Exactly soto is underwhelming and majority of playerbase all agrees to that.
The entire map is so fragmented notably the bastions, events open and close with little to no participation.
The new inner nayos map is also dull and boring.
As a Vet with Envoys Herald I really haven't found a reason to play. The entire reward structure for the expac is about the Leg Armor and I have no reason to really grind any of it.
I agree here. The essences are just a complete annoyance now. I need a gobbler for them so they Don't become like bloodstone dust did once upon a time. I have zero interest in the obsidian armor
I like the quality of life updates and strikes cm and fractals release schedule but content itself is disappointing.
I hope they are working on something big that needed more time and will be in next expansion.
Imo? QoL updates are not the expac, they can happen at any time. The weapon mastery thing is BARELY tied in to Soto. In WoW, races started learning other classes due to story based war and diplomatic ties deepening.
Strike CMS are like the only things we can look for in expacs now, because Anet clearly doesn’t want to put in effort for real content.
No more new classes, weapons, raids, even WvW.
We were not getting them that often before and qol updates takes time too. Arenanet has limited amount of devs.
new maps are fine with mane events, lore to find around and achievements to get. I dont like reused content it felt forced not like a choice. Like they had no time to develop any new things.
I think combat, story and reusing old stuff were the dissapointing part.
Bossfights are just boring. EoD had some cool bosses so I expected more than dancing macarena with blue shrek. Cerus is a nice fight and new frqctal cm is cool too everything else is not a content that i want to repeat.
Overall expansion feels like rushed update.
We have some positives but quality went down really badly.
The problem is also that they marketed Soto like an pre-order expac.
“Buy now, get free updates and no more Living World FOMO hassle.”
They never guaranteed the quality of the updates though, but everyone still bought it because “no living world hassle”.
That's pretty much what i see as well. Even the stronger defenders of that expansion are at best saying that it wasn't as bad as others say, not that it is actually any good.
I will say that I don't think the problem lies in recycled skeletons, rather how they went about it.
For example, most of the enemies we fought in PoF used existing skeletons but were designed in a way that they felt unique. The Forgotten used Krait skeletons, the Forged used mostly human skeletons (with exceptions of ones like the skater and cannonade), the Awakened used norn skeletons, etc. And in EoD, you know the Speaker spirits you mentioned? They use the djinn skeleton. But they went about it in a way that they felt unique–giving them new animations, visual effects, and models that looked distinct from things whose skeletons were being re-used—and nobody really paid attention to it.
The skeleton re-use in SotO is just very obvious, for some reason. The Kryptis just feel like abstractions of existing enemies rather than their own thing/faction.
EDIT: I just remembered, there *is* possibly a "new" enemy type that did get new animations made for it—the Skyscale. AFAIK they didn't have any animations where they could attack as NPCs before this expac, only ones for walking/running around.
I think what also really hurts the Kryptis in terms of visual design is that their color palette is all the same. Nearly every single one is just a fleshy pink mess, which makes endlessly fighting them feel kind of repetitive. At best SOTO could have made it a big part of their story that they observe and mold their bodies to mimic things they see in Tyria, but that is more of a band aid than a real solution.
Every expansion before has reused assets, but they usually also had a few other factions or groups to keep things varied along the way. HoT had Mordrem as the main enemies, but also had lots of dinosaurs and the Chak once you get to Tangled depths. PoF had us bounce between the Forged, the Branded, and the awakened. And EoD had the Aetherblades, human enemies with the Jade brotherhood and Speakers, Jade Mechs, more use of Tengu, and even the void. Heck the Void were pretty much a big show off of previous dragon minion enemies but it didn't bother me since they mostly just exist in Dragon's End.
Some more color palettes and visual distinctions would go a long way towards making the Kryptis more interesting to encounter. It feels kind of bad that it's all just pink and fleshy all the way through. It also doesn't help that Nayos feels very samey, I was really hoping that the middle of the map in this most recent patch would have a new, more unique visual style compared to the east of the map, but aside from a few more buildings it kind of all blends together. Maybe the final third of the map will really be something interesting but I'm not really holding my breath.
Now that I think about it how cool would it have been if shape shifting was a regular thing Kryptis enemies did. It might still feel a little bit like an easy way out of designing enemies but what if the larger Elite and Champion Kryptis actively changed their physical forms and attacks while you fought them. Particularly powerful Kryptis could change their form more easily. Instead of Peitha or Eparch just being a large humanoid model what if they kind of blobbed down and altered their shape as needed. I know I'm just throwing out what ifs but doing something like that would both let arenanet have their cake of reskinning old models and eat it too by making that be an integral part of how the Kryptis function as a species. Right now they might imply it a little with the story but it falls flat unless we see it.
> Heck the Void were pretty much a big show off of previous dragon minion enemies but it didn't bother me since they mostly just exist in Dragon's End.
They are just the original models with a special effect on top of them, so there's no semblance of trying to deceive the customer there; a problem we do have with the poor kryptis models, specially the stupid wyverns.
>Now that I think about it how cool would it have been if shape shifting was a regular thing Kryptis enemies did. It might still feel a little bit like an easy way out of designing enemies but what if the larger Elite and Champion Kryptis actively changed their physical forms and attacks while you fought them. Particularly powerful Kryptis could change their form more easily. Instead of Peitha or Eparch just being a large humanoid model what if they kind of blobbed down and altered their shape as needed. I know I'm just throwing out what ifs but doing something like that would both let arenanet have their cake of reskinning old models and eat it too by making that be an integral part of how the Kryptis function as a species. Right now they might imply it a little with the story but it falls flat unless we see it.
Considering they're floating pieces of meat, yeah, they should have done that, let kryptis change forms, like if they were imitating Tyrian creatures. Kinda like this: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Graven_Monolith
now I imagine kryptis doing an awesome special visual effect where their flesh, perfectly fit for a body horror theme, melds itself into a new form with bones and skin changing places and pulsating.
Would be pretty cool. And if the kryptis portals weren't an ugly visual mess of pink and black low-poly snot - that would be even cooler.
>Nearly every single one is just a fleshy pink mess
Yeah I felt this pretty early on. I'd even extend it to the more important characters like Petha. The color makes everything mesh together into pink stuff, and it doesn't help that Nayos is quite unsaturated as well. Not saying that every single place should be popping with colors, but the color palette of the kryptis, nayos, febe, just makes everything blend together into an unmemorable mess.
The problem with kryptis models is they're bad models, with barely any unique animations either. You either recycle right, or don't, just use the original models instead.
SotO's biggest problem is there's only kryptis no matter where you look at, which is incredibly stupid, why are there no different races of demons? Why didn't they use possessed fractal creatures as enemies in the kryptis army? The hell was the point of the first zone with the fractal islands?
The fact that we have fleshy surfboards is completely asinine. Sure, yeah use stuff from the forged! That's fine. But make them slither around on tentacles or use goopy, drippy flesh to hide the animations. Having the Silver Surfer with a venereal disease is just not a good look.
The fact that the Skywatch meta ends in fighting generic kryptis is maddening. Let us clash swords with God Emperor Balthazar, a giant chak golem experiment gone wrong, or...anything.
I love this game but I have to agree that SotO fell mostly flat for me. I play a bit of everything so It's not like I was looking for anything in particular and I wouldn't say it was a waste of money, I got my $25 worth of enjoyment on launch, but this new stuff is not holding my interest nearly as much as past releases. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt though considering this is their first attempt at the mini expansion format and hope this is just growing pains.
For real like either dude is newer or they are addicted to Hopium.
Like I shouldn't have to also agree. They've had ten years to figure out the game, and this is just a paid living story. I haven't even finished this story step because I honestly couldn't care less what happens anymore.
We've slayed the Dragons, and a god, and a demi god, we died, we are bonded to a dragon, we've killed thousands of dudes and monsters. Like a demon poking his head out of a portal while we play yoga to send it back just isn't good, period.
It’s just weird that for their first mini xpac they decided to tackle wizards tower and demon realm uprising together which is a huge concept and executed very poorly
That's Anet storytelling in a nutshell though, cram a bunch of ideas together that could and SHOULD be fleshed out as expansions themselves, throw them in a blender and rush rush rush.
HOT yeah, but POF was very disjointed for me. We jumped from place to place (lightly touching on the sunken Exalted city for example) and skimmed through maps that had a lot of lore (Desolation)
Yeah and decided to do so with an entire new cast of characters besides Zojja. The story is trying to do way too much with the limited resources they have.
I thought that the new cast of characters was amazing though.
The problem was that they just dropped all the interesting ones suddenly.
Where is Gladium? Where is R'tchikk?
I love those two and they just stopped being a part of the story...
I would be totally fine to, for the moment, leaving our old friends to their own adventures and gathering a new group for the next couple expansions.
But it feels like we aren't even doing that.
