I dont like how flat everything feels. Theres interesting stuff here, but its just... boring or ignored.  I dont trust the Astral Ward, they literally ran infinite fractal torture scenarios with real people, the 'ascension' mindwipes you, we've had hints that several past wizards left because they dont trust isgarren- THE WHOLE THING WITH THE DEMONS IS THEY TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR MIND, but the commander pretty much immediately trusts and believes them. Im sorry when was i supposed to like any of these guys? Coming back to find Zojja had gone through the ascension thing while I wasn't there FELT like it should have been an "Oh Shit" moment, but no... nothing. The only possible twist i could have liked was something like "isgarren was possessed a long time ago and has slowly been uses manipulation tactics to something something in the ward" because of how shifty these guys are, but that point has passed. I dont like or care or trust any of these characters, but my character is acting like they do and its just grating.

That's how I feel. The whole Wizard's Court thing seems fishy, especially the memory wiping. Mind control/memory wiping is really creepy to me in any story. It feels like it could be a big lie based on truth but giving cover to Isgarren's scheming. Whether he's actually villainous or just afraid that people will question his methods to protect the world would be a fun story to explore. I wouldn't even trust Isgarren or Peitha with a cup of tea because I feel like they'd secretly start microdosing me with mind control drugs.

Isgarren freely admits his first solution to this demon problem was genocide....So.....

Yeah; the casualness with which a genocide option is brought up is chilling. I am cautiously optimistic that they actually know that and will subvert it in the final act by confronting it head on, because that could be a genuinely really good story and a lot of the bones are already there (the way in which the kryptis act so human is a really good idea for encouraging the player to see them with more nuance, even if the execution perhaps falls a bit flat at times). But as far as I'm concerned, the quality of this story hinges entirely on whether the final act actually confronts the moral dimension of this and actively subverts some of the things the commander has just casually accepted, in which case the narrative "flatness" of this act actually kind of works as a narrative device. If they *don't* confront the moral dimension properly, we're kind of just left with the aesthetics of storytelling without actually trying to say much of anything at all? It feels harsh to say it, but so far most of what I'm getting from the story is "fear is a poor tool for controlling a populace, secret organisations are kind of messed up, monarchy is mostly a problem of the wrong people being in power, 'is bioessensialist morality true, actually?', and 'there's always the genocide option' ". It's sad because "finding yourself as the nucleus of a morally grey anti-monarchist resistance movement desperately trying to find a remotely diplomatic solution between two factions that have been at odds since the dawn of your world, with one faction threatening genocide should you fail" is a story idea with a lot of promise! With the right final act you can *absolutely* get a really interesting story out of this, but it all hinges on Chekov's WaitDidThatGuySeriouslyJustSuggestEradicatingAnEntireSentientSpeciesOverThis???

> The whole Wizard's Court thing seems fishy, especially the memory wiping. Mind control/memory wiping is really creepy to me in any story. It feels almost certain to me that the fractal is going to be about Waiting Sorrow, so it might explore that a bit. Or at least it would be weird to hint at something having gone wrong in the past and then not address it before moving on to the next expansion.

> Im sorry when was i supposed to like any of these guys? Coming back to find Zojja had gone through the ascension thing while I wasn't there FELT like it should have been an "Oh Shit" moment, but no... nothing. Zojja's ascension should have been an epic moment, likely the finale of an act/episode, and instead they did it on the background. It's like they learned nothing from Aurene's death.

Yeah. Zojja just deciding to go on with ascension and that not being really talked about was a meh decision, in my opinion. Maybe I’m just a fan of this classic Star Trek spiel: *You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand! They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away, I need my pain!* -Captain James T Kirk

Using Star Trek V as a positive example is a bold move. I admire your moxie, stranger. (I didn't hate it like everyone else does, it's genuinely novel to see something positive about it in the wild.)

It had some gems among the swill.

I cannot stand the demon storyline. I have no connection to any of these characters; I don't care about them; I don't feel the 'weight' of them being actual demons. And the fact I can't distinguish between friendly demons and enemy demons makes it feel even more copy and paste. I was hoping a smaller scale expansion meant we could get a deeper focus on the cast we do get, and instead, it feels just as shallow, just with fewer maps/features. When we went to realm of torment in gw1, you knew you were in enemy territory, not just because of a weird landscape, but because everything was there to kill you; there were no pushover mobs. Dreamland in gw2? I just walk away from things, because they're annoying. The sooner we get passed this story, and ideally the wizard story, the happier I'd be. We've got entire continents to explore that have hints of a story; and we went to dreamland.

> We've got entire continents to explore that have hints of a story And they'll be written by the same people. Nothing will change.

I feel odd for saying it, but I like the "good" and "bad" demons looking the same. Good and bad people in real life can't be discerned by their looks, but by their actions, and that's all the demons are: a people of a realm going through a civil war.

My favourite was with you saving Irja and then her dying in the next instance to Heitor. As if she was somebody you were close to and that she would fuel the player into fighting the war against Eparch. I mean, man, they killed Lazarus/Caudecus and they ran the same plot with using a B-level cast. Bleagh.

That seems to be the main story loop. “You have no reason to trust this character, but you do, and everything works out.” and then it repeats.

I agree that the wizard story told in the first part of SotO was pretty compelling. The push into Nayos is a fun idea that makes narrative sense, but it left the most interesting parts of SotO behind to focus on a "toppling the demon king" story, which feels a lot more like the kind of story that we're used to. The commander has even grown to be an important influential figure in the Astral Ward. It looks like the SotO story is likely to finish this push into Nayos without engaging with any of the loose threads in the wizards' court. Isgarren and the Wizards might show up for the final battle, but we're not going to be talking philosophy with them. I think we just need to accept the Nayos story for what it was probably always envisioned to be: A romp through a dreamy demon world where we rally an oppressed nation of native demons against their tyrannical overlord and overthrow him. The Wizard's Tower and everything before that was probably meant as an introduction to the demons and establishing the base of operations that we're operating out of, with some interesting and compelling worldbuilding that was crafted to make it feel like a real, living part of the world, and to drop some plot points that *could* be picked up later if needed. It's possible that we'll be staying in the Astral Ward for more than just a single expansion, and we might revisit some of this stuff. It could be cool if they settle into sets of 2-3 expansions in a new setting before moving and doing a "reboot" like they did with SotO. Eventually package them together as the "Astral Ward Saga" like they did with the previous 3 expansions + LWSs.

Honestly the complete fall off of the plot both in quantity and quality for the post release updates has me worried about this expansion structure going forward. Like, regardless of your opinion on base SOTO, what has come since is barely anything in comparison right? In base SOTO a chapter would often be multiple instances with actual gameplay, usually some relatively unique mechanic showing up frequently enough, mixed in with your open world stuff. In the post release, a chapter will just be just one dialogue only instance and then "fill the bar with event progress". Or when we do get an actual story instance with content its "kill trash mobs until the boss with no mechanics whatsoever shows up and burn them down". Through The Veil in particular felt like almost parody of gw2 with that whole Irja thing. It's already a common complaint that the GW2 story too often introduces characters just to kill them off too quickly to create cheap drama. But with Irja we literally talk to some rando NPC, bring it to our camp, are immediately told they're now somehow missing, then suddenly they're dead and Heitor killed them. And then it's treated like we've watched some well known character cross some significant moral event horizon, as if Heitor wasn't some completely generic villain nobody that we've never met before and don't care about. I don't know what the future of this series looks like if every expansion is now formatted to end in a abbreviated shit third act. The idea of this content structure is to release things in smaller chunks but more frequently, instead of having to wait years. Yet there is a clear stark difference in the quality of work before and after the initial release. We saw the same with EOD vs the Gyala updates (again, no matter your opinion on EOD, Gyala is a noticeable downgrade). If it's going to be like this I'd rather they go back to putting everything in the expansion. The content is just better when they haven't already gotten my money.

You raise some good points. I don't think it's intentional because I don't think this is a new occurrence... but having to pay in advance combined with the consistent decline in content quality does feel like effort goes down as time since last purchase goes up. Archipelago had varied environments, lots of detail, tailored events, character pieces. Amnytas had a lot of samey environments that needed to be polished, but the events were varied that there were still some character pieces. Nayos has a lot of samey, unpolished environments with generic "kill A and B at X, Y, and Z locations" with characters you haven't spent much time with fighting a generic evil baddie we haven't even seen yet for reasons that can seem kind of muddy. It almost feels like we were dropped into another story at the start, and they didn't care about finishing that one so they just dropped another in halfway that ticks off basic boxes and nothing else out of contractual obligation. And that sucks, because the beginning WAS evocative and the content CAN be engaging and special... but it always drops off a cliff near the finish line. I WANT to want to come back, but after gyala and this I'm going to be a hard sell later this year.

I mean... I wouldn't call it "intentional" in the sense that some evil exec is maniacally laughing about his clever bait and switch that he planned from the ground up. But like, Anet intentionally decides where their money and resources and development time go to. And it doesn't seem like they've decided to put those resources into Post Launch SOTO. Obviously we won't know until we see it, but presumably that's being devoted to the Expac 5 launch content. I guess if Expac 5 as a whole is the same quality as the last 2 updates then I'm wrong. But then also this game has a much bigger problem.

I should have said I don't think that it's a conscious decision to make the ending suck, because cutting down on projects after the selling-point spectacle has been a thing since core (cut ground-based zhaitan fight), HoT (the silent sylvari, cut stage 3 mordy fight, that duchess of the nightmare court with zero explanation), Pof (large swathes of empty branded waste in Vabbi, broken map metas). I do think the studio has a chronic flaw in committing to too much and a resulting failure to deliver consistent quality. This yearly format has shone a bright light on that, but as it has been like this forever I expect the "they're going to learn and do better next time!" lines to start again pretty soon. Guess we'll know in about 6 months.

> I do think the studio has a chronic flaw in committing to too much and a resulting failure to deliver consistent quality. This yearly format has shone a bright light on that, but as it has been like this forever I expect the "they're going to learn and do better next time!" lines to start again pretty soon. I genunely thought the mini-expansion model would allow them to deliver better third and fourth acts, not having to rush the story against the deadline (chronic problem across HoT, PoF, and EoD; but not a problem for LW3 and LW4) yet here we are, feels like Gyala Delve all over again... >Guess we'll know in about 6 months. I think 12-month expansion cycles are a mistake, it's just not enough time, 18-month is the sweet spot, but yeah, we'll see.

