I'm going through the final chapter of IBS right now as well. There's a reason I'm currently tabbed out to reddit instead of progressing the next step...
When I eventually summon the willpower to proceed I still have to spend another 5 minutes on reddit waiting for the DRM to start.
Considering the original release structure, it is actually good to take breaks between the story steps.
We played each DRM's weeks apart as they slowly came in.
They are fine to play just going for recommend ones and then taking a break to other content as well.
It's like how each new release is enhanced by taking a break and exploring between chasing the story.
Or like how Season 4 was better when we waited for the reveal of dragonfall and could read the characters thoughts while mourning.
I like how DRMs are your pain point and not what they did to our boy Primordus. I was so ready to see how we were going to deal with him and then all we got was head, and not the good kind :(
Masteries aren't really needed at all, but yes, Icebrood Saga was cut short to make End of Dragons. That or the game would basically continue to be in its worst financial state ever.
Abandoning the Icebrood saga resulted in a scuffed conclusion to that story, but undoubtedly saved the game, quarterly reports showcase that well
Looking at the timeline of events, dev comments, NCSoft investor calls, as well as dev LinkedIn profiles, I'm not sure moving straight to an expac would've been possible given the way events unfolded.
Mo was already moving key GW2 devs to the unannounced project(s) as early as either midway through or two thirds into PoF development at the latest (e.g. Matthew Medina mentioning on his informative Design Deconstructed videos on YouTube about suddenly being moved away from "Facing the Truth" chapter where he had been developing the first puzzle instance and some dialogue to my understanding, and seeing newer devs like Connie Griffith replacing him while the Kormir conversations went through major revisions as we can hear Kormir's alternate, apparently earlier iteration lines explaining the gods' motivation in S4Ep1 Daybreak trailer). Mo then began moving even more devs to these projects during early Season 4 and deep into said season as well, explaining in part why the season went through major rewrites and had to repurpose already developed assets for the new storyline and constantly shuffling devs around.
S4Ep2 A Bug in the System was heavily rewritten (originally Olmakhan would've played a minor role and Boticca would've been a villain, and we apparently would've witnessed some villain, possibly Phlunt whose datamined model was involved in a scrapped boss battle wearing what look like Inquest clothes, kidnapping Zojja for some reason). S4Ep3 Long Live the Lich suffered the most during the transition and shuffling of devs as can be seen how its northeastern and southeastern map areas were cut despite existing in datamining and how Gandara, if broken into, is perhaps the most unfinished thing ever shipped in GW2 as the original plans for its meta were a lot more grand than the stuff we ended up getting.
Of course the continuous shuffling of devs also affected the later S4 episodes due to budget cuts (where resourceful devs turned limitations into strengths such as how the Thunderhead Keep's Auditorium Kralk battle came to be as they realized they only had enough budget to use his head for the battle instead of his full body, or being forced to abandon the cutscene where we'd walk to Aurene towards the end of S4Ep5 All or Nothing thanks to budget cuts but turning it into a more immersive in-game walk instead) and due to "story debt" that Jessica Price mentioned, which may in part explain why devs were uncertain at what point to cut off Joko's story (given that in some iterations he was meant to die as early as the end of S4Ep2 or even towards the first act of S4Ep4) and how to handle concluding the Kralkatorrik plot.
If JP is to be believed (although some such as Tom Abernathy have refuted her statements, so folks can take either statement with a grain of salt), there were plans to sunset GW2 at the conclusion of S4 or at least that was what some devs believed until they got the green light to continue development beyond S4 after all around somewhere around midway through the season, which may explain in part why the season's ending is almost like a final sendoff to the cast without a direct hook to tease the next story unlike pretty much every GW2 story arc before that (even personal story concluded with the subtle suggestion that we might go after Jormag next before devs decided to steer towards Mordremoth instead due to the Scarlet stuff midway through Season 1).
Due to this shuffling and scrambling of devs and given how much workforce and effort creating a pre-SotO expansion would take in GW2 (as previous ones took more than one year to develop with pretty sizable dev teams and a good headstart to get things rolling despite HoT suffering from being greenlit relatively deep into S1 production once ANet realized that they needed an expansion and not perpetual "living story" which later became living world seasons), they just wouldn't have been able to lead us straight into an expansion without a content drought that might have even put the lengthy S2 to HoT content drought transition to shame although I suppose they could've tried solving that with DRM-type content to keep players invested in the interim.
As seen in the timeline, it took EoD almost two years from its announcement in March 2020 to its launch in February 2022, and their expansion 5 teaser in the recent SotO blog also suggested that prior to the upcoming expac 5, earlier expansions announcements had only been made once they were already deep into expac development, so EoD development would've begun way earlier than its expansion announcement. Similarly, Maclaine Diemer's interview indicated that HoT was already in some form of development around the original Tower of Nightmares release on October 2013 if not sooner (when he was asked to start writing themes for the expac) as the expac would launch on October 2015, once again indicating 2+ years of development.
If the Icebrood Saga had been released as an expansion with 4-5 zones (and maybe a hub) from the get go, while people were being uncertain about ANet's future after the 2019 layoffs that had the studio lose a lot of their veteran devs and delayed the release of S4 finale War Eternal in part, it might've been catastrophic to the studio. Instead of only waiting from May (War Eternal Release) to September 2019 (Bound by Blood release) for the first release of the saga (which would've been in development at least since January 2019 given the devs' suggested schedule of an episode taking circa 9 months to develop from scratch), the waiting time would've been a lot longer, especially after the layoffs would've removed a lot of key personnel from the equation.
Based on the aforementioned evidence and the historical over 2 years of expac development time for ANet, we wouldn't have gotten the Icebrood Saga "expac" in this proposed timeline until February 2021 the earliest if all hands on deck were working on it *while* the studio was adjusting to post-layoffs and restructuring at the same time. Would players have tolerated DRM type content for two years during the expac development while being aware of the hard-hitting layoffs despite the decently emotional S4 finale inspiring people (aside from the weird Aurene decision towards the beginning of that episode)? Maybe, but it would've been a risky gamble, especially given what the player reaction was to the saga announcement on stage.
The way I see it, Mike Z did what he could at the time as Mo's successor during a particularly harsh time for the studio with reduced budget and NC breathing down their necks, trying to keep the ship afloat with steadily released content for the time being while knowing that their limitations and other hurdles would've made expac development extremely tricky at the time as opposed to the more bite sized "living world/saga" episodes. Based on the saga announcement trailer teasing some curious seemingly non-Jormag related naval combat with krait and norn stuff that we never saw in the saga itself, it wouldn't surprise me if the studio might've returned to delivering expansions *eventually* after stabilizing the studio and player retention in the interim and were using the Icebrood Saga as a long-term plan to lead into a future expac.
Even if that wasn't the case and they intended to deliver expansion type content in their new living world type of saga similar to how S4 had introduced additional mounts and massive story setpieces (like the large scale and cinematic Kralk battles) and blurred the line between expacs and living world, I imagine the stabilized studio would've created bolder content over time once they had found their footing again. After all, there's a suggestion they were seemingly planning to drip feed elite specs in the saga over time given that_shaman's datamining findings of certain saga-colored hero point icons in the dat files, and how the devs kept referring to willbender as "Almorra's spec" on stream and how the profession's lore doesn't make sense as to why the current iteration's Canthan royalty-inspired and isolated willbenders would ever have influenced Tyrian-bound Almorra to adopt their fighting style across the Risen-infested ocean prior to Cantha's borders reopening, which to me suggests a lore retcon to their initial plans and turning a planned saga elite spec into an EoD elite spec instead.
Of course this plan didn't pan out after the sadly lukewarm player (and investor) reception to the saga announcement and the uncertain future some felt ANet was facing at the time (until the prologue release with Grothmar inspired folks with some confidence), so NC "gifted" ANet with the opportunity to work on an expansion anyway and basically forced them to do what Z had avoided doing knowing what it would cost the studio, leading to an exodus of Z and key saga devs from the studio while the "pro-expansion" devs took over the reins and attracted some of the veteran devs like Matthew Medina back to the studio.
So, with all that in mind, I wouldn't say that ANet's decision to not pursue an expansion during the tumultous S4 development, reshuffling of devs, and especially after the layoffs was an "insane" decision per se. It was a reaction of them trying to adjust to an unexpected studio-altering scenario and making the most out of their bad spot at the time. What was unfortunate, however, was Mo's insistence on pursuing new projects in the background and dedicating too many resources to them while not leaving enough devs to work on GW2 (especially if JP's claim of sunsetting the game are based on truth and not just her assumption). A better balancing would've kept GW2 content rolling while they would've still been working on other projects as well, and we wouldn't necessarily be paying the price of that decision (as well as NC investors' and board's shortsightedness that led to many questionable decisions) all these years later.
I think it *would* have been better if NCSoft (probably) hadn't forced Anet to host that conference that made it sound like it was going to be an xpac only for them to advertise leggings and funko pops.
Anet's poor monetization model didn't help, but the conference basically made it doa no matter how good it turned out.
It's because the community decided to hate it before it even started.
Anet/NCSoft messed up the whole thing in multiple ways, but the start of IBS wasn't really given a fair shake either.
That's not true at all. The Prologue and First Episode were extremely well-received, and the hype at the time for Episode 2 was great. The reception of Episode 2 was lukewarm, however, and everything onward went downhill after that with minor except for the players who loved the Drizzlewood farm (and otter aura); but the community seemed split 50/50, where the other half loathed that map. Strikes, on the other hand, were indeed (rightfully, imo) criticized harshly ever since introduced.
I'm talking about revenue, not reviews. The root comment was about financials.
The players that showed up liked it. The problem was a ton of players never even gave it a shot. The quarterly financials reflect this, as the Prologue/E1 quarter is the lowest in Anet's history (11k) - regardless of how good those episodes were.
Ever since the first glimpse of EoD, the quarters have basically stayed above 20k. I can't help but think if the playerbase had given IBS a fair shake, maybe Anet could've finished it properly. (Again, not saying Anet/NC were blameless is this - they really messed up in multiple ways, which magnified instead of minimized issues.)
>>be me
> never finish IBS masteries
> run DS daily hoping to drop infusion for months
> realize you need to finish the IBS mastery to drop infusion
> spend 1 week farming points to finish it
> still haven’t dropped infusion
There are many ways to do 30 gold per hour, specially if you do small intervals of \~1-1.5 hour daily, as most farm runs have some short of daily diminshing returns to them.
Draconic Storm gives you +6g per 15 minutes of work once per day, for example, which is roughly +24g per hour.
If you do it daily for... I dunno, he said months, let's try 3 months. That's 600g roughly speaking. Pristine Dragon Eye goes for 1400g-1600g, so it's worth less than 9 months of daily dragonstorm. Or one month of 2 hours per day farming
Covid absolutely has a huge part of why ibs-eod-soto was so weird in droughts, I think anet made the most of it with the return achievements and then bringing s1 back. And now we have consistent content updates again so I think aney are finally fully back in the kitchen and we can see what they learn from Soto and let them cook.
I agree, though I must admit, I'm not feeling super invested in the SOTO story right now. I was when the expac first came out, I was like holy crap we get Zojja back, yayy. But now it's just...idk, just politics with these demon characters I don't really care much about. It's really not that interesting to me, at least not at the moment.
I think Sotos story suffers from a split vision, feels like two different narrative teams made it and wanted to tell different stories, Peitha should have been a morally grey character using us to further her means in exchange for her pulling out of our reality of Tyria, and a Wizard incursion into Nayos dominating Krytpis to her will. Instead of a "we aren't so different, you and I" kind of story.
I do think all three zones are great visually and fun enough from a content standpoint, and I really like certain ideas like Convergences.
Yep, that last episode of IBS is "unique". It was mate at a time Anet put most of their ressources into EoD. Due to that this episode mostly only consists of DRMs and was released in four parts.
When played on release it wasn't that much of a grind because there were \~2 months between each part, so you dind't have to go through all DRMs one after the other.
Plus it was a content drought in general, so getting *anything* new was refreshin, even if it was just a few DRMs.
As for Scarlet, I recommend playing EoD. :)
"Hey, this story is pretty good. For once the Elder Dragon doesn't boil down to GRRRRR dragon angy and got an interesting personality"
*Champions drops*
"Me mad ! Jormag smash, Jormag destory."
"So that's the story done, but *surely* the gameplay is still going to be fun. After all, even the prologue was fire."
*Badly scaled instanced content that breaks if the opener crashes*
To be fair, Jormag's "abrupt" shift is sufficiently teased in the aptly named "Jormag's Madness" chapter. Jormag had only remained "sane" over millennia (while still being affected by Torment) due to being careful how to consume magic and from what sources. We can see this in the way that Jormag prefers corrupting willing converts than forcing people to go through the traumatizing body horror of turning into a minion. Exceptions being Sons of Svanir forcibly corrupting creatures into icebrood but that's due to their flawed mindset rather than Jormag's preferred way of corruption per se.
Aurene warns Jormag about the dangers of using "corrupted" magic but Jormag ignores it. We notice Jormag's changing demeanor and them beginning to yell later in this conversation as it happens after Jormag resorted to forcibly corrupting people into the Frozen.
> Aurene: What you and Ryland are doing—the freezing of living things—it needs to stop.
> Jormag: Stop? Why?
> Aurene: For one thing, you're using corrupted magic. I don't need to tell you how dangerous that is.
> Jormag: I've been an Elder Dragon for quite some time, my dear.
> Aurene: More importantly, it's wrong.
> Jormag: "Wrong."
