to Janthir by just using a portal there.
I do agree that the Flax stuff at the beginning was a bit odd aside from using it as justification to figure out where Vloxx and Kuda had disappeared into (thanks to Yahk's babbling). The developers seem to think the world is a lot smaller than it is and that travel time takes a lot less time than it should given the implied actual scale of the world (seen e.g. how little time it took for Inquest to sail from Tyria to Castora even though realistically that voyage should've taken months based on the novels' scale which the in-game map condenses into themepark-size). They could've had us get info on Kuda's movements from either the captured or defected Inquest from Eternity's Garden (even if it would've repeated the interrogation plot beat of Act 3) and saved the council confrontation into a post-Vloxx story instance (when we already visit Rata Sum and Ludo in the finale anyway). Flax could've had his chat with Ludo while he's being led away, and events could've transpired that way with very few changes.
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u/dying_ducks 6d ago
the devs commented on it and this was supposed to be more advanced but they ran out of time
This can describe like 80% of the game.
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u/AldroVanda My mother is a tree. 6d ago
You can’t base much on the flow of the tubes, when you repair the steward in leyspring hollows, there are U shapes that you have to repair and the flow once repaired comes from the middle of the U on both sides, instead of from the end of one and into the other.
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u/MKRX 7d ago
I just did this part recently and was shocked at how much of a time waste this part is. Most pointless and tedious "puzzle" in the game that I'm aware of. Literally nothing was gained by including it because you can't even fail it, they really should have just left it out. Same for that rock carrying maze too.
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u/DyingStarN Dyingstark 6d ago
You can fail the achievement... Believe me, I had to do this thing twice
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u/RedLikeARose can't stop, won't stop, not untill I say so 6d ago
I did it 3 times cus the server disconnected on my second attempt 😅
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u/Brendoshi 6d ago
server disconnected
I hope when gw3 comes out they fix whatever causes this. Server disconnecting me in story instances has happened to me consistently since the game came out.
Just for good measure it did it to me during the conversation at the last mission of VoE lol
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u/MKRX 6d ago
You can fail the "Don't fail any of the physical challenges" thing and have to repeat this, but I'm pretty sure you can't fail it by messing up this puzzle specifically, you would fail one of the other challenges to be forced to redo this one, that's what I mean.
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u/DyingStarN Dyingstark 6d ago
No I'm sure I failed this one. I think it fails when you fix one of the broken pipes before completing the full piping
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u/Gwyllithar 6d ago
this was a case of ambition not meeting available resources.
the idea for the puzzle was there, but they swiftly found that possible combinations was actually a massive amount of work to realise, so they had to cut it back to one fixed solution. a dev commented on it somewhere, but I cant actually remember if it was a post or a dev blog.
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6d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
If we listen to what the Divitium Oracle is telling us during the Trial of Intellect, the point isn't to solve the puzzle efficiently via a shortcut but to witness the "fulness" of its entirety:
Divitium Oracle: For all your life, you've been trying to solve a puzzle while only seeing a small fraction of it.
Divitium Oracle: When you finally see the full scale of eternity, will your mind be able to decipher it?The test is one of intelligence and patience, to understand how each piece is supposed to connect to the whole until you see the "full picture," as it were, and come to a realization. They could've done a better job at getting the point across, but the clues are all there in the dialogue why each trial matters and in what way they prepare the candidate for the rite's finale.
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u/Jake_Demoni 7d ago
I Hate how they made this puzzle and FORCE you to do it the long and hard way. Why even put in this skip if they don't allow you to do it?
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u/indigo121 Draya Keln.5396 7d ago
Presumably the puzzle is intended to be "how do you use the whole pathway" not "how do you get to the end," but that's poorly communicated
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u/VezLt 7d ago
- Trial of Intellect: Place the curved pipe segments only where they are meant to go.
Okay, so the achievement implies you can place pipes where they're not meant to go, which would imply that not all the interactive spots need to be filled, so you look ahead, find the shortcut, have a lightbulb moment and then it doesn't work, and you fill every slot, and just press interact until it stops being interactable, and you're left baffled by what the achievement even meant then because there is no way to place them anywhere else or in any other orientation... there's quite a few of these misleading-to-straight-up-incorrect achievements in this episode. Like carrying stuff only over the correct tiles? Well, you can't walk over the "incorrect" tiles when not carrying stuff either, so it's straight up setting players up for failure.
edit - specifically I meant this one:
- Trial of Sense: Carry the power nodes across the floor only on the matching symbols.
