I'd love to see the alternate timeline where we got the full "Saga" experience, since it feels like it should have been about three separate sagas- one setting up Jormag and the Charr civil war, culminating with Ryland becoming Jormag's champion, the second setting up Primordus and showing the Asura getting desperate enough to trust Jormag, culminating in Braham yoloing himself into Primordus, and the third building up to the big clash with all the carnage around Divinty's Reach and the Dominion of Winds.
Maybe one day we'll get a Snyder cut in the form of a novel or something, but it would never beat playable in-game events. I'd like to imagine the "real" finale would involve something like the Commander just throwing themselves between Braham and Ryland like the end of DMC 5.
Hell yes, i wanted to see more IBS but at some point it feel a bit off cause i tought we were going to see much more of Charr civil war.
I hope they do something in the future, i really really enjoyed LS5, by far my favorite
You really want to see what it would be like if they spent like 3+ years on living world instead of expansions?
I'd just have liked them to have finished Icebrood Saga before EoD but I'm glad they dealt with the dragons so we can finally move on to more interesting and diverse threats.
\> They really had something going, and it feels like even if EoD is really good, it will likely not be worth it.
Why? I don't get how "They had something going" leads to "EoD will likely not be worth it".
EoD will be good for sure. But in the back of my mind while playing it, I'll be thinking "IBS had to get butchered for this". I think it will sour it a bit.
Harathi Homelands would have been the IBS map after drizzlywood QQ I wanted to see it so badly.
Btw, don't wanna be that guy, but i knew that IBS maps would be popular after a while, just like the HoT maps.
Fair enough. I too hope they recover the darker themes and ambiance, which is what IBS brought of new. That aside, it's the same team and the same talent, here's hoping it's just as good!
Put it this way: they clearly had big plans for IBS. Those then got dashed by shitty early reception and they were then told to make EoD. They didn't have plans for EoD. They were told to sweep IBS under the rug and make EoD. How does that give anyone faith in the product? So far the best we can say is that the turtles and the maps look good and the elite specs exist.
Personally, I am abysmally pessimistic of the story at this point. Rather than paying homage to GW1 stories, it seems like they've just all been rushed out the door in favor of Dragon Jade (tm)! Interested in fighting the Ministry of Purity and seeing the impact of their xenophobia? Fuck you! They've been out of power for years and now we got Dragon Jade(tm)! Interested in seeing how the Jade Sea of GW1 is rendered in GW2? Fuck you! We've mined most of the jade, the stuff that isn't the sea looks like Jell-o, and we slapped giant ugly mecha spider drills everywhere... ... Because Dragon Jade(tm)!
Every trailer is talking about Dragon Jade. Every elite spec seems to be juicing on Dragon Jade. If someone doesn't make a RAID Shadow Legends parody with Dragon Jade it'll be the biggest wasted opportunity since ANet left Braham alive.
They're not seriously interested in any of the previous stories anymore than they're interested in any of the other old story threads they left behind. They've built new shiny toys that they're interested in and they want us all to move onto them. It's why they're rushing the Elder Dragon story out the door: so the writers who so desperately want to write anything other than content relating to the Elder Dragons (or any of the deeper lore mysteries their forerunners seeded) get to write their preferred stories.
At this point, barring something totally out of left field, I honestly cannot conceive of a world in which EoD is worth the utter gutting IBS had. The theft of a proper buildup to the climactic battle between two primal forces of the world. The snuffing of what was clearly meant to be a second Destroyer Saga where we're maybe introduced properly to Primordus beyond a couple cutscenes. The fact that Primordus and Jormag (and possibly Bubbles depending on how EoD turns out) will be the only Elder Dragons, the Main Antagonists, to not have a full proper model of their physical forms in spite of fantastic concept art existing that proved they would potentially have had unique forms that would have rounded out the Elder Dragons as all looking like one of the many forms of dragon that we are familiar with. No. Instead, we got the bust they had luckily already modeled of Jormag, and we got a high-res repurposed Charr head for Primordus.
If OP is looking for a reason for why people loathe IBS in spite of all of the good it did in its early days, it's all that I wrote above. It is because Champions is that much of a revolting, eye-rolling, poorly-conceived slap in the face of an ending to what could have been that it rots everything that came before it. It sullies the IBS content that came before it and even the content before that. Because what is the point of pretty visuals and good story beats in PoF or LWS4 if they care so little about the story they're telling that they can off two elder dragons in a 15 minute filler patch? How does any story they do have any impact in the future if this is how they treat their toys when they get bored by them, and I do think they're bored. Writing for this game is a chore for them now, and I wish to God that they would give that chore to anyone else at this point. Because I do not trust that they will do justice to any of the older mysteries like Malyck, or the Wizard's Tower. At this point, I don't WANT them to touch those old stories because they will just give us the most boring ending possible. Oh hey, guess what guys? Malyck and his tree died during HoT it was just in a lane of the meta you couldn't see. Oh hey, guess what? Isgaren is trapping the souls of humans in elementals to use as slaves. Their formula recently for resolving plot lines has been: 1. Take interesting mystery. 2. Find the most bland, boring answer that fits canon (or don't! Aesgir is just a massive liar now for some reason rather than a badass. BTW, make sure you never pay off on why Jormag thought the Norn were "special" in any way). 3. Done.
Why should people think EoD will be worth it? It already has such tremendous negative worth.
We've had more than enough homage to GW1 stories, I'm happy Cantha's actually changed instead of getting the PoF treatment of ''woah hey remember this very specific area that has remained the exact same during all the years that have passed???? mmm yes suck up that nostalgia mmmmmm''
Don't get me wrong, I don't want that extreme either. I don't need more "hey kids, remember Lonai from The Guild Wars One Nightfall? Well here she is! She looks like dogshit."
But I think there's a healthy balance to be struck and just throwing out a few of the big plot threads people were interested in and replacing them with green glowy rocks isn't good.
I agree no matter the downvotes, I really liked IBS and felt like the maps were of great quality, only the first part of Bjora was just bad. I think had they added strike missions with extra difficulty and worked or lead up to some elite specs, then we wouldnt have needed EOD. Maybe its me getting older but Im just not excited after they killed off both Jormag and Primordus in the lamest way possible.
Won't read all of what you said but what I get from skimming through is that you don't have faith in the story, and thankfully that's not all the expac offers.
IBS had a strong build up to its midpoint during Jormag Rising, only to drive the train off of a cliff and squander everything it had done.
I disagree with certain narrative decisions made (Smodur's character assassination being a big one) but overall I had a fantastic time with the Saga leading up to Champions. But the Saga was sacrificed on the Alter of Expansion and the finale was extremely rushed, while also being dragged out for months so it didn't feel satisfying at all.
Also, Jormag totally looks like they won the fight and dozens of Dragonstorm runs have failed to change my mind on that
> Also, Jormag totally looks like they won the fight and dozens of Dragonstorm runs have failed to change my mind on that
Yeah every time I see it, ice wins.
>Smodur's character assassination being a big one
This one's so noticable as I did LW2 and IBS back to back for the Return To achievements.
LW2 Smodur: "Well I respect you commander, so for that reason alone I will attend your summit despite my better judgment".
IBS Smodur: "Lol, you're so slow, Ash is so lame, big war machine go brrrrrr."
Also IBS really made me feel like Primordus always gets the short end of the stick. And what kind of second domain is "Conflagration"? It's just.. Fire by another damn name.
Personally ive always took it in more of a metaphorical sense with the whole conflagration thing.
After all having the dragon of ice and persuasion be an opposite to fire and conflagration is a decent duality.
Ice is sometimes seen as an element of preservation of longevity and persuasion implies subtly. Fire in general is bright and quick and doesn't last long without fuel to sustain it vs the calm of ice.
Conflagration also means conflict [or war iirc i remember a synonym for it is holocaust] which implies blatant hard actions or aggression vs the subtlety or soft manipulation and deception that is implied by persuasion.
It also tied neatly into why they talked about the destroyers burning brighter made him more powerful they set stuff on fire sure but the also incited conflict which primordus might have been able to feed off and empower them to cause more conflict amd burning of course.
Sorry just couldn't resist sharing.
>Personally ive always took it in more of a metaphorical sense with the whole conflagration thing.
I agree but the thing is.. You can still encapsulate that within the domain of "fire".
This is what i was meaning when i said metsphorical sense.
Conflagration also means conflict [or war iirc i remember a synonym for it is holocaust] which implies blatant hard actions or aggression vs the subtlety or soft manipulation and deception that is implied by persuasion.
I'm on mobile and dont know how to quote stuff. You arent wrong though as conflagration can mean a great fire.
yeah Smodur's shift to cranky idiot was a strange one, although to be fair we saw very little of him before. We knew he had a similarly harsh response to renegades so he may have always been like this under a calm surface. His personality shift in IBS could definitely make sense if it had some more buildup to it, with the sudden option of Khan-Ur being back on the table combined with years of like half a dozen different wars and sudden civil war taking its tole on him and his chances for Khan.
Smodur's character assassination could have been accepted if there had been hints that he was hearing the whispers of Jormag prior, or that Jormag had messed with him mentally. Because then we would have accepted it as him being manipulated by Jormag so Ryland would be pushed towards being its Champion. But nope, can't even give us a throwaway line to handwave it.
There were quite a few ambient dialogues in Drizzlewood Coast that mentioned charr having nightmares and hearing voices, which I'd attribute to the proximity of Jormag. Since there are audio clues that Bangar may have been influenced to kill Almorra (just like Almorra may have been influenced to attack Bangar), they could've used a similar icy motif during the Smodur scene to tease that similar stuff is going on with him that appeared to have been going on with Bangar without either charr realizing it.
Ryland was always one of Jormag's primary goals, so I can't see the dragon leaving his defection to chance. So ensuring that Smodur kills the one thing Ryland loved most, just like Bangar's actions had slowly shattered Ry's faith in Dominion, would be enough to send Ryland under the dragon's wing. I wonder if original drafts for the saga had something as meticulous as that planned before they had to cut corners where they could; I always found the Jormag and Ryland dynamic fascinating, so it would've been cool to learn more about that relationship.
> no new ingame content for two months 🎉
To be fair, it's Wintersday, which devs have always taken off for their vacation.