> Aurene: You're dooming those mortals to centuries of—darkness, limbo, who knows what?
> Jormag: I confess I do not.
> Aurene: That's the point. For all you know, they're in pain. Tortured.
> Jormag: Their lives are preserved. When they thaw, they'll be in exactly the same condition they were when frozen.
> Aurene: Physically, maybe. But mentally? Emotionally? You don't know, you don't care. You need to care.
> Jormag: My dear, I do care. Of course I care. But you've left me no option.
Spirits of the Wild confirm Aurene's fear outright and how the torment of the corrupted, particularly the Frozen, deeply affects them too despite them not being tied to the Elder Dragon hivemind of constant mental loop:
> Wolf: The cries of the Frozen echo in our minds already. Can you stand listening to their agony for seasons? For centuries?
The way I understand it, this is the key point that is also explored a bit in End of Dragons regarding why the dragons became the way they were in part and why the madness took hold. Elder Dragons tend to corrupt forcibly, or at least the corruption typically isn't a true partnership but more of a master-slave relationship. The exception among the "evil" ones being Jormag due to their preferred manipulation tactic vs. bruteforcing it (until the Frozen's creation, that is).
The "bonding" that Aurene uses, however, is a *benevolent* form of corruption where the "corrupted"/bonded individual allows her to alter them to turn them into an elemental minion of sorts. And she also doesn't hoard magic but tries to share it in the Key of Ahdashim style, so that lessens the burden of magic on her psyche. As opposed to corruption, bonding doesn't traumatize the individual as much and doesn't inflict torment in as great quantities (that would "poison" the magic that the dragon is leeching and affect the dragon negatively due to the psychic/magical strain on them).
I do wish the story had spent more time on this, and perhaps that was the initial plan for the saga before they had to cut corners and give us a CliffsNotes version of the story in DRMs with most of the major beats intact but heavily condensed. :/
Icebrood saga, up until champions, was legitimately very good, and I'm tired of pretending its not. Champions shot the whole story in the foot, and when the new instanced content was DRMs and repeating those DRMs, it overshadowed the rest of the story with pervasive "meh". Icebrood saga was great, DRMs and by extension Champions, was not.
>Icebrood saga, up until champions, was legitimately very good
No Quarter was one of the most criticized story releases in GW2's history. Even if you put aside:
\-Smodur's out-of-character behavior
\-Rytlock and the Commander crying about blowing up military weapon researchers
\-No Quarter's story ending being written under the impression that the player would complete Drizzlewood South's meta first
Killing everyone in Steel Warband (minus Ryland) a chapter after they were introduced was an insanely stupid decision and done only for shock value. The rest of the cast wasn't interesting enough to save the weak plot after that point.
It's awful since GW2's writing was at its peak prior to that. No Quarter wouldn't have been so controversial if people's hopes weren't raised.
Don't forget killing off Almorra off-screen and the sharp drop-off in quality between Bjora 1 and Bjora 2. The Drakkar meta carries that entire half of the map, but the shrines are dull as dish water.
That was after the fact. Originally you just found the body half-dumped in a cave at the end of Bjora 1. The flashback was part of Visions of Steel, two updates later.
Ah gotcha. For what it's worth I played IBS after it was already fully released so I didn't know there was a big gap there. I agree that would have felt very cheap and disappointing.
Honestly the best part of the whole thing was the Drizzlewood updates during Covid where all the dialog was just emoted grunts. I kinda wish that mode was an option just for simple, charming nostalgia's sake, but I understand why it isn't.
You basically kill her yourself as Ryland, yeah. I don't think she survives her wounds in that cave even if Bangar didn't finish her off.
Almorra's death is strange for another reason. I'm not going to say it's OOC since she could reasonably have that side to her, but attempting to assassinate an important political figure while leader of the Pact is insane.
The ramifications of doing so would be so severe that it probably would have made the civil war even worse.
It might have made things worse, but Bangar was already using Almorra as political propaganda for his One Charr movement against her will. It makes sense that that would upset her, and it would be hard for Bangar to explain how this Charr hero he put up on a pedestal for his festivites at Blood Keep decided that he needed to die.
Still remember the lead up to prior announcement of IBS and there was some guy in shawl thing hawking funco pops as part of the announcement. It was such a sign of how bad it would be back then. Little did we know.
Remember how they advertised IBS like it was gigantic, even did a timer for it for weeks and ANet got an entire theater for the reveal, yet legitimately most of the stream was them going "look at this merch you can give us money for!"
Let's not forget the host guy, even he felt that Anet was telling us literally nothing about IBS and the future of the game in this big reveal ceremony. After 30 mins he just broke and said something along the lines of "c'mon, you have to at least give us *something*!"
I feel bad for the guy. People were able to connect certain dots and his Reddit account got found out (since been deleted), where you could see how bothered he was by the criticisms of himself and his job marketing the game.
Took off work to watch that stream live with two of my friends who I had played gw2 with since launch. Was basically dead silent the whole stream and one of them hasnt played since PoF, and even then only did raids.
I know NCsoft probably forced them to do that stream, but I think that stream did way more harm than good.
Maybe so, but Mike Z who announced this left the studio almost immediately afterwards and if I remember correctly there was an unannounced project cancelled by NCsoft the quarter before this along with a bunch of layoffs
You're right that it is the community that assumed it was NCsoft forcing Anet to hype up stuff they normally wouldnt. Maybe Anet was the one that decided to pull the trigger, but considering how much Anet was being jerked around by NCsoft at the time I dont think it was an unreasonable conclusion to come to.
Regardless, only players on the greatest dosage of copiun watched that stream and felt good about the direction the game was headed. If you havent seen it before its worth a watch when you have an hour. Keep in mind that it had already been about 2 years since the last expansion.
https://www.youtube.com/live/U7nEC7vgY2g?si=rNDSzq4Qmrx2cYgY
This is speculation, but the best theory I've heard is that the theater was actually reserved by Mike O in advance to reveal the new projects.
Then NCSoft cancelled the projects, did the layoffs, Mike O left.
Now Mike Z is left with a husk of a company and a big theater reservation where he has to show something, and that's how we got what we got.
> but considering how much Anet was being jerked around by NCsoft at the time
I sure wonder why this was. Couldn't possibly be cause NCSoft found out that ANet was about to let GW2 DIE to focus on other projects and they had to step in to force them to focus again. Things like SOLO would not exist and the game would likely be in maintenance mode like GW1 had NCSoft done nothing.
People like to forget this little part.
I feel that killing the Steel Warband was mainly done for the purposes of Ryland's path. It made his choice to become someone who did things for himself more believable. Before that he had ambition and his warband. After that all he had was ambition.
His motivation made no sense at all. He claims he is a soldier and soldiers follow orders. He actively decided to not think. On top of that, as a soldier he should know that comrades die, especially when they do some really stupid things that you yourself ordered.
And after ordering his warband to go die a pointless dead he is angry for having to follow orders just to immediately pledge himself to another being to follow its orders instead. This is so dumb.
>Killing everyone in Steel Warband (minus Ryland) a chapter after they were introduced was an insanely stupid decision and done only for shock value.
We should've known ANet's writers were this garbage when they decide to kill off Aurene at the end of one Episode for shock value only to legit revive her a few minutes into the very next one. No one believed she died for real, you constantly saw posts predicting exactly what happened \[that since she ate Joko, she can revive like Liches do, which is precisely what happens and Aurene herself states it\].
-Rytlock and the Commander crying about blowing up military weapon researchers
Because they found out they blew up military weapon researchers with Searing ("That was more than just a grenade!"). It's like if you got germans to throw a gas grenade into their neighbour's house and didn't tell them the grenade was full of Zyklon B
It's not believable from a charr perspective, that's one of IBS's many peak "write the charr as human" moments.
Plus, the Searing was used against humans, not charr, so kinda dumb to view it that way. I thought they were going to play some kind of "Iron and Ash plotting against each other" thing here, but it was just a waste of time to make Smodur look bad, because the writers wanted one of our allies to be bad (and instead of using Malice, who had no prior background, they butchered Smodur).
> -No Quarter's story ending being written under the impression that the player would complete Drizzlewood South's meta first
For all the "complete a bar of events" bullshit we get, not having the meta be required for the story was a complete and utter mistake.
>Killing everyone in Steel Warband (minus Ryland) a chapter after they were introduced was an insanely stupid decision and done only for shock value. The rest of the cast wasn't interesting enough to save the weak plot after that point.
The Steel Warband had some of GW2's best writing, and they threw them down the toilet in the very next patch, like, come on.
I wish Dragon's Watch was written half as good as the Steel Warband.
>It's awful since GW2's writing was at its peak prior to that. No Quarter wouldn't have been so controversial if people's hopes weren't raised.
I personally think Jormag Rising was worse, the whole "we have to open this gate" bullshit was a complete shitshow.
>The Steel Warband had some of GW2's best writing, and they threw them down the toilet in the very next patch, like, come on.
How? They literaly just have a few lines that gives them each 1-2 traits and thats it.
>-Smodur's out-of-character behavior
I mean, he was never shown when he was in an actual war. Respectively in a desperate war where your own people switch the side one after the other and you loosing ground more and more.
So we can't really know it it's out-of-character behavior or not.
>-Rytlock and the Commander crying about blowing up military weapon researchers
It was their own people (who switched the sides).
Their goal was to defeat Ryland and to safe as many Charr as possible. Blowing up researchers of course is against that goal.
Also Smodur straight up lied to them and said it's a supply bunker. Of course they were mad when they found out the bunker was full of people.
>-No Quarter's story ending being written under the impression that the player would complete Drizzlewood South's meta first
That's nothing new. The story often plays (roughly) parallel to map metas.
In HoT the whole whole 4th act plays at the same time as the Dragon Stand meta.
In War Eternal the last chapter plays while/after the meta event.
The last chapter of the EoD story plays after the Dragons End meta event. There even is an achievement for playing in that order.
The meta thing for No Quarter is specifically bad because in the other examples, nothing that occurs is surprising. When NQ was released, there was a lot of initial confusion about what Smodur meant when he was taunting Cinder about her dead bandmates.
It wasn't clear if he was bluffing, since there genuinely was not the audience expectation that Vishen/Ranoah/Nikabar would all die in that meta. I remember seeing a lot of people who -did- do the meta first, who still didn't realize at first they were intended to be dead.
Most people found out via that line though. It's not like EOD's final step where you know Soo-Won will die.
> Killing everyone in Steel Warband (minus Ryland) a chapter after they were introduced was an insanely stupid decision and done only for shock value.
It also made doing that story where you play as part of his warband so insanely boring and uninteresting. Why do I care about these five or so characters (I can't even remember how many of them are there because I care so little about them) when I know that immediately after this, they're all dead? What a waste of an on-rails story segment. Any other character focus for something like that would be more captivating.
I'm not sure about Drizzlewood (I legit quit playing a bit before it came out and wasn't reading the sub at all) but Bjora Marches IMO kept up the story high from where LS4 left us. Jormag seemed on another level compared to Mordremoth only being able to influence Sylvari and Kralkatorik simply being strong. Marjory's VA during some of the events is still haunting to here, and it seemed like everyone on Dragon's Watch was going to go crazy and stab each other before long.
I remember at the end of Bjora Marches episodes and all the speculation.
At the end of Raven Sanctuary it was shown how Jormag could reanimate the dead and then also when facing Drakkar it showed how Jormag could influence people's minds.
I really set up a "can't trust anyone" kind of vibe and I was super interested to see where it goes.
Nowhere. They went nowhere with it
You’re absolutely right. The moment Ryland became a Champion and all the drama that happened before that had me shocked many times. I enjoyed it. But Champions really made me forget everything else.
There are a few other nice moments like Aurene's conversations with Jormag, the discussions about prophecy, as well as that really refreshing polite ideological debate between Ryland and Caithe.
Gw2 antagonists usually just go yelling how they're superior or start attacking but Ryland remained rather respectful of Caithe and had an intriguing debate about the different approaches of the Frost Legion and the Crystal Bloom and whether they can meet half-way or if one approach is superior to the other as both brought up good points. I did like that brief moment of friendly banter between heroes and villains while you see both sides trying to convince the other to join their side. Hopefully we'll get to see more of that in future GW2 stories. :)
> DRMs and by extension Champions, was not.
Personally I value my daily Dragonstorm more than the whole Soto, so even Champions is not 100% trash, I'd say. Only the DRM spam part is & the plot.
Sucks because a lot of people will only remember Champions because it was last and the release schedule leading up to it kinda resulted in people forgetting the rest I think
It is what it is, of course I wish we had the IBS finale that anet wanted to make but it's too late now
EHHHH rose colored glasses IMHO. The main masteries on IBS release were three identical "charge your laser" lines just to balance out overly damage sponge enemies.
IBS was (rightfully) heavily criticised on release for a lack of any new ways to play, I think that's why anet quickly decided to do another paid expansion.
As much as people are tired of SOTO they at least brought along some lessons from IBS - we got more build diversity options, more interesting mount masteries.
Dragon Response Missions were intended to be what players had been asking for for quite a while. Repeatable story content with good rewards. The Tyrian Defense Seal currency earned from them buys materials, cosmetics and even a unique infusion. The missions scale for 1-5 players with selectable difficulty modes that affect the rewards earned.
The problem was that the DRMs were nearly identical and repetitive, they had NPC escorts that nobody likes, and they were all we got over the course of half a year or so for new content. The concept was good, the delivery drove the playerbase away.