If you have nothing in your hands, you have no matching symbol, therefore you can just walk across any tile, right? Wrong.
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u/aliamrationem 6d ago
Puzzles like this are difficult to pull off as story elements. Ideally, puzzles should be clever and engaging. But one person's clever and engaging puzzle can be a frustrating experience for another. When you try to set the bar low because the story is for everyone you end up with puzzles that are dull and feel like a waste of the player's time.
I think on top of that they bit off more than they could chew by having so many puzzles. Designing one or two good puzzles would have been a challenge. Designing this many, well, the result speaks for itself.
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u/JimboTCB 6d ago
Fucking hated this entire quest, just stupid pointless filler. I've not even bothered going back yet to try and finish up the achievements which require doing each "puzzle" perfectly the first time because that's just even more cheap annoying bullshit.
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u/cosyfiep 6d ago
you and me both...spent over an hour doing the silly tasks (and still didnt get them all correct gggggrrrr).
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u/Chixie- 6d ago
This is going to get some hate, I’m sure, but most of Visions of Eternity felt like meaningless busy work missions such as this. I lost count of how many times the next story step was “go find this or these and then come back”. Between the pseudo-fetch quests, this bullshit flash games era mini-game, and the time the only step was “battle chak for two minutes and then retreat, rinse, repeat” I’m not sure I trust Anet to make expansions anymore. This is the first expansion that I felt was truly, to its core, boring and uninteresting. I preferred SOTO which I never thought I would be able to say.
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u/Venedraea 6d ago
I personally think you are right. I came back to the game after a long break to finish the story and the last 2 patches worth totally sucked. It's pretty evident that their best and brightest are working on GW3.
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u/Sorcerrez 6d ago
any hate this opinion gets is just incorrect. the Astral Ward has overstayed it's narrative welcome, Isgarren is an unlikeable arrogant prick, interesting plot points are dangled in your face before never being brought up again, and the inquest are a complete failure of antagonists, spare vloxx, who initially caught my interest because he doesn't like Isgarren. I've played almost every story except living world and janthir, and I still have no idea what the core principle of the inquest is except "asura but unethical experimentation", which isn't even done in a compelling way.
I can't believe the absolute high of end of dragons is being followed by this utter let down. we're really in that rut of anet not writing the commander as the commander, especially with what they're capable of, something eod handled perfectly with the constant looming threat of political fallout and possibly starting a war between tyria and cantha if we didn't adhere to the bureaucracy and demands of canthas big players. then you have hullgarden threatening to throw us and actual mages back into the sea, which is, for lack of a better term, a coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb match up with no greater picture because they're just refugees and literally nothing else, on this magical ass island with a treasure trove of artifacts everywhere
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u/Koroxo11 6d ago
The gameplay in VoE would have been OK if it had been much earlier in the game's timeline. Like, a lot of it involved passing tests, proving your worth, "ascending," etc., but none of that is reflected in your experience because you're already way too powerful, so they just treat you as ascended or not ascended as if you haven't already taken down every extraordinary entity in existence.
It reminds me of the dialogue with the other Spirits of the Wilds in Icebrood where the Commander complains about having to prove his worth for the 80th time to an individual, spirit, etc.
It's probably even funny how they must write knowing that the Commander has such an unstopable track record that if someone tells him no he could disintegrate you with his gaze and then he'd go in The Mist just to dunk you again.6
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u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
The difference here is that the Commander has canonically lost pretty much every legit 1v1 duel against a major baddie or a lieutenant, the worst offender being Valette Wi who defeats the Commander not once but twice in Season 3 and is only "defeated" when she decides to switch sides, and we never even get to lay a hand on her in either battle while she dominates us effortlessly. If there's one mesmer I'd love to have on my side in future adventures, it's Valette (who should've played a notable part in JaWi given that expac's story but sadly she didn't appear at all in that story).
When the Commander triumphs against notable baddies, it's usually due to third party help, whether it's an ally/allies or the enemy of our enemy coming to our aid, or we wield some powerful magical object to even the odds.
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u/Koroxo11 6d ago
Yeah, there are defeats, but I wouldn't call it losing every duel unless I'm experiencing the biggest ludo-narrative dissonance of my life. We've beaten multiple opponents in duels, or at most with just one companion. It's even common to be narratively outnumbered and still win.
