Sirius.4510

It would make sense for the frequency to go down to something more like Triple Trouble, but still be there for people who want to play it at a reduced difficulty level. Due to time constraints it's looking like I'll have to hunt for private squads to complete a few of the achievements - that will be... interesting 🙂

I'm not a graphics programming expert, but I'm going to guess it's because a significant part of their players' computers still don't support DX12, while they now almost all do support DX11.

Hm. I do have one and it's probably my second-most-played character, but now that you mention it, I'm not really sure when the last time I saw another was.

I do tend to think people complain too much, but when a major arc is wrapped up this quickly, the results are never going to be great. Though I think part of me was relieved for it to just be over, given how drawn-out the DRM phases have made it feel (even though it really wasn't). Still, there was a new map, sorta, which I was thinking there might not be. It did have a reasonably epic battle on it, at least as much as you could reasonably have hoped. And I guess now we have to hope EoD makes up for the abridgement of IBS. I assume they didn't really want to do that, but maybe the business situation didn't leave any better alternatives.

I wouldn't go too far with this. ArenaNet's founders (Wyatt, Strain, O'Brien) had several years' experience at Blizzard working as programmers on StarCraft, Diablo etc., and Wyatt's blog suggested they'd learned a lot of hard lessons about what to do and what not to do from that time. The company itself may have been new but its leaders weren't.Regardless, the GW1 engine was designed in the early 2000s when PCs on the market were all single-core, and it performed the job for which it was originally intended well (GW1 was rock-solid at a time when games rarely were). But then the scope and demands expanded, and it's not a simple task to scale up to multi-core. Some engines have done it (e.g. Unreal), but if your business priorities are always "ship the next expansion/game", major overhauls to the engine are just going to keep getting punted down the road, and the more you build on top of it, the harder it gets to move later on. And so we are where we are now, with a severely single-threaded CPU perf constrained game.

Honestly I think the best argument going around here is the "it hurts my eyes/gives me headaches" one. For accessibility reasons if nothing else, it probably pays to give players a way to rein it in a bit.Most of the rest comes across as people trying to dictate what everyone else should like, which is never going to make any headway.

Twitch reportedly has 140 million monthly active users. That's not really niche. Not everyone "gets" it - I'm not super into it either, just found it's a handy way to keep from getting bored during workout sessions :D - but it's popular.Now, obviously, not all of those users are going to find GW2 streams, or watch them, or decide they want to play it. But it's worth considering nonetheless. Although there is already a respectable streamer presence in GW2 on Twitch.

I think you're more or less on the right track there. Though I don't know if I see ArenaNet pulling a "kill the commander", because then you have to explain how you replaced them and figure out some kind of transition where the existing Dragon's Watch etc characters adjust to the commander's death, replacement, and fairly quickly have to act the same with a "new race" character as an "existing race" character so they don't need to split the dialogue forever. They might still do it, but it'd be a tricky balancing act. It might be possible to instead appear alongside the commander (who would be an NPC in this case) instead of replacing them, but that introduces sufficient complexities it might not work out either. So I'd expect the game would pretend you were always the commander but not allow you to play old story content with the new race. Then you warn new players that they probably want to start playing with an existing race first, or they're going to miss stuff. And that way you don't really need to do a big tutorial either; the character can just start at level 80 and have some kind of introductory story that explains how they joined the Pact. It sounds like WoW does something similar with its "allied races". Obviously it's not ideal, but I suspect for most players who want new playable races, it beats never adding any at all. The one significant problem is that it still adds cost to future content, because you still have to handle voicing (and GW2's player character has quite a lot of voice lines, for an RPG) and you still have to set up new armor skins to work. So ANet might still have decided "no", but that said, there aren't a lot of other interesting things to add for expansions at this point.

Kind of like GW1's "Hard Mode"?There might be some interest in this, but I'm a bit concerned about the "damage sponge" trend making it more tedious than challenging...

I mean, both things can be true. It's not like those we encountered before were likely to be representative of everyone in the Dominion of Winds.But I do agree (though I liked the character) that her style of speech probably needed more explanation.

Matthew Mercer is a talented guy, but oh boy, what a challenge. Agreed, hopefully over time he can nail it.

On average, I'd vote for the beetle races as toughest because there's the steepest learning curve for them (I still struggle to control them). And that applies to all the races.But in terms of peaks, not really. Not So Secret is far more difficult (and, for most people, frustrating) than any of the rest... and then you have Chalice of Tears and whatever the Draconis Mons puzzle was called, that are just obtuse and go on forever. No beetle race holds a candle to those. :)Toughest griffon course would have to be the master course in Labyrinthine Cliffs, when it's open. I recommend making sure you have a steady, high framerate for that one - adjust graphics settings if needed - makes it far easier to thread the needle at the end there. It's probably more technically challenging than the beetle races, but it's also shorter so it may take less time overall to get gold... but your mileage may vary.I do wish they'd bring those back. Wasn't such a big fan of beetle racing but it's also been a while since they added one of those...

I'd rather see a "back to the future" approach - a new game that takes the essence of GW1, but makes it feel more fluid and modern, and moves on with a new story. I have no particular desire to see a re-run of the GW1 story again - large parts of it weren't really that good anyway. But the instancing, that actually was a good idea. I don't think we really "got it" at the time - with all the MMOs floating around - but it's far easier to prevent combat from degenerating into all the lag, visual noise, etc we get from raid bosses now. Last but not least... anything like this needs a business case. Adding a fresh coat of paint to GW1 is probably not going to recoup costs if you don't have something to sell to prospective players that they actually want to spend money on. If it doesn't look like it'll make money, I don't see NCSoft green-lighting it.