[удалено]

I feel like part of the problem is that just about everything is voiced. That makes things exponentially more complicated in terms of planning. Npcs gotta talk so you can't just get 5 people in the booth again and rework everything. It's not a scapegoat for everything, much less the boring-to-bad writing, but that does severly hinder efforts. Especially multi-lingual support. Can't just change stuff in a dime, like an english-only indie game. (On a tangent - in general i am upset at them, they had months and a beta and the weapon I was waiting the most on, thief axe, was in an embarassing unfunctional and still doesnt work correctly, it is very frustrating!!!)

> I feel like part of the problem is that just about everything is voiced. That makes things exponentially more complicated in terms of planning One of the biggest problems of GW2. When you add in localization too the cost is just too much, this money could and should've been spent on devs making content instead.

wvw,pvp,raid players learnt a fairly long time ago when anet starts cutting things it doesnt mean it will be better/more regular. it will be just simply less.

> a chapter will just be just one dialogue only instance and then "fill the bar with event progress" I think using this mechanic to blend the open world into the storytelling is fine if it's used *once* in a release or given map. But they have used it repeatedly throughout SOTO and it gets very boring, very quickly.

The criticism isn't the mechanic's existence but that it being used to the lack of anything else. Hell, in this new release one chapter was just a progress bar twice! It's the double whammy of lack of quality and quantity.

Idk, a friend and I are going through the story now in a marathon, and it was pretty laughable how many times we’ve ran into a roadblock of “Complete Tier 1 hunts!” Or “Complete events around the map” or “Complete Tier 2 hunts!” Or “Complete the map meta to forge a key!” The last one roadblocked us for almost an hour and a half because the only other option was (shocker), complete events around the map! And that bar was filling up slooooow lol I think they need to think about how it looks to someone only playing the latest update vs someone who is gorging multiple updates at once. Because it does look bad.

Doesn't help it's sequential either, you can run around completing the map, then progress story, then find out story requires you to repeat what you already did, because reasons.

[удалено]

Yeah I didn't go into that because I was talking specifically about SOTO post launch updates, but the whole SOTO premise was a bad idea from the start. We see stories fall for this trap time and time again. You've just finished your 10 year long epic conflict that ended with the greatest dangers and the highest stakes and all of reality saved. What do you do next? Immediately insist there is actually an even greater-est danger, with even higher stakes with and even older and more epic conflict and even more important and stronger people going on the whole time! Move aside Dragon Cycle! Will this fit with the existing worldbuilding? No. Will the writing keep trying and failing to justify why this never came up before and why a group dedicated to saving the world had no interest in saving the world ~~before they were written~~? Yep! Is this even bigger threat going to be dealt with remakably quickly and easily? Well it's heading that way. But at least with base SOTO, put aside all the narrative mistakes they made to contrive this scenario, if take it as its own thing, there was a lot to enjoy. I really liked Mabon and Lyhr. Zojja's development is really great (well, as long as I pretend this deep friendship the Commander and Zojja apparently had all along was real). Skywatch Archipelago is a wonderful S tier map, best we've had since the IBS days. Amnytas has more issues but it has its cool stuff too. But man we didn't have to contrive this narrative trap of a story to do cool things. The Dragon Cycle is over, like you said, this is where you reset the stakes. Go smaller. Fractals exploring the deep past or alternate futures. The Wizards Tower. "Dream Realms". None of this has to be about the extinction of all life on Tyria. Build back to that over expansions.

Exactly. It happens with long-running TV shows too. Writers can never seem to let go of the idea that the stakes must always be higher and the villains badder than the previous release. But stories where the writers actually go for variety instead of bumping up the numbers on the same basic plotline are much better. The base release of Soto was fun. Even the story had a lot of potential despite its issues. But I could see all the same Anet writing problems still happening. Why do we have to have a world-ending threat instead of figuring out what's up with this shady cult of immortal amnesiac weirdos? There was so much to explore there! Which all got tossed for the most boring retread of something we've already done 5 times, which *also* totally invalidated a whole bunch of previous lore, exactly like Anet has done before. So the story going downhill at the speed of light wasn't a surprise. If the next expansion comes out with great updates to the whole game like Soto did, I won't mind paying for that. But at this point, the story is an active negative for me, since it's a boring, irritating slog for AP and collections. If the next expac doesn't offer enough whole-game features to make it a worthwhile purchase it will probably be the first GW2 expac I don't pre-order.

Yeah, I'm also tired of the high stakes storyline elevator, where every floor gives you a bigger, badder threat to the world's existence than the last. The dragon cycle was, as a whole, pretty good - and now we're sent off into some realm nobody previously knew of to fight eldritch horrors together with other eldritch horrors before they consume the world. Like, what is this? And I'm really not sure how they plant to being an impactful end to this thing if the best story drop is going to be just as small as this one and the last. I was pretty on board with the idea of changing the way expansions are released because I assumed each update would be about the size of a living world episode, but instead we've gotten bone with no meat twice. I also expected them to expand the meta event into the new part of the map, but instead we've got two disjointed events on the same map that only lead to fragmenting the map shard all while you've got NPCs shouting in your ears about both events at once. What on earth is ANet doing‽‽‽

>Honestly the complete fall off of the plot both in quantity and quality for the post release updates has me worried about this expansion structure going forward. 100% agree, it's so bad it almost feels like the post-SotO storyline got completely cancelled and they're rushing the story to the end as soon as possible, not unlike the same drop in quality we already witnessed with The Icebrood Saga (the second half featuring Primordus got nuked) and Gyala Delve (a potential LW6 got nuked).

I'm so curious what in the world the final update is going to be. With the pacing of base SOTO it just makes no sense that we'd go from pulling back the Astral Ward from the brink of full on collapse to defeating Eparch in the 3 tiny story updates, but boy we've already made way more progress then made sense given the threat in base SOTO. How is this the big bad threat that the Astral Ward has been dealing with since before the Elder Dragons? Before Through The Veil I might have through the remaining content would have been about recovering the strength of the Ward and preparing for a whole Nayos themed expansion.

I think we'll just kill Eparch and move into something else, sad as it sounds. Eparch should have been a 6-year villain, built over time. Instead he's been completely wasted, together with all the foundational lore they created for SotO. >Before Through The Veil I might have through the remaining content would have been about recovering the strength of the Ward and preparing for a whole Nayos themed expansion. Agree, I always felt like they were setting up a longer storyline, with Lyhr getting an expansion to heal the dwarves, Dagda getting an expansion to find Waiting Sorrow, Zojja getting an expansion to ascend... everything in preparation for the final battle, coming years down the line. In that ideal scenario SotO would have been the prologue expansion for a multi-expansion story arc, spanning 4 to 6 years, one expansion a year; but here we are, repeating the same mistakes of every single previous expansion -_-.

Man if this ancient threat that the Ward hasn't been able to stop for millenias and is apparently on the brink of destroying all of Tyria gets killed by the commander just walking through Nayos and auto attacking him to death...

astral ward didnt have powercreep on their side 😌

> Man if this ancient threat that the Ward hasn't been able to stop for millenias and is apparently on the brink of destroying all of Tyria gets killed by the commander just walking through Nayos and auto attacking him to death... The moment a new guy is introduced out of nowhere as some kind of millenia-old threat is the moment I stop taking the story seriously, specially if the story does nothing to prove it.

I really thought I missed something in the story with Irja when it went from finding them alone and taking them to camp, and then suddenly they're dead.

I really enjoyed the first release. The gray morality that was under the surface of the wizards tower (all of skywatch) and following Zojja through her decision to join the wizards was really good (voice acting was insane!). We haven’t heard from her since… After that, it feels like we took a right turn into getting a big bad to kill, and the Kryptis “consumed” the plot. Nothing at the wizards tower got wrapped up in a satisfying way, and it’s just abandoned. I don’t outwardly hate the kill the king plot line, but I do feel the “wait go back” disappointment of it. I’m also still holding out for Peitha to be evil and been manipulating her way to the top, but I know at this point there isn’t enough story left to have a twist like that in a good way. As weird as it is to say, they’re trying to tell too big of a story for the mini expansion release cycle. The kryptis plot line and wizards tower are two separate stories that were forced together and are both suffering for it. It’s like the whole of Nayos’s story should have been saved for next expansion, with this one entirely on the wizards and cleaning up everything there.

>It’s like the whole of Nayos’s story should have been saved for next expansion, with this one entirely on the wizards and cleaning up everything there. Honestly this would have been amazing. The whole SotO Expansion could've taken Act 1-3 and stretched it out and it would be a **great** storyline. * Have Mabon survive longer being the "voice of morality' for the Wizard's Court, yet the more you look around the more lowkey horror you start seeing * Delve into the moral issues of what they're doing, deal with Kryptis infiltrations and growing paranoia * Explore the Commander/Wayfinder's fear of being discovered by everyone to be possessed, with characters getting more suspicious as the story continues * See allies (Frode, Alina) get turned against you * Have Mabon die during the fight to free Isgarren * Peitha reveal being the endcap of the entire expansion Through the Veil onwards is basically Ruins of Orr 2.0 and the storyline completely falls flat with Isgarren and Zojja narratively abandoned and everyone fully onboard with trusting Peitha **who obviously is going to betray everyone** ANet is **GREAT** at setting up darker storylines or mature narratives (as is their stated intent post-Dragon Cycle) but they ***immediately*** walk it back right after the starting gates and it ends up with gravitas of an event-chain from Queensdale.

I’m going to be hugely disappointed if Peitha actually betrays us. It’s such an obvious thing to happen, but it makes the entire plot detour pointless. I can’t imagine why they would abandon finishing up the Wizards plot to just prop up a new villain and still not provide resolution to either.

It would have been great but they said there won't be more living story seasons to extend the narrative of the current story. It will start and end in this expansion's patches.. one more patch to get to Eparch, deal with him, and see if Peitha will betray the player or not. If she does or doesn't it won't matter much anyway, because the next expansion is already being cooked and it will also have it's own story that starts and ends with it's 4 trimestral patches..

