Poor pacing into poor storytelling

[Vamp Rook.7835]

Pacing has become poor on last expansions and LW, and always repeats the same structure:

Story -> force to play a few events -> Story -> force to play a few events -> story

And story steps usually makes u to play an event that u already played griding events for unlocking the next story step, what makes a boring pacing and a terrible storytelling because u get disconnected from the story.

I know that right now that's impossible to fix, but for future releases on next expansion maybe this can be improved. 

[ilMasa.2546]

Story step: unlock 3 vistas. 

Pinnacle of story telling

Also if you already discovered those 3 vistas you have to go back and watch them again to complete the step lol

Edited February 27 by ilMasa.2546

[Linken.6345]

Just so you know OP  there are now living world anymore.

[Zebulous.2934]

Is the plot any better?  From what I have read the recent writing has featured bland and safe topics with little character development.  Has the story been thought provoking? Have any of the main characters had to deal with the lasting consequences of their own actions?  

note: Death doesn't count. A dead character doesn't deal with anything, they are simply removed from the story.

[Randulf.7614]

I enjoyed all of Acts 1-3 map and story. These last drip feeds making up Nayos are of a lower standard. Update 3 is going to need to throw everything at this map to elevate it - bounties, adventures, tons of things to find, even hearts if it has to! It's pretty enough, just bare bones empty with a wafer thin story so far.

The Kryptid felt like a threat before we came to Nayos. Now they don't

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, ilMasa.2546 said:

Story step: unlock 3 vistas. 

Pinnacle of story telling

Also if you already discovered those 3 vistas you have to go back and watch them again to complete the step lol

Considering the story brought you to those exact points just a step before, it was extremely likely you've got those vistas then.

14 minutes ago, Linken.6345 said:

Just so you know OP  there are now living world anymore.

Of course there are. They are just calling them "expansions" now so we won;t see as easily as with IBS that we're now transited into expansionless model again.

[ilMasa.2546]

33 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Considering the story brought you to those exact points just a step before, it was extremely likely you've got those vistas then.

I got those vistas while doing the first block of  "do open world events" to unlock the next step of the story.

Hey all im saying is...shouldn't be hard in 2024 to have a quest "understanding" that you already did that step so you don't have to backtrack and do it again a second time...

Also let me skip dialogues.

Edited February 27 by ilMasa.2546

[Knight.6914]

Something is wrong when I look at the latest releases and old expansions or even GW1. It saddens me to see storytelling and atmosphere are not as good as before... I can't tell, but I miss it.

[ugrakarma.9416]

i like the history but i agree with OP that "structure" is repetitive, i feel like i was just playing previous chapter again.

[Sen.7530]

The story is super generic. It's like being written by an amateur/ wannabe writer. What is going on?

[Teknomancer.4895]

3 hours ago, Vamp Rook.7835 said:

Story -> force to play a few events -> Story -> force to play a few events -> story

The word "story" might be a little overgenerous for 3-5 minutes of tedious blather.

I just finished the first step, and what I heard doesn't really make me all that interested in getting dragged deeper into the barf monsters' civil war.

The immediate hard shove toward the zone events just makes the lack of story development even more glaring.

[Wolfofdivinity.6251]

Ya Gw2 story just feels like a half baked indy game anymore. PoF was the last Story that felt decent. Ever since it's just been meh. Whoever wrote Factions should be paid a boat load of money to come back and save GW2's story. Factions was the Guild Wars series Absolute Peak.

[Rvoltpt.8453]

started story... 2minutes in was already yawning...boring start... unlocked  weapon profency and quit the area...  wanted to try new weapon on main char with diferente stats and builds but cant  unless i mess up with 8 templates i already have saved... so im quite bored aready... wish we had more equip templates like we had on arc dps addon...