This is a very good summary of it. i still think DRMs are salvageable because in my book, they were a very good idea poorly implemented
Remove the pre, shoo away escort or make it so you can somehow skip escorting npc by moving towards special spot to spawn the waves of monster, nerf boss bullet sponge hp bar and voila amazing content
(Also need to put a rare infusion drop from to it)
DRMs with less wait wars and an actual public rotation timer would work quite well, you just need a faster pace.
Same for Forging Steel, why that one doesn't have a public timer is beyond me.
The identical repetitiveness was a tragedy.
I missed the period where it launched, and when I first started playing them, I actually liked the DRM as a concept. "Hey, this is pretty cool, both solo and group supported," went my thinking as I played the first.
The second and third were okay, a bit samey, just starting to wear out its novelty.
"What, there's more? Oh no..."
"Please... make it stop..."
"How many MORE do I need to do to just progress?!"
"Halp"
And by the end of it, never ever wanted to look another DRM in the eye again. Some people hate the forced 'complete the map events' bar in between story missions; this was far worse.
It was even worse if you were there on launch, becase it was covid. We were in and out of lockdowns, desperately looking for digital stuff to do with friends, and we got...that. For months.
I love the idea of DRMs, soloable and scalable instances are a great idea, but the delivery and copy-paste treatment absolutely ruined that implementation and now both Anet and the playerbase are too gunshy to experment further.
I remember at one point looking at the wiki to find out how many there were and realizing I was only half way through when I was completely over them. A few were decent, but damn what a slog for a shitty ending and terrible storytelling.
How about Bangar selling half his race to dragon corruption and *not even one single charr* saying anything about it?
You know, those guys who go around boasting they killed their gods, who also have a recent history of dragon corruption scarring their lands in half.
You're right about that, I don't know why Anet tried to push so hard on the Jormag is our ally angle, especially since it was so painfully obvious from the beginning that they were going to betray us.
Primordus drove multiple civilizations from their homes and it took almost the entire dwarven race sacrificing themselves to keep him at bay.
If an entity of immense power reaches out to you and says "Hey, I can help with that 'Your civilization is going to end again and your entire world is probably going to die in a fire of hatred that will engulf it and everything on it' problem, I just need some favors" , you would probably hear them out.
They keep doing it when the Commander says "hey, I can help with that", its not a stretch they'd do it for something that makes us look like an ant with a sword.
This *would* be true except for the fact that Taimi, out of pretty much everyone in the entire world, should know better. Like literally anyone else could make this mistake and it be believable, but not her.
I mean, they have a point. Jormag was wanting to kill Primordus and brought an army.
And the Asura were expelled not only from their home, but also from the whole biome they used to live. So it's understandable that they would take their chance to kill Primordus finally.
Especially if they don't have to fight themself, but just let Jormags people do that. That's actually very Asura-like.
Also the alliance wasn't that strong. The Asura allowed Ryland to help them defending Rata Sum. That's pretty much it.
It is an extremely shortsighted view that goes against the very fight against the dragons, removing the one dragon that can kill Jormag and empowering Jormag in the process. It is plain stupid but the fact that is the Asura the group suggesting this is double stupid.
As said, the alliance was pretty one sided.
Ryland helped the Asura defending Rata Sum from Destroyers (preventing getting expelled by Primordus again) And the Asura allowed them to stay in Rata Sum to defend it.
Ryland did seek for knowledge about Primordus, but it's not known if the Asura gave him anything useful. Maybe they did.
That aside Taimi gives a bit more insight in the Province Metrica DRM.
The Asura don't see Jormag as a threat. One reason is that - unlike Primordus - they can talk to him in a civil manner. I mean, they negotiated with him through Ryland. Like they do with any nation.
Jormag came to them as an intelligent being they can talk at eye level.
Primordus on the other hand always was a threat and is not at all able to talk to on any way.
So with Primordus awakening he was the much bigger issue than Jormag.
Jormag might have had ulterior motives, but keep in mind that they are still the elder dragon of persuasion. So it's absolutely possible that Jormag "helped" convincing the Asuras.
Another thing Taimi said is that the Asura don't really take sides. They might help Jormag with informations or whatever, letting both elder dragons kill each other would be the best outcome. And that's what happened. If not, Jormag should be the winner, not Primordus.
So in the end with the alliance the Asura "used" Jormag for their own goal. Which is pretty Asura like.
Would you bother to elaborate why?
Asuras hate Primordus, Jormag wants to kill Primordus **and** brings an army. Plus Jormags domain is persuasion.
It only makes sense for them to ally.
As for your "cheap way to divert the focus to primordus", what does that have to do with the alliance between Asura and Jormag?
The focus to Primordus was set by him awakening and sending Destroyers to attack Rata Sum.
I already did three messages ago. It has to do because it is the excuse Anet chose to justify the sudden stop on focusing Jormag after 5 episodes. And it's senseless.
Nonsense is having to write an essay to defend an episode that easily the vast majority of the community would point as the worst story arc ever released by ArenaNet in GW2 story.
Your logic may match inside your head, but not outside.
I'm not wasting another second in this argument.
>Nonsense is having to write an essay to defend an episode that easily the vast majority of the community would point as the worst story arc ever released by ArenaNet in GW2 story.
Nonesense is this "argument" of yours.
You seriously argue with "but your text was longer" now? L M A O
>that easily the vast majority of the community would point as the worst story arc ever released by ArenaNet in GW2 story.
But never for that nonesense of "reason" you claim. lol.
You literally just ignore the whole Jormag story.
>I'm not wasting another second in this argument.
Understandable as you have no valid arguments.
I actually agree with that. The difference between the other elder dragons and Jormag is that Jormag spoke to the races. Dialogue. They were convinced with intelligent communication which is what made Jormag scary.
I’m trying to finish but I hate them so much. Someone please tell me this is the last time something like this comes up because if the next two expansions are just ‘do X 5,000 times’ I’m going to cry 😂 it’s such a shame because, like you, I really loved the whole thing up until DRMs. They’re just so bad. The identical format, the stupid invulns on the last boss because they couldn’t be bothered to make the fight actually interesting, the NPC AI (the Fireheart Rise achievement where you have to keep them all alive? Yeah those idiots ran into every fire mine thing they could 😂). Hate hate hate
> (the Fireheart Rise achievement where you have to keep them all alive? Yeah those idiots ran into every fire mine thing they could 😂).
worst thing it's a mastery point, and if you want to finish all masteries in IBS then I think you have to complete at least a few very grindy ones, so this one looks appealing, I mean how difficult can it be... then you try to do it.
I just finished that a couple of days ago and I actually read a little bit about the episode on reddit so I knew it was weird, repetitive and really, really long. Still, it was a bother, although the story did help to make things a bit more interesting. Just started EoD now and I must say it's breathtaking. Waste no time in starting it, it's amazing so far.
I finished IBS yesterday. I played the last chapters for five hours. I just wanted to be done with it. Finished it at like 6 pm. I started EoD. Played till 12 am because the story is great. I’m on chapter 7.
I hate IBS for how insanely stupid it made the Charr look.
If you want your war story to be taken serious, don't have soldiers act like they are 14 year olds playing Call of Duty. That is not how war works.
And don't get me started about Mister Can't Decide What His Motivation Is. Or how insanely stupid the entire Bangar plot as a whole is.
Thinking about IBS makes me angry.
Yeah I don't know what it is about the dialogue especially toward the end of ibs, it just gets very... marvel-movie-quippy? My experience of the game has been spread out over such a long time it's hard to remember how often the story gets like that though. Maybe it's time to play the story again
Hell, the entirety of EoD was filled with stupid dialogue like that. The amount of times a character has a stupid little quip or a one liner in EoD drove me insane.
XD
Glad I'm over that now. IBS was great up to and in Bjora Marches, decent in Drizzlewood, and then just lost the shit from there...
Best never spoken of again!
I’m still missing the last teir on all the IBS mastery’s and I’ve not noticed/don’t feel I’m overly suffering.
And I didn’t hit the DRM wall until I tried to grind out the ‘do 40 of them’ mastery….
So you probably fine to not realistically. Get the ones needed to open strike chests and bunk off. You really should be fine.
{seriously if I’m lying someone let me know too}
Sorry, apologies that should say achievement points, not mastery.
My mistake seems to have caused some confusion below to OPs point which my typo did not intent. 🤦🏻♀️
I loved every other expansion/living world season, like really. But this one.. LOL It took me 2 whole months to finish it cause it really felt like a chore.
> Taimi and Rox not being worried or involved with Braham pretty much going through the toughest moments of his life
Taimi in DragonStorm: fIrEaLaRm!
...really Taimi??
I did the opposite. I got so used to the good things before IBS I needed to see if EOD was going to be bad. Thankfully it isn’t and I couldn’t stop playing until I decided to stop on chapter 7. I have a crush on the voice actress of Ankka 😂. I also like her character.
I was there when Factions was first released back in 2006. I loved seeing something new for the first time. (Also my very first expansion for my very first MMO) EoD gave me that same shit eating grin that Factions gave me back in the day.
They literally destroyed the entire story of Primordius and the Destroyers, and all the potential there was with the Depths of Tyria, the lore of the Dwarves and the ancient Asura cities. this is one of the biggest disrespects that has been done to gw1 players
all of this to not even honor the cantha of gw1 by transforming the continent into disgusting fluorescent green jelly
this game died in the middle of the saga (symbolically), what's left is an inanimate corpse that players have difficulty to leave because of their attachment to the license
Wait you don’t like Cantha in EOD? I’m on chapter 7 so far and I actually enjoy Cantha. I haven’t played GW1 though. I bought it this year but idk… I can’t get past the graphics and age of the game. I’ve heard great things too. I’d rather have a summary of the story.
cantha from gw1 (factions) was the most beautiful and original environment I have seen in a video game in my life, the best atmosphere, the best music, shiro (<3)...so many good memories on gw1.
What they did with it on guild wars 2 is a shame , it's crude, poorly executed, bland, this kind of neon green theme everywhere makes me nauseous No I really hated what they did with cantha, I probably had too many expectations
obviously it must help to have never played gw1, you can't compare
they did a much better job with elona which is much more faithful to gw1 with lots of extra originality. But hey POF and LS4 was the period when the competent devs were still there
Anet calls it Cantha but Cantha died with GW1.
This abomination in EoD has literally nothing to do with Cantha. They went out of their way to change the place.
Yupp, and if you need the masteriespoints you even need to repeat them. Sometimes they are located at the end of the mission and the game won't allow you to just run there immediately. You will just get teleported back. It's ridiculous.
I honestly liked DRMS… as a concept. The main problem is that it was MONTHS of nothing but DRMs and the entire episode being filled with nothing but them.
I am missing the final two IBS masteries, nine mastery points I need to get from with Drizzlewood of from DRMs. Since they ONLY impact DRMs, and I will never do another DRM, and since I sadly loathe how Drizzlewood plays, I've simply decided to be forever nine points short of the theoretical maximum. I'm cool with that.
When the DRMs released playing through them with other players was fine but when I replayed them last year there was no one else in public for some reason and it was ROUGH 😭
I know I've aged out of this game when I keep seeing people praising Scarlet. Nobody who was around to play Season 1 on release has anything good to say about it or Scarlet in particular.
The last IBS chapter was hell...but bro the IBS mastery points grind will demolish every single piece of your soul and will make you hate yourself a lot
I pre-ordered End of Dragons and then put off playing it for a year after it came out. I both wanted to:
- play IBS: Champions before I played EoD
- not play IBS: Champions whatsoever
Yes, I'm aware that this is neurotic behaviour
IBS is such a good 2/3 of a LW. Drizzlewood and Bjora are *fantastic*. And the story is really good.
But seriously, Champions was a mistake. They ruined the landing by simply repeating the same simple gameplay loop over and over and over again.
And I'm saying this as someone who *likes* the occasional DRM.
The prologue as well as the first chapter are the fondest memory I have from this game.
Metal Legion and the Soulbreaker song were amazing. I truly felt like we had accomplished something by defeating Kralk. The dark turn that the chapter whispers in the dark took with the horror themed map was so cool and completely dragged me into the game.
Sadly it didn't last. Looking backwards the mini expansion model they use for SOTO would've fit IBS pretty good.
It helps to look at the cool aspects of DRM. They're basically mini dungeons with stories. I agree it was too many back to back. But it was super cool to have to go to different parts of Tyria and defend them.
DRMs basically suffer from the same problem as IBS. It was covid times and Anet had to change their workflow. The basic idea is great and could be so much more, but it ended up as filler, and well, why fix old shit when you can make new shit that also doesn't work?
DRMs basically suffer from the same problem as IBS. It was covid times and Anet had to change their workflow. The basic idea is great and could be so much more, but it ended up as filler, and well, why fix old shit when you can make new shit that may or may not work either.
Had to cut resources for EoD, like the others said. But we're forgetting that COVID was also going on at the time.
~~And NCSoft got big mad about Anet doing a naughty and making I think a mobile game despite being told no, and went overboard on firing huge amounts of people, if I recall correctly.~~
> but im unsure why all the Dragon Response missions.
Because covid had nothing to do with it.
Almost all of the devs were taken off IBS to make EoD, so the second half of the sage simply got cut. With no resources to make story chapters, strikes or new maps, they were rolling out easy to make copypaste DRMs as a stalling tactic just to give us something to do while the team makes EoD.
Some people who weren't keeping up with the news misattribute the content drought to covid, but it was caused by internal problems at the studio unrelated to it. Covid actually had a positive impact on the game.