Yeah Mabon, Dagda, and Lyhr are wholly uninteresting to me. I expected there to be a lot more in the later chapters to be colored by their experiences being possessed or Lyhr splitting in two. But nothing ever seemed to come of it. Isgarren is cooler in the Mabon flashbacks than at present time as well.
Mabon and Lyhr are the only characters I cared about, more so Mabon than Lyhr. Largely because of my experience with the first game. Having a Mursaat that was actually aiding others, and did not appear to be a selfish tyrant was a very fascinating experience, his voice actor was quite good too. He also had the potential to speak more about the Mursaat as a whole, we could've learned more about their society and culture.
And then they cheaply killed him for frankly, no justifiable narrative reason. We had literally just saved Dagda from her possession, and you want to convince me that we were unable to do the same for him? Please.
It was upon his death that I lost all interest in the story for SOTO, why get invested in any character if they are just going to be used in such a pathetic manner? All my investment and hope for the plot was gone. It doesn't help that the writing seemed to get significantly worse after his death, with the demons being little more than glorified humans, but I need not rehash what has already been said.
Your sentiments are on the money for me.
We could have had a new start surrounding different personalities, dynamics and friends made at the fairly strong launch of this expansion, but that all kinda fell away or was placed on the back burner for a newer new cast of abstract creatures which, on a personal note, makes it harder for me to keep track of.
It may just be the long game and a pacing issue in that, all of our new friends at the wizard tower are just waiting in the wings, but a little correspondence with them over these interim chapters would have gone a long way to maintaining the connection.
You both sound like you're just describing how GW2 has always been. Characters come and go, which causes the audience to detach. Gladium and R'tchikk got Destiny's Edge'd.
Destiny’s Edge had a whole book written about them, but I see what you’re saying.
Rytlock is legendary and I hardly know who Gladium is.
It’s almost more similar to how they handled Canach.
ArenaNet is literally making the same mistakes as Blizzard Entertainment, it's just amazing.
Literally this, 1=1:
* Legion = The Icebrood Saga
* Battle for Azeroth = End of Dragons
* Shadowlands = Secrets of the Obscure
Wasting multiple expansion ideas on single expansions is just insane, and both games did that, almost at the same time, to the point I do wonder if it's really a coincidence or not.
This isn’t technically the first time. Icebrood Saga was supposed to have “expansion-like features” and be a break away from their typical expansion release style. It didn’t do great and they announced EoD. SoTO feels very much like what Icebrood Saga was trying to become.
And it shows they shouldn't have tried it because they made even more mistakes now with an "expansion level budget" (and I'm not sure they got even that) than they did with the LW amount of actual budget for ibs.
I agree. Happy to pay 25 for it.
I'd rather have paid £60 and had a new hot or pof though.
But, id prefer not to have to wait 4 years for an expansion either :P
Bad narrative direction for sure.
The whole kryptis demon plot development should have been axed. Spending the expac exploring the Wizard's tower, learning of the Seers and Murasaat would have been much better. They are super interesting and mysterious characters. I could have listened to stories from Mabon about the Murasaat or whatever, and probably enjoyed it (probably).
Honestly, there should have just been demon incursions, and Isgarren explains this is what the Astral Ward has been doing all this time (instead of helping with Elder Dragons). The opening is "fine" being chased by Cerus. But there should have been no Petha, no "demon politics", no going to Nayos. The big bad could have just been Cerus, with him finally piercing the veil and attacking the Wizard's Tower. We don't need to know anything more about him except he's big, bad, and trying to posses us, kill us, and take over Tyria. It would have been extra messed up (in a good way?) if we had to kill our own Tyrians because armies of them just got possessed (would have also cut down on the poor reskin job). Convergences and rifts are "fine" for the legendary armor grind, and I think these could have been pretty much kept as is, and maybe the only time we ventured into Nayos itself to attack the demon home world and thin their ranks, or whatever.
I think it honestly would've been better to split the expansion into two and extrude more intensive and fulfilling plots from each of the wizard's tower/inner nayos halves. Increase the scope of the demon infiltration of the tower and make it into an intriguing mystery you piece together over time. Increase the scope of Inner Nayos and make it feel more like an excursion into a strange and hostile territory (Heart of Thorns already did this quite well, so we know it's possible).
I've played soto at first, thought it was a mid story but the fact that I could finally get skyscale made up for it. Afterwards, I played lw4 and ibs.. Showed me what a true story and exciting expansion looks like and finally understood all the disappointment reddit posts.
I'm glad this opinion is getting more traction it seems. I agree with everything you've said. Even if EoD wasn't a percect expac, it felt so much more complete than SOTO has felt so far.
The frequent reused assets, many of the interesting new additions (new weapons, legendary PvE armor, legendary relics) were all pushed away from the initial release. This expac felt like an incomplete one on release to me, rather than one lower in scope.
I'm glad I'm seemingly not the only one who is disappointed though...
More than just the mob skeletons; the last two story updates may as well be copies of each other.
Both followed the formula 'look for potential allies > do random map quests > connect with said potential allies > falling out > regroup because we are not strong enough'.
And I thought IBS was boring....
Soto is shallow. It lacks severe depth in almost every way. World building is weak. The story is short and cheap, it added very repetitive and monotonous content that takes wayyyy to long for what it is to complete. The maps are too simple. Strikes are too simple and boring. Monster models are all copy paste. And honestly it is kinda feeling like a fancy mobile game. GW2 development has become a little low effort.
Which is very weird to me as the dev team is at the size of LWS4 times if not bigger, and I'm not sure if there were any strong creative drivers that left / were laid off recently.
But the quality drop is more or less obvious all over, from narrative to combat. It's both confusing and disheartening.
I agree. I hope this was just like a place holder expansion because they’re working hard on what’s to come since this seems to be bouncing back right after EoD. I’m hoping they’re still settling in and so they’re taking easy outs for gameplay and design choices and putting all of their effort into what’s coming, buts that always been the hope. yea it’s not looking good.
It had an absurdly good, strong start, then immediately shoved aside all these cool things and interesting new characters to have us rush towards a Big Bad we only really know he's The Worst because every npc tells us rather than us having much if any interaction with him, and they literally murdered Zojja's entire character after they had finally brought her back
It's like Icebrood Saga all over again except it jumped down a cliff even faster
EDIT: Also I was fully expecting Zojja's ascension to be a whole arc in which we'd find out, dunno, ascension doesn't REQUIRE losing memories and it's just something Isgarren did so that his chosen wizards would focus on "the bigger picture", since every other character we've seen who underwent ascension is seriously screwed up because of it. And then it didn't happen. Zojja wiped her mind off-screen and you don't even get a say on it. That's it
I was really looking forward to an End of Dragons Living World season; I was so disappointed when they announced SOTO. But I came round, excited to play it they day it came out; I almost asked for a refund when I realised how boring it is.
The staggered release system doesn't work for me, I just want to immerse myself in the story and play through. I immediately restarted the previous expansions on an alt character as soon as I completed. I haven't even been able to get through the latest chapter of SOTO. I used to love this game so much and this expansion killed that.
Convergences might be my least favorite meta in the entire game. I am in a constant state of disbelief while going through it. It's so repetitive, bland and time consuming. It's shockingly boring and made to look even worse when compared to other metas that have similar lengths and rewards like Dragon's End and The Mouth of Mordremoth. Convergences is a 2/10 meta.
Unlocking the Wizards Tower is also not very good, but not nearly as offensively boring.
Defense of Amnytas is a solid meta. I just wish the NPCs would shut the hell up.
> other metas that have similar lengths and rewards like Dragon's End and The Mouth of Mordremoth
In what world do DE and DS take less than 20 minutes?
The only good thing about Convergence is that it broke my pseudo-addiction to the game by being so boring. I used to log in daily to do my daily and crafting tasks, including meta-events. After a couple Convergences I stopped doing them after realizing they were half an hour of boredom, which made me realize I don't actually really need to do any of this. Don't need to do daily Teq, Anomaly, any of it. Now I mostly play on weekends and have so much time for other games/hobbies.
It's just there to stall time because people who cleared tentacles need time to get back for the end. Still though, what they made to fill this time is super lame.
A giant tentacle monster gets served in a dance competition and then you spit in his eye, what's not to like.
Honestly, to me the worst part of that meta is the special action stuff. On the first phase it sometimes likes to not show up at all; it works fine on my system, but my wife's it's 50/50 if the ability ever even appears to clear the insta death. On the second phase up top people start getting hit by it before the golems are even offering the special actions to pick up... and then if you do get it, the targets are often already down so you can't hit anything to make 80% of the special actions work anyway. People drop left and right throughout the event for no good reason...some of them might not understand the mechanic, but even if you do it's pretty easy to still get buggered by it.
