GW2 – LW4, Ep 2, A Bug In The System (Spoilers)
1,365 words.
I finally finished Guild Wars 2’s Living World Season 4, Episode 2, “A Bug In The System” on Friday night. So here’s the quarterly post where I yell at Guild Wars 2 again for making me incredibly angry when I play it.
It was the most disjointed episode I can remember, but I’ll concede it was probably because of the way I played it. The episode consists of five “chapters.” I played the first three chapters all in a row (because you have to, grumble, grumble) back in March. I started into the fourth “chapter,” the one where you have to wander all over the new Sandswept Isles map and destroy shield generators, but I stopped in frustrated disgust (because I really did not care for the maze-like, mob-packed map or the lack of clear directions about where to go) and left the game for a month. Then I went back into the game and finished the shield generator bit over several non-contiguous days last week, and played the final chapter on Friday night.
Gameplay-wise, I just don’t even want to talk about this game any more. It’s reached Scary Movie trope-level status. It’s an endless series of annoying, aggravating, tedious, meaningless puzzles or fights. But wait, there’s more! Lately they’ve even had the nerve to add to the long, tedious boss fights by adding … a long series of trash mob fights leading up to the long, tedious boss fight! It’s a test of endurance. And of course they undermine every bit of the difficulty by giving you infinite chances, which is even more aggravating, because it’s even more of a pointless waste of time.
Story-wise, we continue with the same complaints as always. I have no idea what I just finished. Wasn’t there a big dragon destroying the planet just a little while ago? I guess we don’t care about that anymore. Or is the dragon wreaking havoc in super slow-motion, like in Inception? They threw in a couple of mentions of him “gaining new powers” just so we can ponder how annoying that boss fight will be.
Anyway we’re still chasing down this Joko guy, who was last seen locked tight in some weird alternate-dimension prison, but now he’s out for no apparent reason, like every cartoon villain ever. At least we know it’s really him now, because we actually saw him. (Then again, we saw Lazarus too.) And now there’s Inquest who are the most horrible people in the world, but also really funny so it’s all okay. And bioterrorism of course, that old, tired fantasy trope. I don’t know. It’s just … whatever.
There was a big dramatic scene at the end with Taimi and Blish and I just stared at the screen thinking, “Why am I supposed to be moved by this? Who is this Blish guy? Why does it sound like Taimi and Blish were more than just casual acquaintances? Did the game ever once say that? Let alone demonstrate it in any way?”* All I remember is Taimi saying, “Hey try not to hurt those guys because I know them.” (Not that I had any choice about it.)
Cut to the commander (me) saying, “Oh gosh Taimi I’m so so sorry to have to tell you this because I know it’s going to crush your tiny little spirit but Blish is a robot now.” They played it out like it was supposed to be a huge dramatic, emotional reveal and I was just like, “So what?” And how was I (the commander) supposed to know it would upset Taimi? Since Taimi never once gave any indication that she hoped Blish was not a robot? I must have missed the line where Taimi said, “I can’t wait to see Blish again and boy I sure hope he’s not a robot because wink, wink, nudge, nudge!”
Of course it’s possible I missed something because they sometimes try to deliver story dialog in the middle of fighting, which is, incidentally, a terrible idea and I wish they would stop that.
What they should have done is a scene where Taimi grills her old friends about how they got involved with the Inquest. That would have made sense within the context of what they had told us. Because Taimi did say repeatedly that she didn’t understand how her old friends could get involved in the Inquest. And we, the audience, still don’t either.
I also remember another scene at the beginning, right after the first boss, when that Charr leader died. It was played as another dramatic, emotional scene (and it was done well… it was clear the characters were very sad over the loss of this leader). It’s just that since I never knew that Charr leader, and I don’t think he spoke more than a single line, so it was impossible to feel any emotional connection with his death. Imagine how much more powerful that could have been if we’d had even a single meaningful conversation with him before he died.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m thinking too much like an editor. “You can’t put an emotional scene here without building some sympathy with the reader beforehand!” Maybe this is one of those situations where programming issues forced them to have to cut out important story bits that would have explained everything.
Speaking of thinking like an editor, I immediately assumed these new Asura have arrived in the story and joined “the team” because they are setting up a plan to kill off Taimi later.
Oh, and one more thing: I don’t enjoy doing puzzles in GW2 at all so I didn’t care for those aspects of this episode. And there were a lot of them. I don’t play puzzle games for a reason. I got so mad at the game at one point because I spent ten minutes trying to figure out a puzzle when I hated every second of it, submitted it, failed, got attacked by a million golems, then it turned out all I had to do was just “break” the thing to get past it. So I never needed to figure out the puzzle in the first place. That kind of crap is an enormous breach of trust between the developer and the gamer. Grrr.
Reading over other reviews, people saw a shift in the storytelling in this episode. I didn’t notice anything like that. Unless Rox’s voice actor changing is supposed to represent a shift. (I didn’t like the new Rox either, but it’s not like I was a huge fan of the old Rox, who seemed to have a grand total of two lines over the last two years.) Was it the Inquest-as-thinly-veiled-Nazis motif that people thought was a shift? I thought they undermined every bit of the grimdarkness that could have been there with the comedic Office Space-style humor of the Inquest workers, and the “Remember, we care!” hologram. In other words, it seemed to me they were playing the Inquest for comedy and not horror.