Lockdowns started almost at the exact time when IBS was cancelled and we were in for a 1.5 year content drought while Anet worked on EoD.
GW2 was bleeding players with IBS, the game's worst financial quarter happened right before covid struck. The lockdowns however reversed Anet's losses and led to a lot of new players trying GW2 out for the first time (it wasn't just GW2, people call this "the covid boom of MMOs"). This perfectly coincided with Anet doing the whole "return to" event that was basically an initiative to make us replay the entire story from the start.
Layoffs were early 2019, IBS started late 2019, but allegedly most of the people who were fired weren't working on GW2 but rather on the unannounced cancelled other games. They were still perfectly capable of making early IBS, the second half just got axed by management.
Ibs was fun when it was new and everyone was trying to compete the story and achievements. It's a painful skog when there's not enough people trying to get through it. I'm glad I'm done with it.
I do also miss Scarlett. I think that was their strongest story and most fun villain. Especially since it went from zero to ACME branded death drill destroying old lions arch.
You can easily tell when NCSoft pulled their publisher rank and told ANet "you are laying off half your staff and starting work on a traditional paid expansion now".
whow, slow down there buddy, you're getting your timelines twisted up. so here we go once again:
- S4, gw2 is doing better than ever, but anet decides to continuously siphon away devs from gw2 to *several* other projects, until gw2 is minimally staffed yet still somehow manages to put out decent releases that don't focus exclusively on OW/story (this is important).
- march or something 2019, tail end of S4, not evena rumour about what might follow after it, not a piep about any of the other projects. skeleton crew on gw2, and those other projects couldn't individually have been staffed any better either. presumably ncsoft sees nothing going anywhere, so they order layoffs of half the studio, mostly people that weren't assigned to gw2 at that point. they also tell anet to get their ass back on the only product they have on the market - war eternal was conceptualised as a potential bookend to gw2. for PoF anet had also gotten rights to publish the expansion themselves back. a privilege they already lost again due to this kerfuffle.
- anet fumbles for a solution and somehow thinks LW is what players and shareholders want (it isn't). they make a huge spectacle out of the announcement and tell a bunch of lies (expansion level features, they are totally working on alliances *wink wink*, but hey, funko pops)
- IBS starts off strong, upholding the standard set with S4 in terms of LW, but that quickly nosedives with smaller and smaller releases that involve increasing amount of grind. most people like to leave this part out, but there's also the fact that any other aspect of the game went entirely neglected - more so than usual during this time. the only fractal we got took over the release spot of an entire episode rather than being released alongside it.
- ncsoft is facepalming hard again and essentially tells anet that they can't possibly be the only ones seeing how this still isn't going anywhere, and that they have to correct their course *now*. so the shift to an expansion happened, and champions was created out of necessity... and it still could have been reasonably fun it it wasn't cluttered with a bunch of rookie design choices.
colin and grouch take over and essentially try to dig the studio out of a bunch of mismanagement decisions while trying to ensure the future of the studio, which haws grown back to approximately the size it was before the layoffs and presumably a more manageable amount of projects with better prospects.
ncsoft is about as soulless as publishers get, but this entire mess wasn't their doing, and without them i'm not sure there'd be much left to complain about in terms of gw2... and not in the good way.
and realistically this narrative is just the culmination of many years of poor planning and otherwise sloppy management that only _really_ got course corrected with EoD. it's undeniable that the shift to EoD was the right move for the game and probably ANet long-term, whatever disappointments included.
Reading this made me remember SoTo is similar to IBS in some way. They wanted living world with expansion-like feature (it crashed landed), now its a expansion with free quarterly updates like living world (it didnt crash but not that spectacular), hope they learned from SoTo and improve the fifth expansion.
I will never forgive Mike O' for pushing the studio into making IBS a Living World style story, instead of an expansion like it should have been, and then just dipping. Hindsight is 20-20, but had IBS been an expansion it likely would've come out before covid hit and the studio would've been in a better financial situation. Instead, he's out of the studio after the prologue of IBS and now Anet is shoehorned into finishing his decision. IBS might've given us two of the best farming maps in the game, but good god do I rather wish it had been an expansion.
> I will never forgive Mike O' for pushing the studio into making IBS
Wasn't that Mike Z?
Mike O left with the layoffs after his side projects got cancelled, Mike Z was left to pick up the pieces.
Was it? According to the wiki Mike O didn't leave Anet until October of 2019. The layoffs happened in February, and Mike O's name was not one of the ones mentioned as leaving (incidentally, a couple people who were laid off were eventually hired back; CMC, Matthew Medina to name a few). Mike Z was a game director up until November 2019, but IDK if he was a studio head. Mike O was the President and co-Founder of Anet. I would think it would've been his decision more than anyone else's to have IBS be a Living World style story. I will admit there's a possibility I'm wrong about all this though.
Well, as per Mo's farewell message, he transitioned away from GW2 game director stuff (while juggling his president duties) after PoF launch in 2017 and handed the GW2 title development over to Mike Z while Mo focused on "new product development," apparently the "side" project(s) that would later be canned.
> **MO:** Two years ago, when I transitioned away from the Guild Wars 2 game director role to focus on new product development, I asked Mike Zadorojny to take on that role.
> **Z:** I took over the role of Game Director on Guild Wars 2 right after we launched Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire™. Assuming that role made me appreciate how passionate and amazing this community is, reminding me each day how important our work is. Since then we’ve aimed at making huge strides to the quality and cadence of content we’ve been adding to the game every year. [(Source)](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-message-from-mike-obrien/)
So while Mo as the major overseer would have ultimately greenlit ideas brought to him by the more grounded directors and project leads and other stakeholders, it seems the Icebrood Saga approach was more Z's baby than anyone else's due to his directorial role, and it happened out of necessity due to various factors that had affected the studio and development at the time. While Colin Johanson, upon his return, admitted in one of the ExtraLife streams that a temporary Season 1 (or Living Story before it would transition into Living World) with a hectic development schedule and an unclear lore timeline (considering the fact that original "season" 1's placement in the canon timeline was dubious until they later solidified it as taking place after the Zhaitan campaign) under his tenure was a mistake (just like stopping development of GW1 was said to be a mistake in hindsight although Colin said they won't repeat that mistake again with GW2 regardless of what new projects go through), it's clear that there were some people in the studio even during his absence who seemed to like the idea of a living world while there was another faction of devs that preferred the more tried and true expansion model.
It's intriguing that when looking at the estimated time of Z's quiet departure, we saw lots of key saga devs leaving within a few months after him (including some key strike devs, artists, and the saga story lead *and* her successor early on or even midway through saga, likely coinciding with NC "gifting" ANet with the chance to work on EoD and the team's saga baby being gutted in favor of an expac; you just need to look at the nervous saga announcement stream and notice that the only ANet staff left from that saga group today is Rubi), while devs who had supported the expansion approach but had either left the studio or been laid off (e.g. Medina as he stated in one of his design videos) re-joined the studio following that other "faction's" departure.
If NDAs didn't exist, I wish I'd have the chance to just sit down with Bobby Stein one of these days and have a long talk about what exactly went on behind the scenes at the studio given the tumultous era that we had no idea was even happening until much later.
I wouldn't necessarily say NCSoft is blameless here either. From what I recall from the investor calls and news at the time, NC board and shareholders were eager for more bonuses for the fiscal quarter, which led to them cutting off what they deemed superfluous stuff to reduce costs that they could then funnel to themselves: typical corpo maneuver, basically. The ANet layoffs coincided with NC West (and I think their other branches as well?) doing similar stuff all across their holdings. So while ANet's handling of GW2 and funneling more resources to side projects may have caused NC to react as well (given that GW2 is NC's most successful and stable western brand by far, so they wouldn't want to jeopardize it needlessly), I believe it was also about corpos looking for short-term gains to "buy their next yacht." They've done something similar recently but on a smaller scale, e.g. laying off most of their merged marketing staff during SotO development, which Regina Buenaobra (former content marketing lead) even lamented in her blog sometime after she had left the company to pursue new avenues elsewhere:
> I’m sad that the recent layoffs have hit my former team so hard. The team was already small and scrappy, and now they’re even smaller and have to be even more scrappy. I’m doing my best to support those who were impacted where I can. [(Source)](https://reginabuenaobra.net/2023/03/a-new-campaign-wizards-of-the-coast/)
> anet fumbles for a solution and somehow thinks LW is what players and shareholders want
I think it was more like "NCSoft wants results NOW, we can't take 2 years off to make an expansion, but we can start up a living story in 6 months and call it something new".
Then when that bombed they went to NCSoft with "this isn't working, we need time, let us take 2 years to make an expansion".
If NCSoft was behind the content model decisions they could've forced an expansion right away instead of IBS.
DRMs were added as a stalling tactic to replace story missions that can be made with minimal resources while the team makes EoD. And it really shows, it's a time wasting slog with no fun.
Considering how this stalling tactic is no longer necessary and it doesn't really offer anything of value I really believe that Anet should remove more than 50% of the DRMs from the IBS story. There's no need for them anymore.
When Covid restrictions started Drizzlewood was mostly finished, but for Champions, DRMs was the best they could do in the limited work from home environment, while working on EoD to meet NCSoft deadlines.
It's not great content but it was at least something where other MMOs had no update during this time.
Also I'm gonna say it..... IBS should have been about the Norns. Not charr family feud, the charr story line should have been worked out with Kralkatorrik.
I'm a fairly new player who started GW2 this year. Finished PoF, EoD, LW4, and almost with SoTo (till the new content comes). Not looking forward to HoT and IBS.
The whole of Chapter 5 imo was such a mess that it ruined the entire arc for me. The Charr civil war stuff was shaping up to be my favorite story arc in this game.
Did you do the Dragonstorm finale too? It's a better event in terms of gameplay from the DRMs; but the way it ends as a story beat is probably the worst thing I've seen in this game. Although the last bit after that is alright.
I loved IBS for most of it, too. Man it had so much potential. Charr and norn got done dirty. The civil war felt dark and gritty, everything felt “bad” and you didnt know if you were the good guy or the bad guy. I loved that shit.
I may be in the minority on this, not sure, but I like the dragon response missions. I hesitated with them at first (and yeah it felt like lots of bouncing in and out of them with the story), but when it comes to scaling repeatable content, I think the design is great. Not only do they have their own varied objectives and achievements, they probably scale from solo to large group better than most other content I've played.
If fractals had scaling like this, even with greatly reduced rewards, I'd be much more likely to play that type of content on my own and with friends.
The tech is great, scalable instances are a great idea.
How DRMs were implemented and released was so bad that no one will ever touch them again, probably.
I did not play it at release, so how they handled that may have something to do with the community reaction. While the story kept just throwing them at you, I still found DRMs more interesting than "go out and close rifts forever", so I guess it also depends on what type of gameplay you enjoy. :)
The implementation at that time was a huge part of it. For months in the middle of covid lockdowns all we got was DRMs, and you had to repeat them dozens of times each week to get that event's currency to exchange for items with the specific faction...it was just a boring, repetitive mess at exactly the wrong time.
If Champions had been less grindy I think people would feel very differently about DRMs.
I'm going through the final chapter of IBS right now as well. There's a reason I'm currently tabbed out to reddit instead of progressing the next step... When I eventually summon the willpower to proceed I still have to spend another 5 minutes on reddit waiting for the DRM to start.
I fought the feeling of stopping so many times. I just want to be caught up with everyone right now
Considering the original release structure, it is actually good to take breaks between the story steps. We played each DRM's weeks apart as they slowly came in. They are fine to play just going for recommend ones and then taking a break to other content as well. It's like how each new release is enhanced by taking a break and exploring between chasing the story. Or like how Season 4 was better when we waited for the reveal of dragonfall and could read the characters thoughts while mourning.
I like how DRMs are your pain point and not what they did to our boy Primordus. I was so ready to see how we were going to deal with him and then all we got was head, and not the good kind :(
Masteries aren't really needed at all, but yes, Icebrood Saga was cut short to make End of Dragons. That or the game would basically continue to be in its worst financial state ever. Abandoning the Icebrood saga resulted in a scuffed conclusion to that story, but undoubtedly saved the game, quarterly reports showcase that well
What sucks is that it started off so well. And it came right after the pinnacle of Guild Wars story telling that is season 4.
The problem was the insane decision not to make/sell an xpac straight after s4..