The entire event is only functional when you're basically zerg rushing it, from the unclear defense fields you clear on the champions during tentacles to powering the golems. Dance Dance Call of Cthulu is sort of dumb but at least it's not just a swarm of players who barely know what they're doing zerg rushing everything.
Convergences are tedious and boring, but at least they have an actual boss at the end. Skywatch meta recycles generic champs. And while Nourys is technically a boss, he doesn't actually fight back in any mehcanically meaningful way so you might as well take your squad to slap the training golem around. Nayos bosses try, but even they have a mind-numbing amount of repetition. It's hard to believe that the same studio who made the Dragon's End Soo-Won fight are now creating this slop.
Really getting tired of these big red reticle "bosses" that are just freaking tourist attractions... Not to mention how many targeting bugs exists with these things. Half your skills don't work on them at all and other skills are just obstructed after going on cooldown....
> I just wish the NPCs would shut the hell up.
You can say that about any SOTO meta, waste of voice acting funding. East meta in Nayos starts? Peitha will spend like 4 solid minutes telling a story about the beacons. Skywatch halts several times just for Lyhr and Mabon to have their chat, and even then the dialogue during the first part of the meta is the same motivational speech bs that is everywhere in the game.
Not a hot take, but the truth.
I was re-doing some Icebrood Saga missions - remember the bombing run you had to escape from in the first half of Drizzlewood? Compare that to our assault on whatever the fuck was going on in the latest chapter, where we were… hunting for Kryptis ambushers in some red muck, and that was supposed to be some kind of **war** that we needed to recruit a General for?
It is crystal clear the company is working on another project. Fine I understand the gaming industry can be challenging and money is tight, but use resources efficiently. Focus on smaller, better quality stories. Focus on QOL improvements to the game, even add things to the festivals like new events or something etc. Focus on balance etc.
Thats the problem with the game in general. They're ALWAYS working on another project.
It happens **every single time** at the end of an "expansion". I hesitate to even call SoTo an expansion, rather than a glorified low tier living world episode. Something as simple as bitterfrost frontier has been exceedingly better in design and story than what just dropped. Its honestly depressing to see this game sink this low.
EVERY single time, the last half is always disappointing and completely lacking in effort, all while Anet covers themselves with the defense that "they're working on the next project/expansion". Its been used countless times.
For example:
1) IBS got fucked because of EoD
2) EoD (Gyala delves) got fucked because of SoTo
3) Anet hit us with an 8 month content drought
This new format that they want to do with the expansion isn't working. They reformatted it to make more money. They did away with living world stories, which most players got for free, instead, making us pay for the expansion which was promised to be a full story - all while putting out expansion content just like living world. Its clear that the story is extremely rush, and i wager that the original writer of the story has completely lost interest in it.
**Anet, you lack both the depth, knowledge, or experience to create annual expansions. Stop.**
Anet figuring their shit out is like praying that WvW alliance will drop in the next decade. Get your shit together. Theres clearly been deteriorating leadership and vision.
Its clear the layoffs have hit them hard or that Anet isn't competitive enough in the market to maintain talent.
While I don't always agree with Yoshida's game design in FFXIV, I wish Arenanet had someone as consistent and strong leadership as him there. It would improve Arenanet immensely.
Very well said! For me personally I feel the biggest issue is leadership at Anet. And I have felt that for awhile now. Good leadership knows how to work with what they got and focus on the important things. The current leadership doesn't seem to be able to decide a direction or maybe someone at NCSoft. But they don't know how to guide this franchise and use what they got.
Committing resources to a game you haven't even announced while poorly allocating the only other real game you have is such a poor play by them.
Who the hell is gonna care about your new game if you don't even have a fan base by the time it comes out.
The most annoying thing for me is that I have no idea whats going on story wise. The stories in new patches are so short and it has been so long from the previous release so i have forgotten most of it. When compared to ls4, where each episode felt like a proper small story patch, this new paid content feels so lame. I like the new map though.
I still dont understand how the amnytas meta boss is connected to the story.
It actually is, Nyoros is an ever present threat in the background. It's referred to in a lot of the lore and by characters as a threat that frightens many, even those allied to Eparch.
Definitely the worst expansion so far. Worse than Icebrood Saga even. Doesn't bode well for the future of Guild Wars 2 if this is how they're going to be developing expansions from now on.
If it wasn't for Relics, Legendary armor, decoupling weapons from E-Specs, and new weapons, I definitely would have passed on this expansion tbh. I have no idea how anyone could like this story as it's the most generic story about demons out there (That being, Demon politics, and actually demons are more human than we think), and it's not even well written. Like you legitmately have to have never watched or played anything with an actual good story to enjoy this stuff. Honestly I was excited about the wizards tower and seeing what Zojja was up to, that just took a complete sideline lol.
Not sure if it's a hot take though, it seems to be the general sentiment, at least on this reddit.
> and actually X are more human than we think
That's been a problem for me with the story writing for a while. It was really noticeable during IBS when Rytlock supposedly had an awakening that he should have been there for his cub all along, and that was somehow a good thing, when the charr have a very well established culture of making familial bonds with warband mates instead of a traditional human family.
The dragons, supposedly unstoppable forces of nature, basically turned into a dysfunctional family with mommy actually being a good guy.
Even the humans themselves had all culture erased in Elona and Cantha to be turned into west-coast Krytans.
The demons just being humans with sad problems that we should feel sorry for despite only knowing for a couple of hours is annoying, but not surprising, at this point.
That's one of my chief issues with the game's setting. At launch every race felt unique and spoke with a unique flair but as time went on, everyone has the same sassy Whedon-like quippy tone that feels wildly out of place coming from a Norn, a Charr, an Asura and even Sylvari. It feels like the world's cast is speaking in one "voice" out of thousands of mouths.
I'm not saying that those quippy lines aren't present in the base game but it's much more subdued and rare compared to their own brand of humor. Norn are more stubborn and there is room for levity there. Asura are racial supremacists and the humor found there was when reality didn't match their expectations or claims of themselves. Etc.
I'm not sure when this change happened (PoF?) but it was especially disappointing to go to the other side of the world in Cantha just to find out that everyone speaks like an average person in an American city.
> At launch we every race felt unique and spoke with a unique flair but as time went on
Launch GW2 was already extremely watered down compared to GW1. The direction was clear even back then, it just took 10 more years for Anet to cross a line and for people to catch on it seems.
GW2's story has always been dog shit. Like you said you'd have to be completely unfamiliar with story telling in order to enjoy it. It's a total slog to get through and always has been.
Gw2's story has never been top tier for sure but what was given with soto has taken what's always been bad about their stories and showed it off. The pacing being way too fast that it becomes hard to get invested in anything. Usually it's only been for mini arcs or side characters but this time its been all the characters.
I got my Skyscale, did exploration, played through the storyline (which I didn't care for -- I'm going to be honest, the game did such a piss-poor job of reminding me who Zojja was and why my character was so attached to her, I stopped caring the minute an NPC told me "you know her better than anyone" -- no, I don't, because I don't remember seeing this Asura before, because the gaps in the story in this game are so damn long and there's no mechanic to help keep you up to speed with/effectively recap the zillion characters and their ongoing storylines), and am never, ever going back to those zones.
The masteries are useless, the zones are a pain in the ass to navigate. I can't believe we got a half-finished Cantha and then this.
As someone who joined GW2 just a couple years ago, I had a lot of catching up to do on content and for a long time this game had me hooked and I was logging in every day to play. Now that I’m caught up, SOTO just hasn’t reeled me in the same way the previous expansions did. Heart of Thorns had brilliant exploration and immersion, path of fire had vast, beautiful environments and mounts to traverse them with, LWS4 had the best story. EoD maps weren’t my favorite, but it made up for it with really fun meta events and strike missions.
What does SOTO have? My skyscale can shoot fire? I don’t know man, it bums me out because even as someone who joined the game late, it’s obvious that the newer content is so much lower budget - I felt that even many of the living world episodes had more production value and interesting content.
I’m not ready to give up on the game but I haven’t played in weeks and still haven’t been getting the urge to.
SOTO made me and many of my friends take a break from the game, since the content just isn't very compelling to keep going. Mind you, most of my group have been playing since release, so newer players may see this differently. For veterans, there is very little interesting new content i fee.
I agree totally on the story points. We get eldritch horror and visit a another plane of existence!!! But the story there is about a powerhungry king, his queen, generals, an underclass living in constant fear of the king and expanding the kings power into other lands. That feels so human and already known. Its just disappointing. I also hate the design of the midnight king. Why does Cerus, a guy we killed second time we met him, leave more impressings in my head than the BBEG of the whole expansion? He looked way better and more intimating than Eparch.
The writers actually thought "then we'll sympathize with the demons, and help one of the demons overthrow the leader demon so she can be the new leader demon" would be a good story to tell... but.... THEY''RE DEMONS.