So yeh that and the boring story start really killed it for me.. kinda dont feel like paying no more.. having more fun in gw1 lately 😛

[Dragenstein.2671]

I'm pretty bugged about this whole SOTO thing.  You end up someplace where everyone disrespects you.  They won't use the name you go by and just call you Wayfinder which doesn't mean anything.  I feel no connection to the characters because they just complain about their problems with the other characters. This isn't really a plot.  In this last "expansion" you are merely a "helper" to the real characters. They always want your help, but never quite seem satisfied with what you do.   All the fights are like the kryptis rifts.  I was having trouble staying awake because I was so bored.  Then it takes kind of a grim turn at the end.  Now we have to wait however many months for more.  Nothing really happens, so it is just a matter of who all dies before the end .

[Linken.6345]

1 hour ago, Sen.7530 said:

The story is super generic. It's like being written by an amateur/ wannabe writer. What is going on?

Maybe chat gpt or open ai wrote it for all we know.

23 minutes ago, Dragenstein.2671 said:

I'm pretty bugged about this whole SOTO thing.  You end up someplace where everyone disrespects you.  They won't use the name you go by and just call you Wayfinder which doesn't mean anything.  I feel no connection to the characters because they just complain about their problems with the other characters. This isn't really a plot.  In this last "expansion" you are merely a "helper" to the real characters. They always want your help, but never quite seem satisfied with what you do.   All the fights are like the kryptis rifts.  I was having trouble staying awake because I was so bored.  Then it takes kind of a grim turn at the end.  Now we have to wait however many months for more.  Nothing really happens, so it is just a matter of who all dies before the end .

They way you say it this sound like core story 60+  follow treeboy all over again.

 

 

Edited February 28 by Linken.6345

[Teknomancer.4895]

1 hour ago, Linken.6345 said:

Maybe chat gpt or open ai wrote it for all we know.

Which would be pretty rich, given the recent TOS change (see sec. 2.2.3.i.).

[Linken.6345]

6 minutes ago, Teknomancer.4895 said:

Which would be pretty rich, given the recent TOS change (see sec. 2.2.3.i.).

Might be the reason we are not allowed ot add anything to notice its already there 🤪

[anninke.7469]

3 hours ago, Linken.6345 said:

Maybe chat gpt or open ai wrote it for all we know.

They way you say it this sound like core story 60+  follow treeboy all over again.

 

 

The treeboy was much more appreciative and didn't treat us like something stinky on his shoe half the time...

[Maria Murtor.7253]

Also to mention, that the actually instanced story content is repetitive as hell. While playing the new content yesterday, I said to myself: "This is so boring." It felt like playing some sort of looter shooter: Fight another wave of enemies. 

[Astralporing.1957]

7 hours ago, Sen.7530 said:

The story is super generic. It's like being written by an amateur/ wannabe writer. What is going on?

Oh, the story, as short as it is, is not all that bad. At least to me it seemed to be better than the one from previous patch. That's about narrative however, because the delivery of that story was definitely substandart and could use a lot of improvement. It's almost as if someone was told to design the quests and story steps for the purpose of distracting the player from what's going on and making him feel bored as much as possible. I nearly fell asleep halfway though it and that's not a good reaction at all.

Not a great fan of the map either. Especially the idea of making the second meta be able to run concurrently alongside the first one (instead of them chaining together) was obviously something that hasn't been thought out well. The new meta also seemed boring (...and now i seem to see a recurring issue with this patch). Not because of the difficulty, but because the main part of the last fight seems to not be the boss, but rather dealing with two Rifts Champions we have seen already. With the main issue being that attacks from one of them are bigger than the platform he stands on (well, at least it wasn't the Champion with Green mechanic)

And that's even without going into how bugged the new map is. One of the instances i was on had like half the new map part covered with stalled events (including the meta one). And while some of them (the nests event around the waypoint, where quite often less than required 20 nests spawns and becomes targettable) had failure conditions that could ultimately reset them, some (like the meta one) did not.

Overall impression is that as far as LS episodes go, this one was somewhere around the bottom of that list. Not at the very bottom (because we still have Champions being a strong contender for that position), but still very close.

TL/DR; version:

Story narrative - okay-ish, better than Patch1 (but still significantly worse than SotO main)

Story delivery - really bad. Worse than Patch 1.

Map - really bad. Worse than Patch 1.