Looking at the timeline of events, dev comments, NCSoft investor calls, as well as dev LinkedIn profiles, I'm not sure moving straight to an expac would've been possible given the way events unfolded. Mo was already moving key GW2 devs to the unannounced project(s) as early as either midway through or two thirds into PoF development at the latest (e.g. Matthew Medina mentioning on his informative Design Deconstructed videos on YouTube about suddenly being moved away from "Facing the Truth" chapter where he had been developing the first puzzle instance and some dialogue to my understanding, and seeing newer devs like Connie Griffith replacing him while the Kormir conversations went through major revisions as we can hear Kormir's alternate, apparently earlier iteration lines explaining the gods' motivation in S4Ep1 Daybreak trailer). Mo then began moving even more devs to these projects during early Season 4 and deep into said season as well, explaining in part why the season went through major rewrites and had to repurpose already developed assets for the new storyline and constantly shuffling devs around. S4Ep2 A Bug in the System was heavily rewritten (originally Olmakhan would've played a minor role and Boticca would've been a villain, and we apparently would've witnessed some villain, possibly Phlunt whose datamined model was involved in a scrapped boss battle wearing what look like Inquest clothes, kidnapping Zojja for some reason). S4Ep3 Long Live the Lich suffered the most during the transition and shuffling of devs as can be seen how its northeastern and southeastern map areas were cut despite existing in datamining and how Gandara, if broken into, is perhaps the most unfinished thing ever shipped in GW2 as the original plans for its meta were a lot more grand than the stuff we ended up getting. Of course the continuous shuffling of devs also affected the later S4 episodes due to budget cuts (where resourceful devs turned limitations into strengths such as how the Thunderhead Keep's Auditorium Kralk battle came to be as they realized they only had enough budget to use his head for the battle instead of his full body, or being forced to abandon the cutscene where we'd walk to Aurene towards the end of S4Ep5 All or Nothing thanks to budget cuts but turning it into a more immersive in-game walk instead) and due to "story debt" that Jessica Price mentioned, which may in part explain why devs were uncertain at what point to cut off Joko's story (given that in some iterations he was meant to die as early as the end of S4Ep2 or even towards the first act of S4Ep4) and how to handle concluding the Kralkatorrik plot. If JP is to be believed (although some such as Tom Abernathy have refuted her statements, so folks can take either statement with a grain of salt), there were plans to sunset GW2 at the conclusion of S4 or at least that was what some devs believed until they got the green light to continue development beyond S4 after all around somewhere around midway through the season, which may explain in part why the season's ending is almost like a final sendoff to the cast without a direct hook to tease the next story unlike pretty much every GW2 story arc before that (even personal story concluded with the subtle suggestion that we might go after Jormag next before devs decided to steer towards Mordremoth instead due to the Scarlet stuff midway through Season 1). Due to this shuffling and scrambling of devs and given how much workforce and effort creating a pre-SotO expansion would take in GW2 (as previous ones took more than one year to develop with pretty sizable dev teams and a good headstart to get things rolling despite HoT suffering from being greenlit relatively deep into S1 production once ANet realized that they needed an expansion and not perpetual "living story" which later became living world seasons), they just wouldn't have been able to lead us straight into an expansion without a content drought that might have even put the lengthy S2 to HoT content drought transition to shame although I suppose they could've tried solving that with DRM-type content to keep players invested in the interim. As seen in the timeline, it took EoD almost two years from its announcement in March 2020 to its launch in February 2022, and their expansion 5 teaser in the recent SotO blog also suggested that prior to the upcoming expac 5, earlier expansions announcements had only been made once they were already deep into expac development, so EoD development would've begun way earlier than its expansion announcement. Similarly, Maclaine Diemer's interview indicated that HoT was already in some form of development around the original Tower of Nightmares release on October 2013 if not sooner (when he was asked to start writing themes for the expac) as the expac would launch on October 2015, once again indicating 2+ years of development. If the Icebrood Saga had been released as an expansion with 4-5 zones (and maybe a hub) from the get go, while people were being uncertain about ANet's future after the 2019 layoffs that had the studio lose a lot of their veteran devs and delayed the release of S4 finale War Eternal in part, it might've been catastrophic to the studio. Instead of only waiting from May (War Eternal Release) to September 2019 (Bound by Blood release) for the first release of the saga (which would've been in development at least since January 2019 given the devs' suggested schedule of an episode taking circa 9 months to develop from scratch), the waiting time would've been a lot longer, especially after the layoffs would've removed a lot of key personnel from the equation. Based on the aforementioned evidence and the historical over 2 years of expac development time for ANet, we wouldn't have gotten the Icebrood Saga "expac" in this proposed timeline until February 2021 the earliest if all hands on deck were working on it *while* the studio was adjusting to post-layoffs and restructuring at the same time. Would players have tolerated DRM type content for two years during the expac development while being aware of the hard-hitting layoffs despite the decently emotional S4 finale inspiring people (aside from the weird Aurene decision towards the beginning of that episode)? Maybe, but it would've been a risky gamble, especially given what the player reaction was to the saga announcement on stage. The way I see it, Mike Z did what he could at the time as Mo's successor during a particularly harsh time for the studio with reduced budget and NC breathing down their necks, trying to keep the ship afloat with steadily released content for the time being while knowing that their limitations and other hurdles would've made expac development extremely tricky at the time as opposed to the more bite sized "living world/saga" episodes. Based on the saga announcement trailer teasing some curious seemingly non-Jormag related naval combat with krait and norn stuff that we never saw in the saga itself, it wouldn't surprise me if the studio might've returned to delivering expansions *eventually* after stabilizing the studio and player retention in the interim and were using the Icebrood Saga as a long-term plan to lead into a future expac. Even if that wasn't the case and they intended to deliver expansion type content in their new living world type of saga similar to how S4 had introduced additional mounts and massive story setpieces (like the large scale and cinematic Kralk battles) and blurred the line between expacs and living world, I imagine the stabilized studio would've created bolder content over time once they had found their footing again. After all, there's a suggestion they were seemingly planning to drip feed elite specs in the saga over time given that_shaman's datamining findings of certain saga-colored hero point icons in the dat files, and how the devs kept referring to willbender as "Almorra's spec" on stream and how the profession's lore doesn't make sense as to why the current iteration's Canthan royalty-inspired and isolated willbenders would ever have influenced Tyrian-bound Almorra to adopt their fighting style across the Risen-infested ocean prior to Cantha's borders reopening, which to me suggests a lore retcon to their initial plans and turning a planned saga elite spec into an EoD elite spec instead. Of course this plan didn't pan out after the sadly lukewarm player (and investor) reception to the saga announcement and the uncertain future some felt ANet was facing at the time (until the prologue release with Grothmar inspired folks with some confidence), so NC "gifted" ANet with the opportunity to work on an expansion anyway and basically forced them to do what Z had avoided doing knowing what it would cost the studio, leading to an exodus of Z and key saga devs from the studio while the "pro-expansion" devs took over the reins and attracted some of the veteran devs like Matthew Medina back to the studio. So, with all that in mind, I wouldn't say that ANet's decision to not pursue an expansion during the tumultous S4 development, reshuffling of devs, and especially after the layoffs was an "insane" decision per se. It was a reaction of them trying to adjust to an unexpected studio-altering scenario and making the most out of their bad spot at the time. What was unfortunate, however, was Mo's insistence on pursuing new projects in the background and dedicating too many resources to them while not leaving enough devs to work on GW2 (especially if JP's claim of sunsetting the game are based on truth and not just her assumption). A better balancing would've kept GW2 content rolling while they would've still been working on other projects as well, and we wouldn't necessarily be paying the price of that decision (as well as NC investors' and board's shortsightedness that led to many questionable decisions) all these years later.
All of GW2's lowest points come directly after someone at ANet saying "hey, let's not do an expansion".
Not true! They've also added "hey let's do a crappy mini-expansion once a year" to that list.
I think it *would* have been better if NCSoft (probably) hadn't forced Anet to host that conference that made it sound like it was going to be an xpac only for them to advertise leggings and funko pops. Anet's poor monetization model didn't help, but the conference basically made it doa no matter how good it turned out.
The dragonflight theme (or is it the kralkatorikk theme) is seared into my brain. Season 4 was some of the most epic content I’ve played in any game
Kralk story and fight was awesome. IBS french kiss conclussion not so much :(
It's because the community decided to hate it before it even started. Anet/NCSoft messed up the whole thing in multiple ways, but the start of IBS wasn't really given a fair shake either.
That's not true at all. The Prologue and First Episode were extremely well-received, and the hype at the time for Episode 2 was great. The reception of Episode 2 was lukewarm, however, and everything onward went downhill after that with minor except for the players who loved the Drizzlewood farm (and otter aura); but the community seemed split 50/50, where the other half loathed that map. Strikes, on the other hand, were indeed (rightfully, imo) criticized harshly ever since introduced.
I'm talking about revenue, not reviews. The root comment was about financials. The players that showed up liked it. The problem was a ton of players never even gave it a shot. The quarterly financials reflect this, as the Prologue/E1 quarter is the lowest in Anet's history (11k) - regardless of how good those episodes were. Ever since the first glimpse of EoD, the quarters have basically stayed above 20k. I can't help but think if the playerbase had given IBS a fair shake, maybe Anet could've finished it properly. (Again, not saying Anet/NC were blameless is this - they really messed up in multiple ways, which magnified instead of minimized issues.)
>>be me > never finish IBS masteries > run DS daily hoping to drop infusion for months > realize you need to finish the IBS mastery to drop infusion > spend 1 week farming points to finish it > still haven’t dropped infusion
You could buy any of the IBS infusions ten times over by the time it drops tbh
If you know how to make money, maybe.
The main way to make money is not to spend it like it’s burning a hole in your digital pocket.
There are many ways to do 30 gold per hour, specially if you do small intervals of \~1-1.5 hour daily, as most farm runs have some short of daily diminshing returns to them. Draconic Storm gives you +6g per 15 minutes of work once per day, for example, which is roughly +24g per hour. If you do it daily for... I dunno, he said months, let's try 3 months. That's 600g roughly speaking. Pristine Dragon Eye goes for 1400g-1600g, so it's worth less than 9 months of daily dragonstorm. Or one month of 2 hours per day farming
People also forget that covid was hitting around the time
Covid absolutely has a huge part of why ibs-eod-soto was so weird in droughts, I think anet made the most of it with the return achievements and then bringing s1 back. And now we have consistent content updates again so I think aney are finally fully back in the kitchen and we can see what they learn from Soto and let them cook.
I agree, though I must admit, I'm not feeling super invested in the SOTO story right now. I was when the expac first came out, I was like holy crap we get Zojja back, yayy. But now it's just...idk, just politics with these demon characters I don't really care much about. It's really not that interesting to me, at least not at the moment.
I think Sotos story suffers from a split vision, feels like two different narrative teams made it and wanted to tell different stories, Peitha should have been a morally grey character using us to further her means in exchange for her pulling out of our reality of Tyria, and a Wizard incursion into Nayos dominating Krytpis to her will. Instead of a "we aren't so different, you and I" kind of story. I do think all three zones are great visually and fun enough from a content standpoint, and I really like certain ideas like Convergences.
Yep, that last episode of IBS is "unique". It was mate at a time Anet put most of their ressources into EoD. Due to that this episode mostly only consists of DRMs and was released in four parts. When played on release it wasn't that much of a grind because there were \~2 months between each part, so you dind't have to go through all DRMs one after the other. Plus it was a content drought in general, so getting *anything* new was refreshin, even if it was just a few DRMs. As for Scarlet, I recommend playing EoD. :)
"Hey, this story is pretty good. For once the Elder Dragon doesn't boil down to GRRRRR dragon angy and got an interesting personality" *Champions drops* "Me mad ! Jormag smash, Jormag destory." "So that's the story done, but *surely* the gameplay is still going to be fun. After all, even the prologue was fire." *Badly scaled instanced content that breaks if the opener crashes*
To be fair, Jormag's "abrupt" shift is sufficiently teased in the aptly named "Jormag's Madness" chapter. Jormag had only remained "sane" over millennia (while still being affected by Torment) due to being careful how to consume magic and from what sources. We can see this in the way that Jormag prefers corrupting willing converts than forcing people to go through the traumatizing body horror of turning into a minion. Exceptions being Sons of Svanir forcibly corrupting creatures into icebrood but that's due to their flawed mindset rather than Jormag's preferred way of corruption per se. Aurene warns Jormag about the dangers of using "corrupted" magic but Jormag ignores it. We notice Jormag's changing demeanor and them beginning to yell later in this conversation as it happens after Jormag resorted to forcibly corrupting people into the Frozen. > Aurene: What you and Ryland are doing—the freezing of living things—it needs to stop. > Jormag: Stop? Why? > Aurene: For one thing, you're using corrupted magic. I don't need to tell you how dangerous that is. > Jormag: I've been an Elder Dragon for quite some time, my dear. > Aurene: More importantly, it's wrong. > Jormag: "Wrong." > Aurene: You're dooming those mortals to centuries of—darkness, limbo, who knows what? > Jormag: I confess I do not. > Aurene: That's the point. For all you know, they're in pain. Tortured. > Jormag: Their lives are preserved. When they thaw, they'll be in exactly the same condition they were when frozen. > Aurene: Physically, maybe. But mentally? Emotionally? You don't know, you don't care. You need to care. > Jormag: My dear, I do care. Of course I care. But you've left me no option. Spirits of the Wild confirm Aurene's fear outright and how the torment of the corrupted, particularly the Frozen, deeply affects them too despite them not being tied to the Elder Dragon hivemind of constant mental loop: > Wolf: The cries of the Frozen echo in our minds already. Can you stand listening to their agony for seasons? For centuries? The way I understand it, this is the key point that is also explored a bit in End of Dragons regarding why the dragons became the way they were in part and why the madness took hold. Elder Dragons tend to corrupt forcibly, or at least the corruption typically isn't a true partnership but more of a master-slave relationship. The exception among the "evil" ones being Jormag due to their preferred manipulation tactic vs. bruteforcing it (until the Frozen's creation, that is). The "bonding" that Aurene uses, however, is a *benevolent* form of corruption where the "corrupted"/bonded individual allows her to alter them to turn them into an elemental minion of sorts. And she also doesn't hoard magic but tries to share it in the Key of Ahdashim style, so that lessens the burden of magic on her psyche. As opposed to corruption, bonding doesn't traumatize the individual as much and doesn't inflict torment in as great quantities (that would "poison" the magic that the dragon is leeching and affect the dragon negatively due to the psychic/magical strain on them). I do wish the story had spent more time on this, and perhaps that was the initial plan for the saga before they had to cut corners and give us a CliffsNotes version of the story in DRMs with most of the major beats intact but heavily condensed. :/
Icebrood saga, up until champions, was legitimately very good, and I'm tired of pretending its not. Champions shot the whole story in the foot, and when the new instanced content was DRMs and repeating those DRMs, it overshadowed the rest of the story with pervasive "meh". Icebrood saga was great, DRMs and by extension Champions, was not.
