What is your opinion on IceBrood Saga

[Fangoth.4503]

**overall: 1

Grothmar and Bjora: they are fine, nice maps, interesting concept with the introduction of strikes.

• Vision of the past: terrible, take the interesting concept of strikes to destroy it by releasing forging steel
• Drizzlewood: nice map, bad meta and terrible strike
• Champions: makes youselves a favor, don't release more and move devs to work on EoD

**Strike: You want to increase the number of player raiding? they release an ingame guide that player can lookup to have a detail of boss mechanics and the dev intended strategy to defeat that boss. It can really help the player that still move away from green in pirate fractal... and gives a player something to do during the multiple downtime between pulls ant it will be way more helpful that escorting a tank or killing stupidly weak adds for 4minutes.

**Dragon mission response: like remove the initial 5minutes thing at start. No one does it as it is not interesting at all and whether or not you complete it the mission continue so its better to go make a coffee and come back. is it reproducible? not at all, there is nothing to gain out of that except headhecks. Like stop wasting your time on it and work on EoD it's your only hope right now...

Putting icebrood saga on hold when starting working on EoD and releasing developpement updates, like few mins of gameplay in one of the new map, new specs updates etc to feed the player. then finish icebrood saga after EoD release before starting next living world would have been way better than ruinning the end of icebrood saga!

I'm definitively not gonna buy EoD at release as there is no raid, devs are wasting their time removing content from fractals and dungeons instead of adding any and living story are getting worse and worse, so yeah I will wait until the first raid is being released if it ever happens.

[Blocki.4931]

It's better than expected in many parts, a bit weaker than I had liked in others. I really enjoy the DRMs, but I also took my sweet time with them.

[NotTooFoolish.7412]

The idea wasn't bad, it's nice to revisit the far shiverpeaks again.Recent releases are not as appealing as the beginning of Saga, the content feels too diluted for me. I've done the first DRMs couple of times, the 2nd batch I've done only to complete the story. I might revisit them to complete the achivements, but not in the near future.

It's nice to see the old maps in new light, but it doesn't have the appeal of visiting parts of Tyria we haven't seen since GW 1.

[Pifil.5193]

@Randulf.7614 said:

@mindcircus.1506 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:As other people have said I think it's a shame they're so obviously rushing it because of the complaints about not having another expansion after season 4.Are they?I mean when IBS was originally presented to us wasn't it that the last several parts would be with the developers trying to incorporate the aspects they most liked about s1 into the story? or maybe it was a puff peice for an MMO site where this was mentioned. How they wanted to change the story telling near the end to do this.Isn't that exactly what they are doing now? Giving us these instances where places we know are under attack/change?And if indeed that was the plan all along, then how is it rushed?These DRMs have clearly been the plan from the beginning. To transition the game towards a place where they can tell the stories they want without worrying about the headaches that the development approach to s1 created. In a way that makes them repeatable and relevant as group content.The problem isnt that they have rushed the end of Icebrood, the problem is that they are spreading it out too thin. What should have been 4 months of content updates now becomes 6-8 while they continue work on the expansion.I don't think this was rushed. I think it was the plan all along, but that the DRMs would release weekly or biweekly.I like what we are getting, but I will forever wonder what we could have had and how much more interesting it could have been if only people had been willing to give them a chance instead of endlessly going on about the game dying because they didn't have to pay for it.To blame the portion of the playerbase is a little puzzling.This was the play by Anet,Don't be surprised if a lot of your End of Dragons story is told in a similar way.

Quite so. They hinted at the Champions releases being this way as far back as Feb 2020. We simply do not know if there was a change of direction and if there was, when that happened. It's possible Champions wasn't meant to be the end of the Saga and much more was planned of course. With the Game Director leaving and seemingly never replaced, I suspect some change may have happened around the time of the presentation, but it's clear a lot of this was always going to happen expac or no expac

Yeah, they said that in February, shortly before Mike Z left and the expansion announcement. However, only 6 months before, around the icebrood saga announcement, Mike Z said that they had no plans of making any more expansions. He also said they had four fully staffed teams to work on the Saga.