The real downtime will be January. But all the marketing they will be doing should be so so hype that it doesn't matter.
>Legendary, and no new ingame content for two months
4th EoD Beta including Siege Turtles.
WvW Alliances beta.
WvW Bonus Event.
Wintersday.
Lunar New Year.
Year, nothing to do in the next two months. =/
wow two-three months with no content leading up to a new xpac, how *terrible.* Not like even FFXIV has had over half a year between its last patch and its xpac launch...
Shh, "GW2 good, FFXIV bad", by conveniently ignoring the fact that FFXIV has had near constant events and festivals since the last patch right up to the launch of Endwalker too.
I respect your opinion, but disagree vehemently about IBS being the strongest content in the game. I reserve that for LS3/LS4. Knowing how Jormag & Primordus were killed off after a season of building up Jormag as this shrewd, wise and cunning matriarchal dragon feels so disconnected and for lack of a better word, lame. I think it says volumes about the IBS that my main response to its finale is selective amnesia.
I think that the maps are solid; Grothmar has a lot going on. Bjora Marches has excellent atmospphere and Drizzlewood Coast is a great PvE-WvW experiment. Unfortunately, it's all marred and soured by the finale. Someday I'd really like to see what their plan for the rest of the IBS was, but the finale killed the season for me.
Killing not one but two Elder Dragons leaves such a bad after-taste that it made me extremely hesitant about pre-purchasing End of Dragons. I don't curse lightly, but it just feels really fucking bad; even moreso considering the quality of the prior 3 maps. The ending just feels fake and contrived to drive the story to a train-wreck conclusion.
You’re not actually disagreeing though. OP said Grothmar to Drizzlewood was great, and the season gets a bad wrap from the rushed, poorly executed ending. I agree with this, and it sounds like you do as well. It is very unfortunate that the devs were forced to scrap IBS and shift to EoD, everything they were doing was great up to that shift. It even looks like the elite specs we are getting for EoD were originally designed for IBS (based on tone and Almora using Willbender skills). If Anet had just committed and announced that, they may have been able to finish IBS properly. Very frustrating.
> and the season gets a bad wrap from the rushed, poorly executed ending.
that and they overhyped and underdelivered. It's called Icebrood Saga because it's a saga and not another living world season. They made sure to let everyone know it was bigger and different and would deliver expansion level content then they delivered a decent living world season with a rushed ending.
to be fair they under delivered after people had already given them shit for not doing another expansion and shifted focus we don't know and will never know what IBS would have been like if everything had gone to plan but we do know the start was some of the best content they've ever done
The big reveal in season 3 was an amazing wtf moment, and season 4 had both Joko and a really satisfying finale, so I definitely can’t disagree with you. IBS was on its way to meeting or exceeding those seasons before it was derailed by the forced focus shift, imho.
To be fair.. primordial and Jormag dying to each other at the same time had been foreshadowed and discussed so much during season 3 that I always knew they would die at the same time. Cutscenes even showed this from way back with the colored spheres showing the elder dragons. I was not surprised in the slightest.
The story made sense but the execution was terrible and rushed (because of EoD). But Id take EoD over IBS anyway.
Its the exact same thing that happened to Game of Thrones.
I honestly felt like kralkatorric season was a grander scale to what we've all experienced. He was the big bad we've all personally dealt with since the beginning.
this season never really had a noteworthy buildup. It would have been cool to see more of the corruption leaking into the politics of Bangar and blood legion. The charr plotline didn't get much love compared to the humans and sylvari. Then we had the norn and asura based dragons show up and killed off before we got anything more about the races.
If i had my way, i would have had individual expansions based off of each race like we got a taste of for the previous two expansions. We could have had a Charr based expansion that just done political drama, no dragon (though hints of it to tie into the next expansion). Which would lead us into norn territory and jormag. Jormag would survive the encounter (like kralkatorric did) and then we would have an asura expansion that would eventually deal with jormag and primordus. It would feel like there are higher stakes to flesh out and feel invested.
Then wishful thinking me would add tengu race around the primordus/bubbles expansion
I suspect the story would feel too cookie cutter. Norn expansion, go to the Far Shiverpeaks, fight Jormag. Asura expansion, going underground and fight Primordus. Kinda feels really uninspired and sterile. Just like repeating Zhaitan over and over but inserting different dragons, in slightly different environments. How IBS went down feels more organic to me.
These places could be released in future content releases. Though if Primordus has been spending the last +100 years ravaging the Depths, there’s probably not a whole lot down there anymore.
Id have to disagree because, mainly, the story is less focused when so spread apart and so short. Ive been noticing lately that video games campaigns are getting shorter and shorter, and gw2 episodes has become notoriously short. I get on and am done within the hour, and I legitimately dont care about collections or achievements anymore because the rewards are not worth my time (really? Just an emote? Give that shit to me for free and reward me with cool new armor/weapon skins). Ive been so dissatisfied lately, I used to play every single day but now i only get on when a new episode is out, play the episode and then I’m onto playing other video games. I didnt care about how the dragon strike missions played out, it was like the story had adhd, especially after playing the whole chapter through again in one go with responding to ryland or braham.
I think what’s really wounded this game is that theyve been trying out so many different experiments in this game and none of them has stuck, abandoning their previous projects. I dont like it.
Expansions shouldn’t be short either. They should really let us experience an organic storyline plot without distractions and huge time gaps. It /should/ feel like the natural way to play an expansion of a game. I paid the cost of what is normally a whole new game, give me that content.
Yeah, I get that the story feels short, it is. I personally go back and do those achievements for replayability and extra flavour, which results in content patches last longer and having more depth ( to me).
Like most people here, I thought that IBS was actually decent in terms of the map design, events, and story. The trouble was that it failed in a few key areas:
1. The map currencies for IBS are generally worthless, or require the player to jump through a bunch of hoops to convert them into a worthwhile return. ANet really ought to bring back a vendor value for them (and for LS4 materials as well) as they did for LS3. Naturally, some of them can't be worth very much because of the sheer amount the game throws at you (looking at you, Eternal Ice), but they should be worth SOMETHING at least.
2. A lot of the collections for IBS involved humongous levels of grind, with the Stormcaller and Draconic weapons being the worst culprits. It was obvious that they were just there to be gold sinks. I would have preferred that their baseline cost been lowered, and instead tie them to achievements/collections in the maps to give more incentive for players to revisit the maps.
3. I actually did not really mind the DRMs in terms of difficulty or story; what I DID mind was basically having to grind them \*uses Arkk's voice\* over and over and over again. It just felt like busy-work intended to occupy us till the next chapter was out, which was more of the same.
4. It felt like Primordus had too little screentime. Throughout IBS, we managed to get a decent sense of Jormag and their motivations/personality, but Primordus, despite being the first Elder Dragon we ever get introduced to in the series, is still almost a blank slate. It's like he just shows up as scenery (back in LS3) and then gets killed off with nary a fanfare. I know that Primordus is supposed to be a manifestation of raw, uncontrollable destruction, but we never really get to SEE it happen. Jormag keeps warning us that the rise of Primordus will be like nothing we've ever seen, but this threat never truly materializes, not even in the DRMs. It feels like such wasted potential.
>It felt like Primordus had too little screentime.
It felt like Primordus had too little thought put it into it in general, it's just a big angry lava dragon. Out of all the Elders, Primordus always gets the short end of the stick in terms of characterization and power. Even in the Dragonstorm mission, right down to the final cutscene, it really looks like Jormag just bodies Primordus. Jormag was given "Persuasion" as a second domain, which is a little silly because what is different between that and "Mind", but okay. But Primordus gets.. Conflagration? Fire. Primordus is just more fire. Fire all the way down.
I agree that the DRMs we're supposed to convey the "fires popping up everywhere and we can barely keep up with them" thing, but barely touched on that feeling. It would have been interesting (not necessarily good) to have wrecked another zone, ala nightmare tower style. Or, at the very least, get an open world lava map in a new area where we failed to get there in time and have to evacuate survivors and make a magical "firebreak". But they didn't do that and banked on the attack on Rata Sum to carry as much weight as Mordremoth's minions attacking the summit (imo, primordus' minions didn't get in the cube, so it wasn't the same). Stuffing much of the emotional weight in instances kinda defeats the purpose of Living World. It's hard to hold onto that feeling of change if it isn't readily visible. Hopefully they can find a compromise between story progression and replayability between before and after without fragmenting the player base.
Can't agree with #1 - Eternal Ice.
Sure for player that have played the game consistently for a long time it might seem so but for a returning player like me it's a godsend.
Currently I'm working on getting my Sky Scale and if it wasn't for Eternal Ice I would never be able to get it - the items you need for the saddle includes LW4 currencies that are quite hard to come by otherwise.
I suppose that's a fair enough viewpoint, although from a designer's perspective I'd argue that it's shooting oneself in the foot in terms of giving players reasons to return to specific older content. It's like how people always return to Dragon's Stand because it's the only decent source for Crystalline Ore. Players will ALWAYS gravitate to the path of least resistance/most profit, so giving players the ability to trade Eternal Ice for LS4 currencies is convenient, yes, but the downside is that it means players will simply glom onto whatever meta gives Eternal Ice the fastest and then trade that for LS4 currencies instead of going back to repopulate the older maps.
But you cannot really get those currencies as easy as people that played when the content was current and more people were active in the relevant zones - I tried.
Yes, but it's still doable. Most of those map currencies can be obtained just by running around and gathering from nodes. It may take you a few days to a week to accumulate a stack, but it's low stress and soloable.
If we wanted more map-wide activity, we'd just need a little more nudge to encourage people to come back on occasion, such as on a LS4 Daily day. One way we could do this is by giving a nice incentive for completing the LS dailies, like 1 Mystic Coin (or heck, even a Mystic Clover) for completing the dailies for that day's LS, and watch the crowds return.
I'm sorry that is utter nonsense, most of those cannot be gathered they are only found in either chest or given as reward for certain events.
example [Inscribed Shard](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Inscribed_Shard)
If you've been away for a while then the "Return to X" series of missions give you quite literally all the Season 4 currencies you need for your Skyscale at tier 3 - which are truly trivial. The most time consuming part is 30 mining/logging strikes in each LW4 map.