Bug level - somewhat high. Way higher than Patch 1.

Overall result: Please, please, try better next time, because this just isn't good enough.

[Randulf.7614]

28 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Oh, the story, as short as it is, is not all that bad. At least to me it seemed to be better than the one from previous patch. That's about narrative however, because the delivery of that story was definitely substandart and could use a lot of improvement. It's almost as if someone was told to design the quests and story steps for the purpose of distracting the player from what's going on and making him feel bored as much as possible. I nearly fell asleep halfway though it and that's not a good reaction at all.

Not a great fan of the map either. Especially the idea of making the second meta be able to run concurrently alongside the first one (instead of them chaining together) was obviously something that hasn't been thought out well. The new meta also seemed boring (...and now i seem to see a recurring issue with this patch). Not because of the difficulty, but because the main part of the last fight seems to not be the boss, but rather dealing with two Rifts Champions we have seen already. With the main issue being that attacks from one of them are bigger than the platform he stands on (well, at least it wasn't the Champion with Green mechanic)

And that's even without going into how bugged the new map is. One of the instances i was on had like half the new map part covered with stalled events (including the meta one). And while some of them (the nests event around the waypoint, where quite often less than required 20 nests spawns and becomes targettable) had failure conditions that could ultimately reset them, some (like the meta one) did not.

Overall impression is that as far as LS episodes go, this one was somewhere around the bottom of that list. Not at the very bottom (because we still have Champions being a strong contender for that position), but still very close.

TL/DR; version:

Story narrative - okay-ish, better than Patch1 (but still significantly worse than SotO main)

Story delivery - really bad. Worse than Patch 1.

Map - really bad. Worse than Patch 1.

Bug level - somewhat high. Way higher than Patch 1.

Overall result: Please, please, try better next time, because this just isn't good enough.

I almost entirely agree with this although I think the map and event variety is better than part one. However, it doesn’t takeaway from it barely being utilised. They did a pretty effective job converting the Echowald assets and then did nothing imaginative with them from a gameplay point of view.

To split a map three ways and have so little content in it is crazy. There’s so much more they could pack in here. The sep metas is odd though and they run so often it makes it harder getting people for other group events. It really needed to be more like Drizzlewood in style

[WaifuJanna.9108]

11 hours ago, Vamp Rook.7835 said:

Pacing has become poor on last expansions and LW, and always repeats the same structure:

Story -> force to play a few events -> Story -> force to play a few events -> story

And story steps usually makes u to play an event that u already played griding events for unlocking the next story step, what makes a boring pacing and a terrible storytelling because u get disconnected from the story.

I know that right now that's impossible to fix, but for future releases on next expansion maybe this can be improved. 

i personaly like that open world story content. more fun then roaming alone in some story instance. You literally can freely explore the map, do some events, and do the story same time 😄 bit sandbox feeling

[Ashantara.8731]

After reading the above feedback, I feel even less motivated to start playing Update 2 ... 🤔

[Blackari.2051]

wait ...are we calling this a "story" nowadays ? ... like holy kitten 
the last 2 updates should be just a single update at minimum .... the kitten "do events" part that is being used every single time now is absolute garbage and cannot be even considered as a story 
the whole new update has like 40 minutes (if that) of gameplay, and word gameplay is really stretching it in on itself .... like 90% you are just listening to some dialogue that a 1st grader could put together and you actually play the game for like 10 minutes maybe and fight 1 mini boss, who doesnt do anything and like 30 mobs in the rest of the story.
You no longer have any dialogue option even if your choice wouldnt change anything , at least you would have something at least 
dont even get me started on the "go watch vistas" as a part of a story ....

[Zok.4956]

12 hours ago, Dragenstein.2671 said:

All the fights are like the kryptis rifts.

There is also a Wyvern fight which seems copy-pasted from HoT. 

Which then made me aware of how creative and individual and new monsters and fights were at HoT back then. Instead of continuing to farm events for the story, I went back to HoT maps and continued playing there. The 8-year-old content of the HoT maps somehow feels more modern than the current release.