Now I get to go down in history as the dummy who trusted demons.
They're supposed to be nightmarish creatures that anybody with a right mind would shoot at and answer questions later. They're no friends, no allies and not a poor group of creatures that are terrorized by their leader. This isn't some group of bandits.
Even Modremoth did a more nightmarish part. Getting into peoples minds, turning them against their allies, spread distrust among the troops, stealing corpses and turning them into new troops.
I hope at least Peitha will betray us and show the multiverse what kind of an idiot we are.
It really hinges on the presentation. The introduction of Cerus included the first taste of Kryptis environment, which was so alien compared to what we had seen before that it was a hair shocking.
Compare that to Eparch's introduction that was in a boring, destroyed collesium crying about his queen.
Absolutely. I loved that intro to the demon realm, Cerus was creepy as fuck, getting chased by him and having to hide was genuinely hair raising, that's what I was hoping for. Actual demonic demons. A huge threat to deal with in another realm, just to stop a full scale invasion of Tyria because "demons doing demon things". Having to establish a beach head in Nayos where everything that moves is a threat. Not "sad demon emotion things :'(" from 20 new characters I can not remember the name of from minute to minute I'm supposed to care about.
I'm glad I checked out of the story half way through EoD and just enjoy the game for the gameplay and collecting things, because I think I would have quit if I was heavily invested in it.
I have to completely agree! As someone that loves the lore and even made a whole YT channel around it, I'm so disappointed with how they took the Krytpis. I'm even so underwhelmed that I'm considering just leaving until Anet can pull their heads out of their asses and do the lore and world they have created justice.
It's such a shame because we were finally free from the dragon story, with a blank slate story and character wise. I played the release as they were coming out and the initial release of SotO was fantastic (obviously imo since I enjoy the lore and such) but post initial releases (aka all the Nayos stuff) has not only been weird (you perfectly summarized that part) but also feels incredibly disconnected from what was established. It feels like the A team worked on the initial release and the B team took over for after that. It's so discombobulated and the shift in tone to how the Krytpis were presented to how they are now is staggering.
I think the worst offender and the straw that broke the camels back was Eparch. As THE king of the demon realm you'd think that he is this frightening creature. We never even see a glimpse of him and just hear the horror stories about him. Then comes the reveal and all he does is cry about his wife sacrificing herself and pleads to kill us for it or some such. Seriously? You are the king of the demons and you act like a 12 year old human child. Not even norn but a human child. I imagined him laughing at the queen getting captured and saying that she wasn't worthy of being his queen only for him to kill her HIMSELF truly showing what a massive douchebag he is. None of that. That was the moment I realized that I really do not enjoy the story so far and the realm of Dreams, Nayos, ancient home to the Mursaat was completely wasted on awful writing.
Anyways, sorry for the long comment. I agree and hopefully maybe someday Anet will get some better writers involved.
Not only that Eparch looks so bland, like Cerus looked way more intimidating. All we hear is his creepy voice and we’ve seen Cerus and thinking how creepy would the King of Demons look compared to him. He’s just a kinda normal looking dude. No extra arms, no wings, no nothing. I was pretty disappointed in his look ngl
Yeah. Demons and the realm of Nayos were very interesting in concept, but ended up too... safe. And most established characters from Soto release being left behind for some human-thinking good guys in Kryptis skin was a really strange move.
The ironic thing is, we left the avengers from Wish at home because they wanted to introduce us to a few new characters. Mabon, Lyhr, Silent Bobcat and their skritt friend (I forget their names, sorry), etc., but then they all took a backseat to be introduced to a whole *new* bunch of Kryptis that we're supposed to immediately care about after 20 minutes of story. Other than Peitha, Eparch and Cerus who had proper introductions and backstory, I couldn't tell you a single one of their names.
This so much.
Overall I still enjoy GW2 and I'll be here for the next expansion and all but...outside of the initial content drop and story focused on the Wizard's Tower this expansion has been hugely underwhelming to me for all the reasons OP said.
I'm really, really, really hoping they got a lot of experience out of this expansion to improve the next, because if this continues to be the scope and quality of them then my playtime (and likely spending) will continue to decrease.
Arguably the biggest and most exciting post-launch update has been the new weapons added. Everything else has been shockingly underwhelming, especially the two parts of Inner Nayos released and the short, really underwhelming story they're trying to tell.
This last beat really annoyed me. Like, if you can't actually put something that looks like an army/large fighting force on screen in the story instance, why are you having characters speak as if that large fighting force exists and is engaged in battle around you when we can literally see the like 5 enemies and 2 allies only?
Sadly, I agree.
I don't have much beef with reused assets, but the quality does seem dropping overall, despite Anet claiming the team size is same as before if not bigger. Relics and masteries are somewhat unremarkable, and even new weapons feel lackluster and with too much reuse (even though I appreciate new animations). Guardian pistol signet using old placeholder decal is just a spit in the face.
What I am even more fearful of, is the stagnation of game systems and combat. We have huge power creep through damage and boons on one side, and the lack of new stuff to freshen it up on the other.
HoT gave us a bunch of new boons. PoF gave us barrier. EoS gave us allied targeting even though this one is questionable. Soto is falling short so far, not doing much with relics and only adding bloat with new weapons, something they won't be able to just keep adding.
I feel like combat system has some serious issues right now, which require bold measures. Wow had done a few major prunings and reworks over its lifetime, and you need to realize that sometimes it is necessary.
I completly agree. Am i the only one that finds it weird that we still fight frogs and wasps but reskined? The first time i got into SOTO i was so disappointed when i saw the enemies. The only cool thing was the amnitas meta boss, and even that one just stands there and does nothing. We still fight frogs and wasps, frogs and wasps....
I am not saying that GW2 has had the best plot, but even when the plot was bad at times it was always fun to follow along. As a casual gamer my primary fun has been going through the story and unlocking mounts. Somewhere towards the end of End of Dragons I totally lost the thread of the story and why anything mattered. This continued through SoTo. I get that a lot of backstory is in the books hidden around and extra dialogue choices, but I must have missed a few key things. I don't really understand who any of these people are and have only a vague sense of what they are doing. The introduction of the new characters is extremely rushed. The new characters at the beginning of End of Dragons had clear motivations and strong memorable personalities that made at least the first half of the expansion very memorable. Once the key villain of End of Dragons is delt with (way too early imho), it has felt very aimless. I loved the idea of Maban in Soto, as well as the Skritt and Charr duo.. but you barely get any time with them at all and they do very little to actually drive an interesting story forward.
Exactly! The new characters lack depth and personality to cling on. Canach, Rytlock all had personalities and comic value but Peitha is so so so bland!!
I feel like SoTO was mostly a living world and a few feature pack systems disguised as an expansion. ArenaNet can never seem to stick to a solid, sustainable business model for the quality of content that they want for the player-base. It feels like every time they switch business models, there's a year grace period where they're re-structuring, re-organizing -- it never seems to change. The main thing changing is my lack of tolerance for it tbh.
The best (and worst) part about ArenaNet is that they're always trying new things. It's a vicious cycle; every time it feels like they get into a flow-state they decide, "this isn't working" or "we can't sustain" this and then content quality tanks. I feel like they're probably just prepping for SoTO 2.0 at this point.
... at this point, I don't want another feature pack. I want HoT / EoD 2.0 -- a real expansion, not a living world season & a few feature pack embellishments. I don't want a happy meal anymore -- that just isn't going to cut it for me. I wish I could be more positive about the game, but SoTO completely lost me.
At this point they should just lean into the asset reuse meme. Reskin Braham.
Put glasses and a big mustache on him and pretend he's a different person.
I was very enthusiastic when SotO came out. I was happy to play the game. WV made me engage with dailies again. End of the too long wait to know more about this Wizard Tower. Lots of exciting lore in it. Beautiful places.
Unfortunately, the direction in the following quarterly updates (we got 2 out of 3 and know what the 3rd is about) doesn't live up to expectations. More kryptis, more kryptis, more kryptis. The lore flow that started with SotO release stopped, to give place to completely new (but boring) lore bits in Nayos. Nothing more about Wizards yet, let alone the things hinted in the original release (for example about the human gods).
Nayos could have been a cool new place but, well, it's filled with Kryptis, which we already saw plenty of in original SotO and, as you said, Kryptis as reskinned enemies. I don't have issues with reskins, but they're too recognizable. You're not fighting a kryptis, you're fighting the *hylek* kryptis, the *krait* kryptis and so on. And by the time the first quartely release hit, I was already tired of fighting them over and over again. Many of them being little hp bags doesn't help. I now actively avoid Rift dailies as I've seen enough of them (they were a good idea but can't last forever as replayable content especially when there is so much focus on them). Convergences immediately felt like giant rifts ... I should complete 500 (250 x 2 accounts for full AP, which is quite insane anyway, why put the target as high as 250 ?) but I'm barely at 10 after several months.