There's an empty tab in Goro's "shop" titled "Tengu Relics" that I suspect is supposed to be used eventually (assuming it's not cut content from Ep3 that someone forgot to remove the evidence of). That doesn't necessarily point anywhere in particular, but it does have me wondering if Mineral Springs shows up at some point, since that's the one unvisited place in the Shiverpeaks where you might find those.

There is some nuance to it, though. I haven't been able to make a clean comparison, but I think the griffon's base flying speed is faster than the skyscale; but if you use the skyscale optimally (meaning the corkscrew spin as frequently as you can - which most people don't seem to bother doing), you can get considerable extra speed out of it. On the other hand, you can also get extra speed out of the griffon with a partial dive, it just doesn't last indefinitely. Which one wins in a race is highly dependent on terrain. If you're going uphill, it's probably going to be the skyscale. (If it's very flat, it probably will be too, but then again, most likely you didn't ask yourself that question and just pulled out roller beetle instead.)Long-distance of course you'll usually want to use both - I think the skyscale can get high enough off even flat ground to switch to griffon and get a full swoop out of it. I wish the game had some actual air races to test this out with, though ? So far they've all been on the ground, which is great and all but it's time for some variety...

I use griffon more than skyscale, but not because I use skyscale rarely... I just tend to use it as a launch vehicle for griffon. Look for a nearby high spot, climb it, touch down on top to refill the height gauge then fly as high as I can go, leap of faith -> glider -> griffon. Virtually always gives enough space to get full speed and cross the map to wherever I want to go. Theoretically roller beetle would do that faster, and it does on reasonably flat or uncomplicated maps, but otherwise I'd rather not have to worry about hitting obstacles. (Griffons actually go where you want them to, it's great. ;)) Edit: Almost forgot...

It gives the impression that a lot happened between last episode and this one - I assume in those few months, Bangar was deemed a traitor, formed his own organization, and started recruiting from other legions... maybe not in that order... and the other legions were forced to ally against him due to depleted numbers... but it all happens while we're not there. Kind of like why the war is over there in the first place. It's impossible that ArenaNet didn't consider that question - most likely it's because of proximity to Jormag - but it hasn't been explained so far. Which I'm not sure I'm a fan of either. I kind of got it with Almorra, where the twist wouldn't have worked if her death weren't off-screen, but it's difficult to imagine a similar Really Good Reason for this narrative decision. There could have been some exposition... somewhere...

I would have to figure Ryland's in a pretty dark place with the way things have gone. The war took a turn, the cost is probably something he wasn't prepared for, and with this new "Frost Legion" maybe things still look winnable but what kind of victory is it when everyone is effectively Icebrood? He probably has deep doubts about Bangar but hates the United Legions more. So I see him being that kind of nothing-left-to-lose character that could go pretty much any which way...I agree that he probably doesn't survive the saga. Though it wouldn't be a total shock if he sacrifices himself to save Rytlock and/or Crecia, given they're the only characters that still like him.

I thought this was a joke at first. Factions has interesting aspects to it, but the story arc is probably the least compelling of any GW1 campaign. Shiro feels like a generic anime villain. Especially in his cutscenes.

That's a good point; we already know Kralkatorrik was struggling to handle the extra magic released from the deaths of Zhaitan and Mordremoth. It's not unreasonable to assume that Aurene, too, has her limits.

I could see Shaman as a new elite spec in next expansion. Revenant would seem a natural fit, or Ranger possibly, or perhaps Elementalist or Necromancer. I'm not sure whether you've already counted this, but I get the impression most of the "druid" classes in video games are derived in some form from how they were presented in Dungeons and Dragons. As it happens, the D&D version (at least early on; I think it's a bit narrowed down in 5e) seems to have one of the most diverse capability sets; there's the nature-themed magic part, which had a little bit of healing but also things like moving earth and plants around, calling lightning or ice storms, and summoning wild animals; there's an animal companion; there's a shapeshifting component; and a certain amount of combat capability with simple weapons like a staff or a dagger.The common modern archetype of druids being healers might have come courtesy of EverQuest. They don't appear to have had that focus in other contemporary RPG series, such as Ultima, Might and Magic, or Diablo.

It was nowhere near as bad as crafting Nevermore, but skyscale did take a fair bit of work, yeah. Lots of running around LWS4 maps doing events. I found it helped to work on achievements for those maps at the same time... gives you a reason to be there and organically pick up materials, even if not as quickly as a focused grind.It seemed pretty manageable even on a more casual schedule, although I think I might have spent a couple hours on it a night for most of two weeks back when it first came out. I don't regret it, even if I mainly use skyscale as a launch vehicle for griffons these days ?

There's no point in a WoW-style "classic" release given nothing was really taken away from GW1 (I mean, maybe the pre-power creep experience, but... eh...). A remake would at least make a difference, but I'm not sure I'd want that either. There are things about GW1's story that didn't age all that well, or that were a little hokey even back at the time... I'm not sure I'd look forward to reliving Shiro's existential angst. There's only so much that better voice acting and animation can save. ;) Something I could get behind is a more "back to the roots" adaptation of Guild Wars... take the deck-building aspects people liked so much, combine them with a more modern control scheme and game engine, and use that to tell new stories in the GW universe. Or maybe explore old stories from angles we didn't see. Any era you want. Whatever suits.And it would be a gross oversight not to try to build a great competitive game out of it, of course. Nothing inherently prevents a GW reboot being as good a spectator sport as DotA or Overwatch.

I recall some of the beta weekends before the original GW2 release in fact ended with battle royale events. They were interesting, though I have to admit I haven't been inspired to play Southsun Survival much.