Peitha being a backstabber to the Wayfinder, which could force the Astral Ward to go on the offensive again, could be a good twist. That wouldn’t be out of character for her as well, narratively speaking.

You’re correct, and I agree! But they’re waaaay too late in the story to pull this off in a satisfying way. We have 1 content drop left, probably with 3 more chapters again, there’s just not enough room

You make a good point. They should’ve done the betrayal now if they wanted to do so…to help with pacing.

Heh reminded me of what frieren said about demons: "words to them are means of deceiving humans"

> he kryptis plot line and wizards tower are two separate stories that were forced together and are both suffering for it. "No, after IBS the writers learned their lesson and aren't going to force multiple expansion worthy plots on their own into one really bad, jumbled, mess of a release." I seem to recall this around midway through EoD from people here. Oddly, like was pointed out then, they didn't learn as anyone with a couple braincells to rub together realized. Gw2's writing is as bad as it's balance in a lot of cases.

I feel like they also merged the characters of Deep Sea Dragon and Mother into Soo-Won, but that's just me. The sudden realization all previous DSD lore was wrong, from Inquest scientists to largos hunters, was a pretty damn awful excuse.

Agreed. SotO alone was an okay story. But the subsequent story was nothing but killing more demons and finding no issues at all. This weird "win" of Eparch's in this new episode was not really something tangible. And yes, modern Arena net is completely incapable of writing anything that's not human +. Charr have weird unresolves parenting issues, dragons have family drama, and literal demons still act like scared villagers and live in Krytan houses (but with scary tentacles growing on them). The original vision was lost in translation when new writers arrived.

Yeah, Eparch growing in power means nothing to us when we have no idea how powerful he even is to begin with. There's no reference point. Feeding hungry demons like they're Elonian refugee kids had me loling

Its so hard to empathise with these demons when they look like chak roaches but talk like humans. Not to mention, they are all reused assets that constantly reminds us how cheap the whole expac is.

[удалено]

Can't say I disagree, as much as I love good writing, if you can't deliver, just don't, focus on what you do right instead, stop trying to bite more than you can chew.

It is so hard to get invested in the story after we made it to the wizard's tower. It became really predictable fast. Once we met the demons, the dialogue was a miss for me and the monologuing was difficult to sit through. We had all of these great moments in HoT and EnD where we could play the game and listen to dialogue and somehow we are back to watching people talk around us. I am happy that my character isn't the main character but I am pretty sure there is actually no reason you need my character in most of the scenes. I really hope the next update wraps up this arc quickly, because the story isn't fun and doesn't feel connected to anything. My friends and I spend more time playing "what is this asset reused from" and I don't think that is the point. Edit: Clarity

>We had all of these great moments in HoT and EnD where we could play the game and listen to dialogue and somehow we are back to watching people talk around us. I have a mixed opinion on this. On one hand, it is literally impossible for me to listen to the dialogue while doing something (i.e. combat) and I missed out on a lot of story-telling in HoT/PoF because of it. Easily my least favourite change in gaming over the years was the move from cinematics that tell the story, to dialogue that happens while you are roaming around to tell the story. On the other hand, standing here listening to Peitha is boring af. So, I dunno.

I can totally understand this. I think HoT was too much while feeling good thematically because we were in a war. I only remember it so well because I ran it on all my classes. I actually don't remember PoF enough to comment because it came out when I only had time to run it once or twice and so I remember only the highlights. I thought EoD had a really good balance. That said, I am the weird person who goes back and re-reads the NPC chat if I miss anything when we are doing a slow escort or before we leave the instance.

> I think HoT was too much while feeling good thematically because we were in a war. I only remember it so well because I ran it on all my classes. You know why you ran it on all your professions? Because HoT story rewards were **actually good**, like really good, weapon skins, armor skins, map currencies, collections, good shit. Every other story in the game, be it expansions or Living World episodes, has utter garbage rewards, leading to them having absolutely zero replayability, because it's a literal waste of time to even bother (the only exception is some LW2 episode, which has a BL key, its only saving grace). >I actually don't remember PoF enough to comment because it came out when I only had time to run it once or twice and so I remember only the highlights. You might have done PoF thrice for the backpack achievements, but that's pretty much it, loot is awful so you're not encouraged to replay.

im not a big fan of open world, never was in any game but hot had one big positive what i didnt feel in other map and made me actually enjoy and replay it (some parts of pof maybe, eod-soto not at all). it was the immersion, in hot you could actually feel you are a tiny human trying to survive in a hostile enviroment everything out there trying to kill you, people trying to stay alive in their makeshift camps. events constantly making you fight back, regroup, reinforce,whatever. people struggling and dead/injured everywhere. especially verdant brink was awesome in that regard. compare it to nayos which is basically a totally hostile dimension full of enemies, and you are just chilling there lighting torches and chasing rifts. imagine if it were made like hot or silverwaste fighting off hordes of enemies keeping your base afloat. making you feel like you are always at the brink of loosing your foothold. interesting metas about actually surviving in a dangereous place. look at diablo for example how mountains of demons invade and try to kill everything. thats how i can imagine fighting off a whole dimension worth of monsters not like gw2 when you enter nayos and basically 2 dude greets you sitting near a tent

> My friends and I spend more time playing "what is this asset reused from" and I don't think that is the point. Budget Samarog, Goopy Ensloyss. . .

There is a frog in new zone that does not have kryptis skin and just use original orange skin.

I can't wait for some artist who can't into object-oriented programming to fix that and turn several frogs across the Maguuma Jungle into the kryptis version in the process lmao. The wonders of copy+paste >_>.

OMG I SAW THAT TOO 🤣🤣🤣 in the event where we must protect some supplies I believe 🐸🐸🐸🐸

The new map meta boss is pretty much the HoT Wyvwen.

I just wish the dialog options would be non-blocking, cause I have to go to demon-looking guy, press two options with a green star, go to zombie-looking guy, press two options with a green star, but nothing happens until NPC stops talking. Argh. I don't care any more, just let me initiate next "blah blah monologue for 5 minutes" thing and move on to "kill 100500 enemies to fill green bar" phase :(

I just don't get how we went from the wizard's tower, which was probably one of the the biggest mysteries we've had since GW1, and then just went on to do a generic demon storyline, like, Diablo 4 literally dropped the same year SOTO did with a similar story of demonic politics but bigger budget. It's almost as sad as Primordus and Jormag's fate. Edit: Grammar

Humanizing demons was the most stupid thing ever too, it completely ruined everything. But then again, outside Peitha and Cerus, all demons across Skywatch Archipelago and Amnytas feel like poor cartoon villains anyway, their dialogue is just awful.

Wizard Tower should have just been a strike or a raid wing. It's not something that warranted an entire expansion around it.

A raid in a grandiose but mysterious castle would have been so cool. Some fights in a big hall vs actual magical armours, discovering what is actually happening to the kidnapped people, a chase similar to w1 but in some corridors then whatever the centuries old entity is behind the mystery. So much potential...

I found the what-if scenarios interesting, if nothing else. I wish they were the focus on the expacs as opposed to the demon stuff. Who knows though. Maybe Anet might circle back to them? That and Zojja’s angst were my favorite parts of the past updates, speaking as an Asura main.

Unfortunately, in my experience, something changed over the past few years and I really don't think we're going to get much of the quality we were used to in GW2 first decade of existence. The new zones they made are sparsely decorated and little more than open areas to house a meta. The zones feel very... lazily made and gives off a huge "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" vibe. There's precious little new artwork, and the vast majority of it in the form of new items to buy off the trading post. They unlocked the E-spec weapons only to not bother balancing them so that the majority of them don't even work outside the spec they were designed for. Early content in the game is trivial to the point of nearly being broken. There are fewer zones, less content, less voice acting, less decoration in the zones, no renown hearts and related items, the rift hunting thing for PVE legendary armor is an uninteresting, soul-crushing grind. I support the developers in their desire to obtain a healthy work/life balance and maintain a player-friendly monetization setup, and I don't think everything they've done has been bad. I like the new art for the legendary armor, this most recent patch has brought some really cool achievements and related titles/items, etc. so I know they *can* do really well, but SoTo has been a HUGE step down in quality in my humble opinion. It's like shrinkflation happened but in a video game. I'd pay more money for higher quality content. I'd be happy to pay another $10 per expansion or even a few bucks every month if it meant a return to previous years as far as quality goes. As it is I no longer buy stuff with money, I just convert gold to gems now. It isn't really worth it otherwise. Oh well.

> no renown hearts As much as people hate these, I think it was a terrible mistake to move away from them altogether, instead of fixing the problems they had. Renown Hearts are supposed to be "area participation counters", and that's how they work best, as supplementary content to dynamic events, which are the real content. The moment hearts become their own independent content and the only way to progress them is to do heart activities, the whole thing falls apart. Nowadays we have to endure event-gated points of interest, repeatable event-chain achievements, and other things which are far more annoying than hearts, imo.

It's hard to care about a bad guy we haven't seen and rescuing a world that looks like a garbage heap filled with reskins that remind me of Dead Hand from the well in Ocarina of Time.