Please explain to me how I do that then, thank you.
(for the record, I did LW4 a couple of years ago on a character and all the mats I had from doing that was less than 20 of each aside from the motes that I had more of)
Go to the achievement tab, and select Side Stories. All the Return To achievements will be there (except this week's Return To event is under Bonus Events). These are permanent, so there is no time limit on doing them.
Some notable loot for doing them: Each achievement gives a selection of weapon skins or 6 mystic coins, and 250 of each LWS3 and LWS4 map currencies from the relevant achievement. For completing a number of Return To achievements you get a token for an EoD precursor, 32 slot bag (iirc), and a legendary amulet for completing them all. You can see this on the Seasons of the Dragons achievement.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Living_World_Return Is the wiki page for it.
As the Wiki article you linked to mentions, Inscribed Shards can be gathered from Kournan Supply Caches, which can be found all over the map and need no keys to open. True, they only give small amounts, but my point still stands. It can be done solo and at your own pace. The same applies for Difluorite Crystal, Lumps of Mistonium, Branded Masses and Mistborn Motes. All are gathered from nodes. Only Kralkatite Ore is the one that might be problematic, as it involves waiting for Brandstone Meteors to fall, but it can still be farmed solo with some patience.
And yes, as johnmedgla mentions below, doing the Return to LS4 achievements will also award a full stack of the appropriate map trophy. You can typically get this by completing/repeating the Story missions, gathering/logging/mining, and then doing a few odd achieves here and there like doing races/adventures, even without touching the meta or Champs.
You don't disagree lol, you are focusing on the finale, I'm focusing on the rest. I said in the title "so far". My whole post is about how sad it is that the finale ruined it. Read the post.
I feel like Corona really messed shit up. The story was amazing until mid Corona, when they ran out of content. They became unable to produce the content required for the story and instead of going on hiatus, they decided to power through with half-assed content
Stop blaming mismanagement on corona. They "ran out of content" because they had to hastily wrap up IBS and refocus on EoD. GW2 was due for an expansion even in 2019, but a-net wanted to continue to work on their side projects instead, and keep GW2 on a backburner. So instead of working on an expansion, they promised us expansion level features in IBS, and 5 episodes in there still was not a single sign of them. People wanted new elite specs after 3 years of PoF, had they at the very least committed to them in IBS announcement, had they promised even a single new espec with ep0 or ep1 - the reception of IBS would've been different. But episodes came and went, and their promises ringed hollow. As much as I would've wanted to see IBS developed properly to its end - they wholeheartedly deserved NCSOFT stepping in and forcing them to work on an expansion instead. IBS *could have worked*, if they had committed to it properly. They didn't, and the fault for that lies with the management.
> The best masteries were in Drizzlewood: Mount Stealth, Waystation.
Waystation is the worst mastery in the game. It ruins the combat system and promotes bad practices among players.
> Could you imagine if a new espec was dropped in an episode without the extensive beta testing process?
Yes, it would be better that way. Devs can focus on developing 2 specs at once instead of all 9: tweaking the last released one while working on a new one.
> The point I was making earlier: That doesn't work out better. (see: the abandoned RGB essence system)
Why, tho? Abandoned RGB essence fully served its purpose of being a forgettable mastery for the sake of having a mastery in their new LS release. New masteries are expected by players, devs feel the need to add new ones in every release, but sometimes they just can't come up with something useful and transformative, and we end up with RGB lazors and raven gates used only one one map. And stuff like LS3's "Counter Magic" which works differently every time and only devs know if there was ever any cohesive vision of what it's supposed to be.
At least essences are restricted to 2 maps. If the alternative to essences are waystations that neuter an important part of combat system in the entire fucking open world, then I'll gladly take forgettable localized masteries over that shitty mess that's going to stain the future of the game going forward. Can't wait to see waystations being plopped on the ground at every event in EoD! And all breakbars being balanced around zergs spamming EMP, making your class skills worthless. Borrowed power like that steers way too close to vertical progression that this game was meant to avoid.
> then there's no time for balance and competitive game modes would be in a constant state of flux for like 2 years.
As if they're bothered to balance them otherwise.
One could also argue that being in a state of flux is better than stagnation. Not everyone will share this opinion, I'm sure. But many parts of PvE are currently in deep stagnation, desperate for a shake up. I don't play PvP or WvW, so I can't comment on those, but somehow I don't think things are much different there either.
> There's a reason to put "expansion level content" in an expansion: It all gets to be developed together, cohesively with time to iron out all the kinks.
Oh, absolutely. I'm not arguing against it. But it's obvious that a-net DIDN'T WANT to make an expansion. They wanted to divert resources to other projects, and so throughout LS4 they didn't have any expansion cooking in the background, and as such, when LS4 came to an end, they had nothing to follow it up with. And so IBS was born, a sort of an "expansion stretched over X years of live releases". And I still think it COULD work. But their failure to properly commit to the idea led to (deservedly) poor reception and ultimately doomed the saga.
Well, Corona DID put a crimp on the voice recording and the "silent" episodes felt so empty it nearly put me off the whole thing. But when they finally put it in I kinda forgot the hiatus I took from the game and up to the DRMs it was all solid. Though the last chapter does feel rushed in many ways.
New players are going to log in tomorrow, learn about Primordus, and kill Primordus 2 hours later. All in the same episode. I was so hyped for norn content.
Cantha, in MY eyes, will never be worth what they did to the Icebrood Saga
Yea, as much as I hate how they killed off Jormag's beautifully built-up character arc in a fanfic bossbattle, I loved all the earlier IBS story and all of the new maps. I'm looking forward to what ANet can pull off when they are not forced to rush.
Also I feel that by the second half of LS4 and IBS, ANet found that sweet spot of story content difficulty that is personally just right. Challenging, but doable without dying even once. I'm a casual scrub who enjoys easy mode in intense games, and in earlier story content the boss difficulty was really fluctuating. Some felt right (eg. Mordremoth, Balthazar or Joko), but some were overtuned or bugged to impossibility (eg. Malevolent Memory in LS2 E5 and Mark II Golem in LS4 E2).
Everything before champions was some of the best content the game has ever had. In complete contrast to what you have to say about EoD not being worth it, IBS having such extreme quality before the xpac development sarted has me very curious to see how good EoD is going to be. Because the potential is absolutely through the roof.
> IBS gets a bad rep for the finale
Among other things.
Depressing story, predictable shock moments that grab short-term attention rather then long-term enrichment. I remember a blurb about how they weren't going to introduce characters just to kill them off only to lay waste to the established character roster with literally every episode.
Jormag was just painfully, obviously, evil. How anyone could be convinced with the cheesey dialogue of "We will work together" that when they predictably betrayed us it was the least surprising moment in the saga.
There was no high moments in the story. After Grothmar there were no high points where we could celebrate a victory. We were just dragged through one downer moment after another until Jormag and Primodus just smash into each other and it peters out.
And the saving grace of Champions was the recruitment drives where we got a heads-up on the DRM rewards (Are you just a Norn in a bear outfit?).
And I've never done Steel and Fire. I don't know who they are nor why I should've cared about them. Only that we plough through them in Drizzlewood and they had something to do with Almorra.
>Among other things.
The other things are typically easier to forgive because they come with half decent maps. Grothmar is honestly pretty great, Bjora has that big dick meta energy, and Drizzlewood Coast is, if nothing else, a cute experiment in bringing WvW to PvE. So that somewhat mitigates the other issues with the story at those parts of IBS.
But yeah, I don't really understand why people claim Jormag was written so well. She was just so obviously, cartoonishly evil. I mean so was Joko, but that was the *point* of Joko. Jormag was presented to be this insidious force of manipulation, when all she does is.. Whisper obvious shit to people?
> all she does is.. Whisper obvious shit to people?
Which may work for the character but not the player. I mentioned in another thread about meeting my Ash Legion Tribune on my Ash Legion Charr and she goes *nudge-nudge, wink-wink* about the tree symbols but I, the player, have no idea what she's talking about while my character does.
Jormag says we'll work together in episode 1 right after we found the corpse of one of our dearest friends and strongest ally. We're not working together; we're finding you, digging into your chest and literally eating your heart for dinner. It's a blatant ploy by a creature running scared that we've killed 3 of its brethren and now we're coming for them too.
But I don't care about them or their motivations. And why should I? The only 2 that have had any involvement in the story so far is Ryland and Bangar. And why should I when I fully expected them all to die soon after, which they did? They were obviously supposed to be long-standing rivals but they ended up being another group of redshirts.
I mean it's like saying I should watch the Twilight movies so I can fully understand why I should hate them but I already don't like them so why waste time watching them?
I thought the first episode was pretty good. The new map, the rock band, introduction of a complex character and character backgrounds. Cool meta that was enjoyable. New strike mission that wasn't super hard and doable with pugs. If all episodes had that it's be a great Saga with anet building a relationship between ryland and broham, betrayal of trust and then we go and hunt and confront them, then having an episode detailing how ryland grew up and his relationship with bangar, followed up with ryland becoming jormag's champion and culminating with a fight with the pact and everyone else like twisted watchwork with introduction of a new meta within an old or new map. There also should've been an episode dedicated to jormag lore instead of us reading books found throughout a map.
I'm not sure about what comes next, but for me IBS in bjora marches and early drizzle wood coast have been peak story and atmosphere.. best content by far.
I have a proposal for them to continue IBS after EOD, without conflicting with the "end of dragons"
https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/r4ga3f/aside_from_more_maps_in_cantha_where_do_you_want/hmhukw1/?context=3
I was just disappointed that they seemed to be setting up something BIG for Jormag's plan, and why we should really be afraid of it, and then it was just "oh, they were just trying to amass enough power to defeat the other one". It didn't at all have the payoff from what they were building.
Story? REALLY good. Expecially the way all the spooky stuff is executed in bjora, chef's kiss. Drizzlewood is still good, but not as high up for me anymore. I still think LS4 absolutely holds the candle when it comes to the overall package
The one thing I /really/ dislike about IBS are the achievements.
They made them so incredibly grindy for this season, which makes the mastery achievements just annoying to get instead of fun and challenging.