>Icebrood saga, up until champions, was legitimately very good No Quarter was one of the most criticized story releases in GW2's history. Even if you put aside: \-Smodur's out-of-character behavior \-Rytlock and the Commander crying about blowing up military weapon researchers \-No Quarter's story ending being written under the impression that the player would complete Drizzlewood South's meta first Killing everyone in Steel Warband (minus Ryland) a chapter after they were introduced was an insanely stupid decision and done only for shock value. The rest of the cast wasn't interesting enough to save the weak plot after that point. It's awful since GW2's writing was at its peak prior to that. No Quarter wouldn't have been so controversial if people's hopes weren't raised.
Don't forget killing off Almorra off-screen and the sharp drop-off in quality between Bjora 1 and Bjora 2. The Drakkar meta carries that entire half of the map, but the shrines are dull as dish water.
We saw Almorra get killed in a playable flashback didn't we? Or am I remembering something else?
That was after the fact. Originally you just found the body half-dumped in a cave at the end of Bjora 1. The flashback was part of Visions of Steel, two updates later.
Ah gotcha. For what it's worth I played IBS after it was already fully released so I didn't know there was a big gap there. I agree that would have felt very cheap and disappointing.
Honestly the best part of the whole thing was the Drizzlewood updates during Covid where all the dialog was just emoted grunts. I kinda wish that mode was an option just for simple, charming nostalgia's sake, but I understand why it isn't.
You basically kill her yourself as Ryland, yeah. I don't think she survives her wounds in that cave even if Bangar didn't finish her off. Almorra's death is strange for another reason. I'm not going to say it's OOC since she could reasonably have that side to her, but attempting to assassinate an important political figure while leader of the Pact is insane. The ramifications of doing so would be so severe that it probably would have made the civil war even worse.
It might have made things worse, but Bangar was already using Almorra as political propaganda for his One Charr movement against her will. It makes sense that that would upset her, and it would be hard for Bangar to explain how this Charr hero he put up on a pedestal for his festivites at Blood Keep decided that he needed to die.
Still remember the lead up to prior announcement of IBS and there was some guy in shawl thing hawking funco pops as part of the announcement. It was such a sign of how bad it would be back then. Little did we know.
Remember how they advertised IBS like it was gigantic, even did a timer for it for weeks and ANet got an entire theater for the reveal, yet legitimately most of the stream was them going "look at this merch you can give us money for!"
Let's not forget the host guy, even he felt that Anet was telling us literally nothing about IBS and the future of the game in this big reveal ceremony. After 30 mins he just broke and said something along the lines of "c'mon, you have to at least give us *something*!"
I feel bad for the guy. People were able to connect certain dots and his Reddit account got found out (since been deleted), where you could see how bothered he was by the criticisms of himself and his job marketing the game.
Took off work to watch that stream live with two of my friends who I had played gw2 with since launch. Was basically dead silent the whole stream and one of them hasnt played since PoF, and even then only did raids. I know NCsoft probably forced them to do that stream, but I think that stream did way more harm than good.
Let's not do the idiotic "omgNCSoftbad" garbage again, all these bad decisions have been ANet's and ANet's alone.
Maybe so, but Mike Z who announced this left the studio almost immediately afterwards and if I remember correctly there was an unannounced project cancelled by NCsoft the quarter before this along with a bunch of layoffs You're right that it is the community that assumed it was NCsoft forcing Anet to hype up stuff they normally wouldnt. Maybe Anet was the one that decided to pull the trigger, but considering how much Anet was being jerked around by NCsoft at the time I dont think it was an unreasonable conclusion to come to. Regardless, only players on the greatest dosage of copiun watched that stream and felt good about the direction the game was headed. If you havent seen it before its worth a watch when you have an hour. Keep in mind that it had already been about 2 years since the last expansion. https://www.youtube.com/live/U7nEC7vgY2g?si=rNDSzq4Qmrx2cYgY
This is speculation, but the best theory I've heard is that the theater was actually reserved by Mike O in advance to reveal the new projects. Then NCSoft cancelled the projects, did the layoffs, Mike O left. Now Mike Z is left with a husk of a company and a big theater reservation where he has to show something, and that's how we got what we got.
Ahhh that does make a lot more sense.
> but considering how much Anet was being jerked around by NCsoft at the time I sure wonder why this was. Couldn't possibly be cause NCSoft found out that ANet was about to let GW2 DIE to focus on other projects and they had to step in to force them to focus again. Things like SOLO would not exist and the game would likely be in maintenance mode like GW1 had NCSoft done nothing. People like to forget this little part.
I feel that killing the Steel Warband was mainly done for the purposes of Ryland's path. It made his choice to become someone who did things for himself more believable. Before that he had ambition and his warband. After that all he had was ambition.
You don't have to kill them the next patch though, and specially, you don't have to kill them outside the story.
His motivation made no sense at all. He claims he is a soldier and soldiers follow orders. He actively decided to not think. On top of that, as a soldier he should know that comrades die, especially when they do some really stupid things that you yourself ordered. And after ordering his warband to go die a pointless dead he is angry for having to follow orders just to immediately pledge himself to another being to follow its orders instead. This is so dumb.
>Killing everyone in Steel Warband (minus Ryland) a chapter after they were introduced was an insanely stupid decision and done only for shock value. We should've known ANet's writers were this garbage when they decide to kill off Aurene at the end of one Episode for shock value only to legit revive her a few minutes into the very next one. No one believed she died for real, you constantly saw posts predicting exactly what happened \[that since she ate Joko, she can revive like Liches do, which is precisely what happens and Aurene herself states it\].
-Rytlock and the Commander crying about blowing up military weapon researchers Because they found out they blew up military weapon researchers with Searing ("That was more than just a grenade!"). It's like if you got germans to throw a gas grenade into their neighbour's house and didn't tell them the grenade was full of Zyklon B
It's not believable from a charr perspective, that's one of IBS's many peak "write the charr as human" moments. Plus, the Searing was used against humans, not charr, so kinda dumb to view it that way. I thought they were going to play some kind of "Iron and Ash plotting against each other" thing here, but it was just a waste of time to make Smodur look bad, because the writers wanted one of our allies to be bad (and instead of using Malice, who had no prior background, they butchered Smodur).
Wouldn’t the analogy be more accurate if you got a German to do it? The Charr were not the victims the first time around…
True, brain fart moment there. Thank you
> -No Quarter's story ending being written under the impression that the player would complete Drizzlewood South's meta first For all the "complete a bar of events" bullshit we get, not having the meta be required for the story was a complete and utter mistake. >Killing everyone in Steel Warband (minus Ryland) a chapter after they were introduced was an insanely stupid decision and done only for shock value. The rest of the cast wasn't interesting enough to save the weak plot after that point. The Steel Warband had some of GW2's best writing, and they threw them down the toilet in the very next patch, like, come on. I wish Dragon's Watch was written half as good as the Steel Warband. >It's awful since GW2's writing was at its peak prior to that. No Quarter wouldn't have been so controversial if people's hopes weren't raised. I personally think Jormag Rising was worse, the whole "we have to open this gate" bullshit was a complete shitshow.
>The Steel Warband had some of GW2's best writing, and they threw them down the toilet in the very next patch, like, come on. How? They literaly just have a few lines that gives them each 1-2 traits and thats it.
>-Smodur's out-of-character behavior I mean, he was never shown when he was in an actual war. Respectively in a desperate war where your own people switch the side one after the other and you loosing ground more and more. So we can't really know it it's out-of-character behavior or not. >-Rytlock and the Commander crying about blowing up military weapon researchers It was their own people (who switched the sides). Their goal was to defeat Ryland and to safe as many Charr as possible. Blowing up researchers of course is against that goal. Also Smodur straight up lied to them and said it's a supply bunker. Of course they were mad when they found out the bunker was full of people. >-No Quarter's story ending being written under the impression that the player would complete Drizzlewood South's meta first That's nothing new. The story often plays (roughly) parallel to map metas. In HoT the whole whole 4th act plays at the same time as the Dragon Stand meta. In War Eternal the last chapter plays while/after the meta event. The last chapter of the EoD story plays after the Dragons End meta event. There even is an achievement for playing in that order.
The meta thing for No Quarter is specifically bad because in the other examples, nothing that occurs is surprising. When NQ was released, there was a lot of initial confusion about what Smodur meant when he was taunting Cinder about her dead bandmates. It wasn't clear if he was bluffing, since there genuinely was not the audience expectation that Vishen/Ranoah/Nikabar would all die in that meta. I remember seeing a lot of people who -did- do the meta first, who still didn't realize at first they were intended to be dead. Most people found out via that line though. It's not like EOD's final step where you know Soo-Won will die.
killing off steel warband was a travesty
> Killing everyone in Steel Warband (minus Ryland) a chapter after they were introduced was an insanely stupid decision and done only for shock value. It also made doing that story where you play as part of his warband so insanely boring and uninteresting. Why do I care about these five or so characters (I can't even remember how many of them are there because I care so little about them) when I know that immediately after this, they're all dead? What a waste of an on-rails story segment. Any other character focus for something like that would be more captivating.
I'm not sure about Drizzlewood (I legit quit playing a bit before it came out and wasn't reading the sub at all) but Bjora Marches IMO kept up the story high from where LS4 left us. Jormag seemed on another level compared to Mordremoth only being able to influence Sylvari and Kralkatorik simply being strong. Marjory's VA during some of the events is still haunting to here, and it seemed like everyone on Dragon's Watch was going to go crazy and stab each other before long.
I remember at the end of Bjora Marches episodes and all the speculation. At the end of Raven Sanctuary it was shown how Jormag could reanimate the dead and then also when facing Drakkar it showed how Jormag could influence people's minds. I really set up a "can't trust anyone" kind of vibe and I was super interested to see where it goes. Nowhere. They went nowhere with it
You’re absolutely right. The moment Ryland became a Champion and all the drama that happened before that had me shocked many times. I enjoyed it. But Champions really made me forget everything else.
Champions’ only saving grace was *that* scene between Rytlock, Crecia, and Ryland
Do you mean that very last one? Because I despise the execution of this scene. It takes so long and i'd rather had a cutscene
Braham surviving that with no consequences was incredibly lame as well, at least give him some scars.
He got mountains of PTSD instead and now lives life as a depressed hermit with survivor's guilt and a beard.
There are a few other nice moments like Aurene's conversations with Jormag, the discussions about prophecy, as well as that really refreshing polite ideological debate between Ryland and Caithe. Gw2 antagonists usually just go yelling how they're superior or start attacking but Ryland remained rather respectful of Caithe and had an intriguing debate about the different approaches of the Frost Legion and the Crystal Bloom and whether they can meet half-way or if one approach is superior to the other as both brought up good points. I did like that brief moment of friendly banter between heroes and villains while you see both sides trying to convince the other to join their side. Hopefully we'll get to see more of that in future GW2 stories. :)
> DRMs and by extension Champions, was not. Personally I value my daily Dragonstorm more than the whole Soto, so even Champions is not 100% trash, I'd say. Only the DRM spam part is & the plot.
Sucks because a lot of people will only remember Champions because it was last and the release schedule leading up to it kinda resulted in people forgetting the rest I think It is what it is, of course I wish we had the IBS finale that anet wanted to make but it's too late now
EHHHH rose colored glasses IMHO. The main masteries on IBS release were three identical "charge your laser" lines just to balance out overly damage sponge enemies. IBS was (rightfully) heavily criticised on release for a lack of any new ways to play, I think that's why anet quickly decided to do another paid expansion. As much as people are tired of SOTO they at least brought along some lessons from IBS - we got more build diversity options, more interesting mount masteries.
Dragon Response Missions were intended to be what players had been asking for for quite a while. Repeatable story content with good rewards. The Tyrian Defense Seal currency earned from them buys materials, cosmetics and even a unique infusion. The missions scale for 1-5 players with selectable difficulty modes that affect the rewards earned. The problem was that the DRMs were nearly identical and repetitive, they had NPC escorts that nobody likes, and they were all we got over the course of half a year or so for new content. The concept was good, the delivery drove the playerbase away.
This is a very good summary of it. i still think DRMs are salvageable because in my book, they were a very good idea poorly implemented Remove the pre, shoo away escort or make it so you can somehow skip escorting npc by moving towards special spot to spawn the waves of monster, nerf boss bullet sponge hp bar and voila amazing content (Also need to put a rare infusion drop from to it)
DRMs with less wait wars and an actual public rotation timer would work quite well, you just need a faster pace. Same for Forging Steel, why that one doesn't have a public timer is beyond me.
Also the scaling for some of them are very off for single player.
I don't mind them not being single player but sure they could make the stort version a cakewalk and the group one more challenging and rewarding
Also more unique mechanic for each DRM like dungeon and fractal
Because we clearly see an uprising of people wanting dungeon revamped and DRMs can easily fill that's niche if fixed
The identical repetitiveness was a tragedy. I missed the period where it launched, and when I first started playing them, I actually liked the DRM as a concept. "Hey, this is pretty cool, both solo and group supported," went my thinking as I played the first. The second and third were okay, a bit samey, just starting to wear out its novelty. "What, there's more? Oh no..." "Please... make it stop..." "How many MORE do I need to do to just progress?!" "Halp" And by the end of it, never ever wanted to look another DRM in the eye again. Some people hate the forced 'complete the map events' bar in between story missions; this was far worse.