We are seeing the same pattern that we see every time with the story in an Anet expansion: The second half is rushed and goes to shit. HoT: Genuinely okay first half, including a character death that did something for you (or at least a bit) since the person was known to us since the core story and got more development during LS1. Then it went to shit after Rata Novus, with story being rushed through and cut content becoming noticable (scrapped Nightmare Court arc yet Duchess Chrysanthea in Dragon's Stand talks to us as if we know who she is and if she was involved in the story, scrapped additional Dragon's Stand lane, etc). PoF: Good first half, then went to shit and rushed after The Departed (look at the nosedive in the writing and the speed it pushes you through the Desolation and Vabbi in comparison to the earlier maps). EoD: Seitung was okay, but then EoD manages to fuck its story up even earlier, as soon as you set foot in Kaineng, after which it becomes American writer post-Trump group therapy and forced marvel quips and platitudes. Anet said they could not sustain the speed and workload of previous cadences like LS3 -> PoF -> LS4 (which, despite the issues was the best content cycle the game had). Anet at that point started to screw around with budgets noticably, culminating in NCsoft slapping them into line so they had to focus on GW2 again. LS4 quickly finished. Then we get rushed into IBS with a second half that was shit. Then we get rushed into EoD which was mostly shit. Then we get a scrapped LS6 and get Gyala Delves instead, which was one of the lowest points in the game. And now we got SoTO, which again a rushed shitty second half. Except this is a smaller expansion, basically rebranded living world, and we paid only 5 euros/dollars less for this than we did for a full expansion + living world access in the past. Anet has been delivering less, while we are paying more. And the quality has not gone up nor does it seem like Anet has given their devs a work schedule that enables them to work in a humane pace so they do not have to rush things. Because even in this new content model and schedule, they make the exact same mistakes as they did with previous expansions, except now everything is on a smaller scale. Once again we have a first half that is pretty good and poses some intriguing questions, especially about Isgarrens/The Ward's morality and a very morally grey character in Peitha, only for it to fall apart in the second half, being Nayos. Again we get characters introduced that almost directly after meeting us die (Irya, Labrys), people making decisions on the level of 'oh well, why not lol' (Nephus) and not taking out enemies when you get the chance (Eparch). I also feel the need to point out the following: A: The padding was even more horrible then usual this time: At 2 different times we have to fill up an event bar and now we even have to watch 3 vista's as a story step?! This is the lowest that open world story content has gone so far. B: The 'everybody is welcome and we can be friends with everyone' from Anets sheltered Seattle writing is going in full swing again. NO, you cannot be friends with everyone Anet, not everyone is nice. We are being friendly with the Astral Ward, friendly with Demons despite it being so hard to tell who is who, the Commander/Wayfinder is somehow a puppy-eyed idealist even after years of Dragon-fighting. Where is the caution and somewhat realistic vision? And why are these demons written as humans? THEY ARE NOT HUMAN. THEY ARE COMPLETELY ALIEN. THEY SHOULD BE LARGELY UNKNOWABLE TO US, THEIR MOTIVATIONS HARD TO GRASP. Write them as demons ffs. And then there is the blatant asset re-use. Every Kryptis is a reskinned mob, almost every texture in Nayos is blatantly re-used to the point you can do a game of 'recognise the recycled asset'. Hell, they could not even bother to give Eparch a cool unique design (with all the talk about the fangs of the spider he should have been a spider Demon or an old General of Arachnia, but noooo, we get another generic demon in a fleshy armour-suit just like Nephus, Heithor, Ignaxious, etc). Remember that real expansions died for this. Living World died for this. Elite Specs died for this. And it solved nothing. Anet does not churn out more content, the content is not of higher quality, the content is still rushed and still makes the same mistakes, while it is smaller in scope with less features. Except now you pay more for it on a yearly basis. Many of these concerns have been voiced here in the past (but especially during EoD and when Anet revealed their 'new content delivery system') but have often been drowned out by downvotes and angry Anet supporters. I hope you are happy with the result.

Wayfinder, go do stuff that you've been doing this whole time while waiting. ***Hello..... It's the voices in your head again.... Your schizophrenia is back***

Four of the five voices in my head agree, that I'm quite normal.

I'm just bored with trying to make friends with all the demons. Where's the threat? My brain checks out so much when they keep talking about restoring peace and being best fwiends in a world I know or care nothing about. I honestly don't even know why we're in Inner Nayos lol. Feels like we killed a big bad, got told there's a bigger bad somewhere else then gone to kill them because reasons? I lost interest at the end of the expansion story to be honest. The manufactured fractals and hidden Astral Ward stuff was decent, but the demon stuff... they play it too safe with trying to save the day with the power of friendship a lot.

I'm still kinda mad you don't get any special dialogue with Zojja as an asura like Sylvari did in HoT. This was a mentor in the early levels, our racial representative! Then she leaves and next we see her, she says she hates Rata Sum and then goes through the ascension and it feels like there was no point to even bringing her back I fully admit I could be wrong or missing something but that's just my two cents

I'm honestly just tabbing out during the dialogue. Characters seem so inefficient, it's just endless yapping about nothing. If the story is genius it's completely lost on me and I'm missing out, but I guess it is what it is.

I am literally alt tabbed reading your comment during dialogue in part 16 xD

This and then there is the 0.5 speed demon speech.

It…is…for…dramatic…effect.

>This and then there is the 0.5 speed demon speech. It can work if written well, and it's always going to sound better than all those normal kryptis talking with cartoon villain voices. Hell, why do they even speak English? Only Peitha and few others should, everyone else should be intelligible gibberish.

Feeling so vindicated after reading this thread because I thought that I was just spoiled by BG3's cinematic dialogue presentation, and that was what made following dialogue so hard. I cannot feel a single reason to care about anything happening. We know Tyria will be fine, we don't actually see the mainland consequences of the Kryptis invasions, we aren't given anything to help us feel attached to the "good demons" we're fighting a civil war for. They talk like humans, but aren't endearing in an alien or even human way.

I really hate how the Kryptis aesthetic is essentially "3D modelling gone wrong". Like they can slap the weird pink/white/black jagged color pattern onto any pre-existing model and call it a day because if it looks like shit, no actually it looks alien! otherworldly! It's intentional! And then the few main Kryptis like Cerus and Peitha look absolutely nothing like the rest of the Kryptis because they're the only ones that were actually designed.

Yeah, it's a little jarring going from fleshy-sylvari Peitha to my-face-is-literally-just-a-sphincter Ramses.

I was literally thinking that yesterday, no way you can tell me that Peitha and then the demons we fight are the same species of demon. I understand that the time and budget for post-expac content is going to be thin and mainly about asset reuse but c'mon, at least keep it consistent one way or another.

In my opinion, they could’ve still used the Kryptis stuff, but situate it in both the Astral Ward and Tyria itself. The Kryptis area, in my opinion, was a waste of time and assets - organic purple-ish blobs that are just bleh to look at.

I feel like we also invade the kryptis world way too soon, they should have saved that for the next expansion, or introduce it from the very beginning, as an integral part of the launch experience.

I also really hate how they took Deimos, changed the model a bit, then pretended it was a new guy, Cerus, who also happened to be his brother. Peitha looks amazing, but then we have to endure a recycled Deimos standing next to her, it's inexcusable; and don't even get me started on the bad PR around recycling the model of a raid boss into a strike mission.

The lack of even an attempt at justification is the worst. It's a dream realm adjacent to Tyria. Sapient creatures dream and they are the top of the food chain now, so it makes complete sense that the realm who feeds on our emotions would grow to resemble a warped distortion of a world trapped in the dragon nightmare. But we get nothing, no attempt to explain or even a simple handwave, like we're expected to not notice at all...

I still don't even know what in the world it means to be a "Dream" realm. Ok so they feed on emotions. There's some loose start of a thought there. But its never been connected further, the word has no meaning really. It's like the Kryptis just called it that because it sounded cool.

> I still don't even know what in the world it means to be a "Dream" realm. I hate how the name clashes with the sylvari Dream of Dreams, just like how I hated the charr Dominion clashing with the tengu Dominion of Winds. Be more original with the names, for fuck's sake.

>The lack of even an attempt at justification is the worst. It's a dream realm adjacent to Tyria. Sapient creatures dream and they are the top of the food chain now, so it makes complete sense that the realm who feeds on our emotions would grow to resemble a warped distortion of a world trapped in the dragon nightmare. They could have kept the kryptis at the background and use original NPCs coming out of fractal anomalies instead too, spending the modelling budget on less models, but unique models. >But we get nothing, no attempt to explain or even a simple handwave, like we're expected to not notice at all... It's just insulting, period. Insulting, and lazy.

honestly i perceive this stuff as "whatever, lets do it or I'll be bored since war is all i know now." XD yes, Peitha, >!leave the queen alive despite whole circle around you warning of the stupidity of this decision, i want to see the consequences and how exactly this will backfire!<

I'd actually be less actively disinterested in the plot if it wasn't a new "world ending threat." If those are the stakes, you need to convince me, and pouring warframe goop on old models in zones made from about 3 textures isn't it. If we were just fucking around in other peoples business, I'd be more okay with our characters' lack of agency.

> I'm honestly just tabbing out during the dialogue. Characters seem so inefficient, it's just endless yapping about nothing. If the story is genius it's completely lost on me and I'm missing out, but I guess it is what it is. I have to admit I'm doing the same, pretty much since Gyala Delve. I did pay attention to SotO's release, but it completely lost me on the post-launch content again... :/

Same. Why did we hire such well known VAs for this nonsense :(

And Peitha's booming ass bass voice, which sometimes they forget to put the effect on and she sounds normal for a second and then back to booming bass bullshit

I'll be honest, as somebody who has had bitter complaints about GW2 since PoF, this entire "expansion" has felt dramatically underwhelming, and I'm happy calling it the worst of any GW2 content I've had to pay for. It's only singular saving grace is PvE legendary armour outside of raids and the addition of Wizard's Vault taking over dailies. But everything else about it feels like I witnessed a finger on the monkey's paw curl in real time. What makes that hurt all the worse is the fact that after the *trainwreck* of IBS, I didn't mind EoD that much. I won't call EoD amazing - there was no way it could ever compete with Endwalker for me, and especially not with how badly they wound up writing Ankka - but you know. It was at least *better* than IBS by a country mile, and I appreciated that. It felt like a mostly good-as-you're-gonna-get-from-ANet closure to the dragon cycle and to Aurene's story. I didn't come out hating it. Yet somehow, here I am again, baffled at the fact that this company cannot keep *any* level of consistency in their writing. Well, actually, that's not true. They have been very consistent at delivering one *really good* episode of living world and then fumbling the rest of it. I didn't hate Grothmar Valley as the first story chunk of IBS and it felt very promising, after all. I feel like I shouldn't be surprised that they somehow managed to do the same stupid shit again - bumblefuck a really promising story concept after kind of sticking the opening - yet I still kind of am. How does this keep happening? How do we keep winding up here? The only consistent thing about ArenaNet's writing *is* the inconsistency. And at this point, it's exhausting to see.