Anyway, the important thing is that it’s over, and I never have to play it again, because I recorded videos. :)
I doubt I will log in to GW2 again until Episode 3 arrives. If then. I’m kind of over GW2 (again). I mentioned that I was getting close to the end of my rope with FFXIV recently, but I reached that same point with GW2 years ago. The only explanation I can think of for why I even bother to log in is that it’s free to do so, and the game loads very fast, so there’s not enough time to change my mind about playing between the time I click the desktop icon and the time I’m in the game. If I had to pay a subscription for GW2, I absolutely, positively wouldn’t be playing, and I probably wouldn’t have bought any of the expansions either.
* Wait, wait, don’t tell me. The whole thing with Blish is explained in that book isn’t it. :)
Archived Comments
Bhagpuss 2018-04-23T16:07:54Z
I agree with a good deal of that although I think you’re over-egging it for comedic effect somewhat. The fighting is largely pointless and rather obviously extended to pad out what would otherwise be about an hour’s worth of narrative content every three months. The writing, which was always bad, has become worse.
I had no idea who Blish and his pal were either. If they have ever been mentioned before in six years I must have blinked and missed it but I don’t believe they were. The Inquest have always been played for laughs and it has never woreked. GW2’s writers believe you can play anything for laughs, no matter how despicable, and it makes it okay. This episode was particularly egregious in that respect but in no way inconsistent with established practice. that said, almost every MMo I have ever played does something similar. None of them bears ethical scrutiny.
The most anoying part, as you point out, was how the writers repeatedly flag up something as though they are going to deal with it and then completely ignore it. Yes, it did seem as though Taimi had some kind of romantic history with Blish. Yes, I was expecting her to demand the reason behind her friends joining a cult of psychopathic, genocidal sadists. Yes, that Charr commander was apparently supposed to be someone I’d recognize - only I didn’t. And so on.
About the only part where I’d strongly disagree with you is in your description of Sandswept Isles as “maze-like, mob-packed”. In comparison to almost every map since Silverwastes I’d say it was open and thinly-populated. Best thing about the whole episode, really.
As I’ve said before, both the storytelling and the gameplay in the Current Events which happen between episodes of the Living Story are orders of magnitude superior to LS. By only coming back for the LS chapters you are actually selecting the very worst, most annoying of all the available content and focusing on it alone. I wish the Current Events team could do the LS content - they certainly have a far better handle on what works in a game like GW2, which is and always has been aimed squarely at very casual, low-skill gamers.
Jeromai 2018-04-23T23:56:20Z
Except that now the main level and encounter design team appears to be staffed by a group of developers happily catering to the subset of players on Reddit, who are plainly into increased difficulty, high skill challenges.
So the whole game has turned increasingly schizophrenic as the years pass.
The story is off doing its own thing over here; encounters are getting harder and more complexity programmed in; the hardcore difficulty seekers are over there destroying content by soloing/cooperatively grouping with min-maxed and increasingly creative builds and declaiming that they are bored; while the casuals have turned into harvesters and AFK bots because that gives the most return for the least annoyingly tedious input.
Moongy 2018-04-24T07:02:40Z I don’t know where you got the notion that ‘casual’ = ’low-skill’, GW2 was always aimed at casuals only in terms of time requirements. That said, I still don’t understand why people struggle with story instances, they are pretty quick and mechanics are generally easy to understand. The only one I’d call somewhat complex was in Glint’s lair back in LWS2, the one with boon stealing and color crystals, and if you understood that one, all the next shouldn’t give any trouble whatsoever.
Bhagpuss 2018-04-24T14:30:29Z
I don’t equate “casual” with “low skill”. I’m saying that, as originally conceived at launch and for the first three years of its existence, the audience it appealed to and which it attracted was in the main both casual in approach and low skill by comparison to the playerbases of its competitors. I base that on my experience in other MMOs, my observations of and interactions with players within the game and the commentary provided by current and ex-players outside of the game up until the release of Heart of Thorns. I don’t think it has ever been controversial to say that GW2’s original open world content prior to the intended end-game of the three Orr maps was more forgiving of a lack of technical facility than most MMOs. A lot of people left the game in the first 4-6 weeks citing “too easy” as the reason as I recall.
The reason people struggle with story instances rarely has anything to do with the mechanics, which are indeed simple to understand. It has to do with the intentionally attritional nature of the combat, which is designed to lengthen the duration of the instances so as to pad the chapters. One of the most common complaints has always been that the LS chapters were too short. ANet addressed that by adding a map each time, always with a new currency to accumulate and latterly with farms of various kinds, and by extending the combat in the narrative sections so that they would last longer. That a small subset of players can still complete the instances quickly is largely irrelevant. The bulk of the playerbase does not seem to be able to rip through them so the purpose is being served. No doubt if power creep leads to the average player breezing through LS instances in short order some new brake will be applied.
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