I think it's highly likely that the decision to make an expansion after all resulted in the icebrood saga being redesigned and scaled back. How else would they be able to get the people to make the expansion for this year? The people to design the maps, events and other content? If those four fully staffed teams haven't been redirected to the expansion then what are they doing?

I didn't like everything in the saga but I have to acknowledge and appreciate the ambition shown in the earlier episodes, new world bosses, the visions of the past, the scale of Drizzlewood, the strikes that came alongside those episodes, the finale seems very incongruous with that scale and ambition shown earlier. A single episode's content starting 4 months after the previous release and stretched out over 7-8 months.

Is it possible that they always intended to end the saga in this manner? Possible but I think it's very unlikely, this saga is looking increasingly likely to limp to an unsatisfactory conclusion. I can't imagine a world where this was their original plan back when the whole team was focused on it.

[Dreamy Lu.3865]

A 1 from my side.I liked somewhat of the prologue in Grothmar. After it, I disliked about 80% of the content. With the last episodes, it's up to 100%.I had not finished the "Truce" episode when the new one "Power" came out. I did only first step of this new one and stopped. I didn't complete several of the mastery tracks and it doesn't bother me. Since I play GW2 (since beta), it's the first time that I let story business unfinished and don't care about. It's no good sign.However, I don't want to criticize because it's a matter of tastes and preferences. In my case, simply, this content doesn't interest me. That's all.

[Ashen.2907]

@Yggranya.5201 said:

@mindcircus.1506 said:

@Yggranya.5201 said:

@mindcircus.1506 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:As other people have said I think it's a shame they're so obviously rushing it because of the complaints about not having another expansion after season 4.Are they?I mean when IBS was originally presented to us wasn't it that the last several parts would be with the developers trying to incorporate the aspects they most liked about s1 into the story? or maybe it was a puff peice for an MMO site where this was mentioned. How they wanted to change the story telling near the end to do this.Isn't that exactly what they are doing now? Giving us these instances where places we know are under attack/change?And if indeed that was the plan all along, then how is it rushed?These DRMs have clearly been the plan from the beginning. To transition the game towards a place where they can tell the stories they want without worrying about the headaches that the development approach to s1 created. In a way that makes them repeatable and relevant as group content.The problem isnt that they have rushed the end of Icebrood, the problem is that they are spreading it out too thin. What should have been 4 months of content updates now becomes 6-8 while they continue work on the expansion.I don't think this was rushed. I think it was the plan all along, but that the DRMs would release weekly or biweekly.I like what we are getting, but I will forever wonder what we could have had and how much more interesting it could have been if only people had been willing to give them a chance instead of endlessly going on about the game dying because they didn't have to pay for it.To blame the portion of the playerbase is a little puzzling.This was the play by Anet,Don't be surprised if a lot of your End of Dragons story is told in a similar way.

So, are DRM possible to complete solo? Because if the answer is "no" they might as well not exist. If that is what the future holds, then that's bad.Of course they are.But to say that content must be soloable to exist in an MMO is among the more misguided comments someone could make.

From how things are designed in GW2, anet agrees with me. Want to twist my arm in an attemt to make me join your grouping thing? I'll just bail insted.

So, how is the design of raids, fractals, strike missions, sPvP, and those dungeons that absolutely require a team an indication that Anet agrees with you?

[Sarrs.4831]

Bjora Marches is alright.I love Drizzlewood, apart from siege clogging up my bags. It's very Silverwastes v2 which I like and I love long meta-events.I was really lukewarm on DRMs at first but honestly they're just a straight up better version of story instances.

What's there is good, it's just very clearly been scaled back because of the expansion.

As far as the story goes I'm not really sure. It does feel undercooked, probably because most of the development resources are going into EOD.

[felix.2386]

its just incredibly low budgeted fillers to keep u repeating the same thing till EoD release.

[Manasa Devi.7958]

It was okay until the Champions part. Not perfect, but it kept me entertained. Champions is just terrible.