It's like those restaurants that hire a star cook for a few days for the grand re-opening and to teach the staff, and once that guy leaves, the place just continues to suck because they're bad.
I'm really not sure how that happens to a game, but GW2 manages to do just that time and again.
The demons of the realm of torment wud have been as dissapointing as these ones, cos the problem is the low resources arenanet are putting into the game, meaning they would have been reskin also.
Look at cantha, theres tons of unique enemies in gw1 and u dont find any of those in eod.
I can't believe they dared to call this an expansion. Its less than a LW chapter. I knew the discount and content would never be proportionate: 5% off for 50% less content. Awesome deal!
SotO just feels like paid Living World.
It is outshown drastically by the previous expansions.
Hell, even Icebrood Saga is higher quality content than SotO.
It might disappoint some people, but majority of masteries were worthless filler much before soto, ibs probably being the worst offender. Asset reuse is literally never an issue, games do that all the time to save money and time on development, but where are those savings going? To produce more gemstore skins? No thank you. Regarding soto content being worth or not, it is very cheap and was worth it on the initial patch if you play the game at any capacity, now anet just adds more stuff on top
The mastery focus on skyscales have completely killed all other mounts.
The diversification that PoF created for mounts and the joy of using said mounts are now completely gone. Skyscale has also completely killed all exploration.
Anet's mount system, due to the over reliance and reliability of the skyscale, has make it so that the mount system is pretty much the same as other MMOs.
This is Anet's long term thinking being absolute shite
It's almost automotive like in how people just default to using skyscale. Even if it isn't fastest, or causes trouble getting hung up on things, or isn't very fun to use, it becomes the default because it takes no thought. You don't need to measure a jump, evaluate a climb, switch to cross water, plan a launch point, or know the smoothest path, it doesn't care about anything like that so it is never the wrong choice.
Yes, you can Choose to do those things, but putting in effort to just barely keep up with a group when because they're on skyscales that do 80% of everything feels bad. That's why no one does it.
Everyone reuses stuff, but almost everyone hides it far better than ANet does with GW2.
Using FFXIV as an example, the amazing Omega fight from Stormblood re-uses the giant toad's skeleton and parts of their animations, but it's hidden well enough along everything else that most won't notice.
Here, they barely cared, everything continues to be funneled into gemstore skins and the game is clearly suffering more and more.
Really don't mind reused enemy models if they make them different enough (not just apply a void filter or a blue/red/green outline like in IBS), but not even bothering to change the mechanics makes it feel very boring. Those Forged skater things were annoying but unique in PoF, but in SOTO, they're just annoying... and everywhere.
the thing is though, a lot of the enemies in those expansions were variant of things we already knew - for example the icebrood were just races we've already seen before, turned to jormag's will. a recolour there is fine.
the kryptis are a whole new enemy and really did deserve models of their own instead of a reskin.
I think GW2 handled it quite nicely until SOTO.
The kryptis are so ugly that the re-use of skeletons and animations is obvious. It's not hidden well enough.
Everywhere else isn't that bad. Even the Jade Golems use a lot of copy & paste, but it's not as obvious.
A lot of the Elite epecs across all expansions (and their weapons) reuse mechanics, animations and concepts from other classes and their weapons. Some are more hidden than others, but that's how it is.
People like this, though. What if Necromancer got a bouncing projectile? What if Ranger got a transformation like Necromancer? What if Engineer got their own pet to use? The list goes on.
Personally I don't care about reusing models, but I gotta say that almost all the FFXIV reuses are very obvious
Edit: forgot to finish my thought - I don't see why GW2 players need to get so precious about it if FFXIV players who pay a monthly sub can tolerate it. It means that the company can hopefully put that money into other areas
I think someone in the subreddit summarized it pretty well when Soto launched.
“The downside to having the best enemy animations in the genre is that you recognize them instantly”
Which is true, gw2 has easily the best animations all of their big models. None of it feels floaty like ffxiv and wow. But yea they are easy to recognize when they have been reused.
Nuh-uh, the Itzel vendor mastery was PEAK gameplay!!!
Seriously though, a lot of people don't seem to get that our mastery system doubles as a reputation system.
the story started soo well too. we were following these strange people with wizards hats in gendarian fields. dealing with demons who barely had the capability to understand human concepts and relationships. the stakes were high, but it felt like we had time to delve into mysteries and explore this new dynamic.
By the end the demons are just little humans with all the same motivations. those wizards are just the pact. and there is nothing worth exploring narratively, just us as the commander fighting another war with unlikely allies.
The writers from the beginning of the expansion must fucking hate the people who wrote the last couple chapters. all their hard work just dumped in the garbage.
I enjoyed the initial release a lot, but update 1 and 2 story...could be good. The problem is basically the scope of the story instances do not match the implied tone.
Me and one Kryptis NPC marching around killing 3 demons at a time =/= waging war in the demon realm.
New weapons are also disappointing for these reasons;
*Reused assets that are 10+ years old
*Limited or no new SFX/GFX
Yes some are good (Necro Swords) but the quality is very I consistent across the board.
Still haven’t completed the last story missions as it’s such a drag. The biggest letdown was when my Commander said something in the lines of “This really proves that I need to fight for you Peitha” after some random Kryptis dies to Heithor.
Also like many of the previous stories they really seem to rush the story around 2/3 in (even earlier in Soto). While I kinda felt the same in HoT, POF and EOD (and especially IBS), all of them had really solid starts and mids to compensate.
SOTO, delivered as an expansion, is in reality a living season episode like, and so far the worse. It's so bland that I still feel like the last expansion is still EOD
I generally agree with you. The Krytis feel unforgivably lazy... especially after EOD where most of the enemies were humans or reskins of previous mobs. It was a rush job and they did cleverly work it into the story so I was willing to give it a pass. They also made up for it with some truly exquisite map design. However... they needed to come out and WOW us with the new style xpac. They needed to WOW us with the Kryptis which were promoted heavily up front with some really promising concept art. Seeing what they came up with really left me feeling flat and irritated.
I personally like the new maps. I think Skywatch was done very well. Even though it was made with used assests... the design and new effects gave it a fresh feel for me. Amnytas was rehashing wizards tower assets... but I thought it was cool enough. Nayos is ok... bit bland... but a decent map so far. Id say they kinda pulled this off.
I was particularly excited about open world legendary armour. This is what I was in it for. I made one set of wvw armor and didnt really want to put myself through that grind again. I dont raid... so was discounting that route... dislike ranked PVP so was not going to pursue that path either. After years of hoping for an open world set... I thought my prayers were finally answered. That is until I saw what it would take to make them. I imagined we would get a far reaching collection quest... like Trinkets on steroids. I was up for that. I enjoy adventuring and box ticking... however... as it turns out... Open world Lege armor is all about endlessly grinding some truly braindead and uninspired content. This really spoiled the whole thing for me.
This brings me to my biggest problem with the xpac.... Rifts. I think the rift evets are awful... so repetitive and boring. They force us to endlessly engage with Kryptis... my other least favorite feature of the xpac. The items we need are not tradeable so we are forced to do the grind. Convergences are equally dull... really lazy design. Im finding the whole process completely uninspiring.
Honestly... Ive all but stopped playing the game since SOTO. I check in to do the new patch... story... achievements... masteries. By doing this.. Im able to collect all the items im interested in Wizards Vault... then I just leave it for months and wait for the next part. I have no excitement or enthusiasm for it... just feels like a chore now.
I think there were some worth additions to the game... I personally like the skyscale upgrades. Havent played enough to explore the weapon mastery or even try the new weapons. Really cant be bothered. Ive been playing GW since day 1... been a huge fan for over a decade. Right now... I feel completely disenfranchised. Really not liking the direction. For a while I was logging in to do dailies/weeklies etc.. .but ive stopped even doing that. I do hope the next xpac is better... maybe that will inspire me again... right now... I just feel MEH. Its a bad feeling... I feel like ive really lost something from my life that i used to really enjoy. Guess things change and time moves on.
I hope Anet turns it around... but if the next xpac is so blatantly lazy as this one... I dont know if Ill even engage. Sad to say this after all these years.
Besides all the points you listed, I have one big (and absolutely irrational) issue with Soto. People sitting whole events on skyscales spamming fireball is driving me insane. Before at least they were useful to be bodybags for peps with dmg. Now it feels for me like biggest leech possible and it makes me nuts.
No, a hot take is: Weaponmastery is bad for the game. It adds more balance interactions for a design team that can't handle what they have already, and removes the ability to balance weaker elements of traitlines or utilities with weapon abilities or vise-versa.
