Marrow.9815

That sounds dangerously like content. Those days are behind us.

I just feel like I've lost my mind because I think the dominant response has been positive from the community. I absolutely respect that opinion, but this has really soured me on the franchise, personally. The missions are tedious and frequently broken up by grinds that you probably already did in your free time, but which didn't count towards story progress because you didn't know they were going to interrupt the story to make you grind moments later. When you're not grinding, you're doing busy work, clicking random items, and doing puzzles which really just involve running around aimlessly hunting for clickables near spongy, silent enemies. They turned two missions of content into ten and it was still too little. A lot of the padding also seems to come from the fact that the rifts are needlessly clunky, just like the meta events. Storywise, I honestly feel like I missed crucial context, but I played back through the beginning on two alts to make sure I didn't. Much of the story seems to be coming through location-triggered dialogue that gets thrown at you completely out of order based on which events you're doing. There's also this half-cocked fish-out-of-water plotline they're trying to push that really didn't endear me to most of these NPCs. And more than ever I feel the limitations of their refusal to establish the commander as a real character. They cannot advance the commander's development while also refusing to develop them. GW1 was driven by its story. GW2 may as well not have one. And none of this is made better by the fact that the game's visuals continue to show their limits. Its style is not aging gracefully and that's an issue for an expansion that arguably *needed* to draw you in aesthetically. I also think we only got like two new sets of armor, not counting legendary, so I can't even really comment on how their new gear looks. The only one I got, after completing the entire story in which it would have made sense to be wearing it the whole time, looks...fine? All of this is without addressing what everyone else has already said about the lack of new specializations, the lack of new professions, the tiny world, and even the still-grindy farm for skyscales with the new method. Again, I know a lot of people really enjoyed this one, I respect their opinion, and I definitely see how certain things were positive, but I've been playing less of the game now than I was before the expansion.