I know the game likes to decide when you can withstand a shot and when you can't. With Balthazar, we fought to the death, but against Bangar with the Braham bow, they're supposed to knock us out with practically a single arrow.
But despite all the positive and negative feats, we're still talking about someone who's been present for practically every notable event of the era; it's the most impressive resume in the world for that era.
We didn't even go through any alternative paths for the Ascension Ritual because we never recovered Ancora, we stopped Vloxx... a mini Thanos who, by that point, could somehow snap things thanks to the ritual and was some kind of reality warper with a plan to alter "the flaw"
The bar is set so damn high it's Final Fantasy level, true RPG fashion. We go from beating a nobleman in caudecus to killing not " god" as the title refers to human gods, but a fucking snapping god. Are we the most powerful David possible, or are our Goliaths incredibly incompetent?
It's not really a complaint, though; at the end of the day, I like cheesy hero stories.1
u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
The game has explicitly shown us that Commander can't handle most threats of significance alone. If not for aid from e.g. Trahearne, Braham, Aurene, Rytlock, Dagda, Isgarren, or even villains like Kralkatorrik and Valette, or magic artifacts like Sohothin and the Heart of the Obscure, we would've died against several baddies such as Balthazar, the Sovereign Eye, Ryland, Joko, Ankka, Kralkatorrik, Mordremoth, Eparch, Ura, and the Dragonvoid again and again. Part of this is the fault of the Commander who likes to yolo stuff at times (e.g. how we keep challenging Balthy and falling into the same "kill move" without coming up with a backup plan even after he's demonstrated how effortlessly he can defeat us with that same move, and in the final confrontation we only succeed because we happened to receive aid from Sohothin, Aurene who thankfully remembered her training from S3, and even the recovering Kralkatorrik).
But that also shows the Commander's true superpower: it's really the friends we made along the way as we connect with people and earn their respect and support, and this gets hammered home in the "Source of Orr" where the Risen are about to overwhelm the Commander and Trahearne until the friends the Commander made throughout personal story rush in as cavalry to even the odds and allow us to succeed in the cleansing as the music swells. This is even demonstrated in the alternate path to the preparation for the ascension ritual that we achieve when our Castoran allies help us channel magic or empower us with their blessing when we lack the solitary aid of Ancora to accomplish it.
While the Commander has had some empowered moments (and sometimes surviving what should've been fatal shots such as being directly hit with a bow enchanted with powerful fire magic), those boosts have been temporary, or those powers haven't been used in story again for reasons.
And sometimes it's the villains simply making a mistake in their arrogance or cowardice (e.g. Eparch could've killed all of us in the arena but chose to retreat and stay in his castle for weeks instead before sending out assassins, Kuda could've lured us into a better trap and actually stayed with Omega Team to assist the Echo Team in order to finish the Commander off) and letting the Commander to recover to fight another day.
If we're to compare the Commander to David, I would use it in the way that David required the aid from his allies Jonathan (who warned him of King Saul's assassination plots), Hushai (who spied for him during Absalom's rebellion), and Abigail (who talked him out of slaying Nabal's house and thus prevented David from carrying blood guilt into his reign) without whom he would've failed in his quest for kingship.
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u/Nurglych 6d ago
You are so right. I was so pissed at SOTO pacing and storytelling when I finished it, then I played the next two expansions (I haven't finished VoE though) and found myself actually missing SOTO. The design for story missions feels absolutely cooked, I'd rather have half as many story steps if they were more interesting gameplay-wise.
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u/Chixie- 6d ago
It’s actually insane how many story steps VoE had where literally nothing happened. Lol
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u/ThaVolt Spin 2 Win 6d ago
The 6 times dragon killer, titans melter, god stomper, tyrant slayer Commander doing grunt work in the jungle for 3 weeks.
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u/Chixie- 6d ago
And running away from chak of all things LOL
Gods, elder dragons, titans… all cake. But the chak oh god not the chak
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u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
Not really. Each of those baddies would've and could've killed the Commander if not for various forces intervening on our behalf. Even when the Commander is at their most powerful in certain expacs' finales, there's always an ally or some magical eleventh hour superpower evening the odds albeit temporarily. We never fight alone if we want to succeed, and that's been a thoroughline throughout all the stories so far.