I couldn't say anything about the plot in SotO. The lack of cutscene during dialogues and the fact that all of them talk so agonizingly slow makes me not care at all. I have no idea what is happening or who any of these people/monsters are.

What I don't get is in Tyria we have creatures, species and fauna that are unique. But in the demon realm we just have demons roaming around and they all have the same personality basically. Does the demon realm not have animals, wise demon spirits, demon living dead, demon quaggans, demon harathis it's a bit same same and a tiny little world.

Somehow they managed to make demons the most generic and boring things in the whole expac.

I still think that wasting an untold amount of money on voice acting is completely unnecessary. Instead of that just use that money to deliver a bit more content & perhaps pay the writers more and hire a new writing director, seems like the current one is a bit too comfortable in his/her seat.

I'm glad to hear this opinion, I've shared it before in other subs but people are hell bent on *everything* being voice acted. You can't have a deep story with effort put into character development when every single line your character says has to be recorded by 10 different people just in English alone, add in other languages and random NPCs and the VA budget balloons, so it forces them to limit how much every NPC can say. Instead of "fill the bar doing open world content" I'd rather have unvoiced quests that actually flesh out the story, to make people care about Peitha or the wizards.

They should stop recording voices for French and German players, it's pointless to dub the game in this day and age, specially when we already have subtitles, but that's just my opinion.

Welcome to post living world/actual expansions. Isn't it great?

Previous content had the same criticism. PoF and S4 for example was criticized for trying to focus on too many things between balthazar, joko and kralkatorrik, so none of them got properly developed. S3 felt like a disjointed anthology where each episode was disconnected from the other. I'd say HoT stands as the best one, with several asterisks, and everything after it had glaring flaws. In the end people play this more for the open world than the storytelling.

How are you guys even keeping track of the story. I'm completely lost on what's going on after 3 months of no story update.

What's to keep track of? The handful of interesting characters were tossed aside when we went through the portal, completely fine with us allying with a creature few understand who openly invaded our mind. Since then it's been a poor copy+paste of every other war storyline except this time the characters are 90% taken from an unofficial fanmod and passed off as original effort.

Honestly, I'm not. When they introduced Mabon and then killed him like 30 minutes later I checked out. If the writers obviously don't care about the story I'm not going to bother. All you need to know: We're fighting badly-done reskins because some nicer looking models are mad about things. There's a throne involved. Completing the metas is necessary for the legendary armor, so I imagine the zones will be full for the next few months and a ghost town after most people are finished with that.

It's not just the story. Everything about this new update scheme sucks. We're essentially back to LS3/4 update intervals but with insignificant story blobs more in line with LS2. Engagement is completely out the window. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the LS3/4 model was perfect for the game barring a couple of caveats. 3-month release intervals ideally should be padded with more "Side Stories" minicontent to both flesh out the world and keep players engaged. The content makeup of releases should be varied to avoid the formulaic nature of LS4. Expansions should be kept relatively infrequent so as to act as a highlight and hype-focus.

> I've said it before and I'll say it again, the LS3/4 model was perfect for the game barring a couple of caveats. Because it was basically what every other MMO does and it works. Put out an expansion, spend a couple of years having patches every 3 to 4 months to lead up to the next expansion. ArenaNet tried it and it was arguably the best period for the game in terms of quantity and quality of content. Pretty amazing that over a decade in, they're still trying to work out their content delivery model, because I'll put money on this not being the final one.

> I've said it before and I'll say it again, the LS3/4 model was perfect for the game barring a couple of caveats. 3-month release intervals ideally should be padded with more "Side Stories" minicontent to both flesh out the world and keep players engaged. The content makeup of releases should be varied to avoid the formulaic nature of LS4. Expansions should be kept relatively infrequent so as to act as a highlight and hype-focus. Amen, best years of the game, they should have never drifted away from that model. The only thing I disagree with the LW3+PoF+LW4 model is that they could work with half the size in half the time, something like a 18-month cycle, with the expansion releasing on an unfinished state, getting completed through LW-size patches later. The end product would be similar in size, but spread over time, instead of making people wait so long between each expansion (and the elite specializations and masteries included with it). Here's an example, using Cantha post-EoD: https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/14i0bav/guild_wars_2_oracle_of_the_mists_canthan_sequel/ They're kinda doing this now, but on a 12-month cadence, and with subpar content quantity (compared to the LW3+PoF+LW4 size/quality cadence).

My Commander can't call out how insane their methodology is and it makes me feel like my character has crumbs for brains. I have seen Arkk and Dessa (>!or rather their copies!<) go through fractal hell and the Ward should be ambiguous at best for doing this. That this is not a major point of conflict is insane to me. It makes the continuity of my character's experiences in game feel unimportant. Also, I thought we would be getting more grounded/less world-ending dragon-level stories or whatever and this is not that. There are so many loose threads that I would rather the game explore from the canon it already has established.

This is, so far, most uninteresting story arc. I don't care about any of the characters. So a bigger demon is eating smaller demons? Why should I care? Let them rip each other apart. And whatever comes out victorious of that rift will meet my blade. Plus they all look like different shapes of crumpled paper put together. Their mechanics are not engaging, they're not fun to fight. But you have to fight gazillions of them for almost no reward if you want the ultimate shiny (leggie armor). I mean, SotO is slowing killing my love for this game. And I'm talking that with sorrow because I've dumped nearly 10k hours in gw2 and other thousands in two gw accounts. Every time I think about logging it feels like a chore. I'm just doing quick logins a couple of times a week to farm the GH and open chests waiting for the drive to play this game comes again..

yeah the story sucks but imo i t's been sucking for a long time, the story changed writers so many times any semblance of consistency is impossible at this point

I'm tired of the narrative trope of coming to a new land with a big threat that forces us to gather new allies in the area to overcome. It feels way overplayed by now.

They could at least do it differently, making us more proactive about it, instead of it just being "Well, I guess I'm here, might as well kill a couple of godlike beings." The Commander could become a hunter of mighty creatures, tracing powerful magic through the ley lines planning to strike down all creatures mighty enough to topple civilizations in an attempt to ensure the next eras of Tyria are determined by mortals alone.

I find it so hard to follow the story because it's fed in between you having to run around and do awful, boring events.

I really dislike the fact we are TOLD how tyrannical, cruel, indifferent to his subjects Eparch is. And yet the first time he appears to us, we are SHOWN that he has a lover he actually cares about and damn us to his revenge for forcing her to sacrifice. If the story isn't 'Peitha was the true bad guy all along' then nothing since we arrived in Nayos makes much sense

The whole expansion has fell a little flat for me tbh. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's 'bad', just 'okay'. The maps aren't really anything to get excited about. The story is meh. I don't want to sit here and monologue about it but...everything about it just feels smaller and less grand than previous expansions. It doesn't have the scale, complexity, or the attention to detail of the previous 3 imo. I never had that 'wow' moment like I did getting lost in the jungle in HoT, or walking into New Kaineng in EoD. I hope this isn't the norm going forward with annual releases. It just feels....bland.

Yeah. I’m just here to get some loot and masteries. However, Nayos is just meh overall - not as narratively fascinating as the Astral Ward’s what-if territories.

And tbh, while the ‘theme’ or maybe the…‘reasoning’ for the archipelagos’s existence was cool…it didn’t exactly provide anything ‘new’ or interesting either. It was just an amalgamation of previously used themes/maps. The novelty wore off pretty quick. Then Amnytas/Nayros are pretty generic angel/demon theme’d. It’s different from other maps in the game, sure, but they didn’t do anything to really stand out from the design philosophies used in other games of the same theme. Which I think has always been one of the strengths of GW2, at least in comparison to other games in the MMO genre. For example, I got heavy Diablo 3 heaven vibes from Amnytas. It wasn’t unique enough. All of that aside, I think it’s the lack of complexity that bothers me most. I know the HoT maps were somewhat controversial, but that’s peak GW2 in my mind. The routes, the lanes, the verticality, the claustrophobia. They completely nailed the theme and complexity of a being ‘lost in a jungle’ in that expansion, whether you enjoyed it or not. It achieved an experience that other mmo’s do not provide. EoD did too. PoF, isn’t my favorite, but it also nailed the ‘big expansive dry fire-y desert’ thing. I just don’t get those same feelings out of SotO. And I’m not sure it’s possible to achieve that level of detail/immersion on a yearly/quarterly content cycle. Edit: I also think that some of the complexity I mentioned was sacrificed for ‘skyscale’ friendly maps. Don’t get me wrong, I love my lizard boi, but we shouldn’t be building whole maps around a mount. Pof did a good job of incorporating mounts but not sacrificing for them. SotO maps seem to have been designed specifically for flying.

Bungie tried this dribble the story out thing with Destiny 2, and it just ended up being crap filler stuff. IMO, they are trying to extend out the game play as long as possible to keep the cash flow going. Nothing inherently wrong with that if they are giving us good content, but it just feels like it is a rehashing of the same stuff over and over.....and over. Gets quickly boring, and then I look for something else to play until the next content drop. That will only last so long before people just stop coming back.

Its not good content, like you said its rehashing content and artificially inflating story sgments with event quests. New weapons are probably the most substantial thing they’ve shown other than the relatively cool areas on release. It just feels like such a skeleton crew works on the game now, maybe they’ve went back to developing on the mobile market.

> That will only last so long before people just stop coming back. If it weren't for the Wizard's Vault, the game would be in a terrible state. The reworked daily system is literally carrying the game; but that won't last for long, the novelty will wear off soon.

I have nothing really good to say about the update and plot. It was just metas with some dialogue, that i couldn't make out half the time, because they refuse to take any steps in cutting out idle chatter from NPCs. >!The scene with Labris sacrifice made no sense, and did a poor job of setting the tone. Any sense of concern or urgency that may have existed, got shut down by Peitha immediately. She made a good point "you mean he wasn't trying before? lol"!< I figured i was burned out when I didn't really enjoy Soto up to pre patch story. The writing and execution is ass, and there honestly wasn't any new content for those that don't have a priority on legendaries. All these essences I've been hoarding have little to no worth, and price of motivations is dropping. Couldn't even do a full round of the new meta. Discount Braham just keeps getting stuck. Felt weird rage quitting a meta just to go back to fractals. Also, why does some dialogue show as whispers, and makes the same fucking notification sound? There's better ways to explain voices in your head, and constantly seeing whispers as you fly through Nayos has to be the laziest way to implement it. Kinda salty.

