I haven’t been following the general reactions to the new patch, but fair warning going into this that I personally was pretty disappointed in it from a story standpoint.
I was very pleased with Soto overall, and I think they seriously improved on many of the issues I’ve had with the writing over the years, but I can’t help but feel that somehow it has regressed in the newest patch.
The crux of my issue is that I want to distrust peitha and keep her at arms length, but it really feels like the story is making it crystal clear that I’m not allowed to feel that way. The speed at which not just my character, but even the astral ward, an organization dedicated to stopping her kind for thousands of years, is happy to not only help her, but to frequently espouse how much they trust her completely. I don’t think I’ve ever felt less connected to my character.
I was hoping for the story to keep her in a suspicious and interesting place, where we’re helping her for now but no one is sure what to think yet. Instead we’re back to the often hamfisted story telling of the end of dragons era, where it feels like every character is to be taken at complete face value.
To be honest I hope she does betray us, because that would at least be an interesting direction, and something to shake my character’s naive level of confidence. Though if they do go that way at this point they laid it on pretty thick with the implicit trust angle.
I’m curious if anyone else feels the same, or differently. Would love to hear other’s takes on it.
Personally I trust Peitha more than I trust Isgarren. Peitha has saved our lives multiple times, been seemingly upfront about everything, and hasn’t really given us a reason to not trust her.
Isgarren on the other hand has an underlying god complex, and I feel will betray us without hesitation for the ‘greater good’ of Tyria. Or you know Anet could be doing the whole swicheroo where Isgarren says he is not possessed but he really is possessed and is just playing along to lead us on to kill us at the perfect moment.
I think that all tracks. I guess for me I don’t see peitha saving our lives as a reason to trust her, beyond trusting that she needs our help to accomplish her goals. It could easily be a trick to get our guard down so she can use us.
I also didn’t feel the impact on Peitha of the death of this random Kryptis. What helped a little bit is reading a story journal descriptions of those chapters. It contains more insight on what commander is thinking and Peitha’s feelings. This leads me to believe, that their direction is actually that Peitha is a good one. But again, it is obvious that gameplay needed one or two more instances and more dialogue to properly show this story and portray Peitha’s feelings and motivations.
If it was some other game, like cyberpunk, we would have dialogue choice to express lack of trust even after this. And even if it wouldn’t change anything in the story, it gives us flexibility to express our feelings as a character.
Same, I felt absolutely nothing about that random kryptis. They just appeared, had no character development, and instantly died. I honestly have no clue why that character existed. I could say the same for Heitor.
I’ve never really liked how gw2 seems to want to give every species human emotions and relationships. Why are these emotion eating extraplanar demons going through very human seeming grief? I just think the writers could do better personally.
Yeah they made way too many characters for limited dialogue we had. They could’ve only focus on Heitor, scrap this side character, and make Peitha’s cousin be killed by Heitor.
So Heitor kills Peitha’s cousin, which would really make sense she was sad after that. Peitha’s cousin and Heitor have more character development because we skip story about this side character.It would be 4 kryptis story characters instead of 5. More is not always better.
Totally agree. One memorable character is better than a handful of forgettable ones.
That random Kryptis death was a new speedrun record.
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I think main issue here is lack of resources when they are working on expansion. This is just best they can currently do because expansion is so soon. There is always hope that in time, they will be able to increase length of the story in quarterly releases. I would say that it was already better than EOD’s three last updates. I would say it’s good enough for a start, but it depends if expansion will actually release in 9 months, and if expansion quality is equal or greater than SOTO
This take really worries me, because if that’s true it means every new story will begin well and end poorly. That’s a very bad paradigm.
I just want to point out here that asset reuse is not a bad thing. It’s just a freaking smart use of dev time. The time it takes to create and rig a proper model, and then add textures that don’t look weird is way too long for the release cadence ANet is going for with the team size that they have.
People always point out asset reuse as a bad thing and I don’t get why that is so high up people’s list for some reason…
I have felt this way since HoT. We don’t get to play as our own character, we play as the commander.
That’s true, though normally I actually like the commander (especially during PoF era). There’s been ups and downs with it I think.
I mean, that’s just the way an MMO needs to be with its story. Choice, if present at all, needs to be extremely limited to make open world design possible and to keep the scope doable.
In GW2, the tradeoff is that we get awesome meta-events, raids, etc. all because all of our characters making mostly the same choices.
It’s possible to make choices not matter while still keeping the feeling of playing your own character. Final Fantasy XIV does a pretty good job at it.
Possibly, I haven’t tried ff14, but I personally always feel more frustrated when I feel like my choices don’t matter than I do being railroaded through a mostly good (and sometimes great) story.
You get railroaded in FFXIV, but you get choices where you make your character say something to give them a bit of a personality. It doesn’t actually affect much other than a line or two immediately after but it feels much better than when GW2 makes your character say something that you have no control over.
Mine is still dignified/charismatic.