[crepuscular.9047]

• Prologue = 8, Map metas are very player friendly, can easily duck in-out the map during metas, would be nice if the strike is more punishing

• Bjora P1 = 9, strikes are fun

• Bjora P2 = 7, still feel like Drakkar meta needs some tuning, strike is fun

• Vision of Past = 2, good to show us what happened in between, but FS (Fake Strike) is a massive time sink, let us skip to the end Anet, there are 3 bloody choppers just sitting there doing nothing

• Drizzlewood P1 = 9, meta is good, strike is good too

• Drizzlewood P2 = 3, plenty of complains on the forum already about the meta, 8 months already still nothing is done about the length of it

• Champion = 1 (1 for NPC dialogues to push the story forward, so the rest are 0), DRMs are a massive fail, they are just copies of FS, which players already complained how overly boring it is, and it's stupidly difficult to find any cm groups (at least in my play hour, everytime i look on lfg it's empty); btw, why the does new infusion turns players into a turd man/woman? the Deldrimor dwarves looks like mithril after the Rite of the Great Dwarf in GW1 https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Transformed_Jalis.jpg

[trixantea.1230]

The first part of Icebrood was enjoyable but the Champions episodes feel like a scam because all that Anet did is to reuse old maps fill them with different NPCs.

[acdspydar.8920]

@Fimbulvetr Wraith.2379 said:First time in fifteen years they have convinced me to quit guild wars. So a solid rating of one as I can't even try to care. it started well enough but then just became a blubbery, flabby ,and bile-streaked mass of repetitive content. Same ideas just new (ish) places. Honestly I would rank it lower if it were possible.

I actually agree with this. I feel like the PvE devs found a formula that generated positive responses around the time HoT launched and just kept using the same formula ever since, but have gradually become lazier with the details, while trying to increase the overall difficulty.

There's been some potentially great ideas, but the execution is lackluster at best. I'm not excited to continue with the story anymore. Maybe, if/when they release EoD, hopefully sooner than soon™, it'll bring fresh and exciting content with unique mechanics and dynamics.

[Sylvari.2953]

2/10.First 2 episodes/maps are OK but that's about it.Story is meh, Charr is my least favorite race so I don't really care about them, sorry.I absolutely hate Braham, can we have an option to sacrifice him or something?Meta events are lackluster, the metal concert was fun though.Masteries are useless, I won't max them because I don't even spend time on the maps where they are relevant.DRMs are the worst and most boring content in this game. I'll do them once to finish the story and I'll never touch them again.

[Crono.4197]

8/10

Yeah, I know I'm the minority, but I kind of enjoy the Icebrood Saga. I don't get why so many people don't like it.I don't really have any complaints about anything up to Champions. And when it comes to Champions, my only complaint is that they split it into chapters and now each chapter is a bit short.Dragon Response Missions are ok in my eyes, I do 2-3 of them each day ever since they came out. They are like mini story-dungeons to me and the fact that they aren't too difficult is a plus, I don't like difficult content, it would create more toxicity in the game if they were as hard as strikes or raids.I also like where the story is going, I expected Jormag to be an enemy from the begging and not an ally.

What I've always liked in this game the most are the story, world bosses, metas and just doing random stuff through the world.I'm not into farming for achievements or high rewards, getting legendaries, doing strikes and raids. Maybe that's why I like it while others don't, dunno.

[Westenev.5289]

This season left me wanting a metal legion encore.

Storywise, Anet handles horror and slice of life well, but drops the ball when it comes to dragons and dragons watch in general. Maybe it's time to drop the dragon plots, stop the war campaigns, and do some fun slice of life for a season or two?

Fire and steel was fun. It's like I'm playing alongside other players, so my enjoyment of the content isn't tied to how well they perform. The tank and sniper parts were cool, and the rocket launchers were super metal.

Strikes and Drms are just horrible. They prove Anet is out of touch with their community, which can be split in two camps - the "100 kp or kick" party, or the "I think melee is scary, I'm a casual" party. Anet needs to seriously consider buffing mesmer gs, ranger longbow or whatever weapon bad players use before pushing this sort of content.

Drizzlewood is the new meta map of the week, and probably should have been the sole focus of lws5. The first half of the map is fun, but the second half feels like half an hour of follow the commander tag.