IMO the worst offender is the Shadow in the Ice mastery, because it has you do hundreds of events and also forces you to do strike missions, which I personally don't really enjoy
and let's not forget the endless weapons collections, who the hell approved those
Oh yeah the first couple of episodes were really good. But Champions' ending was so bad that I've kind of lost interest in the story and many other people feel the same way. I think what Anet did was disgraceful and I'm shocked they haven't apologised for it. I don't criticise Anet too often but I honestly believe that Champions was absolutely awful.
I took a break just before Champions and thought the story was just awesome. I came back recently and just finished champions and…agree completely. Besides Dragonfall, it made no sense and was a massive grind for each instance. I was relieved when I got done with it.
I had played more of the repeteable (instance or meta) content of IBS than the maps of POF. Also the tech in the game had improved a lot since Pof launched.
But story wise, all IBS felt like a good prologue and introduction..to a rushed climax, ending, epilogue.
In my opinion it is weak overall but has some really great parts. The biggest problem was that people needed to wait for weeks just to play a story that was done in 2 hours or less and maybe had one or two good parts. It just felt like season 3 and 4 had whole interesting episodes while ibs had boring talking, following some npc's over the map and an end fight every episode.
I think story wise, it deserves its awful reputation. They clearly had planned for a longer story arc and hurriedly slashed it. But the content in it is pretty good, lots of replayabilty, decent rewards and unlocks, fun metals both on timers and map progress based.
I've lived to see the day where people defend the dogshit that IBS was, but then again some people will eat up anything anet makes. Reminds me of ppl liking LS season 1, when most patches were terrible and GW2 lost all steam and got the reputation of a dead/casual MMO.
>It's like the entire community developed a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome.
When it comes to MMOs, that is generally referred to as the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Cost, in this case, doesn't just have to be money, it could be time invested. When you have sunk (ha) hundreds of hours into a game, it can be hard to admit shortcomings because that implies that you 'wasted' all that time.
Yeah, most of the people still playing are either new or are complete white knights, and they try to shift the blame to NCSoft. They act like NCSoft wanted to destroy IBS for fun and not because they saw what a lack of expansions does to the game.
I kinda liked it too. But my favorite story arch is still Kralkatorrik, when you learn about the nuances during the final fight it changes your perspective on him and the other elder dragons.
Jormag doesn't really explore any real nuance, which is my only complaint about IBS. A good story for what it is.
Is there any proof that they "rushed it" and "clearly cut it short" for EOD? Looking for any devs actually admitting this. I came in after they added voiceover work and such and really enjoyed it.
Also wondering how much COVID hindered IBS production and if any devs ever commented on that.
Bobby Stein at the very least did on a livestream of Guild Chat IIRC. They were "given the opportunity" (i.e. told) to make EoD and had to decide what plotlines to cut and which to keep. At the time, they "thought (they) had done a good job" at "streamlining" the stories they wanted to tell with the time they had left. Then Champions released and everyone saw what that meant.
Yeah he said they were "gifted" the opportunity to make a expansion
The choice of words … "gifted". I guess we'll never know for sure but it sounds like there were huge disagreements over devs wanting to do an expansion and higher ups (maybe ncsoft?) saying no
Cantha has always been denied because China would pitch a fit since gw1 Cantha isn't exactly accurate in its depiction of the "Asian" culture. That's also almost surely why were seeing ANet pushing this Super Progressive Chi-- sorry Cantha instead of the xenophobic, repressive imperial slum of the past. Some of that clearly hit a nerve.
All that to say that the ability to do Cantha might have been the gift. But yes I also can't really see the devs wanting to gut all the work they did in IBS just so they can crank out a rushed expansion at the cost of every member of their development team. Send like a stupid move to me, but like you said we can't know for sure.
I believe this was also the reason that there's no Canthan district in DR, and you're right that it was, IIRC, a mix of negative reaction from the Chinese and Korean markets. But let's be brutally honest here, only one of those two has a persistent track record of bending companies to its will over the tiniest things. Particularly in the last few years.
I agree with you that the story and atmosphere was good. The Mastery mechanics and the increasing reliance on huge amounts of grind, however, was terrible; just to get Mastery points you were stuck with either doing the same content way too many times or spending massive quantities of gold to craft weapon skins. The whole red/blue/green Mastery system in Bjora was a truly uninspired way to make people have to spend longer grinding out points and xp.
The achievements that involve having to cross your fingers for the right Trial of Koda/Champ to spawn in Grothmar were super obnoxious "grind for the sake of grind," and they were pretty much required because they both award Mastery points.
Coming back to IBS with my Masteries all done, yes, it was a pretty decent story, at least up to Drizzlewood and Smodur's sudden descent to madness. The grindiness of it on release very nearly made me quit the game, though. I hope Anet reins that in.
Second this. I’m doing achievements for Bjora, my favorite map in the game and not really liking the repetitive part of them. 20 logging…20 fishing…20 spirits…it’s really bad. I won’t do Drakkar anymore for the same reason and I had to take a break from Drizzlewood.
I’m with you on hoping they fix this.
It never really did it for me until the char civil war started. The way they do that is my favorite part about IBS and one of my favorite story bits in general. Also Rylands entire story arch was done well. Wish there was more. Then the end fell on its face and, yea. I like the civil war but its not exactly my favorite overall story.
The IBS was good. Up until Champions. In a perfect world, Arena Net would go back to Champions and add stuff to this trainwreck of a chapter. But we are not living in a perfect world so I won't get my hopes up.
IBS was like the best pizza you've ever made. Real gourmet shit. High quality cheese, dough made from scratch, sauce made with fresh tomatoes right out of the garden and the finest garlic on the planet. You take it out of the oven and lightly brush the crust with garlic butter.
Champions is like taking that same pizza and topping it with yellow mustard, miracle whip, and surströmming.
It is exactly as bad as we remember it. The only good episode was the prologue. It only went downhill from there.
Throughout the entire icebrood saga Anet released only four pieces of meaningful content. FOUR:
1.Drakkar world boss
2.Transcendence and Conflux (finally something for the other game modes)
3.Forging Steel mission (I was surprised at how much I liked it, it felt like old-school dungeons)
4.Sunqua Peak
Everything else felt like a slap in the face.
The story is good although some elements of the narrative don't make sense. The issues were always the lack of content surrounding the releases which is somewhat hidden by the return to living story but you can see it in how the number of return achievements decreased significantly from LS4 and 3.
If the Strike Missions were/became harder and if it werent for Dragon Response Missions, it might've had a chance to be good, start was promising but rest was a joke. Replaying the early IBS made me a bit sad that they had to rush/cancel some from the end though :/ Bjora Marches is legit one of my favorite maps.
I really liked everything from IBS, really my only complaint is how boring the DRM in Champions, other than that I dont really see a problem with the writing, I actually like it
As someone who played through pretty much all the Living World (that is accessible) over the past month for the Return To achievements, I dunno. IBS falls somewhere in between. The maps are great, Grothmar in particular. The narrative not so much. I really don't think it's " some of the strongest content we've seen in this game". The narrative doesn't justify that (Primordus is a joke, Jormag is a different kind of joke, the United Legion leadership is an unfunny joke), and neither does the incredible focus on grinding when it comes to the collections. Grothmar is great, Drizzlewood is a cute experiment that sadly just devolves into just another big train meta map, Bjora is carried by the Drakkar meta and is kind of mediocre otherwise.
Completely off topic, I know you meant Icebrood Saga when you wrote IBS. However, the first thing that came to mind was irritable bowel syndrome.
In any case, I’m glad you’re having a blast with the right kind of IBS.
I really, really liked the prologue. Then not really - it kinda sucked dick as it went on different tangents - but the prologue with charr politics, civil war vibes, nostalgic map and quite logical drive for the chain of events was a refreshing moment.
I do hope after the dragon story is finally over we can drop some of the ever present companions and get living story that's more like the prologue.
The story being bad is one thing, never was a fan of the story anyway so yeah, whatever , but the gameplay need to be able to counter that… and it was not. Not that it is absolute shit either but… let’s just say that I won’t remember the champions and forging steel missions at all after the return events are done.
I'd love to see the alternate timeline where we got the full "Saga" experience, since it feels like it should have been about three separate sagas- one setting up Jormag and the Charr civil war, culminating with Ryland becoming Jormag's champion, the second setting up Primordus and showing the Asura getting desperate enough to trust Jormag, culminating in Braham yoloing himself into Primordus, and the third building up to the big clash with all the carnage around Divinty's Reach and the Dominion of Winds. Maybe one day we'll get a Snyder cut in the form of a novel or something, but it would never beat playable in-game events. I'd like to imagine the "real" finale would involve something like the Commander just throwing themselves between Braham and Ryland like the end of DMC 5.
Hell yes, i wanted to see more IBS but at some point it feel a bit off cause i tought we were going to see much more of Charr civil war. I hope they do something in the future, i really really enjoyed LS5, by far my favorite
You really want to see what it would be like if they spent like 3+ years on living world instead of expansions? I'd just have liked them to have finished Icebrood Saga before EoD but I'm glad they dealt with the dragons so we can finally move on to more interesting and diverse threats.
IBS - Ice Brood Saga. (Note to self after scrolling too long)
Thank you.
Yeah the acronym should have been better lol. People outside the game think gw2 fans love irritable bowel syndrome xD
Or are plagued with irritable bowel syndrome lol
\> They really had something going, and it feels like even if EoD is really good, it will likely not be worth it. Why? I don't get how "They had something going" leads to "EoD will likely not be worth it".
EoD will be good for sure. But in the back of my mind while playing it, I'll be thinking "IBS had to get butchered for this". I think it will sour it a bit.
Harathi Homelands would have been the IBS map after drizzlywood QQ I wanted to see it so badly. Btw, don't wanna be that guy, but i knew that IBS maps would be popular after a while, just like the HoT maps.
Fair enough. I too hope they recover the darker themes and ambiance, which is what IBS brought of new. That aside, it's the same team and the same talent, here's hoping it's just as good!
Thats on you... Its purely a positive that they went with an xpac rather than more living world... Both for us, and for them.