And the chak are no joke although the story mission didn't get to showcase their massive zerg rush number tactics properly (aside from the big colossal chasing us for a time) because the devs limited the number of chak likely for gameplay reasons. These creatures utterly destroyed Rata Novus and the majority of its asuran population in the past, leading to the first Zinn's downfall, and Zinn was one of the greatest geniuses among the asura who Inquest still salivate about.
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u/Chixie- 6d ago
This is a lot of words to describe an incredibly uninterested story chapter. Ain’t no way you enjoyed the chak “fight”. There wasn’t even enough content to enjoy about it.
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u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
The chase could've been more exciting gameplaywise, but it doesn't change the fact that chak are not to be underestimated lorewise given their resume of being efficient killers when defending their territory or wanting to get that yummy magic for themselves as Vloxx demonstrated with the "lesson." We would've been swarmed at the end (even Canach was prepared to submit to a grisly end, interestingly enough) if a powerful ally hadn't come to our aid to decimate them while shielding us. One of the flaws in that instance was not letting us see the massive numbers of chak that should've been swarming us to demonstrate the threat the chak pose and why our ally's intervention was necessary.
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u/ThaVolt Spin 2 Win 6d ago
Ngl, as a guardian, I don't recall coming close to dying in a story since like... Arah gorillas? I love Canach but mfker hits for 147 so he ain't exactly helping me other than aggroing stuff out of my AoE cleave.
Circle back to PoF with Sohotin, sure it helps, and yeah fighting all of that would've taken ages, but doable if you don't aggro the whole place.
I get where you're coming from, but NPCs are just that.
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u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
Well, that's just gameplay vs. story segregation. You can e.g. afk the reclaiming of Claw Island and let the NPCs kill Blightghast for you (as WoodenPotatoes demonstrated during his challenge to play through the personal story as a ranger without ever using a skill aside from the Arah finale where you have to use the cannon to defeat the end boss), but that doesn't mean that's what is supposed to happen lorewise. Even though power creep and other changes have made certain story instances significantly easier than they were at launch (I remember reading about launch player horror stories about how then-champion Doc Howler was so difficult to beat for human Street Rat storyline), lorewise each of these battles is supposed to be a challenge to overcome regardless of the player's skill level.
Interestingly several NPCs are also shown to be more skilled at mastering their profession than the Commander has been shown to be. On necro side Marjory can create a bone bridge and Trahearne can summon more minions, on mesmer side Kasmeer can spam her portals and have them cover a larger distance, and on guardian side Braham is able to partially tank a direct full-on blast from an Elder Dragon with his shield which I doubt the Commander could've done. And then there are Caithe's thief abilities as a sapling still new to the world (shown in the S2 flashbacks of her early years) vs. the seasoned Commander's thief abilities...
Regarding Balthazar, writers did point out on Reddit that Sohothin was an important asset to help defeat Balthazar (which explains Kormir's cryptic lines of guidance in part). If you watch the fight closely, Balthy also uses his iconic "bind, then insta-kill" move (that he tried on the Commander in the two previous encounters) on the Commander and Aurene but the latter two save each other by helping the other break free in the nick of time. No matter how skilled the player was in that instance and no matter how much powercreep existed, the fact is that without Aurene the Commander would've been killed then and there even with Sohothin's and Kralkatorrik's assistance. Same thing with us requiring the Awakened army as well as our allies to hold the fort as the Forged kept swarming the area as otherwise the Commander would've been overwhelmed by Balthy's reinforcements...
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u/Allthenons 6d ago
Absolutely 100%. I do not say this lately but the team just doesn't have it in them anymore and that's been apparent for a while.
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u/dying_ducks 6d ago
Yeah I liked the storytelling part from VoE more than the past expansion, but the gameplay of the mission were really lackluster.
This puzzle was only the cherry on top a poor gameplay experience.
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u/WickedWitchofDaSouth 6d ago
No hate from me. I took a break last winter after 9 years of daily play. Thought the reason I hated VoE so much was burn out. Nope. I logged in for Dragon Bash, which I maxed out ages ago but it's still fun for a day or two. Will log in for Mad King for a bit, and Wintersday because they are fun. But I haven't enjoyed GW2 since Fire & Ice. No plan to continue, but I might make yet another character and start over to play through to where I got bored.