[Ashantara.8731]

Bjora Marches with its dark, spooky forest, puzzles, dungeons and bits of ancient Norn mythology (especially the old library) was fantastic. I also love the weather effect during the first meta, and the variety of events. The story there was enjoyable as well.

Unfortunately, they missed the opportunity to dive deeper into Norn lore after that and add more hidden places and puzzles and an adventurous mythological feel for the season. :/

The introduction of Strike Missions is also a big plus in my book. :+1: The newer DRMs are also quite enjoyable, as are the factions event weeks.

Then there was the lousy implementation of build "templates" - thanks for that. :angry:

The Charr part I didn't enjoy for most part. Yes, the intro map was a lot of fun and well designed (the jumping puzzle, the concert, the map per se) - but I can no longer take the Charr seriously. A teen warband of unintelligent brats, an imperator who fell from grace (i.e., Smodur), another imperator who's megalomaniacal (i.e., Bangar), more of Rytlock's immature emotions and grumpy babbling, badly written casual modern talk dialogue all over the place (not just Braham but almost everyone). Ugh. Away with it!

So, overall, rather a disappointment for at least 50% of its content.

[Daishi.6027]

This may be arguably unfair, but my conception of content is always taken as a whole. If I cannot enjoy PvP, WvW, I cannot in turn enjoy PvE content. If I cannot enjoy Fractals and Raids with the class or archetype I want to play; I cannot enjoy PvP, WvW.

Open world content is such a mundane thing, that I can appreciate, and enjoy it as the bridge; but will never be able to hold my attention alone. Even less so when it doesn’t organically facilitate community interactions.

As it stands now I’m so utterly displeased with PvP, and my main class, and the archetype, that I cannot find enjoyment in Ice brood. Ultimately why would I want to play in a world where I can’t have fun playing what I want to play? Especially when double standards are considered valid to the devs in the competitive and balance scenes.

I stopped playing around the time we lost voice acting, I only log in for about 5 min to get updates knowing that if I ever did come back I’d have to pay. And I have the expectation the pendulum will eventually swing back; or fall off its chain entirely. (Hence why I even post or try to stay in the loop.) But by the time voice acting was added back it’s been far to late, and the disconnect is to large.

On top of the fact good will has not been restored; customer service and their fairness has also significantly declined, I and my friend who still play this game have had quit e a few bad run ins in the past few years; which has soured the experience even more.

Again maybe some of these are unfair standards and conflations. But they had over 8 years to make common problems, not be problems.

[Kurrilino.2706]

I somehow have a hard time to even call the last episode an episode.It was exactly like the one before without any story. Just portal to 3 locations and hold the town.

Thank goodness it doesn't matter you archive something or not. At the end of the timer you get the mission complete.I just went down the kitchen and let the other players deal with that stuff.

Why is this garbage even produced????

Just take the resources and put it into the new expansion

[Tekoneiric.6817]

I think the best part of it the trailer. For me it mostly hasn't lived up to the hype of the trailer. The few maps we got were decent but navigating them can be tedious even on mounts. Either the portal scroll should have offered where to end up at or there should have been mesmer portals to send you to the second rally locations on the two maps main maps. The Drizzlewod Coast meta needs a lot of work. It's to long when you do the combined meta. Many including myself have offered suggestions to fix it.

I'm not a fan of strike missions. I just don't like closed instance format that depends rallying players to form a team to tackle them. I like bounties over strike missions. Yes bounties could be improved but I prefer the open world scramble of players to the target. Closed instance limited player content like strike missions, raids, etc is an environment that isn't friendly to casual players, new ones or players who don't like attitudes the content tends to foster. I'm not against the content because some people like the format. I've offered suggestions to improve them and increase their release speed while making open world players not feeling left out.

I do think that Dragon Response missions are a good compromise but I feel like the length of the episode have suffered due to their inclusion. Champions chapter 2 was better than chapter one. It felt a like a complete episode, a little short but complete.

I know that updating old content is never on their priority list but I think the Dragon Response Missions format would be a good way to go back and revamp old content to be more flexible. I could see the format improving Dragon's Stand Meta by splitting the meta into different lane public instances that work like DR missions while leaving the non-meta map open for general exploration. They could triple the number of players doing it. The entry portal could tell players which lane needs support.