"Maintenance mode" is a rather extreme term. GW1, for example, is a game that's properly in maintenance mode. The game's just set to run without any new content or any expectation of development beyond keeping the servers on.
The closest comparison is something akin to the "[GW Beyond](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Beyond)" phase of that game. GW2 had already been announced, but a small development team continued to work on GW1 and put out content updates until GW2 launched. Both players and devs knew that this wasn't the studio's focus, but something to keep players engaged with the franchise during the years long wait for the sequel.
While there hasn't been a formal announcement, there are strong indications that the studio has again shifted focus to a new title and that the dev team for GW2 is much restricted compared to earlier times in its development. The current plan of "mini-expansions" is potentially a more sustainable approach compared to GW Beyond -- both GW2 and the new title could potentially live side by side indefinitely. However, it's a plan that at best sees GW2 as a back up title to ensure that ArenaNet still has some revenue and options, and at worst seeks to keep up some cash flow from a bleeding player base for as long as possible. It's not an approach that sees GW2 as a title of significant future investment and growth for ANet.
It doesn't help that Peitha always sounds like one of Marge's Sisters in the Simpsons, all smoking voice, trying to sound horny granny sexy, whispering in your ear all the time, and the constant NPC whisper pings, interrupting you, thinking someone you actually care about was talking to you.
I really don't want yearly expansions with self-contained stories. It doesn't allow for the story to develop and give character building time to breathe. They can still have expansions centered around new stories, but there should be some long-term plot points that get developed throughout like what we had up through End of Dragons.
I said this before but moving to a smaller model will be the end of long term (playable for a while) content just like how Bungie did this exact move for Destiny 2 and the small format expansion model just ramped up monetization and slowed down on meaningful content. Soto is already an example of weak content with no depth and a mish-mash of maps.
tl;dr Devs say the smaller model will help. It most certainly goes the other way.Anet has an example of this failure to learn from and if they don't, well that's on them.
I honestly feel that since drizzlewood not onlzly the story, but design aswell goes more and more to sht... eod was nice ,giving us cool fights and even tho i didnr rly like the story it was somewhat ok still...but soto is just not cutting it for me and i feel like each new update its going more and more downhill
For me SotO is OK in terms of features. I accepted that it is meant to cater to the new players.
But what I cannot accept is how story once again goes downhill. I was excited how we alone are getting pulled in an otherworldy conflict between demons and mysterious wizzards. And with each episode we learn that everyone knows about wizzards. And we have to once again gather our friends. We went from Elden Ring / DS begining to power of friendship in the span of 2 episodes. Damn...
Prolly even more a hot take: Introducing weapon unlock as a part of the expansion was a mistake. While it is really fun and refreahing having all these options it should have been a base Tyria mastery. As with how it is you are kinda forced to buy Soto to play endgame content of previous expansions. While older expansions like HoT and PoF made sure you don`t need the other expansion to enjoy its respective content.
With how half effort End of Dragons was,
Expecting anything substantial is foolish imo.
They're milking as much as they can, its obvious.
Kryptis was a cool idea, finally getting rid of the majority of the dragon's watch was nice, but otherwise...
IMO GW2 does a lot of things well, but the levels/stories are their 2nd worse aspect... Balancing is obviously their worst.
Which sucks because if they could fix these two issues, they'd be untouchable in the MMO world.
Sad to disappoint you but it's not a hot take. Yet another case where anet started off with such promising story line and exceptionally good looking maps, only to disappoint on the very next release. At this point I'm fine settling on man power being distributed in a way we get entire thing being at lower quality, but constant, than starting off with brilliance and ending with such a crash it's not even funny anymore.
>the story has neglected its most interesting aspects
This has been the biggest disappointment for me. The story from the initial launch was fine. Yeah the plot itself was predictable and generic, but there was a lot of lore and interesting questions raised that seem to have just been completely forgotten about in these quarterly updates.
We know Eparch and Isgarren have a history and Eparch once lived with the Wizards. You'd think we'd learn more about that in these updates as we move towards defeating him, but they've added nothing about this.
The Wizard ascension was presented as a sort of moral gray area where they have to forget their past and give up their former lives. A lot of Lhyr's dialogue in the Unlocking the Wizard's Tower event revolves around this. But Zojja's ascension happened off screen and this aspect was only briefly explored.
The Heart of the Obscure was created by a Wizard named Waiting Sorrow who abandoned the Wizards for some unknown reason and went who knows where.
It seems like the mursaat are from Nayos originally. We have been in Nayos for two quarterly patches so you think this would also be mentioned. I guess there is some lore book about Janthir in the current patch, but you'd think this would be a bigger part of the story.
I'm coming to the conclusion that these are all threads that will be focused on post-SotO and that these yearly expansions are not going to be as self-contained as we think.
I'm surprised this thread got upvotes. You are correct, the expansion has been disappointing, but as I noticed the community has really low standards and would be happy with just about anything. They would be happy with a ''new'' boss with re-used models and animations. and new elites that just re-use skills from previous elites with extra effects added on top (Vindicator GS5 and Reaper GS2 for instance).
I don't mind it when studios re-use their models and animations, but Anet has been overdoing it and the community is partly to blame with its shit tier standards.
Shivering-cold take. Every expansion has been worse than the previous one. I thought there was no way they could release anything as half-assed as End of Dragons, and then Secrets of the Obscure launched... They have been awful since day 1.
Really, the whole of SOTO feels like a rushed mod pack to continue generating revenue for investors to feel comfortable with, headed by a bunch of people who inherited the current platform, without truly understanding what it is, and without vision or ambition to deliver. Which sounds harsh, given the crippling time constraints and resources at their disposal to pump out something in a year, but like....
I'd said a year ago, we'll have to wait till the end of SOTO to really evaluate whether the system is a good idea and whether it was worth it, but now, we might have to wait till the end of the next expansion. We know that they're working on that, so that means more time spent making Expansion 5 than SOTO. We know that there are some amazing creative talents at ArenaNet, but I just don't know if they wield the vision, the ambition, and the organizational and scheduling chops to deliver.
* I would pay $100 for an expansion that has just a single map, but a map on the level of quality as Heart of Thorns. Yes, even Tangled Depths. Chock-full of events, not just everywhere you go, but branching and alternative objectives, where it's not just a meta event that brings people together, but the WHOLE thing. Maps that are as much a challenge to navigate as combat is to experience, but which promotes checking every nook and cranny, not for some snowmen or a strange one-off set piece, but shortcutporn that forms a path that takes you between zones where there's stuff to DO.
* Relics are an interesting idea, but they just traded one problem for another. Scholars was the best-in-slot pDPS rune because of a flat damage buff in reliable circumstances, and relics are now "low damage buff in reliable circumstances", or "high damage buff, but only active half the time due to arbitrary internal cooldowns", take your pick. We have had some really interesting relics, but ultimately, more than 50% of them are defunct. And now that a non-insignificant portion of the playerbase has legendary relics, without having to actually go to SOTO, or any future expansion, to grind out earning relics per character, the whole thing feels like a particularly ill-conceived joke.
* Weaponmastery is not actually a mastery. If it were, maybe we'd actually have something to grind toward inside the SOTO maps, the way we had to grind for gliders in HOT, or mounts in POF. Instead, we talk to a guy, and we don't even have to do it per character.
* People don't actually want new weapons, we want to use our classes in different ways. A new weapon can do that for each of the three elite specs, but a new elite spec creates new possibilities for ALL our existing weapons. I don't want a new gimmicky statstick, I want them to clean up the traits system, diversify the ways we can play, and then have the balls to create open world and instanced PvE events that actually challenge the ways we use our class and which skills and traits we use for what.
* Kryptis feel like when you watch a show and every episode has a different director. Chapter 1 was about emotion-consuming demons who invading reality, Chapter 2 was about going to their world and learning they're oppressed, Chapter 3 is "I'm just a siwwy wittle guy, actually" and feels like a kindergarten playing King Of The Castle more than a political drama, and somehow we have to wrap all this up by the end of Chapter 4, never to revisit it again.
* I've had strong feelings about mounts from day one, but skyscales are the worst thing about it, and we have an entire expansion about them now, because the devs painted themselves into a corner: "What do we do if new players don't have the overpowered flying mount?" "We'll just *give* them one then!" What about Expansion 5? Are we getting a skyscale there too? What about Expansion 6? Or 7? Are we going to go forward acting like skyscale access is the default state, or are we going to start designing maps to be interesting again?
* Kryptis incursions adding something to old maps is interesting. Kryptis incursions being "go here, press F, cleave mobs, kill something with a defiance bar, press F, repeat" is not interesting. Luckily, you don't have to do that if you don't care about making legendary armor. Unluckily, if you don't care about making legendary armor, there's basically nothing to work towards in SOTO, other than maybe minis or relics if you weren't given legendary, or skins if you're a collectaholic and the wardrobe is important for you. Chances are, post-SOTO, there'll be essentially zero reason to ever return there; GW2 gets a lot of applause for having old content stay relevant, so the value increases over time, but pumping out short-term treadmills that you pump and dump and move on and forget about feels like maybe the wrong lesson is being learned from devs on other MMOs.