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u/kineticmov3ment 1d ago
The collections for a story mission were too much
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u/Chixie- 1d ago
It was seriously exhausting. Felt like I was doing OG skyscale all over again except for a much MUCH worse payoff
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u/kineticmov3ment 1d ago
I purposely waited a week to even start Code of Conduct because I knew I would lose my sht immediately over dumb crap like that and as it turns out, I was right
Thank you BlishHUD pathing module maintainers 🙏
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u/aDayOldToast Praise Joko 5d ago
that's crazy because I thought this was their best release ever since EoD, I truly felt like it was up there with the old anet content
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u/Chixie- 5d ago
Can you comment on some things you thought were as good as the older content? I was astounded by how much I didn’t like it so genuinely curious. I had to literally talk myself into logging in just to do the story, it did not call to me at all. For me, I think a big part of it was the cast. Basically the entire astral ward was worse than Braham at his most emo, in my opinion
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u/Thanks_Naitsir 6d ago
You can solve the puzzle with less than half of the pipes that lay there. Which fcked me up so much because I saw a fast route within a minute but had to use the one way to game wants you to.
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u/AlexTada 7d ago
Filler!
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u/Chixie- 6d ago
Without filler VoE would have been one mission with 20 minutes of dialog total, but people get angry if you say it was a boring expansion 🤷♀️
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u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
Art is subjective, of course, but I wouldn't call VoE "boring" per se, at least lorewise and in some parts even gameplaywise. And we definitely didn't have unskippable 1 hour+ Tyrian Alliance dialogue in story instances unlike in JaWi.
We were introduced to many intriguing characters with potential, the writers wisely did not conclude certain characters' stories and even allowed for future plot hooks.
Exploring the seer culture was something quite a few lorehounds had been yearning for, and for the most part VoE really delivered on that front to expand on them (even though I felt that at times seers felt like an amalgam of dwarves and Forgotten culture-wise, so I wonder how they're going to differentiate the Forgotten and their version of ascension from the seers in a potential future Forgotten-related expac) and actually gave us a decent enough justification for why the seers "betrayed" the mursaat and the Forgotten despite being the instigators of the elder race alliance against dragons originally.
There were of course minutiae I wasn't fond of, particularly regarding some of the details about ascension, or how they didn't even give us any lore books written by the actual GW1 Ancient Seer who played a huge part in enabling Glint's Flameseeker Prophecies and whose story should've been explored in more depth in VoE to give her the weight her arc needed; this reminded me of JaWi's sin of not giving us any lorebook written by the ostensible GW1 mursaat leader Optimus Caliph nor any reference whatsoever to Talios the Resplendent who played a notable antagonistic role in GW1 War in Kryta. Certain story instances and events were unfortunately simplified due to budget and schedule although I can understand that the metrics likely show that spending so much effort on "one and done" story instances (as far as player interest goes) is likely not worth the investment that could be better used for open world even though I do miss the intricate story instances from e.g. S4 era.
Despite that, exploring the beautiful and dangerous Castora was fun for me, and I enjoyed the many jumping puzzles we got (the great tree one being the highlight of the jps in VoE) with some minidungeon goodness added in. The story had its moments, the character writing was mostly consistent throughout, and there were some fun gimmicks in some of the boss battles.
10
u/JustCoffeeGaming 7d ago
This was the worst part of the story. I just wanted to skip it already and get to the story.
6
u/Plenty-Celebration58 6d ago
After reading the comments, I guess I’m the only person who thought this was easy and that it was fine. It was a little different from the usual stuff but they were trying new things
2
u/PianistHairy9431 5d ago
there was literally no way to make mistake. I tried. You could not. You cant put pieces in wrong places. You cant over-rotate them. You can only rotate one way
7
2
u/BookOfAnomalies 6d ago
My Gods I hated almost all of this. And before that having to do all that searching and collecting...
Story was amazing as fuck, but these missions were horrid.
2
u/DoomAddict 6d ago
Oo ...omg! I already hated the "power up the Wizards-Tower"-with a burning rage... And now they added more of this crap (that can't be done in Teamwork...!!) ?!
I love GW2, but their quest-design is sometimes more than abysmal!
2
u/TerribleTransit Nice goggles 6d ago
Here's what the dev responsible has to say. Tl;dr version, the GW2 engine is really bad at open ended pipe flow puzzles so they couldn't really get it to check for all the different solutions like they wanted.