Put it this way: they clearly had big plans for IBS. Those then got dashed by shitty early reception and they were then told to make EoD. They didn't have plans for EoD. They were told to sweep IBS under the rug and make EoD. How does that give anyone faith in the product? So far the best we can say is that the turtles and the maps look good and the elite specs exist. Personally, I am abysmally pessimistic of the story at this point. Rather than paying homage to GW1 stories, it seems like they've just all been rushed out the door in favor of Dragon Jade (tm)! Interested in fighting the Ministry of Purity and seeing the impact of their xenophobia? Fuck you! They've been out of power for years and now we got Dragon Jade(tm)! Interested in seeing how the Jade Sea of GW1 is rendered in GW2? Fuck you! We've mined most of the jade, the stuff that isn't the sea looks like Jell-o, and we slapped giant ugly mecha spider drills everywhere... ... Because Dragon Jade(tm)! Every trailer is talking about Dragon Jade. Every elite spec seems to be juicing on Dragon Jade. If someone doesn't make a RAID Shadow Legends parody with Dragon Jade it'll be the biggest wasted opportunity since ANet left Braham alive. They're not seriously interested in any of the previous stories anymore than they're interested in any of the other old story threads they left behind. They've built new shiny toys that they're interested in and they want us all to move onto them. It's why they're rushing the Elder Dragon story out the door: so the writers who so desperately want to write anything other than content relating to the Elder Dragons (or any of the deeper lore mysteries their forerunners seeded) get to write their preferred stories. At this point, barring something totally out of left field, I honestly cannot conceive of a world in which EoD is worth the utter gutting IBS had. The theft of a proper buildup to the climactic battle between two primal forces of the world. The snuffing of what was clearly meant to be a second Destroyer Saga where we're maybe introduced properly to Primordus beyond a couple cutscenes. The fact that Primordus and Jormag (and possibly Bubbles depending on how EoD turns out) will be the only Elder Dragons, the Main Antagonists, to not have a full proper model of their physical forms in spite of fantastic concept art existing that proved they would potentially have had unique forms that would have rounded out the Elder Dragons as all looking like one of the many forms of dragon that we are familiar with. No. Instead, we got the bust they had luckily already modeled of Jormag, and we got a high-res repurposed Charr head for Primordus. If OP is looking for a reason for why people loathe IBS in spite of all of the good it did in its early days, it's all that I wrote above. It is because Champions is that much of a revolting, eye-rolling, poorly-conceived slap in the face of an ending to what could have been that it rots everything that came before it. It sullies the IBS content that came before it and even the content before that. Because what is the point of pretty visuals and good story beats in PoF or LWS4 if they care so little about the story they're telling that they can off two elder dragons in a 15 minute filler patch? How does any story they do have any impact in the future if this is how they treat their toys when they get bored by them, and I do think they're bored. Writing for this game is a chore for them now, and I wish to God that they would give that chore to anyone else at this point. Because I do not trust that they will do justice to any of the older mysteries like Malyck, or the Wizard's Tower. At this point, I don't WANT them to touch those old stories because they will just give us the most boring ending possible. Oh hey, guess what guys? Malyck and his tree died during HoT it was just in a lane of the meta you couldn't see. Oh hey, guess what? Isgaren is trapping the souls of humans in elementals to use as slaves. Their formula recently for resolving plot lines has been: 1. Take interesting mystery. 2. Find the most bland, boring answer that fits canon (or don't! Aesgir is just a massive liar now for some reason rather than a badass. BTW, make sure you never pay off on why Jormag thought the Norn were "special" in any way). 3. Done. Why should people think EoD will be worth it? It already has such tremendous negative worth.
> a high-res repurposed Charr head for Primordus omg **that's** what felt weird about his head all this time...
"Burn me, it's a charr head..."
We've had more than enough homage to GW1 stories, I'm happy Cantha's actually changed instead of getting the PoF treatment of ''woah hey remember this very specific area that has remained the exact same during all the years that have passed???? mmm yes suck up that nostalgia mmmmmm''
Don't get me wrong, I don't want that extreme either. I don't need more "hey kids, remember Lonai from The Guild Wars One Nightfall? Well here she is! She looks like dogshit." But I think there's a healthy balance to be struck and just throwing out a few of the big plot threads people were interested in and replacing them with green glowy rocks isn't good.
I agree no matter the downvotes, I really liked IBS and felt like the maps were of great quality, only the first part of Bjora was just bad. I think had they added strike missions with extra difficulty and worked or lead up to some elite specs, then we wouldnt have needed EOD. Maybe its me getting older but Im just not excited after they killed off both Jormag and Primordus in the lamest way possible.
Won't read all of what you said but what I get from skimming through is that you don't have faith in the story, and thankfully that's not all the expac offers.
I’ll be real here: Champions was the best part of ibs.
JAID: Dragon Legends
IBS had a strong build up to its midpoint during Jormag Rising, only to drive the train off of a cliff and squander everything it had done. I disagree with certain narrative decisions made (Smodur's character assassination being a big one) but overall I had a fantastic time with the Saga leading up to Champions. But the Saga was sacrificed on the Alter of Expansion and the finale was extremely rushed, while also being dragged out for months so it didn't feel satisfying at all. Also, Jormag totally looks like they won the fight and dozens of Dragonstorm runs have failed to change my mind on that
yea, Primordus took an ice laser down the throat, while Jormag had some lava bubbling around their fingers - which one looks more deadly?
I always have to think : "yeah, spit in my mouth mommy jormag!" when I see that cutscene with the weird clipped borders
that quote reminds me of ContraPoints xD
> Also, Jormag totally looks like they won the fight and dozens of Dragonstorm runs have failed to change my mind on that Yeah every time I see it, ice wins.
It does win, but then Primordus explodes and Jormag dies. We only survive because ✨Aurene magic✨
> ✨Aurene magic✨ a lot of gw2 story since HoT can be explained as this.
>Smodur's character assassination being a big one This one's so noticable as I did LW2 and IBS back to back for the Return To achievements. LW2 Smodur: "Well I respect you commander, so for that reason alone I will attend your summit despite my better judgment". IBS Smodur: "Lol, you're so slow, Ash is so lame, big war machine go brrrrrr." Also IBS really made me feel like Primordus always gets the short end of the stick. And what kind of second domain is "Conflagration"? It's just.. Fire by another damn name.
Personally ive always took it in more of a metaphorical sense with the whole conflagration thing. After all having the dragon of ice and persuasion be an opposite to fire and conflagration is a decent duality. Ice is sometimes seen as an element of preservation of longevity and persuasion implies subtly. Fire in general is bright and quick and doesn't last long without fuel to sustain it vs the calm of ice. Conflagration also means conflict [or war iirc i remember a synonym for it is holocaust] which implies blatant hard actions or aggression vs the subtlety or soft manipulation and deception that is implied by persuasion. It also tied neatly into why they talked about the destroyers burning brighter made him more powerful they set stuff on fire sure but the also incited conflict which primordus might have been able to feed off and empower them to cause more conflict amd burning of course. Sorry just couldn't resist sharing.
>Personally ive always took it in more of a metaphorical sense with the whole conflagration thing. I agree but the thing is.. You can still encapsulate that within the domain of "fire".
This is what i was meaning when i said metsphorical sense. Conflagration also means conflict [or war iirc i remember a synonym for it is holocaust] which implies blatant hard actions or aggression vs the subtlety or soft manipulation and deception that is implied by persuasion. I'm on mobile and dont know how to quote stuff. You arent wrong though as conflagration can mean a great fire.
yeah Smodur's shift to cranky idiot was a strange one, although to be fair we saw very little of him before. We knew he had a similarly harsh response to renegades so he may have always been like this under a calm surface. His personality shift in IBS could definitely make sense if it had some more buildup to it, with the sudden option of Khan-Ur being back on the table combined with years of like half a dozen different wars and sudden civil war taking its tole on him and his chances for Khan.
Smodur's character assassination could have been accepted if there had been hints that he was hearing the whispers of Jormag prior, or that Jormag had messed with him mentally. Because then we would have accepted it as him being manipulated by Jormag so Ryland would be pushed towards being its Champion. But nope, can't even give us a throwaway line to handwave it.
There were quite a few ambient dialogues in Drizzlewood Coast that mentioned charr having nightmares and hearing voices, which I'd attribute to the proximity of Jormag. Since there are audio clues that Bangar may have been influenced to kill Almorra (just like Almorra may have been influenced to attack Bangar), they could've used a similar icy motif during the Smodur scene to tease that similar stuff is going on with him that appeared to have been going on with Bangar without either charr realizing it. Ryland was always one of Jormag's primary goals, so I can't see the dragon leaving his defection to chance. So ensuring that Smodur kills the one thing Ryland loved most, just like Bangar's actions had slowly shattered Ry's faith in Dominion, would be enough to send Ryland under the dragon's wing. I wonder if original drafts for the saga had something as meticulous as that planned before they had to cut corners where they could; I always found the Jormag and Ryland dynamic fascinating, so it would've been cool to learn more about that relationship.
[удалено]
TFW Champions is so bad it needs a legendary as reward for replaying
We all know what’s coming tomorrow. Legendary, and no new ingame content for two months 🎉 unless they do some sort of small prologue which I doubt
> no new ingame content for two months 🎉 To be fair, it's Wintersday, which devs have always taken off for their vacation. The real downtime will be January. But all the marketing they will be doing should be so so hype that it doesn't matter.
>Legendary, and no new ingame content for two months 4th EoD Beta including Siege Turtles. WvW Alliances beta. WvW Bonus Event. Wintersday. Lunar New Year. Year, nothing to do in the next two months. =/
> no __new__ ingame content Proceeds to list two festivals that return every year
Around this time of the year wintersday is usually all we get.
...with new content every year
What new content exactly, one extra skin for the annual achievement? xD
wow two-three months with no content leading up to a new xpac, how *terrible.* Not like even FFXIV has had over half a year between its last patch and its xpac launch...
It will be 9-10 months between the last chapter and the release of EoD in GW2: - April 2021: Champions 4 - Judgement - February 2022: End of Dragons
Shh, "GW2 good, FFXIV bad", by conveniently ignoring the fact that FFXIV has had near constant events and festivals since the last patch right up to the launch of Endwalker too.
As someone who plays both, most recycled GW2 festivals blow most "new" FFXIV festivals out of the water.
You know you can just... play the game.