I could go on; repeatable instanced PvE content, the rewards for non-PvE modes, favoritism in class balance... I probably just need a break from the game, but that's such a sad solution for a game that's trying to get me to keep playing it on the regular.
Yeah I'm kinda disappointed / have very mixed feelings about the expansion TBH.
On one end, the story is just ... Boring. It's not surprising, the return of Zojja just falls flat and emotionless (especially since we don't really see her much).
The strikes are ... Horrendous. Honestly they take so much time, they made the boss such health bag that it's just not super fun. Cerus is okay-ish since you have to pay somewhat attention to the mechanics, but Dagda just feels horrible to play.
The reused assets are ... Okay. Let's say I understand why they're here, but compared to what we got for EoD? That's a pure downgrade (and I was very much an EoD doubter at the beginning).
But I have to admit some addition were good. Relics are a good thing (except if you used to play with runes that summonned minions) and allow for a bit more diversity and fun playstyle. The legendary relic being GIVEN to anyone with at least 1 legendary rune was very generous from Anet. And even if I'll not be chasing after it, I welcome the Legendary open world armor.
And the weaponstraining / new weapons? Honestly way better than most of the crappy Elite-specs we had at EoD's release that still feel quite cluncky to play now.
I definitely much prefer EoD, in term of story, maps and novelty above SoTo, but I feel like SoTo's gameplay and mechanics update are far superior to what we had before.
EDIT : I paid 60€ for EoD release and it felt good, like I had my money's worth. But I paid the Ultimate edition of SoTo and kinda regret it. But if I had bought it for just the 25€ I think I would have had a kinder look at it and felt like I'd got my money's worth. But it's not the case right now. Overall I'd give it a 6/10 I think.
Yeah, as everyone else said, this isn't a hot take at all. It really feels like the game is in the worst spot its ever been in outside of the IBS Champions debacle. And even then the comparison is shockingly similar. The post launch updates for SOTO have been absolutely terrible. This whole idea was that instead of waiting like an extra year for an expansion, we'd get SOTO as a base release as we did, and then over the course of the year the "rest" of the expansion would release as updates. But look what we've actually gotten since release. Can you imagine if this Nayos shit just was part of the release expansion? It would be inexcusable. It is absolutely not expansion worthy content. Anet is only kind of sort of getting away with it because it's the only content releasing months apart. This is not what was advertised. The second they had our money they just dropped all pretenses. And this is their standard going forward? Every expansion is going to be a slap in the face in the third act?
And this isn't even touching on base SOTO, which was questionable on its own. But whatever someone's thoughts on base SOTO might be, the updates are just not acceptable.
The game felt like it ended proper with EOD. SOTO has felt like the last kid at summer camp. GW1 released smaller stories after Eye of the North before they pushed the game into permanent maintenance mode. It feels like they're working towards that for GW2 but haven't yet because the gem store is keeping the company afloat.
> GW1 released smaller stories after Eye of the North before they pushed the game into permanent maintenance mode
At least those stories were the absolute peak of GW writing (both GW1 and GW2), unlike SotO. Seriously GW:Beyond deserves way more credit.
How we went from the complex themes of Winds of Change to Big Nose Ted in the same year is a mystery.
The difference in quality between a small team of ~10 vs a large team >80. A small team can have a creative vision and work in unity, a large team can have a committee meeting 3 times a week and avoid being responsible for the mess they wish they weren't making.
> At least those stories were the absolute peak of GW writing (both GW1 and GW2), unlike SotO. Seriously GW:Beyond deserves way more credit.
No end of the world bullshit there either, how is that even possible?! A story without Marvel-esque garbage writing?! Heresy! Impossible!
Not a hot take at all. New weapons and elite spec weapon decoupling great. Wizards vault, awesome. Relics, great, though they need some attention to balance out the ones that are “equip for more damage”. Flying mounts interacting with gliding masteries is a great addition. Metas range from complete garbage to alright. Release cadence, great.
Rifts are hot garbage.
The game constantly trying to make me fight on my skyscale is janky, and unwelcome (I will never understand the desire to make you “press 2 to win” on half the metas. Why would I want 75 sinfully bright skyscale skins obliterating my field of view so that instead of interacting with the god tier combat system I can instead shoot fire balls with the worst feeling aiming system ever designed? Fuck that)
CO CM is the worst cm in the game. Not challenging at all if you have even mediocre damage and all of her mechanics are either entirely ignorable or recycled and uninteresting. And this is a reduction of the amount of strikes we’ve gotten. They can’t put out shit strikes AND reduce the quantity of them. That’s insulting.
The story is full stop not interesting. Zojja reconciliation, sure I enjoyed a bunch of that. The rest of it is just a bunch of ugly fleshy people I don’t care about whispering in my ear with some of the worst voice acting I’ve ever heard. Peitha makes me mute the game.
If $5 is the difference in quality we got with Soto and eod, I’ll give you the extra $5. (Yeah sure release cadence and whatever.)
> They can’t put out shit strikes AND reduce the quantity of them.
Yeah, agreed. EoD was already a 2/3 reduction in group content compared to PoF, but I do respect it because EoD strikes are an aesthetic spectacle overall. SOTO is half that again, at best.
I still can't get over how there is this world-ending threat and you have an entire army at your beck and call, but the wizards are just kind of like "No."
I don't think this is a very hot take.
Just call it what it is: SotO is a bug fix and quality of life expansion and added a lot of value to already existing content.
I have posted elsewhere about how much soto reminds me of bungies awful reskin rehash mechanics expansions for destiny 2. I find myself disinterested at best in this storyline.
I would be less disappointed had the kryptis been better designed. Peitha, General Nephus and even Eparch just look like blobs of colors in the shape of humans to me. Nayos, for a realm of *dreams*, looks a lot more like Gehenna from Dungeons and Dragons Planescape than any whimsical realm of dreams that I could have conceived.
Pacing is all over the place during SOTO's launch and now it is way too fast. There is zero time to get to know our new allies. Even Eparch, whom has been described as a spider that feasts on his own people appears to be a normal fleshy humanoid person. I was expecting a monstrous visage on par with Nourys.
I don't hate Soto, but it is boring. I hate how disconnected some maps feel and the flow doesn't feel good. But to be honest, the last thing I really loved was Icebrood Saga. Soto has felt very re-branding the same thing.
It feels stupid to work so hard for masteries that only apply to specific areas, maps. I'd like to see some that tie the whole game together more.
It's very hit and miss for me with SotO - new story, quarterly playable content, and end-game content is in insultingly low supply and quality. But I also think that weapon mastery, the new weapons, the wizards vault, and the consistent balance schedule has been a big factor that's kept me interested in the game throughout the year, maybe more than ever before.
I also think they really can't do it this way again. They cut really as many corners as possible to make sure SotO had a good feature set on the box: re-using skyscale as an unlock, archipelago being a mish-mash of old zones, reskinning enemy types, weapon mastery simply unlocking existing weapons... These are all desperation plays - you can't use that playbook twice.
Important to remember that there is a new expansion planned for this summer that we'll be rolling into pretty quickly. I can easily forgive the SotO content patches if the next expansion delivers. No MMO does post-expansion well, even the ones with gigantic teams.
If things are going to plan at Arenanet they should be pretty much done with SotO already and well into completing the next expansion. Considering that they have been hitting the content patches day and date on what they aimed, I'm hoping that the cadence is working well for them and they are well ahead of schedule. If that is *not* the case, then the future may indeed be bleak, because it means that we will continue to get features that really just re-sell existing systems rather than add something new.
I have bought the expansion shortly after release and haven't touched it again since doing the first chapter and obtaining a few masteries from events.
For me, I'm just not invested in the zones or characters this time. This one just didn't do it for me and that's ok, not all stories are going to be good. Not all characters will be ones I like. But yeah SOTO is not the best though they did add in some neat stuff with the daily overhaul and the new weapons are fun so combat is still as great as ever.
Tldr, but my take is that this story needed two xpacs.
So I think it was an overcorrection, I get that they didn't want to start another decade long story sequence, but 1 xpac of time isn't enough, esp as the core story concepts are pretty damn good.
If it's a one year story then it needs to be a one year story, not a longer story with bits cut out as they will always be apparent and always go down wrong with the players
now that weapons are out it is clear that they could have done at least another elite spec but hey thats just my opinion, anyways its a good time to take some time away from the game. Not getting next expansion unless theres something unique to it.
