(Spoilers for new patch) feeling disconnected from my character

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Paradachshund@lemmy.today⁩ to ⁨guildwars2@lemmy.wtf⁩

I haven’t been following the general reactions to the new patch, but fair warning going into this that I personally was pretty disappointed in it from a story standpoint.

I was very pleased with Soto overall, and I think they seriously improved on many of the issues I’ve had with the writing over the years, but I can’t help but feel that somehow it has regressed in the newest patch.

The crux of my issue is that I want to distrust peitha and keep her at arms length, but it really feels like the story is making it crystal clear that I’m not allowed to feel that way. The speed at which not just my character, but even the astral ward, an organization dedicated to stopping her kind for thousands of years, is happy to not only help her, but to frequently espouse how much they trust her completely. I don’t think I’ve ever felt less connected to my character.

I was hoping for the story to keep her in a suspicious and interesting place, where we’re helping her for now but no one is sure what to think yet. Instead we’re back to the often hamfisted story telling of the end of dragons era, where it feels like every character is to be taken at complete face value.

To be honest I hope she does betray us, because that would at least be an interesting direction, and something to shake my character’s naive level of confidence. Though if they do go that way at this point they laid it on pretty thick with the implicit trust angle.

I’m curious if anyone else feels the same, or differently. Would love to hear other’s takes on it.

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Hominy_Hank@beehaw.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Personally I trust Peitha more than I trust Isgarren. Peitha has saved our lives multiple times, been seemingly upfront about everything, and hasn’t really given us a reason to not trust her.

Isgarren on the other hand has an underlying god complex, and I feel will betray us without hesitation for the ‘greater good’ of Tyria. Or you know Anet could be doing the whole swicheroo where Isgarren says he is not possessed but he really is possessed and is just playing along to lead us on to kill us at the perfect moment.

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- Paradachshund@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think that all tracks. I guess for me I don’t see peitha saving our lives as a reason to trust her, beyond trusting that she needs our help to accomplish her goals. It could easily be a trick to get our guard down so she can use us.
  
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lorkano@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I also didn’t feel the impact on Peitha of the death of this random Kryptis. What helped a little bit is reading a story journal descriptions of those chapters. It contains more insight on what commander is thinking and Peitha’s feelings. This leads me to believe, that their direction is actually that Peitha is a good one. But again, it is obvious that gameplay needed one or two more instances and more dialogue to properly show this story and portray Peitha’s feelings and motivations.

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- Paradachshund@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Same, I felt absolutely nothing about that random kryptis. They just appeared, had no character development, and instantly died. I honestly have no clue why that character existed. I could say the same for Heitor.
  
  I’ve never really liked how gw2 seems to want to give every species human emotions and relationships. Why are these emotion eating extraplanar demons going through very human seeming grief? I just think the writers could do better personally.
  
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  - lorkano@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah they made way too many characters for limited dialogue we had. They could’ve only focus on Heitor, scrap this side character, and make Peitha’s cousin be killed by Heitor (don’t remember his name) So Heitor kills Peitha’s cousin, which would really make sense she was sad after that. Peitha’s cousin and Heitor have more character development because we skip story about this side character
    
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- lulztard@lemmy.wtf ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That random Kryptis death was a new speedrun record.
  
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DreamySweet@ani.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I have felt this way since HoT. We don’t get to play as our own character, we play as the commander.

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- Paradachshund@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s true, though normally I actually like the commander (especially during PoF era). There’s been ups and downs with it I think.
  
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- nightdice@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I mean, that’s just the way an MMO needs to be with its story. Choice, if present at all, needs to be extremely limited to make open world design possible and to keep the scope doable.
  
  In GW2, the tradeoff is that we get awesome meta-events, raids, etc. all because all of our characters making mostly the same choices.
  
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  - DreamySweet@ani.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s possible to make choices not matter while still keeping the feeling of playing your own character. Final Fantasy XIV does a pretty good job at it.
    
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halfapage@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I feel exactly the same way. It’s like the story in both updates was written by separate teams. The first one laid great foundation and innovated a lot in comparison with stories from the past of the game, while the second team kind of took it and rushed to nail one point of trusting Peitha in our heads. No side stepping to elaborate, very poor presentation of another, unknown dimension, very loose attempt to make you somewhat empathize with it’s inhabitants. It felt very much like regress to the level of season one of the living story. Especially the steps where you enter separate instances for a dialogue with an NPC and then leave immediately. It was super short too, and pretending that there were three separate “chapters” is really embarrassing. Each one is like 5 minutes of actually something happening, and the rest of patting for time, like walking slowly to destinations etc… Not even filling a progress bar with completed events could mask the scarcity of story content, and it’s sad that they even considered it a valid technique to use. The only good thing is the work of voice actors, you can tell they care and are well directed. The rest looks like somebody took all the assets, got an order to take the story from point A to point B, and just winged it. I really hope it’s the suits decisions, and not the devs will.

I had my doubts about pre-ordering SOTO after EOD, but after initial update they were mostly gone. It had it’s own issues, like heavy asset reuse etc. but you could tell there were passionate devs working with what they got to create best thing they can. The second update made me decide to not pre-order and more expansions. I will consider buying after reading reviews, and after an xpac rolls out in its entirety.

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- lorkano@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think main issue here is lack of resources when they are working on expansion. This is just best they can currently do because expansion is so soon.
  
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  - Paradachshund@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This take really worries me, because if that’s true it means every new story will begin well and end poorly. That’s a very bad paradigm.
    
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- nightdice@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I just want to point out here that asset reuse is not a bad thing. It’s just a freaking smart use of dev time. The time it takes to create and rig a proper model, and then add textures that don’t look weird is way too long for the release cadence ANet is going for with the team size that they have.
  
  People always point out asset reuse as a bad thing and I don’t get why that is so high up people’s list for some reason…
  
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