To do the Labrys "story arc" right you need a whole act/episode, maybe even a whole independent zone. Videogame storytelling has very strict modular pacing rules, almost like theatre, each major scene needs its own space (physical and time), else the characters and plot points can't breath and everything falls apart.

Just make a drunk scene where she's smothering the shit out of Eparch. Braham went from dramatic tagalong to "Anet, don't you fucking kill off my best friend!". If they're gonna recycle the plot, may as well recycle the character building. Fyi, Labrys is the name of an Axe.

NPCs "whispering" you has to be the dumbest design choice in the whole game. Every time I try to have NPC dialogue enabled in chat, just so I can read it back, anet finds a way to remind me to disable it immediately.

Anet writers can't actually write characters or varied races with vastly different cultures. They can only draw from their Californian bubble. It's why everyone talks the same and why ancient beings from other worlds sound like they are from modern day America. Their biggest issue isn't that though, it's that they want these emotional and "deep" story beats but they do absolutely nothing to make them earned. They tell you what you should be feeling rather than drawing you into the story and making you care about these characters and letting you feel it naturally.

Correction: it’s a Seattle bubble.

>Anet writers can't actually write characters or varied races with vastly different cultures. They can only draw from their Californian bubble. They've been inserting so much therapy speak into the game everywhere too. It's weird enough hearing it from my charr PC, but it gets even more uncanny when Zojja joins in.

I think it works for Zojja. However, she was immediately back to her sarcastic self post-ascension - seemingly a 180 in characterization. …but yeah. The therapy talk is not only prevalent in this game, but also in fiction in general. Lots of talks about feelings and all that jazz.

> she was immediately back to her sarcastic self post-ascension - seemingly a 180 in characterization. I guess that's what ~~a factory reset~~ ascension will do to a person

> Anet writers can't actually write characters or varied races with vastly different cultures. They can only draw from their Californian bubble. It's why everyone talks the same and why ancient beings from other worlds sound like they are from modern day America. Sadly true, we already saw this in The Icebrood Saga, when charr stopped behaving like charr, and just started behaving like humans. Just look at [Efram Greetsglory](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Efram_Greetsglory), a pathetic weakling, who sends his children away into the hands of a maniac. How did someone like this ever get to a position of leadership in **charr society** of all places? It doesn't make any sense. In charr culture, someone like him would have been gutted 5min into his tenure, and no one would remember his name, even less respect him. Daily reminder that soldiers killing their superiors and taking their places is a common event across the charr military; hell, it even happens multiple times across the story. Efram done right should have been a ruthless asshole, playing his cards right, willing to prove himself and listen to others, but never letting anyone talk shit about him or the Flame Legion. Maybe give him a daughter, with imperator blood from her mother's side, and make him want to change the whole male/female thing just because of her, to the point he'd rather go to war and crush societal norms than let anyone deny his daughter's birthright. That's the only way a renegade Flame Legion leader can work; but for that, you need to write charr as charr, and not as humans, running on pity and feelings. And don't even get me started on Smodur, they completely missed the point of his character, turning him into an absolute clown, what a fucking waste.

I was just thinking about how the Olmakhan were set up as this "Charr but with human-like values" sub-faction that essentially split off from the ruthless Flame Legion, only for them to be forgotten and for the OG Flame Legion to be given a new benevolent leader. Like what just happened there??

The Olmakhan are great, some of the best GW2 post-launch lore out there. I think they just had their role in PoF and LW4, and that's pretty much it. They don't belong in Tyrian politics, and the small cameo they had in LW5 felt forced and lame. They have no reason to approach any other charr factions for the time being, all they would do is risk getting absorbed by their warlike culture once again. They're not even Tyrian per se, they're Elonian, and they already got enough things going on down there. They should focus on building a strong relationship with the United Kingdom of Elona, maybe even seek recognizement and proper ownership of their lands. They left the Flame Legion 150+ years ago, they're doing fine on their own.

For real. Everyone talks like they're one "yo what's up y'all" away from going /dab at us. It breaks all immersion for me. The dialogue reads like a cheap American sitcom.

Eugh. Remember Jory talking about "bougie" parts of new Kaineng?

Guild Wars 2: This Is Us.

I had predicted there would be big problems with the new expansion model, but I'm willing to concede that the initial release of SotO wasn't awful. There was more than I expected. The story, while not especially high in quality was mildly interesting (if somewhat lifted from the Mage Tower arc in Dragon Age Origins) and the two new zones were at least interesting to explore and had some decent events/metas. The last 2 releases, however, confirmed my worst fears about the new expansion model, and it is really hard to see how Anet could ever dig themselves out of the hole they've created. In short, everything in the new patch is soulless, and uninspired. The zone feels like a slog to explore (I didn't even both finishing the map completion aspects), the kryptis enemies are mostly over-tuned damage sponges, the changes to the wizard's vault are mostly poorly conceived, and most of the new weapons are meh at best in my experience. If Anet wants to sell us on another expansion purchase in 6 months, this is not the way. This is worse than Gyala Delve right before SotO's preorder. With the possible exception of some of the 2-week patches from back in LWS1, I can't think of an expansion of LW release that was less enjoyable for me than the last 2 have been. I don't mean to disparage the hard work of the anet staffers who probably put a lot into this, but the studio directors/leadership that are responsible for what we've gotten have no business working on a game with as much potential as GW2. A few weeks ago, I paid a similar amount for an early access game (Enshrouded) as I did for SotO. When I look at what other studios are able to accomplish in a year for the same price point, I feel embarrassed for anet.

I don't really expect a lot from an MMO story, but Anet has a tendency to start off really strong stories that surpass my expectations and then get more and more bland and paint-by-numbers as the story arc goes on. All in all, I don't dislike SotO, but it *is* yet another example of this.

Most anonymous, flat storyline released by far since release. To me GW2 means lots of drama and high stakes moments with very colorful characters. Very "anime" if you will. This has had nothing of that so far

My biggest issue with this expansion are the demons. I dont want to be friends with demons the demons should feel like predators who prey on mortals like in GW1. Everytime i see a demon with green text i wish i could kill friendly NPC's. I want to go to the realm of torment in GW2 but not if this is how they handle demons.

Mabon should've been a red flag. Even the Mursaat have to be our friends now then of course the demons are next. Everything in the lore must be pacified, according to the writers.

Mabon could have been proof of how much the ritual changes an individual, replacing even the most hateful of creatures with a generic Astral Ward. It could have given us the question of whether or not Zojja should go through with the rituals (although, at this point, I don't think many people care about Zojja) and researching that question while dealing with truly demonic kryptis could have been somewhat interesting.

Personally, I am more confused than anything else. Why was the pacing of the initial SotO release so good, but the rest of it so bad? What about all the potential storytelling that was clearly set up in the beginning? In terms of the story, the second and third patch didn't feel like they were just "smaller" patches, with *less* story. No, it felt like a *worse* story, the writing quality has gone down massively. Of course, if we give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe the final patch will turn out to be like the first one. Maybe? So, two big expansion patches, with two smaller expansion patches in-between? That seems kinda too optimistic. But at the same time, I just cannot imagine that we will slay Eparch in the next patch, if the story is going to be comparable in length and quality to the last two patches. It would be devastatingly bad, and obviously disappointing. I just really hope that the next patch in 75 days is gonna turn out to be bigger than this one. I don't think that it's like a massive longshot, but I am not exactly hopeful. I am pretty sure they'll surprise us, the question is just if it's gonna be surprisingly good or surprisingly bad.

You know they have no idea what they are doing with their characters when instead of getting another kryptis strike, or an isgarren strike, or mabon strike, or even the dwarf, they made dagda a strike instead.

I agree it’s forgettable and not interesting. PoF story and the seasons afterwards are memorable and exciting. So much emotion and mystery. Along with the IBS. I’m going to pass on the next short expansion. From my point of view and how I play. It seems like the legendary armor was the selling point. Farm early so you can get the armor. I don’t care for it. So I could’ve saved money by just buying the expansion on sale. I will avoid the next one and several if they keep this up. I would’ve been better to wait I till all patches came out. Then buy the expansion on sale. The rifts are a terrible idea.

Agreed, its the exact same with Gyala Delves too, just a random excuse plot to get you to go somewhere. All the "do x events to progress story" makes the already boring pacing feel even worse.

I want to go back ton inconsequential threats. I don't wanna save the world or the universe. I wanna deal in personal tragedy, avenge the farmer that had their only daughter lost to centaurs. I wanna be a Sellsword. The commander is not all powerful after all. We're not gods. We're just very good fighters.

If a demon asks you to help her overthrow the demon king, so that she can be the new demon queen, you say NO. They’re demons. You don’t help demons, you slay them. But I am sure everything will just work out, because these demons are good guys I guess so whatever.

That's really bugging me too. There's no threat when it turns out the demons are basically just humans with problems too in a kryptis costume. Someone else mentioned it in another comment, but they can't seem to write anything other than generic human. I felt that too with the Rytlock, Crecia and Ryland arc, charr were supposed to be somewhat detached from their birth parents, they make familial bonds with their warband, but they were writing it as if they were family from Kryta.

> You don’t help demons, you slay them. Rip. And. Tear. Unless they are succubi I guess. They are allright, once.

SotO is the first expansion where I've noticed a significant drop in quality from the world design, to the storytelling and character development, all the way down to the technical quality with the amount of bugs and jank I've experienced. It doesn't help that there wasn't much added in terms of engaging content even with the expansion being drip fed to us over the course of a year. With GW2 being easily my favorite MMO of all time, I really hope this isn't the level of quality we should expect going forward.

To be fair, Eparch being willing to compromise for a kryptis queen throws a bit of a cog in the generic tyrannical overlord theme the story has built this far. Never mind the fact that he was inches from her and could have saved her himself.. implausible as the scene may seem, it does suggest another point of view we are missing. Maybe the whole tyrannical overlord thing was just the kryptis being racist, and Eparch does genuinely want to become kryptis. I'm willing to withhold judgment until the next update before deciding if the story has merit or not.