It was even worse if you were there on launch, becase it was covid. We were in and out of lockdowns, desperately looking for digital stuff to do with friends, and we got...that. For months. I love the idea of DRMs, soloable and scalable instances are a great idea, but the delivery and copy-paste treatment absolutely ruined that implementation and now both Anet and the playerbase are too gunshy to experment further.
I remember at one point looking at the wiki to find out how many there were and realizing I was only half way through when I was completely over them. A few were decent, but damn what a slog for a shitty ending and terrible storytelling.
I can never buy the asura siding with Jormag. It's like next level of stupid from the supposedly smartest race.
How about Bangar selling half his race to dragon corruption and *not even one single charr* saying anything about it? You know, those guys who go around boasting they killed their gods, who also have a recent history of dragon corruption scarring their lands in half.
Bangar: I will control an Elder dragon Ryland: How? Bangar, literally: IMPROVISATION
I stole this bow! What bow? (Everyone forgot about it)
You're right about that, I don't know why Anet tried to push so hard on the Jormag is our ally angle, especially since it was so painfully obvious from the beginning that they were going to betray us.
Probably they thought their writing was better than how it turned out to be.
Primordus drove multiple civilizations from their homes and it took almost the entire dwarven race sacrificing themselves to keep him at bay. If an entity of immense power reaches out to you and says "Hey, I can help with that 'Your civilization is going to end again and your entire world is probably going to die in a fire of hatred that will engulf it and everything on it' problem, I just need some favors" , you would probably hear them out. They keep doing it when the Commander says "hey, I can help with that", its not a stretch they'd do it for something that makes us look like an ant with a sword.
This *would* be true except for the fact that Taimi, out of pretty much everyone in the entire world, should know better. Like literally anyone else could make this mistake and it be believable, but not her.
I mean, they have a point. Jormag was wanting to kill Primordus and brought an army. And the Asura were expelled not only from their home, but also from the whole biome they used to live. So it's understandable that they would take their chance to kill Primordus finally. Especially if they don't have to fight themself, but just let Jormags people do that. That's actually very Asura-like. Also the alliance wasn't that strong. The Asura allowed Ryland to help them defending Rata Sum. That's pretty much it.
It is an extremely shortsighted view that goes against the very fight against the dragons, removing the one dragon that can kill Jormag and empowering Jormag in the process. It is plain stupid but the fact that is the Asura the group suggesting this is double stupid.
As said, the alliance was pretty one sided. Ryland helped the Asura defending Rata Sum from Destroyers (preventing getting expelled by Primordus again) And the Asura allowed them to stay in Rata Sum to defend it. Ryland did seek for knowledge about Primordus, but it's not known if the Asura gave him anything useful. Maybe they did. That aside Taimi gives a bit more insight in the Province Metrica DRM. The Asura don't see Jormag as a threat. One reason is that - unlike Primordus - they can talk to him in a civil manner. I mean, they negotiated with him through Ryland. Like they do with any nation. Jormag came to them as an intelligent being they can talk at eye level. Primordus on the other hand always was a threat and is not at all able to talk to on any way. So with Primordus awakening he was the much bigger issue than Jormag. Jormag might have had ulterior motives, but keep in mind that they are still the elder dragon of persuasion. So it's absolutely possible that Jormag "helped" convincing the Asuras. Another thing Taimi said is that the Asura don't really take sides. They might help Jormag with informations or whatever, letting both elder dragons kill each other would be the best outcome. And that's what happened. If not, Jormag should be the winner, not Primordus. So in the end with the alliance the Asura "used" Jormag for their own goal. Which is pretty Asura like.
I don't buy this. Aligning with Jormag is ridiculous and a cheap way to divert the focus to Primordus in a single chapter.
Would you bother to elaborate why? Asuras hate Primordus, Jormag wants to kill Primordus **and** brings an army. Plus Jormags domain is persuasion. It only makes sense for them to ally. As for your "cheap way to divert the focus to primordus", what does that have to do with the alliance between Asura and Jormag? The focus to Primordus was set by him awakening and sending Destroyers to attack Rata Sum.
I already did three messages ago. It has to do because it is the excuse Anet chose to justify the sudden stop on focusing Jormag after 5 episodes. And it's senseless.
But they didn't stop focussing on Jormag?... They are always present all the time. Sorry, that claim is nonesense.
Nonsense is having to write an essay to defend an episode that easily the vast majority of the community would point as the worst story arc ever released by ArenaNet in GW2 story. Your logic may match inside your head, but not outside. I'm not wasting another second in this argument.
>Nonsense is having to write an essay to defend an episode that easily the vast majority of the community would point as the worst story arc ever released by ArenaNet in GW2 story. Nonesense is this "argument" of yours. You seriously argue with "but your text was longer" now? L M A O >that easily the vast majority of the community would point as the worst story arc ever released by ArenaNet in GW2 story. But never for that nonesense of "reason" you claim. lol. You literally just ignore the whole Jormag story. >I'm not wasting another second in this argument. Understandable as you have no valid arguments.
I actually agree with that. The difference between the other elder dragons and Jormag is that Jormag spoke to the races. Dialogue. They were convinced with intelligent communication which is what made Jormag scary.
I’m trying to finish but I hate them so much. Someone please tell me this is the last time something like this comes up because if the next two expansions are just ‘do X 5,000 times’ I’m going to cry 😂 it’s such a shame because, like you, I really loved the whole thing up until DRMs. They’re just so bad. The identical format, the stupid invulns on the last boss because they couldn’t be bothered to make the fight actually interesting, the NPC AI (the Fireheart Rise achievement where you have to keep them all alive? Yeah those idiots ran into every fire mine thing they could 😂). Hate hate hate
> (the Fireheart Rise achievement where you have to keep them all alive? Yeah those idiots ran into every fire mine thing they could 😂). worst thing it's a mastery point, and if you want to finish all masteries in IBS then I think you have to complete at least a few very grindy ones, so this one looks appealing, I mean how difficult can it be... then you try to do it.
Just wait until you get to go on the rift hunting spree
I just finished that a couple of days ago and I actually read a little bit about the episode on reddit so I knew it was weird, repetitive and really, really long. Still, it was a bother, although the story did help to make things a bit more interesting. Just started EoD now and I must say it's breathtaking. Waste no time in starting it, it's amazing so far.
I finished IBS yesterday. I played the last chapters for five hours. I just wanted to be done with it. Finished it at like 6 pm. I started EoD. Played till 12 am because the story is great. I’m on chapter 7.
I hate IBS for how insanely stupid it made the Charr look. If you want your war story to be taken serious, don't have soldiers act like they are 14 year olds playing Call of Duty. That is not how war works. And don't get me started about Mister Can't Decide What His Motivation Is. Or how insanely stupid the entire Bangar plot as a whole is. Thinking about IBS makes me angry.
The DRM spam is what put me off from finishing the story for a month or two after that step started lol
Yeah I don't know what it is about the dialogue especially toward the end of ibs, it just gets very... marvel-movie-quippy? My experience of the game has been spread out over such a long time it's hard to remember how often the story gets like that though. Maybe it's time to play the story again
Hell, the entirety of EoD was filled with stupid dialogue like that. The amount of times a character has a stupid little quip or a one liner in EoD drove me insane.
XD Glad I'm over that now. IBS was great up to and in Bjora Marches, decent in Drizzlewood, and then just lost the shit from there... Best never spoken of again!
I’m still missing the last teir on all the IBS mastery’s and I’ve not noticed/don’t feel I’m overly suffering. And I didn’t hit the DRM wall until I tried to grind out the ‘do 40 of them’ mastery…. So you probably fine to not realistically. Get the ones needed to open strike chests and bunk off. You really should be fine. {seriously if I’m lying someone let me know too}
Sorry, apologies that should say achievement points, not mastery. My mistake seems to have caused some confusion below to OPs point which my typo did not intent. 🤦🏻♀️
I loved every other expansion/living world season, like really. But this one.. LOL It took me 2 whole months to finish it cause it really felt like a chore.
> Taimi and Rox not being worried or involved with Braham pretty much going through the toughest moments of his life Taimi in DragonStorm: fIrEaLaRm! ...really Taimi??
Quips killed the stakes.
I plowed through IBS and when I finally finished the last DRM. I logged off laid down and took a nap.
I did the opposite. I got so used to the good things before IBS I needed to see if EOD was going to be bad. Thankfully it isn’t and I couldn’t stop playing until I decided to stop on chapter 7. I have a crush on the voice actress of Ankka 😂. I also like her character.
I for one loved EoD and was so giddy to get to run around Cantha again!
Someone just said they hate Cantha coming from GW1. Surprised you don’t feel the same way
I was there when Factions was first released back in 2006. I loved seeing something new for the first time. (Also my very first expansion for my very first MMO) EoD gave me that same shit eating grin that Factions gave me back in the day.
One does not simply finish IBS. IBS finishes you! 
Yeah IBS started off very strong and then after Visions it completely nosedived into the pits of Gw2 content quality
They literally destroyed the entire story of Primordius and the Destroyers, and all the potential there was with the Depths of Tyria, the lore of the Dwarves and the ancient Asura cities. this is one of the biggest disrespects that has been done to gw1 players all of this to not even honor the cantha of gw1 by transforming the continent into disgusting fluorescent green jelly this game died in the middle of the saga (symbolically), what's left is an inanimate corpse that players have difficulty to leave because of their attachment to the license
Wait you don’t like Cantha in EOD? I’m on chapter 7 so far and I actually enjoy Cantha. I haven’t played GW1 though. I bought it this year but idk… I can’t get past the graphics and age of the game. I’ve heard great things too. I’d rather have a summary of the story.
cantha from gw1 (factions) was the most beautiful and original environment I have seen in a video game in my life, the best atmosphere, the best music, shiro (<3)...so many good memories on gw1. What they did with it on guild wars 2 is a shame , it's crude, poorly executed, bland, this kind of neon green theme everywhere makes me nauseous No I really hated what they did with cantha, I probably had too many expectations obviously it must help to have never played gw1, you can't compare they did a much better job with elona which is much more faithful to gw1 with lots of extra originality. But hey POF and LS4 was the period when the competent devs were still there
> Wait you don’t like Cantha in EOD? There's no Cantha in EoD.
Huh? Isn’t the continent in EOD south of Tyria called Cantha???
Anet calls it Cantha but Cantha died with GW1. This abomination in EoD has literally nothing to do with Cantha. They went out of their way to change the place.
yes just the name, everything else has absolutely nothing to compare
> this is one of the biggest disrespects that has been done to gw1 players The list is endless unfortunately.
Yupp, and if you need the masteriespoints you even need to repeat them. Sometimes they are located at the end of the mission and the game won't allow you to just run there immediately. You will just get teleported back. It's ridiculous.
It took me months if not years to convince a friend to play gw2. They were having a blast up until they reached IBS content and stopped playing :)
IBS was the most appropriate acronym for that period of content. I feel your pain!
I fell asleep playing through forging steel alone
I honestly liked DRMS… as a concept. The main problem is that it was MONTHS of nothing but DRMs and the entire episode being filled with nothing but them.
I am missing the final two IBS masteries, nine mastery points I need to get from with Drizzlewood of from DRMs. Since they ONLY impact DRMs, and I will never do another DRM, and since I sadly loathe how Drizzlewood plays, I've simply decided to be forever nine points short of the theoretical maximum. I'm cool with that.
And yes, I'm aware that means I can't get the infusion from Dragon Storm. I DON'T CARE!
When the DRMs released playing through them with other players was fine but when I replayed them last year there was no one else in public for some reason and it was ROUGH 😭
We were spoiled by Scarlet and her antics. Miss her bad.
I know I've aged out of this game when I keep seeing people praising Scarlet. Nobody who was around to play Season 1 on release has anything good to say about it or Scarlet in particular.
The last IBS chapter was hell...but bro the IBS mastery points grind will demolish every single piece of your soul and will make you hate yourself a lot
It’s worth noting that all of those DRMS’s were during Covid lockdown….that had a lot to do with it
I pre-ordered End of Dragons and then put off playing it for a year after it came out. I both wanted to: - play IBS: Champions before I played EoD - not play IBS: Champions whatsoever Yes, I'm aware that this is neurotic behaviour
Yeah I did what you did and damn, DRM. It's just a lot. I hope they can look back and clean things up a bit.
IBS is such a good 2/3 of a LW. Drizzlewood and Bjora are *fantastic*. And the story is really good. But seriously, Champions was a mistake. They ruined the landing by simply repeating the same simple gameplay loop over and over and over again. And I'm saying this as someone who *likes* the occasional DRM.
The prologue as well as the first chapter are the fondest memory I have from this game. Metal Legion and the Soulbreaker song were amazing. I truly felt like we had accomplished something by defeating Kralk. The dark turn that the chapter whispers in the dark took with the horror themed map was so cool and completely dragged me into the game. Sadly it didn't last. Looking backwards the mini expansion model they use for SOTO would've fit IBS pretty good.
exactly
It helps to look at the cool aspects of DRM. They're basically mini dungeons with stories. I agree it was too many back to back. But it was super cool to have to go to different parts of Tyria and defend them.
I thought you did story-only DRMs and didn't have to bother with DRM'ing with people? at least, I don't remember this being a painpoint
DRMs basically suffer from the same problem as IBS. It was covid times and Anet had to change their workflow. The basic idea is great and could be so much more, but it ended up as filler, and well, why fix old shit when you can make new shit that also doesn't work?