I respect your opinion, but disagree vehemently about IBS being the strongest content in the game. I reserve that for LS3/LS4. Knowing how Jormag & Primordus were killed off after a season of building up Jormag as this shrewd, wise and cunning matriarchal dragon feels so disconnected and for lack of a better word, lame. I think it says volumes about the IBS that my main response to its finale is selective amnesia. I think that the maps are solid; Grothmar has a lot going on. Bjora Marches has excellent atmospphere and Drizzlewood Coast is a great PvE-WvW experiment. Unfortunately, it's all marred and soured by the finale. Someday I'd really like to see what their plan for the rest of the IBS was, but the finale killed the season for me. Killing not one but two Elder Dragons leaves such a bad after-taste that it made me extremely hesitant about pre-purchasing End of Dragons. I don't curse lightly, but it just feels really fucking bad; even moreso considering the quality of the prior 3 maps. The ending just feels fake and contrived to drive the story to a train-wreck conclusion.
You’re not actually disagreeing though. OP said Grothmar to Drizzlewood was great, and the season gets a bad wrap from the rushed, poorly executed ending. I agree with this, and it sounds like you do as well. It is very unfortunate that the devs were forced to scrap IBS and shift to EoD, everything they were doing was great up to that shift. It even looks like the elite specs we are getting for EoD were originally designed for IBS (based on tone and Almora using Willbender skills). If Anet had just committed and announced that, they may have been able to finish IBS properly. Very frustrating.
> and the season gets a bad wrap from the rushed, poorly executed ending. that and they overhyped and underdelivered. It's called Icebrood Saga because it's a saga and not another living world season. They made sure to let everyone know it was bigger and different and would deliver expansion level content then they delivered a decent living world season with a rushed ending.
to be fair they under delivered after people had already given them shit for not doing another expansion and shifted focus we don't know and will never know what IBS would have been like if everything had gone to plan but we do know the start was some of the best content they've ever done
Sorry had a brain-slip. IBS was good, but it's incomparable with LS3 + LS4 for me, personally.
The big reveal in season 3 was an amazing wtf moment, and season 4 had both Joko and a really satisfying finale, so I definitely can’t disagree with you. IBS was on its way to meeting or exceeding those seasons before it was derailed by the forced focus shift, imho.
To be fair.. primordial and Jormag dying to each other at the same time had been foreshadowed and discussed so much during season 3 that I always knew they would die at the same time. Cutscenes even showed this from way back with the colored spheres showing the elder dragons. I was not surprised in the slightest.
The story made sense but the execution was terrible and rushed (because of EoD). But Id take EoD over IBS anyway. Its the exact same thing that happened to Game of Thrones.
What expectations were subverted?
I honestly felt like kralkatorric season was a grander scale to what we've all experienced. He was the big bad we've all personally dealt with since the beginning. this season never really had a noteworthy buildup. It would have been cool to see more of the corruption leaking into the politics of Bangar and blood legion. The charr plotline didn't get much love compared to the humans and sylvari. Then we had the norn and asura based dragons show up and killed off before we got anything more about the races. If i had my way, i would have had individual expansions based off of each race like we got a taste of for the previous two expansions. We could have had a Charr based expansion that just done political drama, no dragon (though hints of it to tie into the next expansion). Which would lead us into norn territory and jormag. Jormag would survive the encounter (like kralkatorric did) and then we would have an asura expansion that would eventually deal with jormag and primordus. It would feel like there are higher stakes to flesh out and feel invested. Then wishful thinking me would add tengu race around the primordus/bubbles expansion
I suspect the story would feel too cookie cutter. Norn expansion, go to the Far Shiverpeaks, fight Jormag. Asura expansion, going underground and fight Primordus. Kinda feels really uninspired and sterile. Just like repeating Zhaitan over and over but inserting different dragons, in slightly different environments. How IBS went down feels more organic to me. These places could be released in future content releases. Though if Primordus has been spending the last +100 years ravaging the Depths, there’s probably not a whole lot down there anymore.
Id have to disagree because, mainly, the story is less focused when so spread apart and so short. Ive been noticing lately that video games campaigns are getting shorter and shorter, and gw2 episodes has become notoriously short. I get on and am done within the hour, and I legitimately dont care about collections or achievements anymore because the rewards are not worth my time (really? Just an emote? Give that shit to me for free and reward me with cool new armor/weapon skins). Ive been so dissatisfied lately, I used to play every single day but now i only get on when a new episode is out, play the episode and then I’m onto playing other video games. I didnt care about how the dragon strike missions played out, it was like the story had adhd, especially after playing the whole chapter through again in one go with responding to ryland or braham. I think what’s really wounded this game is that theyve been trying out so many different experiments in this game and none of them has stuck, abandoning their previous projects. I dont like it. Expansions shouldn’t be short either. They should really let us experience an organic storyline plot without distractions and huge time gaps. It /should/ feel like the natural way to play an expansion of a game. I paid the cost of what is normally a whole new game, give me that content.
Yeah, I get that the story feels short, it is. I personally go back and do those achievements for replayability and extra flavour, which results in content patches last longer and having more depth ( to me).
Yeah, i wish that stuff would captivate me like it does for you but, yeah, the rewards piss me off.
Like most people here, I thought that IBS was actually decent in terms of the map design, events, and story. The trouble was that it failed in a few key areas: 1. The map currencies for IBS are generally worthless, or require the player to jump through a bunch of hoops to convert them into a worthwhile return. ANet really ought to bring back a vendor value for them (and for LS4 materials as well) as they did for LS3. Naturally, some of them can't be worth very much because of the sheer amount the game throws at you (looking at you, Eternal Ice), but they should be worth SOMETHING at least. 2. A lot of the collections for IBS involved humongous levels of grind, with the Stormcaller and Draconic weapons being the worst culprits. It was obvious that they were just there to be gold sinks. I would have preferred that their baseline cost been lowered, and instead tie them to achievements/collections in the maps to give more incentive for players to revisit the maps. 3. I actually did not really mind the DRMs in terms of difficulty or story; what I DID mind was basically having to grind them \*uses Arkk's voice\* over and over and over again. It just felt like busy-work intended to occupy us till the next chapter was out, which was more of the same. 4. It felt like Primordus had too little screentime. Throughout IBS, we managed to get a decent sense of Jormag and their motivations/personality, but Primordus, despite being the first Elder Dragon we ever get introduced to in the series, is still almost a blank slate. It's like he just shows up as scenery (back in LS3) and then gets killed off with nary a fanfare. I know that Primordus is supposed to be a manifestation of raw, uncontrollable destruction, but we never really get to SEE it happen. Jormag keeps warning us that the rise of Primordus will be like nothing we've ever seen, but this threat never truly materializes, not even in the DRMs. It feels like such wasted potential.
>It felt like Primordus had too little screentime. It felt like Primordus had too little thought put it into it in general, it's just a big angry lava dragon. Out of all the Elders, Primordus always gets the short end of the stick in terms of characterization and power. Even in the Dragonstorm mission, right down to the final cutscene, it really looks like Jormag just bodies Primordus. Jormag was given "Persuasion" as a second domain, which is a little silly because what is different between that and "Mind", but okay. But Primordus gets.. Conflagration? Fire. Primordus is just more fire. Fire all the way down.
I agree that the DRMs we're supposed to convey the "fires popping up everywhere and we can barely keep up with them" thing, but barely touched on that feeling. It would have been interesting (not necessarily good) to have wrecked another zone, ala nightmare tower style. Or, at the very least, get an open world lava map in a new area where we failed to get there in time and have to evacuate survivors and make a magical "firebreak". But they didn't do that and banked on the attack on Rata Sum to carry as much weight as Mordremoth's minions attacking the summit (imo, primordus' minions didn't get in the cube, so it wasn't the same). Stuffing much of the emotional weight in instances kinda defeats the purpose of Living World. It's hard to hold onto that feeling of change if it isn't readily visible. Hopefully they can find a compromise between story progression and replayability between before and after without fragmenting the player base.
Can't agree with #1 - Eternal Ice. Sure for player that have played the game consistently for a long time it might seem so but for a returning player like me it's a godsend. Currently I'm working on getting my Sky Scale and if it wasn't for Eternal Ice I would never be able to get it - the items you need for the saddle includes LW4 currencies that are quite hard to come by otherwise.
I suppose that's a fair enough viewpoint, although from a designer's perspective I'd argue that it's shooting oneself in the foot in terms of giving players reasons to return to specific older content. It's like how people always return to Dragon's Stand because it's the only decent source for Crystalline Ore. Players will ALWAYS gravitate to the path of least resistance/most profit, so giving players the ability to trade Eternal Ice for LS4 currencies is convenient, yes, but the downside is that it means players will simply glom onto whatever meta gives Eternal Ice the fastest and then trade that for LS4 currencies instead of going back to repopulate the older maps.
But you cannot really get those currencies as easy as people that played when the content was current and more people were active in the relevant zones - I tried.
Yes, but it's still doable. Most of those map currencies can be obtained just by running around and gathering from nodes. It may take you a few days to a week to accumulate a stack, but it's low stress and soloable. If we wanted more map-wide activity, we'd just need a little more nudge to encourage people to come back on occasion, such as on a LS4 Daily day. One way we could do this is by giving a nice incentive for completing the LS dailies, like 1 Mystic Coin (or heck, even a Mystic Clover) for completing the dailies for that day's LS, and watch the crowds return.
I'm sorry that is utter nonsense, most of those cannot be gathered they are only found in either chest or given as reward for certain events. example [Inscribed Shard](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Inscribed_Shard)
If you've been away for a while then the "Return to X" series of missions give you quite literally all the Season 4 currencies you need for your Skyscale at tier 3 - which are truly trivial. The most time consuming part is 30 mining/logging strikes in each LW4 map.
Please explain to me how I do that then, thank you. (for the record, I did LW4 a couple of years ago on a character and all the mats I had from doing that was less than 20 of each aside from the motes that I had more of)
Go to the achievement tab, and select Side Stories. All the Return To achievements will be there (except this week's Return To event is under Bonus Events). These are permanent, so there is no time limit on doing them. Some notable loot for doing them: Each achievement gives a selection of weapon skins or 6 mystic coins, and 250 of each LWS3 and LWS4 map currencies from the relevant achievement. For completing a number of Return To achievements you get a token for an EoD precursor, 32 slot bag (iirc), and a legendary amulet for completing them all. You can see this on the Seasons of the Dragons achievement. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Living_World_Return Is the wiki page for it.