[Poormany.4507]

5/10 - The prologue was excellent, but then the Saga just seemed to go downhill for me in many ways. Bjora was an average LW map, and I haven't been back since doing a few of the achievements. Drizzlewood was much better in terms of replayability, but suffered due to the meta event being too long due to the split map. Champions just feels like filler content that solely exists to fill the content drought until EoD is released.

Story and map-wise, I was expecting a full Jormag vs Primordus expac with epic maps for each dragon, including new underground content, so the Saga putting all of that into a very rushed story was a huge letdown to me ever since they made clear that was the direction they were going. If they kill off Primordus in a single episode of DRM missions without a new map, I will be very disappointed. However, if they do tie the Jormag/Primordus conflict into EoD, I do think it would be a good way to go.

Gameplay wise, some of the masteries are useful outside of the Saga maps, while others (primarily the Raven and essence ones), just don't feel worth getting due to their limited use. Achievements in the Saga have been very bad imo, as the amount of grind they require makes me not want to start them. Before the Saga, I aimed to get every meta achievement and played regularly to do so, but since then, I only got the prologue one and did not even try to get the others due to boring, repetitive grind (do x event 25-50 times) or expensive skin collection achievements being required for the meta. I really hope they go back to the pre-saga achievement variety (exploration, non-material/gold gated collections, lore collection etc.) in EoD.

[lezbefriends.7516]

It was good until Champions.

[atrimentalis.5302]

After seeing Heart of Thorns there's no way I'm spending money on it.

[AzureShiron.7658]

My biggest gripe is, the humans got a human centric expansion, the sylvari got one with a lot of lore and info for them, but the charr and norn have to share their 'expansion'? the charr already get shafted on a lot so this has left a very bad taste in my mouth. The writing has been fairly solid but the previously stated has left my view on the full thing tainted.

[voltaicbore.8012]

What makes garbage stinky and universally despised? If you've ever taken a look at what goes into your own/your community's garbage, you'll notice that everything in there was either useful and desirable to us, or at least part of something else that was useful and desirable. It becomes garbage when we throw it in a heap with a bunch of other pieces of formerly useful stuff, and we leave it to rot.

This is more or less how I feel about how the Saga turned out. I like almost every individual piece of it, and feel that the vast majority of what they introduced has a ton of potential. Charr civil war? Great potential for exploring how a society utterly defined by warfare and military organization handles the evolution of conflict and threat. The Norn (especially Jhavi, descended of both Jora and Svanir) having another crack at Jormag? Also awesome, especially given that ANet was willing to let characters speak directly with the Spirits for the first time we've seen in-game. Ryland? Sure, he's just kind of dumped on us as Bangar's very own Mary Sue, but he allows us to explore the relationship between Charr parents through the lens of our buddy Rytlock and the very interesting new arrival Crecia. All of these, if given the right amount of space to breathe and get properly developed, could come together to make a compelling narrative whole.

And that is precisely what did NOT happen. Instead of doing each of the narrative justice, ANet has just breathlessly piled then on, one after another, without really tapping into their potential. The result? Garbage. Things that could have worked well together are instead just smushed into a container way too small for them to fit, and they all just fester and rot in there together. Champions is like the lid of the garbage can- it feels so rushed, as if they are stumbling toward concluding the story just so we can put a lid on it and walk away from it all by the time EoD comes out.

I am so very disappointed, but still hopeful that EoD will be nothing like the Saga in terms of the problems I described above.

[Perisemiotics.4579]

up until Drizzlewood it was quite good, like a 7/8 (still inferior to S4 imo) but this second half... I don't hate it though, I'm enjoying the diff. mechanics with this 2nd round of DRMs but for a LW season it's extremely underwhelming to say the least. and I don't accept the reasoning that it's because the team is working on the expansion - S3 was running fast and even had that extra final episode whilst PoF got finished seamlessly; granted, different times and studio and yet, to portray an epic clash between Jormag and Primordus through these DRMs and "factions" alone is going to be hard to swallow.