My thoughts on PoF and the new season 4 so far and a thing that keeps bothering me (spoiler free)

These are just my opinions and thoughts. They are coming from a long term active player that enjoys immersive gameplay trough the explorable world, quests and story starting from prophecies back in 2006 ,trough all campaigns and expansions, gw2 2012 ,season 1,2,hot,s3 and now pof.Ill also try to be very brief as im not trying to write a full review here.

The quality in story telling has greatly improved over the years. Dialogue is made in real time, the story instances are prolonged and intertwined with explorable maps.The story instances have multiple interactable objects that provide more ambient and "life" in its environment that also sometimes give you little hints, story or just more flavor.The achievements are more structured and broad and they reward you with ascendant gear, minipets, titles, unique skins and more instead of just simple AP and perhaps a title.The explorable zones have a lot more life as well. Npcs that interact with each other, they move around, they try to help you and directly/indirectly interact with your character differently depending on your choices in the story.And i just love the way objects and npcs behave differently depending on my profession and race. Besides a few rare ones from core tyria (like thief and engineer in hoelbrak) the first one i remember was being able to interact with Scarlets consoles in her drilling machine while other professions cant do it) And not much around that has been made that ive noticed till HoT no?

Over all im very satisfied with the content provided so far. However there is one thing that bothers me more and more, specially now with the release of season 4 episode 1 release.

While i understand gw2 and gw1 share the same worlds, same lore, same old/ancient characters, and while i am very happy to "return" to elona and to see how different it has become after over 250 years under the rule of palawa joko that my old gw1 nightfall dervish released from his "prison"... I cant help but being overwhelmed with "recycled" gw1 content being forcefully shoved in my face....

Lets take a good, and a bad example of this. In the desert there was a giant statue of a hero which under special circumstances would fall down and crumble. Now in PoF we still see the remains of the large statue and some natives decided to make a profit out of it as a attraction. This is good. We have a old thing from the past that logically is still there as a giant statue cant just disappear and the current beings around it have made a use out of it in a completely different way.

Or lets say how the whole abbadon lore was handled in sirens landing. Searching around, investigating and collecting data gave us more answers and lore about that illusive god. And that felt like a successful hunt, looking for clues that lead to anther one, a discovery!

Now lets see a bad example. In the desert we had teleporters that would activate by playing a little memory game back in the first guild wars game. Now that exact same thing is being presented to us in gw2 as a hero challenge in a form of a ghostly "stone" teleporter with a ghost that talks about being fond of his memories when he was alive playing this memory teleporter game....and ends with him saying a nostalgic gw1 thing (being killed by a hydra,which were at that time very fearsome to gw1 players).

Another bad example is adding more and more significant gw1 characters into the game for seemingly no other reason other than nostalgia. I can understand scattering "lost papers" with 2 sentences as a collection achievement in order to form a book that explains what happened to a specific character, or a specific event in the past. But placing Talkhora as a "stiff" awakened burning on the sun for hundred of years enjoying the company of griffons and being able to telepathically communicate with us so she can tell us her story about what happened after nightfall makes no sense to me... It could have been anyone but her enjoying the company of griffonsSame thing as adding Dunkoro as a renown heart npc..again..anyone could be in his place there trying to make amends...

Season 3 has also a similar encounter where suddenly ,out of nowhere livia shows up (which was a huge mystery since gw1 eotn), she interacts with some other characters as if its not big deal for her being a living 280?+ human being, and after summoning the last mursaat (in a weird place to begin with) she disappears and is never heard from again.

And today , in the new living world s4 ep1 we got another gw1 character that could have been anyone else placed in that spot for any other reason... But no, we get that character, his attitude, and his brief story about how he got there (after 250 years...)Also,paragons and awakened undead dervishes that transform themselves in various avatars of the 5 human gods...cool :)

Again, i got no problem with gw1 locations, objects, landmarks, towns and cities being explored and discoveredI have no problem learning more about loose ends form gw1, or learning more about what happened to specific characters from way back when.But do we really need to be doing this by our gw2 character actually facing the gw1 character in person who will deliver us the story and lore of him/herself?!

Do we really need to discover landmarks in a ghostly form which interacts the same way as it was in gw1? Cant it just be a ruin with a durmand priory researcher telling us how it worked and what its purpose was? Maybe also add new lore on top of it that goes even before gw1 time?

I dont know. It was fun meeting all those characters, and going trough memory lane but sometimes i feel im being force given out more and more gw1 content and lore that isnt relevant in any way to current gw2 ongoing events (story wise) and that serves no purposes other than a nudge to us old gw1 players.

What do you think?