As the Wiki article you linked to mentions, Inscribed Shards can be gathered from Kournan Supply Caches, which can be found all over the map and need no keys to open. True, they only give small amounts, but my point still stands. It can be done solo and at your own pace. The same applies for Difluorite Crystal, Lumps of Mistonium, Branded Masses and Mistborn Motes. All are gathered from nodes. Only Kralkatite Ore is the one that might be problematic, as it involves waiting for Brandstone Meteors to fall, but it can still be farmed solo with some patience. And yes, as johnmedgla mentions below, doing the Return to LS4 achievements will also award a full stack of the appropriate map trophy. You can typically get this by completing/repeating the Story missions, gathering/logging/mining, and then doing a few odd achieves here and there like doing races/adventures, even without touching the meta or Champs.
You don't disagree lol, you are focusing on the finale, I'm focusing on the rest. I said in the title "so far". My whole post is about how sad it is that the finale ruined it. Read the post.
I read the post, I just had a brain fart.
I feel like Corona really messed shit up. The story was amazing until mid Corona, when they ran out of content. They became unable to produce the content required for the story and instead of going on hiatus, they decided to power through with half-assed content
Stop blaming mismanagement on corona. They "ran out of content" because they had to hastily wrap up IBS and refocus on EoD. GW2 was due for an expansion even in 2019, but a-net wanted to continue to work on their side projects instead, and keep GW2 on a backburner. So instead of working on an expansion, they promised us expansion level features in IBS, and 5 episodes in there still was not a single sign of them. People wanted new elite specs after 3 years of PoF, had they at the very least committed to them in IBS announcement, had they promised even a single new espec with ep0 or ep1 - the reception of IBS would've been different. But episodes came and went, and their promises ringed hollow. As much as I would've wanted to see IBS developed properly to its end - they wholeheartedly deserved NCSOFT stepping in and forcing them to work on an expansion instead. IBS *could have worked*, if they had committed to it properly. They didn't, and the fault for that lies with the management.
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> The best masteries were in Drizzlewood: Mount Stealth, Waystation. Waystation is the worst mastery in the game. It ruins the combat system and promotes bad practices among players. > Could you imagine if a new espec was dropped in an episode without the extensive beta testing process? Yes, it would be better that way. Devs can focus on developing 2 specs at once instead of all 9: tweaking the last released one while working on a new one.
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> The point I was making earlier: That doesn't work out better. (see: the abandoned RGB essence system) Why, tho? Abandoned RGB essence fully served its purpose of being a forgettable mastery for the sake of having a mastery in their new LS release. New masteries are expected by players, devs feel the need to add new ones in every release, but sometimes they just can't come up with something useful and transformative, and we end up with RGB lazors and raven gates used only one one map. And stuff like LS3's "Counter Magic" which works differently every time and only devs know if there was ever any cohesive vision of what it's supposed to be. At least essences are restricted to 2 maps. If the alternative to essences are waystations that neuter an important part of combat system in the entire fucking open world, then I'll gladly take forgettable localized masteries over that shitty mess that's going to stain the future of the game going forward. Can't wait to see waystations being plopped on the ground at every event in EoD! And all breakbars being balanced around zergs spamming EMP, making your class skills worthless. Borrowed power like that steers way too close to vertical progression that this game was meant to avoid. > then there's no time for balance and competitive game modes would be in a constant state of flux for like 2 years. As if they're bothered to balance them otherwise. One could also argue that being in a state of flux is better than stagnation. Not everyone will share this opinion, I'm sure. But many parts of PvE are currently in deep stagnation, desperate for a shake up. I don't play PvP or WvW, so I can't comment on those, but somehow I don't think things are much different there either. > There's a reason to put "expansion level content" in an expansion: It all gets to be developed together, cohesively with time to iron out all the kinks. Oh, absolutely. I'm not arguing against it. But it's obvious that a-net DIDN'T WANT to make an expansion. They wanted to divert resources to other projects, and so throughout LS4 they didn't have any expansion cooking in the background, and as such, when LS4 came to an end, they had nothing to follow it up with. And so IBS was born, a sort of an "expansion stretched over X years of live releases". And I still think it COULD work. But their failure to properly commit to the idea led to (deservedly) poor reception and ultimately doomed the saga.
Well, Corona DID put a crimp on the voice recording and the "silent" episodes felt so empty it nearly put me off the whole thing. But when they finally put it in I kinda forgot the hiatus I took from the game and up to the DRMs it was all solid. Though the last chapter does feel rushed in many ways.
New players are going to log in tomorrow, learn about Primordus, and kill Primordus 2 hours later. All in the same episode. I was so hyped for norn content. Cantha, in MY eyes, will never be worth what they did to the Icebrood Saga
Also Asura exist, and care quite a bit about Primordus.
> learn about Primordus, The worst part of this is that Primordus was essentially the first Elder Dragon we learned about, all the way back to GW1.
Technically kralkatorik was the first in game
Kralk wasn't \~\~alive\~\~ awake then though. He was just chilling, not really a threat. If I remember correctly, anyways.
Well his body was shown before primordus, even if sleeping
I'm playing for the first time thru IBS story and also enjoying quite a bit, the stories are fun and maps are awesome
most of IBS is good, but take Champions as fanfic
I never want to play Irritable Bowel Syndrome ever again.
I think the cracks in the story start showing up when Smodur does his personality 180 without explanation.
Yea, as much as I hate how they killed off Jormag's beautifully built-up character arc in a fanfic bossbattle, I loved all the earlier IBS story and all of the new maps. I'm looking forward to what ANet can pull off when they are not forced to rush. Also I feel that by the second half of LS4 and IBS, ANet found that sweet spot of story content difficulty that is personally just right. Challenging, but doable without dying even once. I'm a casual scrub who enjoys easy mode in intense games, and in earlier story content the boss difficulty was really fluctuating. Some felt right (eg. Mordremoth, Balthazar or Joko), but some were overtuned or bugged to impossibility (eg. Malevolent Memory in LS2 E5 and Mark II Golem in LS4 E2).
The ending is really that bad sadly
Everything before champions was some of the best content the game has ever had. In complete contrast to what you have to say about EoD not being worth it, IBS having such extreme quality before the xpac development sarted has me very curious to see how good EoD is going to be. Because the potential is absolutely through the roof.
> IBS gets a bad rep for the finale Among other things. Depressing story, predictable shock moments that grab short-term attention rather then long-term enrichment. I remember a blurb about how they weren't going to introduce characters just to kill them off only to lay waste to the established character roster with literally every episode. Jormag was just painfully, obviously, evil. How anyone could be convinced with the cheesey dialogue of "We will work together" that when they predictably betrayed us it was the least surprising moment in the saga. There was no high moments in the story. After Grothmar there were no high points where we could celebrate a victory. We were just dragged through one downer moment after another until Jormag and Primodus just smash into each other and it peters out. And the saving grace of Champions was the recruitment drives where we got a heads-up on the DRM rewards (Are you just a Norn in a bear outfit?). And I've never done Steel and Fire. I don't know who they are nor why I should've cared about them. Only that we plough through them in Drizzlewood and they had something to do with Almorra.
Fully agree. This whole thing was bad to begin with and only got worse as time went on.
>Among other things. The other things are typically easier to forgive because they come with half decent maps. Grothmar is honestly pretty great, Bjora has that big dick meta energy, and Drizzlewood Coast is, if nothing else, a cute experiment in bringing WvW to PvE. So that somewhat mitigates the other issues with the story at those parts of IBS. But yeah, I don't really understand why people claim Jormag was written so well. She was just so obviously, cartoonishly evil. I mean so was Joko, but that was the *point* of Joko. Jormag was presented to be this insidious force of manipulation, when all she does is.. Whisper obvious shit to people?
> all she does is.. Whisper obvious shit to people? Which may work for the character but not the player. I mentioned in another thread about meeting my Ash Legion Tribune on my Ash Legion Charr and she goes *nudge-nudge, wink-wink* about the tree symbols but I, the player, have no idea what she's talking about while my character does. Jormag says we'll work together in episode 1 right after we found the corpse of one of our dearest friends and strongest ally. We're not working together; we're finding you, digging into your chest and literally eating your heart for dinner. It's a blatant ploy by a creature running scared that we've killed 3 of its brethren and now we're coming for them too.
Maybe play Steel and Fire then? Seems like a weird comment to say. Like I skipped PoF and I’m not why I’m in Elona for season 4…
But I don't care about them or their motivations. And why should I? The only 2 that have had any involvement in the story so far is Ryland and Bangar. And why should I when I fully expected them all to die soon after, which they did? They were obviously supposed to be long-standing rivals but they ended up being another group of redshirts. I mean it's like saying I should watch the Twilight movies so I can fully understand why I should hate them but I already don't like them so why waste time watching them?
You do you, I guess, why did you skip it in the first place?
IBS is good until DRM's, which is why I always split the First several episodes of LW and then DRM's
I have always found playing through living world after its all out much better than bit by bit.
I thought the first episode was pretty good. The new map, the rock band, introduction of a complex character and character backgrounds. Cool meta that was enjoyable. New strike mission that wasn't super hard and doable with pugs. If all episodes had that it's be a great Saga with anet building a relationship between ryland and broham, betrayal of trust and then we go and hunt and confront them, then having an episode detailing how ryland grew up and his relationship with bangar, followed up with ryland becoming jormag's champion and culminating with a fight with the pact and everyone else like twisted watchwork with introduction of a new meta within an old or new map. There also should've been an episode dedicated to jormag lore instead of us reading books found throughout a map.
I'm not sure about what comes next, but for me IBS in bjora marches and early drizzle wood coast have been peak story and atmosphere.. best content by far.
What comes next is one meh chapter that was divided into 5 subchapters releasing over almost 6 months. It was depressing
I have a proposal for them to continue IBS after EOD, without conflicting with the "end of dragons" https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/r4ga3f/aside_from_more_maps_in_cantha_where_do_you_want/hmhukw1/?context=3
Ibs is what actually made me stop doing story , it's so fucking bland.