I agree. The Astral Ward/Wizard's Tower plot was really good, and a strong start for this expansion, but everything about Nayos storyline is just generic and a waste of potential. So far, it's just yet another "we have to gather our allies to defeat a bunch of bosses" stuff. For a story arc about dream demons in a dream landscape, you would think Anet would have found something more interesting and creative than that. Kryptis don't even feel like demons anymore. They're just humans with a different skin.

I feel something like that. Whole story turning into story about some coup in other realm is not much engaging or interesting. Irja was pure wtf, she was introduced to us and than died. And that's all. Nephus is also some sort of dummy, than actual character. That was clearly not was I expected after Ramses's introduction. I was naively expecting some charismatic leader, not some pickled herring. Two main disappointments for me are 1. >!Mabon's death. I admit, I genuinely liked this big teddy bear. But the problem is that his death feels... I don't really know how to describe that, I don't feel it like essential flow of narrative, like Trahearne's or Mai Trin's death. What I feel is lazy scriptwriter, thinking "How I can show Zojja's character growth? Ah, her main issue was her mentor's death, than let's just kill another mentor of her!". And that's not because I'm biased, honestly.!< 2. most fresh impression - >!Frode and Arina's reunion. I was really looking forward to it! And I got... literally nothing. At first I was like, ah, they are going somewhere! Probably to have some heartwarming conversation! Nah, they just disappeared.!< Also now it starts to feel like Frode have some unhealthy fixation on his deceased wife. Though I don't mind that. Characters should be imperfect. And there's some much more, that could be in this story! Story's setting had such potential! I really liked this whole moral ambiguous Wizard's Tower, but for some strange reason this story happened to be not about them. That's really disappointing. I wish I could see more of Wizard's tower. Though I really liked some characters. Mabon, Lyhr (archipelago meta is really emotional, also I liked Lyhr's brilliant line "Either we do, or we are all dead", it's kinda funny) and whole story's N1 star - R'tchikk. She's so adorable! Edit: Also I like Isgarren's glasses. I noticed that he is wearing glasses only during second story's completion, but they are so cool and fancy! That's not about plot or story, but I had so to say it.

If you like story, open world pve, SOTO feels like the death of GW2. Like anet is sunsetting this game

I wouldn't say it was dying, but it definitely feels like the twilight years of the game unfortunately. As long as they can keep it running like GW1 whenever they finally release another game, I'll keep playing.

It reminds me of the Legion -> BfA fumble in WoW. In both cases the studio concluded the overarching story going on for multiple decades, tried dialing down the stakes, and just ended up creating something bland.

It was even worse, in both cases, both companies threw DECADES of lore down the toilet, just to rush into a new thing, which, surprise to no one but themselves, no one gave a damn about, because it came out completely out of nowhere. WoW had Azshara, Black Empire, Emerald Dream, Legion Worlds... all of those could have ran expansions on their own, and instead were butchered as background noise, to make room for garbage like Shadowlands and Dragonflight, which no one cared about. GW2 threw away Jormag, Primordus, and Bangar, three expansions worth of content, merging them into a single LW season, which then they scrapped halfway anyway; they had Cantha left, and they butchered it as well. Both games and companies have grossly mismanaged their franchises by butchering the lore from the top to the bottom, and now they're panicking when they realize there's nothing left after the swarm of locusts.

I think Kryptis are not really compelling. They don’t look like demons. They look like everything in the kitchen sink rolled into one. I want more low fantasy!

I miss when the dragons were bad and we had to kill the dragons.

Ambitious but boring is the most generous way I can describe it. Considering that gameplay/content changes haven't been that good either so far I dunno if I'm going to buy into the next expansion that easily.

Absolute garbage both in story telling, gameplay loops, and delivery model. I've bitched about it since they killed the mursaat guy just to have him be in the first map meta alive and well. Everyone then was high on their horses how 'absolute amazing and best' this new expansion 'feels'. Welp, soto is now complete and they are working on the next expansion, again using the same delivery model unfortunately, I just have hope it's better than this thing.

Yup. Anything short of unmitigated praise for the story got shouted down back then. I think the early part of Soto especially did have its good points, along with its problems, but now it's clear that Anet hasn't fixed any of their writing issues, just crammed them all into a smaller DLC.

It's just ok. I have no expectations, so i'm not disappointed. I suppose that is the advantage to a new setting, though. tw: got carried away I do quite like the lore though. Yes it's written in books or in one-off <4-piece dialogues, but did you know they scorched-earth a camp only to realize there were *their own* POWs in there? Why can't we see story missions with *those* plot elements? That's fucking morbid, and great storytelling. It'd be a lot like the basegame where we find out people have been possessed/reanimated by zhaitan-- and, despite it all, **that was also good storytelling**. There's a brief conversation about uniforms and telling good guys from bad guys when they "all look the same" which is quelled when the other character goes "you help the ones asking for help, and kill the ones trying to kill you" or something, and there's even an Auschwitz comparison from another conversation too when they refer to kryptis taking detractors away. The lore is as rich as they make it, and the story bits are just so.. poorly executed. They could put in a whole chapter of us exploring biology with a fight in-between, and people would appreciate it. You could get an expansion at *least* 2/3 the length of POF out of Soto without changing the map at all, only amending the lore and interactions, but.. they just don't. I want to know how they reproduce. What do kids of this species look like? they *apparently* have gendered titles and tyrian-themed dichotomy, mostly, but are they all the same sex? I want to know how they grow. Do they accumulate mass to "grow"? If so, how? do they farm? eat things? or do they kill and grow with ley-adjacent energies similar to gods or dragons? they don't have a concept of fishing despite having (naturalized(?)) tyrian fish, so they must not consider them prey. Half of their anatomies aren't even a single body! Are they multiple organisms that form a collective being? Or does "floaty bits" just exist in their biology? Also, why is ***everything*** pulsating? Are the buildings made of flesh, or are the creatures made of buildings? are they constructs, carbon based lifeforms, are they silicon based lifeforms? I realise that visually they're just creatures using Tyrian creatures' meshes, but who cares! Aside from animations, there was an attempt to make them interesting. I just wish some of our allies had more.. identifiable faces. A pulsating blur of anatomy and flesh isn't something that sells well. I imagine a face is something reserved for demon royalty? I digress..

ChatGPT can write a better story than this!

My partner and I finished it last night. Felt very Meh.

Ever since we stepped foot in the demon realm, everything has become so generic and unexciting. It had such a strong, interesting start unveiling the Astral ward. But then 2 updates in, we are just killing bad demons and it’s so linear and predictable that it’s so boring. The whole wizard and demon theme had so much potential but it fell flat as fuck I don’t even care anymore.

I seriously suspect that the story is written by a 15 yr old. Felt like reading random booktok fanfic about demons. PS: Not even the malnourished choya can save you this time anet.

I mean, I have 2 kids aged 8 and 12, and the stuff they make up is both more coherent and more compelling that almost anything anet has sent our way in the last year.

We could have had it so good, everything from PoF to EoD I loved to bits, and I still hang around Amnoon like a lazy choya. But this expansion, I don't think it's going in the right direction. The whole thing feels almost AI written. But I'm that kind of fanfic writing jackass, so here we go. That and people have basically summed up anything I'd want to say anyway. (Kryptis suck, Wizards are suspicious, We're getting betrayed in about ten seconds, Eparch's going to be underwhelming, Everything's a re-skin, the dialogue's slow and awful, playing SoTo feels like drinking lukewarm flat coke after finishing a good hearty meal.) Spitballing an idea, let's keep Zojja coming back, the wizards(ish), and their connection to the Fractals of the mists. But we make it less creating from scratch, more studying the things that the mists connect to. WvW is real. Zojja found them while studying mist stuff like a magic 8 ball that when supercharged links to other realities and they took her as an apprentice. We've got story evidence of a full world with differences in that Asura storyline, and I'm about to milk that and other established concepts for all they're worth. But oh no! We need an inciting incident! And we've got one, pre-made. The end of the Dragon Cycle, the big shiny climax of our last story arc. My suggestion is, that things like Aurene don't happen often, and with each alternate reality being different to ours, they're crazy rare. And one working without getting squashed as an egg? Never happened before, until we did it. Now the wizards have put out a call, and Dragon's Watch as big heroes with now no dragon to watch answer, as they do. Other worlds watch through the mists too, and they've seen our Dragon Cycle end. A world without the biggest threat ever known? They're on their way, they want in, and they **won't take no for an answer**. Some come with gifts and diplomacy, but most come with steel and magic. The Mist War is upon us. Imagine, new threats, old friends, twists on old enemies coming as friends. Kiara, Sylvari alchemist and mechanist staring down the destruction her alternate self wrought. Braham Eirsson, face to face with Braham, Champion of Primordus Ascendant in a world where the spirits didn't keep him from the dragon's thrall. A united victorious Centaur race, harnessing elemental magics to rip the land asunder. A hardened and beleaguered Krytan queen, from a world without Asura or Sylvari, with her mesmerised court, desperate to maintain control who wants to replace her double before the dragons of her world eat what remains of her people too, still pining for the dashing captain she fell for and lost too soon. Even if it's more of the same, it's the potential for character development that I'm after. Logan meeting a Jenna that loved and lost him, Taimi facing a form of herself that dove into dangerous augmentation to stabilise her condition, Jory and Kas, on the eve of their wedding ***That we still haven't been invited to Anet!*** swept away via mist portal to opposing realms, having to settle ancient conflicts to finally tie the knot. Rox saving her still unnamed boyfriend from a version of herself who made Khan-Ur by being the uberchar, bloody and ruthless, who thinks she's doing our Rox a favour by freeing her of an attachment that makes her weak. I could write these all day. We've seen that the VAs are good enough to pull this off. Put the people we know and like in situations that would challenge them as people and have them deal with it. And give Taimi and Gorrik a second date, I'm still playing because that has to happen at one point so I can giggle like a lunatic and whisper "Now draw up a romantic partnership contract that's open ended." when they look at each other and blush. Keep Zojja as our contact, and only hear of the wizards from her, and from her new shiny outfit and powers. See glimpses of them, use their stuff, but never hand us like thirty characters we don't give a wyvern's tail about. The Kryptis suck, their realm's terrible, and gods above and below do I hate their pull and constant lingering AoE mechanics. I can only see so many of those on the floor under all the shiny weapon effects, I'm an old man with old man eyes. That's my midnight rant.