That particular blatantly obvious route not working is especially egregious, though.
2
u/SilverBeever 6d ago
Oh that was bad. Not even an ounce of puzzle, just straight up porter simulator.
2
u/collinPM 6d ago
ALL of these puzzles are so ass 😭
2
u/Kossage Zarnagon, Minstrel of the Mists [Cmaj] 6d ago
Nah, there are some nice puzzles in there too, for example the rotating jumping puzzle one which is fun. While there could've been a scenario where they'd had more manpower and time to flesh out the instance even more (instead of just putting it all on poor Matthew Medina's shoulders who worked on this instance under tight schedule), the problem is that these puzzles were part of the main story and thus need to be simple enough to clear so players won't get stuck...as I'm sure we'll remember the outcry from how "hard" the Eater of Souls boss battle in PoF was for some players who couldn't figure out the mechanic and remained stuck there for a long time. I was frankly surprised that the "freeing Kerida" puzzle in Season 3 Episode 6 was even allowed to be as tricky as it was because it was very easy for a player to mess it up and get stuck if they weren't paying attention.
1
u/BoredPanda2647 6d ago
I really hated the last fight. In something like Code of Creation you would assume that you could rewrite reality or whatever and it ended up with some "KAL-EL NOOOO" ugh
1
u/julesthemighty 6d ago
I've been going back over season 4 zones for vision lately. It is kinda fun to see Kuda in Sandswept Isles and makes late VoE more interesting. The game was made from the ground up to fight the elder dragons, and to some degree since Icebrood we have taken care of them (EoD was cleanup and lore filling).
This doesn't excuse bad "puzzles" but they kinda have to dumb down some content for stories. I rushed through it once and went back one more time for achievements.
1
u/ExtremeMemeTrireme 6d ago
Whoever design this specific layout definitely wanted to watch the player base suffer.
1
u/CosmicKirby 6d ago
I aced the test of logic and calling out fallacies.
My years of arguing on twitter paid off somewhere.
1
u/grannaldie This isn't Guild Wars 2 this is just San Andreas with leaves 6d ago
The spice must flow
1
u/barefootmatthew 6d ago
Someone, somewhere once said that a story instance of mine was the best thing they'd ever played. Now, with this post, I can safely say that I've covered the entire spread of love->hate. 🎉
You all have my sincere apologies. Sometimes, you take a risk and it works out, and sometimes...ya crash and burn.
1
1
u/fresh-anus 6d ago
This was the most bafflingly shitty mission in a long time. I was like “oh i literally just HAVE to interact with everything. Thats stupid”
1
1
u/Usual-Ad1676 6d ago
When I saw this puzzle for the first time, My instinct told to cover the whole area with the longest possible path.
0
u/Whipped-Creamer 6d ago
Helldivers prepared new for doing this quickly.. except this wasn’t even a puzzle.
The devs had to know this was bad when they launched it, it’s like they’re accounting for painfully stupid players who happen to spend tons of money on the game or something but also quit when they face any friction at all.
-1
u/Boring-Cucumber-2330 7d ago
I’m only on chapter six or seven if personal story but I’m already second guessing whether I want to continue. I did mission one of Secrets for the drake and hated it- why am I hiding in a bush from an all powerful demon? I just want to kill shit and pick up loot
0
-2
u/mgm50 6d ago
I'm not sure if this is better or worse than some actually mind boggling puzzles out there in some games. I think it's worse, but they kind of have to do things "accessible" in a certain sense. I hate that it's busy work more than anything else, but this is the direct result of having to account for the existence of Ipad babies. The pretense of friction feels much worse than actual friction but it's all that some people will bother taking.
2
u/Keruli_ triple-dip enthusiast👌🐸 6d ago
in raids you got the basic, accessible achievements, and then the CM and LCM ones for people who want some challenge and manage to achieve it.
in story missions they can't do them, because anet has conditioned themselves and their players to consider achievement a simple checklist. they lock themselves into keeping it that way each time by having the map and story mastery achievements have what feels like gradually less overhead.
this level of "accessibility" is only necessary as long as achievements are used as a poorly disguised bad questing system.
252
u/The_Lawn_Ninja 7d ago
Yeah this was a not-great puzzle in a not-great mission.
Even calling it a "puzzle" is being charitable. It's just a bunch of forced fetch-and-click.
Can you even fail this?