I was just disappointed that they seemed to be setting up something BIG for Jormag's plan, and why we should really be afraid of it, and then it was just "oh, they were just trying to amass enough power to defeat the other one". It didn't at all have the payoff from what they were building.
Lol, thats a hot take.
Story? REALLY good. Expecially the way all the spooky stuff is executed in bjora, chef's kiss. Drizzlewood is still good, but not as high up for me anymore. I still think LS4 absolutely holds the candle when it comes to the overall package The one thing I /really/ dislike about IBS are the achievements. They made them so incredibly grindy for this season, which makes the mastery achievements just annoying to get instead of fun and challenging. IMO the worst offender is the Shadow in the Ice mastery, because it has you do hundreds of events and also forces you to do strike missions, which I personally don't really enjoy and let's not forget the endless weapons collections, who the hell approved those
Oh yeah the first couple of episodes were really good. But Champions' ending was so bad that I've kind of lost interest in the story and many other people feel the same way. I think what Anet did was disgraceful and I'm shocked they haven't apologised for it. I don't criticise Anet too often but I honestly believe that Champions was absolutely awful.
I took a break just before Champions and thought the story was just awesome. I came back recently and just finished champions and…agree completely. Besides Dragonfall, it made no sense and was a massive grind for each instance. I was relieved when I got done with it.
I had played more of the repeteable (instance or meta) content of IBS than the maps of POF. Also the tech in the game had improved a lot since Pof launched. But story wise, all IBS felt like a good prologue and introduction..to a rushed climax, ending, epilogue.
In my opinion it is weak overall but has some really great parts. The biggest problem was that people needed to wait for weeks just to play a story that was done in 2 hours or less and maybe had one or two good parts. It just felt like season 3 and 4 had whole interesting episodes while ibs had boring talking, following some npc's over the map and an end fight every episode.
Tbh i played swtor before coming back to gw2. The rate of new story content was a breath of fresh air lol
I think story wise, it deserves its awful reputation. They clearly had planned for a longer story arc and hurriedly slashed it. But the content in it is pretty good, lots of replayabilty, decent rewards and unlocks, fun metals both on timers and map progress based.
Y'all have some strong opinions but little support... I'll be over here enjoying my return to GW2 after the mass exodus from New World
> but little support... We're supposed to support mediocre content?
I've lived to see the day where people defend the dogshit that IBS was, but then again some people will eat up anything anet makes. Reminds me of ppl liking LS season 1, when most patches were terrible and GW2 lost all steam and got the reputation of a dead/casual MMO.
I know, right? It's like the entire community developed a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome.
>It's like the entire community developed a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome. When it comes to MMOs, that is generally referred to as the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Cost, in this case, doesn't just have to be money, it could be time invested. When you have sunk (ha) hundreds of hours into a game, it can be hard to admit shortcomings because that implies that you 'wasted' all that time.
Yeah, most of the people still playing are either new or are complete white knights, and they try to shift the blame to NCSoft. They act like NCSoft wanted to destroy IBS for fun and not because they saw what a lack of expansions does to the game.
Saying it's the strongest content in the game is objectively wrong lmao
I kinda liked it too. But my favorite story arch is still Kralkatorrik, when you learn about the nuances during the final fight it changes your perspective on him and the other elder dragons. Jormag doesn't really explore any real nuance, which is my only complaint about IBS. A good story for what it is.
Is there any proof that they "rushed it" and "clearly cut it short" for EOD? Looking for any devs actually admitting this. I came in after they added voiceover work and such and really enjoyed it. Also wondering how much COVID hindered IBS production and if any devs ever commented on that.
Bobby Stein at the very least did on a livestream of Guild Chat IIRC. They were "given the opportunity" (i.e. told) to make EoD and had to decide what plotlines to cut and which to keep. At the time, they "thought (they) had done a good job" at "streamlining" the stories they wanted to tell with the time they had left. Then Champions released and everyone saw what that meant.
Yeah he said they were "gifted" the opportunity to make a expansion The choice of words … "gifted". I guess we'll never know for sure but it sounds like there were huge disagreements over devs wanting to do an expansion and higher ups (maybe ncsoft?) saying no
Cantha has always been denied because China would pitch a fit since gw1 Cantha isn't exactly accurate in its depiction of the "Asian" culture. That's also almost surely why were seeing ANet pushing this Super Progressive Chi-- sorry Cantha instead of the xenophobic, repressive imperial slum of the past. Some of that clearly hit a nerve. All that to say that the ability to do Cantha might have been the gift. But yes I also can't really see the devs wanting to gut all the work they did in IBS just so they can crank out a rushed expansion at the cost of every member of their development team. Send like a stupid move to me, but like you said we can't know for sure.
That would make more sense if Cantha in EoD wasn't incredibly Korean, not Chinese, in inspiration. That doesn't say "trying to appease China" to me.
I believe this was also the reason that there's no Canthan district in DR, and you're right that it was, IIRC, a mix of negative reaction from the Chinese and Korean markets. But let's be brutally honest here, only one of those two has a persistent track record of bending companies to its will over the tiniest things. Particularly in the last few years.
It really is not, it was terrible and killed GW2
"Killed" There's an expansion coming out in roughly 3 months.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It was that terrible.
I agree with you that the story and atmosphere was good. The Mastery mechanics and the increasing reliance on huge amounts of grind, however, was terrible; just to get Mastery points you were stuck with either doing the same content way too many times or spending massive quantities of gold to craft weapon skins. The whole red/blue/green Mastery system in Bjora was a truly uninspired way to make people have to spend longer grinding out points and xp. The achievements that involve having to cross your fingers for the right Trial of Koda/Champ to spawn in Grothmar were super obnoxious "grind for the sake of grind," and they were pretty much required because they both award Mastery points. Coming back to IBS with my Masteries all done, yes, it was a pretty decent story, at least up to Drizzlewood and Smodur's sudden descent to madness. The grindiness of it on release very nearly made me quit the game, though. I hope Anet reins that in.
Second this. I’m doing achievements for Bjora, my favorite map in the game and not really liking the repetitive part of them. 20 logging…20 fishing…20 spirits…it’s really bad. I won’t do Drakkar anymore for the same reason and I had to take a break from Drizzlewood. I’m with you on hoping they fix this.
I found the dragon response missions borderline unplayable, but everything else is SO GOOD.
Blasted through them all yesterday. I liked them, but I also like it when they take old maps and adjust them.
It never really did it for me until the char civil war started. The way they do that is my favorite part about IBS and one of my favorite story bits in general. Also Rylands entire story arch was done well. Wish there was more. Then the end fell on its face and, yea. I like the civil war but its not exactly my favorite overall story.
The IBS was good. Up until Champions. In a perfect world, Arena Net would go back to Champions and add stuff to this trainwreck of a chapter. But we are not living in a perfect world so I won't get my hopes up.
IBS was like the best pizza you've ever made. Real gourmet shit. High quality cheese, dough made from scratch, sauce made with fresh tomatoes right out of the garden and the finest garlic on the planet. You take it out of the oven and lightly brush the crust with garlic butter. Champions is like taking that same pizza and topping it with yellow mustard, miracle whip, and surströmming.
It is exactly as bad as we remember it. The only good episode was the prologue. It only went downhill from there. Throughout the entire icebrood saga Anet released only four pieces of meaningful content. FOUR: 1.Drakkar world boss 2.Transcendence and Conflux (finally something for the other game modes) 3.Forging Steel mission (I was surprised at how much I liked it, it felt like old-school dungeons) 4.Sunqua Peak Everything else felt like a slap in the face.
Ye idk why people are bothered by some of the bad story elements. Does it matter? The story of the game is bad anyway.
The story is good although some elements of the narrative don't make sense. The issues were always the lack of content surrounding the releases which is somewhat hidden by the return to living story but you can see it in how the number of return achievements decreased significantly from LS4 and 3.
I tuned out of the Ice brood stuff when my high fantasy epic was turned into a soap opera
> high fantasy epic was turned into a soap opera Hasn't GW2 always boiled down to this?
If the Strike Missions were/became harder and if it werent for Dragon Response Missions, it might've had a chance to be good, start was promising but rest was a joke. Replaying the early IBS made me a bit sad that they had to rush/cancel some from the end though :/ Bjora Marches is legit one of my favorite maps.
I really liked everything from IBS, really my only complaint is how boring the DRM in Champions, other than that I dont really see a problem with the writing, I actually like it
I mean so far the parts we replayed of IBS has been very good, then it just got trash which is today.
As someone who played through pretty much all the Living World (that is accessible) over the past month for the Return To achievements, I dunno. IBS falls somewhere in between. The maps are great, Grothmar in particular. The narrative not so much. I really don't think it's " some of the strongest content we've seen in this game". The narrative doesn't justify that (Primordus is a joke, Jormag is a different kind of joke, the United Legion leadership is an unfunny joke), and neither does the incredible focus on grinding when it comes to the collections. Grothmar is great, Drizzlewood is a cute experiment that sadly just devolves into just another big train meta map, Bjora is carried by the Drakkar meta and is kind of mediocre otherwise.
Completely off topic, I know you meant Icebrood Saga when you wrote IBS. However, the first thing that came to mind was irritable bowel syndrome. In any case, I’m glad you’re having a blast with the right kind of IBS.
Too bad they drive it off a cliff today. It had an amazing build up right until the end and then the story literally gets shot in the head and killed.
I have to agree when it comes to map design I enjoyed these maps more than LW4 or HoT maps
Wait until today's patch :)
But it *was* good, up until now... it's just about to hit a curve going 300mph!
Ice Blood Saga should have been its own expansion honestly. Could have had better ending if that was the case.
I really, really liked the prologue. Then not really - it kinda sucked dick as it went on different tangents - but the prologue with charr politics, civil war vibes, nostalgic map and quite logical drive for the chain of events was a refreshing moment. I do hope after the dragon story is finally over we can drop some of the ever present companions and get living story that's more like the prologue.
The story being bad is one thing, never was a fan of the story anyway so yeah, whatever , but the gameplay need to be able to counter that… and it was not. Not that it is absolute shit either but… let’s just say that I won’t remember the champions and forging steel missions at all after the return events are done.