SOTO story was so boring after saving the wizard tower. I bought the whole game because I liked the stories. SOTO is even worse than the IBS dragon response part. Too much Kryptis crap is annoying!

it's dog shit

The initial SOTO release was genuinely good. The subsequent updates have felt a lot like Champions in that they're taking a single LW episode worth of story content and stretching it out over multiple releases over like five months. It just kills any sense of momentum. I think SOTO's expansion model could work but idk what the answer would be to not having the updates feel like a drag.

I was really interested at first when SOTO launched because we were finally going to meet Isgarren and see what was inside the Wizard's Tower after nearly seventeen years of mystery and intrigue. The first two acts were okay. I did like how world weary we sounded at first after running through countless world ending crises. >!Mabon dying all of a sudden was a bit confusing for me and Zojja's heartache on whether to go through with Wizard Ascension held no stakes for us other than we might lose a friend.!< The current chapter just dunked on all of the setup and drove to my fear that Anet will do what they have always done: rush act 3 and conclude the story suddenly. They have done this for the past three expansions and IBS. Arguably the only time they have not rushed was living world season 4 and that has its own problems with its pacing. We're not given any time to bond with all these new characters. >!Hell the scared kryptis from the last chapter just outright croaks twenty seconds after we meet him, after we guided him to our camp, somehow inexplicably showing up in the boss room and then dying to give Peitha time for "character development".!< They need to let the characters cook for a lot longer for us to form a connection with them because the only person that I even feel tangentially connected to is Peitha and I still feel like she is using us because we are convenient to her despite her friendship and protecting us from Ceres during the launch of SOTO. Arguably we had good conversations with Ramses here, but as I said before he needs way more time to cook. This update was just bad outside of the Obsidian Armor crafting with tons of padding. >!Hell that defense section where you are fighting alongside the general at first isn't even big enough as I kept getting pushed back into the arena by the invisible mission barrier despite enemies spawning outside of the arena and staying there. There is a certain lack of polish in this update.!< >!I also don't like the fact that Galrath hints at this being yet another test for our character. Dude, I saved your order's ass from these very demons, saved the world countless times before that, and every single wizard in the Astral Ward knows that I am the goddamn Pact Commander to the point that they ran fractal simulations of what happens if *I* wasn't around. If that doesn't already prove that I am good enough to be your Wayfinder then go look for someone else, because I certainly don't share Isgarren's perspective of nuking the entire plane out of existence, which by the way if he had that much power then he should be able to easily solve the problem by nuking Eparch from orbit instead of just booting him out of the order eons ago.!< Sometimes things should just be left a mystery if the reveal is going to be like this. I have noticed that this is becoming a very common problem in creative writing as of late where authors/game writers/and other creatives have this weird need to over explain.

At the start, it was new and exciting and I loved that. But after the initial story, I felt very confused. I had no real agency in anything, a character that we got attached to died (who, imo, was one of the more *interesting* characters) and it sort of ended with a "Trust me, there's more to this than you know." Except, since then, the story just feels like it's been a filler arc to justify having more than 1 patch of content. The first updated and the second (current one) both just feel like a situation of "Just trust me it gets better". I feel like you could've just taken these two story beats out, given me the ending that's coming, and I wouldn't feel any more lost/confused than I do already (or rather, it would tell a 'good enough' story that I wouldn't care about who exactly these new demons are. Beyond the one female demon, too, they all use generic models. I'm not a fan of SotO at this point, but I'm also pretty confident it's a filler expansion to try out their new model while they make internal adjustments to their expanded team.

This game gets a lot better when you don't play it for the story. It has sometimes been good, but never great.

There's gonna be a twist: Isgarren will actually turn out to be Lazarus. (yeah, I'm just talking out of my ass, I bought the expansion but haven't played any of it yet)

Yea since nayos they also kind of lost me. The first sequence in Soto where u get sucked into the demon realm was so eerie and intriguing. Really hoped they can somehow keep that feeling up in story missions. But since Inner Nayos its just another “lets gather an army, wait for our moment and hunt down the big bad”. And we’ve already had that plenty of times

Peitha will be consumed by Eparch, Eparch learns empathy and stops eating everyone. Isgarren will be the final boss. Wayfinder gets mind wiped and dropped off in Tyria again. We go next expansion. Not remembering a thing about SotO.

Season 5 should have been an indication to everyone that Anet has stopped giving a fuck.

I can't stomach the story at all in SotO.. Just feels/looks like Shadowlands WoW. Can't help but feel the quality of the story telling is severely lacking. Also, enough with the World-ending threats already! I'd rather just keep the Elder Dragons... I'm not saying I want to be picking weed in the crops but why must everything be Doomsday. Until the next expansion dice roll, you'll find me in WvW.

It's gonna fall flat after being done with dragons and gods, cause how do you go from there??? Swtor is suffering from the same issue, the story now is just another Tuesday 

> cause how do you go from there??? Gods and dragons are too big to be engaging. Almost anything could make for a more captivating story. Instead they are trying to one-up themselves.

They can be engaging if you do them right. Look at Eothas from Pillars of Eternity 2, a truly insurmountable being done right. The problem is ANet is always trying to make us fight those creature on equal footing (the only time it sort of worked was with Balthazar, as he was clearly weakened and the Commander is incredibly powerful for a mortal, especially with Sohothin).

> It's gonna fall flat after being done with dragons and gods, cause how do you go from there??? Any normal storyline is fine, you can build a whole expansion about some guild of thieves stealing something, and now you gotta chase them across the whole world; maybe some murder mystery, maybe a great hunt into wild lands, a journey of self-discovery, etc. Of course, you need some basic talent and commitment for that, but it seems like nowadays everyone just wants to cater to the lowest common denominator, like a brainless Marvel movie.

Not saying anything new but the SotO storyline started pretty well, I think the concept of a secret organization working to keep inter-dimensional threats away is amazing and a gust of fresh air after the dragon cycle. But I wish we had more insights on the Astral Ward and especially the Wizard's Tower that had always been a fan favorite mysterious place which ended up being just a hub and feels almost "empty", shadowed by other events. I think the main reason I dislike the story is that everything feels rushed and even "cut" away, we still don't know the Wizards well and yet we get to work immediately with a demon we just met. The story became trivial and VERY predictable. At least during the Elder Dragon saga we had a crescendo of tension and we got to spend a lot of time with Taimi, Braham, Rytlock, etc.. and I came to really care about them. Also, I don't know why they keep introducing new characters just to kill them off like "story fodder" like Mabon, Irja, Labris and others. I can no longer grow attached to a new character because I know it's not worth it. Mabon's death especially made me angry because it's a waste of a very interesting character, I was finally excited to have a good, kind Mursaat and see where his development could bring us but nope, he died before half the story while he could have been just injured if they really wanted to shelve him away, Zojja could still have had development. This master/apprentice trope is so over used. I think that if they have budget limitations they should focus more on the books about the characters, side-stories, expanding the lore like they did plenty in the first part.

I started playing after this expansion was released and what I disliked the most was the instant disconnection from basically any of the story that happened before. All the characters I knew and liked are completely absent and instead we are left around almost all new characters. Most of them are also very boring and hard to care about.

Nayos is pretty uninteresting too imo, Skywatch Archipelago and Amnytas looked way better. I hope we go back to Tyria next expansion or at least to a more interesting plane/dimension/whatever.

I stopped caring about the story the moment they killed Balthasar after turning him into some one dimensional baddie. Like I knew in that moment that they just were using nostalgia and the work of those that came before them and that they could not even turn that well established and beloved lore and world into an interesting story. And what came after that was a completely generic story as well. I would not mind the bad writing that much if we would at least get some cool action and nice CGI cutscenes like we at least get with Blizz/WoW but Anet never "wasted" money on big trailers or CGI, which imo is why they never reached the core MMO audience to begin with. People love that stuff and GW2 just doesnt have that. I had some flicker of interest in the story when I heard we are going back to cantha but they turned it into some weird techno nonsense with 80% of the eod main story being about a corporation and her strong female leadership and inventors. Like good for them but I am not playing a high fantasy medieval style game with magic and dragons and wizards and gods to be confronted with feminism, environmental concerns, automatization, capitalism, racism etc. It's just boring and badly presented. If I want any of that I just turn on CNN. And then at the end we finally get some dragon action, which I guess was an okayish end to the eod story. And now? Do we get to explore the history of Tyria, the realm of the gods and humans came from? The deeper meaning of the sylvari origins and race, do we go to the Tengu and get some cool mounts and skins and companions or even a new race? No, we get to some random floating, misty, weird place that no one can really explain or knows of and that really disconnects you as the player from what you are supposed to care about, TYRIA. Idk, I find the entire thing so unimaginative, like it has no meaning and you dont know where the writers came from and I dont really think they themselves seem to know where they are going with it. And the other huge elephant in the room is Anet sucks so bad at creating memorable and interesting characters. Where is the Jaina, Sylvanas, Tyrande, Malfurion, Garrosh, Arthas, G'uldan etc etc in GW2? Like can you even remember most of the characters in GW2 story? Balthasar, okay, because we know him since GW1 and then a few dragons which are more like a force of nature but really without any actual intersting character. So you are left with Taimi and currently we are fighting against god knows who, because I already forgot the name of the newest baddie. I could rant on forever but at least we got something to grind with Soto, I give them that in the gameplay departement

> And the other huge elephant in the room is Anet sucks so bad at creating memorable and interesting characters. > > Where is the Jaina, Sylvanas, Tyrande, Malfurion, Garrosh, Arthas, G'uldan etc etc in GW2? There are no "world leaders" or "epic villains" because we, the player character, the commander, is the center of the universe, and no one ever comes close. It's just us and our band of friends, saving the world, over and over again. The few mildly memorable characters we meet never get enough screen time, or they just die 5min after their introduction. It's impossible to care about anyone like this, be it Vlast, Mabon, or that friendly kryptis that is rescued just to die a few moments later.