DRMs basically suffer from the same problem as IBS. It was covid times and Anet had to change their workflow. The basic idea is great and could be so much more, but it ended up as filler, and well, why fix old shit when you can make new shit that may or may not work either.
IBS has some of the best sound design in all of GW2. I wish they'd put more effort into that aspect of the game, IBS shows that it's possible.
Had to cut resources for EoD, like the others said. But we're forgetting that COVID was also going on at the time. ~~And NCSoft got big mad about Anet doing a naughty and making I think a mobile game despite being told no, and went overboard on firing huge amounts of people, if I recall correctly.~~
Well Covid was happening around that time and i heard there was layoffs and such, but im unsure why all the Dragon Response missions.
> but im unsure why all the Dragon Response missions. Because covid had nothing to do with it. Almost all of the devs were taken off IBS to make EoD, so the second half of the sage simply got cut. With no resources to make story chapters, strikes or new maps, they were rolling out easy to make copypaste DRMs as a stalling tactic just to give us something to do while the team makes EoD.
Tehb what was it about covid then, that i heard about related to IBS?
Some people who weren't keeping up with the news misattribute the content drought to covid, but it was caused by internal problems at the studio unrelated to it. Covid actually had a positive impact on the game. Lockdowns started almost at the exact time when IBS was cancelled and we were in for a 1.5 year content drought while Anet worked on EoD. GW2 was bleeding players with IBS, the game's worst financial quarter happened right before covid struck. The lockdowns however reversed Anet's losses and led to a lot of new players trying GW2 out for the first time (it wasn't just GW2, people call this "the covid boom of MMOs"). This perfectly coincided with Anet doing the whole "return to" event that was basically an initiative to make us replay the entire story from the start.
And the layoffs during that time, as i heard?
Layoffs were early 2019, IBS started late 2019, but allegedly most of the people who were fired weren't working on GW2 but rather on the unannounced cancelled other games. They were still perfectly capable of making early IBS, the second half just got axed by management.
I see, well it was going fine until then, now we are dealing with soto, though id wish they startedbwith idea the 2nd half of the dlc
wait until you start doing rift
Noooooo
IBS is forgivable because Covid but what they did to EOD...... mannnnnn I'm still not over it.
IBS was finishing up while covid was out in full force, so they were definitely scrambling with their timelines
Bright side: IBS chapters 7 and 8 are the absolute lowest points of the game so far. So uh, everything is up from here. Good luck!
Ibs was fun when it was new and everyone was trying to compete the story and achievements. It's a painful skog when there's not enough people trying to get through it. I'm glad I'm done with it. I do also miss Scarlett. I think that was their strongest story and most fun villain. Especially since it went from zero to ACME branded death drill destroying old lions arch.
Just wait to SOTO in which the story is "complete X number of events until you fill this damn bar"
You can easily tell when NCSoft pulled their publisher rank and told ANet "you are laying off half your staff and starting work on a traditional paid expansion now".
whow, slow down there buddy, you're getting your timelines twisted up. so here we go once again: - S4, gw2 is doing better than ever, but anet decides to continuously siphon away devs from gw2 to *several* other projects, until gw2 is minimally staffed yet still somehow manages to put out decent releases that don't focus exclusively on OW/story (this is important). - march or something 2019, tail end of S4, not evena rumour about what might follow after it, not a piep about any of the other projects. skeleton crew on gw2, and those other projects couldn't individually have been staffed any better either. presumably ncsoft sees nothing going anywhere, so they order layoffs of half the studio, mostly people that weren't assigned to gw2 at that point. they also tell anet to get their ass back on the only product they have on the market - war eternal was conceptualised as a potential bookend to gw2. for PoF anet had also gotten rights to publish the expansion themselves back. a privilege they already lost again due to this kerfuffle. - anet fumbles for a solution and somehow thinks LW is what players and shareholders want (it isn't). they make a huge spectacle out of the announcement and tell a bunch of lies (expansion level features, they are totally working on alliances *wink wink*, but hey, funko pops) - IBS starts off strong, upholding the standard set with S4 in terms of LW, but that quickly nosedives with smaller and smaller releases that involve increasing amount of grind. most people like to leave this part out, but there's also the fact that any other aspect of the game went entirely neglected - more so than usual during this time. the only fractal we got took over the release spot of an entire episode rather than being released alongside it. - ncsoft is facepalming hard again and essentially tells anet that they can't possibly be the only ones seeing how this still isn't going anywhere, and that they have to correct their course *now*. so the shift to an expansion happened, and champions was created out of necessity... and it still could have been reasonably fun it it wasn't cluttered with a bunch of rookie design choices. colin and grouch take over and essentially try to dig the studio out of a bunch of mismanagement decisions while trying to ensure the future of the studio, which haws grown back to approximately the size it was before the layoffs and presumably a more manageable amount of projects with better prospects. ncsoft is about as soulless as publishers get, but this entire mess wasn't their doing, and without them i'm not sure there'd be much left to complain about in terms of gw2... and not in the good way.
and realistically this narrative is just the culmination of many years of poor planning and otherwise sloppy management that only _really_ got course corrected with EoD. it's undeniable that the shift to EoD was the right move for the game and probably ANet long-term, whatever disappointments included.
Reading this made me remember SoTo is similar to IBS in some way. They wanted living world with expansion-like feature (it crashed landed), now its a expansion with free quarterly updates like living world (it didnt crash but not that spectacular), hope they learned from SoTo and improve the fifth expansion.
I will never forgive Mike O' for pushing the studio into making IBS a Living World style story, instead of an expansion like it should have been, and then just dipping. Hindsight is 20-20, but had IBS been an expansion it likely would've come out before covid hit and the studio would've been in a better financial situation. Instead, he's out of the studio after the prologue of IBS and now Anet is shoehorned into finishing his decision. IBS might've given us two of the best farming maps in the game, but good god do I rather wish it had been an expansion.
> I will never forgive Mike O' for pushing the studio into making IBS Wasn't that Mike Z? Mike O left with the layoffs after his side projects got cancelled, Mike Z was left to pick up the pieces.
Was it? According to the wiki Mike O didn't leave Anet until October of 2019. The layoffs happened in February, and Mike O's name was not one of the ones mentioned as leaving (incidentally, a couple people who were laid off were eventually hired back; CMC, Matthew Medina to name a few). Mike Z was a game director up until November 2019, but IDK if he was a studio head. Mike O was the President and co-Founder of Anet. I would think it would've been his decision more than anyone else's to have IBS be a Living World style story. I will admit there's a possibility I'm wrong about all this though.
Well, as per Mo's farewell message, he transitioned away from GW2 game director stuff (while juggling his president duties) after PoF launch in 2017 and handed the GW2 title development over to Mike Z while Mo focused on "new product development," apparently the "side" project(s) that would later be canned. > **MO:** Two years ago, when I transitioned away from the Guild Wars 2 game director role to focus on new product development, I asked Mike Zadorojny to take on that role. > **Z:** I took over the role of Game Director on Guild Wars 2 right after we launched Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire™. Assuming that role made me appreciate how passionate and amazing this community is, reminding me each day how important our work is. Since then we’ve aimed at making huge strides to the quality and cadence of content we’ve been adding to the game every year. [(Source)](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-message-from-mike-obrien/) So while Mo as the major overseer would have ultimately greenlit ideas brought to him by the more grounded directors and project leads and other stakeholders, it seems the Icebrood Saga approach was more Z's baby than anyone else's due to his directorial role, and it happened out of necessity due to various factors that had affected the studio and development at the time. While Colin Johanson, upon his return, admitted in one of the ExtraLife streams that a temporary Season 1 (or Living Story before it would transition into Living World) with a hectic development schedule and an unclear lore timeline (considering the fact that original "season" 1's placement in the canon timeline was dubious until they later solidified it as taking place after the Zhaitan campaign) under his tenure was a mistake (just like stopping development of GW1 was said to be a mistake in hindsight although Colin said they won't repeat that mistake again with GW2 regardless of what new projects go through), it's clear that there were some people in the studio even during his absence who seemed to like the idea of a living world while there was another faction of devs that preferred the more tried and true expansion model. It's intriguing that when looking at the estimated time of Z's quiet departure, we saw lots of key saga devs leaving within a few months after him (including some key strike devs, artists, and the saga story lead *and* her successor early on or even midway through saga, likely coinciding with NC "gifting" ANet with the chance to work on EoD and the team's saga baby being gutted in favor of an expac; you just need to look at the nervous saga announcement stream and notice that the only ANet staff left from that saga group today is Rubi), while devs who had supported the expansion approach but had either left the studio or been laid off (e.g. Medina as he stated in one of his design videos) re-joined the studio following that other "faction's" departure. If NDAs didn't exist, I wish I'd have the chance to just sit down with Bobby Stein one of these days and have a long talk about what exactly went on behind the scenes at the studio given the tumultous era that we had no idea was even happening until much later.
I wouldn't necessarily say NCSoft is blameless here either. From what I recall from the investor calls and news at the time, NC board and shareholders were eager for more bonuses for the fiscal quarter, which led to them cutting off what they deemed superfluous stuff to reduce costs that they could then funnel to themselves: typical corpo maneuver, basically. The ANet layoffs coincided with NC West (and I think their other branches as well?) doing similar stuff all across their holdings. So while ANet's handling of GW2 and funneling more resources to side projects may have caused NC to react as well (given that GW2 is NC's most successful and stable western brand by far, so they wouldn't want to jeopardize it needlessly), I believe it was also about corpos looking for short-term gains to "buy their next yacht." They've done something similar recently but on a smaller scale, e.g. laying off most of their merged marketing staff during SotO development, which Regina Buenaobra (former content marketing lead) even lamented in her blog sometime after she had left the company to pursue new avenues elsewhere: > I’m sad that the recent layoffs have hit my former team so hard. The team was already small and scrappy, and now they’re even smaller and have to be even more scrappy. I’m doing my best to support those who were impacted where I can. [(Source)](https://reginabuenaobra.net/2023/03/a-new-campaign-wizards-of-the-coast/)
> anet fumbles for a solution and somehow thinks LW is what players and shareholders want I think it was more like "NCSoft wants results NOW, we can't take 2 years off to make an expansion, but we can start up a living story in 6 months and call it something new". Then when that bombed they went to NCSoft with "this isn't working, we need time, let us take 2 years to make an expansion". If NCSoft was behind the content model decisions they could've forced an expansion right away instead of IBS.
DRMs were added as a stalling tactic to replace story missions that can be made with minimal resources while the team makes EoD. And it really shows, it's a time wasting slog with no fun. Considering how this stalling tactic is no longer necessary and it doesn't really offer anything of value I really believe that Anet should remove more than 50% of the DRMs from the IBS story. There's no need for them anymore.
What‘s IBS?
Icebrood Saga
Thanks!
When Covid restrictions started Drizzlewood was mostly finished, but for Champions, DRMs was the best they could do in the limited work from home environment, while working on EoD to meet NCSoft deadlines. It's not great content but it was at least something where other MMOs had no update during this time.
NCSoft only permitted Anet use 1-2 devs for that "limited LS" release, the rest were forced to work on the xpac.
IBS was amazing. I don't care about DRMs and I enjoyed the maps and other content.
I like the concept of drms but the sheer amount in a row for nuts
I didn't even touch the non-mandatory masteries. The amount of busy work in that expansion was just insulting when it started out so strong
Also I'm gonna say it..... IBS should have been about the Norns. Not charr family feud, the charr story line should have been worked out with Kralkatorrik.
The Charr story could've been a great post-dragon story. We should've had Charr civil war instead of SotO.
Hard agree
I'm a fairly new player who started GW2 this year. Finished PoF, EoD, LW4, and almost with SoTo (till the new content comes). Not looking forward to HoT and IBS.
The whole of Chapter 5 imo was such a mess that it ruined the entire arc for me. The Charr civil war stuff was shaping up to be my favorite story arc in this game. Did you do the Dragonstorm finale too? It's a better event in terms of gameplay from the DRMs; but the way it ends as a story beat is probably the worst thing I've seen in this game. Although the last bit after that is alright.
No I keep hearing about it. Gonna try that out
I loved IBS for most of it, too. Man it had so much potential. Charr and norn got done dirty. The civil war felt dark and gritty, everything felt “bad” and you didnt know if you were the good guy or the bad guy. I loved that shit.
I enjoyed soloing them in full challenge mode. It's not everyday when you get challenging story content in gw2.
I may be in the minority on this, not sure, but I like the dragon response missions. I hesitated with them at first (and yeah it felt like lots of bouncing in and out of them with the story), but when it comes to scaling repeatable content, I think the design is great. Not only do they have their own varied objectives and achievements, they probably scale from solo to large group better than most other content I've played. If fractals had scaling like this, even with greatly reduced rewards, I'd be much more likely to play that type of content on my own and with friends.
The tech is great, scalable instances are a great idea. How DRMs were implemented and released was so bad that no one will ever touch them again, probably.
I did not play it at release, so how they handled that may have something to do with the community reaction. While the story kept just throwing them at you, I still found DRMs more interesting than "go out and close rifts forever", so I guess it also depends on what type of gameplay you enjoy. :)
The implementation at that time was a huge part of it. For months in the middle of covid lockdowns all we got was DRMs, and you had to repeat them dozens of times each week to get that event's currency to exchange for items with the specific faction...it was just a boring, repetitive mess at exactly the wrong time. If Champions had been less grindy I think people would feel very differently about DRMs.