General Update
What to say? Life feels pretty steady and even. The company is driving ahead at breakneck speed, but seems to be doing okay financially, so I suppose I can't argue too much. I'm taking Friday off for no special reason, but coming in early tomorrow. Whee.Weather's weird - the concentration of cold and snow in the Northeast making it actually pretty dry and mild here.
I had a discussion last night about the Marionette fight in GW2. My opinion boils down much like the new Tequatl fight - I like the mechanics, but the specific requirements of open world implementation and the scaling of it ultimately makes the encounter boring to me. Why? Because it ends up feeling like it has nothing to do with skill or any individual performance, instead being a simple matter of "do we have enough people?" In turn, that means you have to be in a main server instance during peak hours to have a reasonable shot at victory. It sounds slightly more forgiving than Teq as far as performance, but you still need approximately 125 active players (150 seems to be map capacity from what I've read) present and at least a little coordinated to pull it off.
At least in 10-man and even 25-man (if barely) raids, I felt like I was making a difference. Here, not so much. And that's the same thing with most open world encounters. It's what I consider the "dark side" of GW2's direction, making much of the game feel like a soulless zergfest. That might be different if I had the time and energy to really get actively involved with the server community, but alas.
I also still haven't seen anything further in this release that makes me appreciate Scarlet any more in a narrative sense, and the Marionette seems to sort of come out of nowhere story-wise.
Other games? Our Aeranos fantasy campaign has hit a stopping point for the moment, consider it a "season" break with the intent to pick up the story after ten years or so. We're looking at picking back up our modern urban fantasy Northport game, which started in Unisystem and was played in Dresden Files RPG briefly, and is now being run using Aeranos rules. Heh. Conversions are kind of painful, but so it goes. I need to get back into the proper mindset for a less-than-completely-sane mage who's been put through the wringer so much he's almost convinced of his own immortality.
I had a discussion last night about the Marionette fight in GW2. My opinion boils down much like the new Tequatl fight - I like the mechanics, but the specific requirements of open world implementation and the scaling of it ultimately makes the encounter boring to me. Why? Because it ends up feeling like it has nothing to do with skill or any individual performance, instead being a simple matter of "do we have enough people?" In turn, that means you have to be in a main server instance during peak hours to have a reasonable shot at victory. It sounds slightly more forgiving than Teq as far as performance, but you still need approximately 125 active players (150 seems to be map capacity from what I've read) present and at least a little coordinated to pull it off.
At least in 10-man and even 25-man (if barely) raids, I felt like I was making a difference. Here, not so much. And that's the same thing with most open world encounters. It's what I consider the "dark side" of GW2's direction, making much of the game feel like a soulless zergfest. That might be different if I had the time and energy to really get actively involved with the server community, but alas.
I also still haven't seen anything further in this release that makes me appreciate Scarlet any more in a narrative sense, and the Marionette seems to sort of come out of nowhere story-wise.
Other games? Our Aeranos fantasy campaign has hit a stopping point for the moment, consider it a "season" break with the intent to pick up the story after ten years or so. We're looking at picking back up our modern urban fantasy Northport game, which started in Unisystem and was played in Dresden Files RPG briefly, and is now being run using Aeranos rules. Heh. Conversions are kind of painful, but so it goes. I need to get back into the proper mindset for a less-than-completely-sane mage who's been put through the wringer so much he's almost convinced of his own immortality.
Samantha got Scarlet's journal, and we've read the short story about her, so things do make sense. Even when she was first 'born', she saw the world as an interconnected series of 'parts', and strove to try to discover how these parts worked, and what drove them. She joined the Inquest, got trained by the charr, and learned what she could, then went and did an experiment to see the Eternal Alchemy. She succeeded, but encountered a horror that lurked outside and beyond the Mists. As far as I can tell, this drove her mad. She's felt the thing push and pull, calling at her and trying to drive her forward, and from her journal, this leads to one of two things. 1) She's succumbed to it, and this means that everything she's making is to try to pull it in and destroy Tyria, or 2) She's trying to fight it off, and everything she's making is made to allow her to defeat it. But, to defeat it, it has to be 'here'. Either way, it's bad news. The marionette she got from humanity - the idea of the clockwork guard. She's using it to give people a 'thing' to fight - apparently she's weeding out the weaker heroes, while the stronger heroes survive. Again, this might be a matter of thinning opposition, or making sure that those who remain are ready for what's to come - I'm uncertain.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to reserve some judgement, and I can't speak to this release too much because I've only unlocked one journal piece (I'd be slightly closer to a second one, at least, if the game had given me any clue how the ciphers worked). Most of that, though, I did get from the short story - which is a poor way, in my opinion, to offer important details to a game character (I didn't much care for so much of some events in WoW being covered in novels either). It's one thing to expand on a character outside the game, but some level of information needs to be conveyed in the game to be effective. So far, I still don't care for her status as super-genius prodigy to learn everything from everyone better than anyone else ever in a short lifespan. Hero or villain, that tends to strike me as lazy characterization that rubs me the wrong way. It makes a character far less relatable to me, and thus less interesting. And in Scarlet's case, it also strikes me as unnecessary. Perhaps even more than Scarlet herself, though, I'm bugged by the factions she's gathered. These are pretty massive forces, one of which (the aetherblades) seem to have come out of pretty much nowhere. How and why any of these people are working for Scarlet is unexplained in anything I've seen. A plant girl walks up and somehow convinces five or six different groups to band together under her control - that puts a real strain on my suspension of disbelief. But on top of that, somehow still no one knows exactly what the heck her ultimate goals are. I'd think that pirate captains and a Flame tribune or whatever might want to ask before throwing in so whole-heartedly. It doesn't make sense to me that she has some pitch that can win all them over, but the PC-centric factions don't seem to have caught one whiff of it (the Order is supposed to find out stuff like that). I know, ultimately, plot often determines events, but I hate it when things feel to me like they're happening just because the plot says so. I want some facade there that I can buy into at least a little. And for me, this has been failing. Scarlet apparently has some special charisma or bargaining power when dealing with these factions, but when in PC view, she comes across as "crazy sauce," which makes it impossible for me to believe anyone would rally behind her.
ReplyDeleteMind, her crazy sauce could be an act for the public.
ReplyDeletePoooossible. If so, however, Arenanet's got a challenge in pulling off such a reveal that doesn't feel cheap for being a last minute "hey, this character's totally different than presented!"
ReplyDelete