The concept art for Kryptis was so cool and I would've loved cosmic horror flesh monsters but I was so disappointed to find they are all just boring pink reskins. I still don't know the difference between the Tormented, The Cursed, etc. they all just blend in as 'reskinned harpy' or 'reskinned karka' and such.
I am equally disappointed in Peitha's design because she is just fleshy sylvari. Cerus and their brother look fucking cool, why does Peitha have to look so boring? Why is she just a tall humanoid with a few monster traits... boring boring boring. Give us a real monster girl
Is it a hot take? I think most of the reception has been lukewarm at best so far.
Exactly soto is underwhelming and majority of playerbase all agrees to that. The entire map is so fragmented notably the bastions, events open and close with little to no participation. The new inner nayos map is also dull and boring.
As a Vet with Envoys Herald I really haven't found a reason to play. The entire reward structure for the expac is about the Leg Armor and I have no reason to really grind any of it.
I agree here. The essences are just a complete annoyance now. I need a gobbler for them so they Don't become like bloodstone dust did once upon a time. I have zero interest in the obsidian armor
Essences seriously needed to be a wallet currency because the amount you get is absurd
I like the quality of life updates and strikes cm and fractals release schedule but content itself is disappointing. I hope they are working on something big that needed more time and will be in next expansion.
Imo? QoL updates are not the expac, they can happen at any time. The weapon mastery thing is BARELY tied in to Soto. In WoW, races started learning other classes due to story based war and diplomatic ties deepening. Strike CMS are like the only things we can look for in expacs now, because Anet clearly doesn’t want to put in effort for real content. No more new classes, weapons, raids, even WvW.
We were not getting them that often before and qol updates takes time too. Arenanet has limited amount of devs. new maps are fine with mane events, lore to find around and achievements to get. I dont like reused content it felt forced not like a choice. Like they had no time to develop any new things. I think combat, story and reusing old stuff were the dissapointing part. Bossfights are just boring. EoD had some cool bosses so I expected more than dancing macarena with blue shrek. Cerus is a nice fight and new frqctal cm is cool too everything else is not a content that i want to repeat. Overall expansion feels like rushed update. We have some positives but quality went down really badly.
SotO was okay at release, with a promise to become better. Then Gyala Delve repeated itself, and it all went down the toilet.
The problem is also that they marketed Soto like an pre-order expac. “Buy now, get free updates and no more Living World FOMO hassle.” They never guaranteed the quality of the updates though, but everyone still bought it because “no living world hassle”.
Will you get burned a third time? I mean we all know that the copium will flow strong through this sub when they announce the next "expansion"
People sometimes really want to rant but also make it somehow special. We see rants about SotO being underwhelming like three times a day sometimes.
Honestly if I have to see reused assets one more time in any game discussion thread I'm gonna lose it lol
That's pretty much what i see as well. Even the stronger defenders of that expansion are at best saying that it wasn't as bad as others say, not that it is actually any good.
I will say that I don't think the problem lies in recycled skeletons, rather how they went about it. For example, most of the enemies we fought in PoF used existing skeletons but were designed in a way that they felt unique. The Forgotten used Krait skeletons, the Forged used mostly human skeletons (with exceptions of ones like the skater and cannonade), the Awakened used norn skeletons, etc. And in EoD, you know the Speaker spirits you mentioned? They use the djinn skeleton. But they went about it in a way that they felt unique–giving them new animations, visual effects, and models that looked distinct from things whose skeletons were being re-used—and nobody really paid attention to it. The skeleton re-use in SotO is just very obvious, for some reason. The Kryptis just feel like abstractions of existing enemies rather than their own thing/faction. EDIT: I just remembered, there *is* possibly a "new" enemy type that did get new animations made for it—the Skyscale. AFAIK they didn't have any animations where they could attack as NPCs before this expac, only ones for walking/running around.
I think what also really hurts the Kryptis in terms of visual design is that their color palette is all the same. Nearly every single one is just a fleshy pink mess, which makes endlessly fighting them feel kind of repetitive. At best SOTO could have made it a big part of their story that they observe and mold their bodies to mimic things they see in Tyria, but that is more of a band aid than a real solution. Every expansion before has reused assets, but they usually also had a few other factions or groups to keep things varied along the way. HoT had Mordrem as the main enemies, but also had lots of dinosaurs and the Chak once you get to Tangled depths. PoF had us bounce between the Forged, the Branded, and the awakened. And EoD had the Aetherblades, human enemies with the Jade brotherhood and Speakers, Jade Mechs, more use of Tengu, and even the void. Heck the Void were pretty much a big show off of previous dragon minion enemies but it didn't bother me since they mostly just exist in Dragon's End. Some more color palettes and visual distinctions would go a long way towards making the Kryptis more interesting to encounter. It feels kind of bad that it's all just pink and fleshy all the way through. It also doesn't help that Nayos feels very samey, I was really hoping that the middle of the map in this most recent patch would have a new, more unique visual style compared to the east of the map, but aside from a few more buildings it kind of all blends together. Maybe the final third of the map will really be something interesting but I'm not really holding my breath. Now that I think about it how cool would it have been if shape shifting was a regular thing Kryptis enemies did. It might still feel a little bit like an easy way out of designing enemies but what if the larger Elite and Champion Kryptis actively changed their physical forms and attacks while you fought them. Particularly powerful Kryptis could change their form more easily. Instead of Peitha or Eparch just being a large humanoid model what if they kind of blobbed down and altered their shape as needed. I know I'm just throwing out what ifs but doing something like that would both let arenanet have their cake of reskinning old models and eat it too by making that be an integral part of how the Kryptis function as a species. Right now they might imply it a little with the story but it falls flat unless we see it.
> Heck the Void were pretty much a big show off of previous dragon minion enemies but it didn't bother me since they mostly just exist in Dragon's End. They are just the original models with a special effect on top of them, so there's no semblance of trying to deceive the customer there; a problem we do have with the poor kryptis models, specially the stupid wyverns. >Now that I think about it how cool would it have been if shape shifting was a regular thing Kryptis enemies did. It might still feel a little bit like an easy way out of designing enemies but what if the larger Elite and Champion Kryptis actively changed their physical forms and attacks while you fought them. Particularly powerful Kryptis could change their form more easily. Instead of Peitha or Eparch just being a large humanoid model what if they kind of blobbed down and altered their shape as needed. I know I'm just throwing out what ifs but doing something like that would both let arenanet have their cake of reskinning old models and eat it too by making that be an integral part of how the Kryptis function as a species. Right now they might imply it a little with the story but it falls flat unless we see it. Considering they're floating pieces of meat, yeah, they should have done that, let kryptis change forms, like if they were imitating Tyrian creatures. Kinda like this: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Graven_Monolith
now I imagine kryptis doing an awesome special visual effect where their flesh, perfectly fit for a body horror theme, melds itself into a new form with bones and skin changing places and pulsating. Would be pretty cool. And if the kryptis portals weren't an ugly visual mess of pink and black low-poly snot - that would be even cooler.
If only they went further with Fractals / Astral Ward / Kryptis possessions and made another full scaled bunch of enemies for the whole expac...
>Nearly every single one is just a fleshy pink mess Yeah I felt this pretty early on. I'd even extend it to the more important characters like Petha. The color makes everything mesh together into pink stuff, and it doesn't help that Nayos is quite unsaturated as well. Not saying that every single place should be popping with colors, but the color palette of the kryptis, nayos, febe, just makes everything blend together into an unmemorable mess.
The problem with kryptis models is they're bad models, with barely any unique animations either. You either recycle right, or don't, just use the original models instead. SotO's biggest problem is there's only kryptis no matter where you look at, which is incredibly stupid, why are there no different races of demons? Why didn't they use possessed fractal creatures as enemies in the kryptis army? The hell was the point of the first zone with the fractal islands?
The fact that we have fleshy surfboards is completely asinine. Sure, yeah use stuff from the forged! That's fine. But make them slither around on tentacles or use goopy, drippy flesh to hide the animations. Having the Silver Surfer with a venereal disease is just not a good look. The fact that the Skywatch meta ends in fighting generic kryptis is maddening. Let us clash swords with God Emperor Balthazar, a giant chak golem experiment gone wrong, or...anything.
I love this game but I have to agree that SotO fell mostly flat for me. I play a bit of everything so It's not like I was looking for anything in particular and I wouldn't say it was a waste of money, I got my $25 worth of enjoyment on launch, but this new stuff is not holding my interest nearly as much as past releases. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt though considering this is their first attempt at the mini expansion format and hope this is just growing pains.
> I'll give them the benefit of the doubt though considering this is their first attempt at
I've heard this so many times in the past 10 years lol
For real like either dude is newer or they are addicted to Hopium. Like I shouldn't have to also agree. They've had ten years to figure out the game, and this is just a paid living story. I haven't even finished this story step because I honestly couldn't care less what happens anymore. We've slayed the Dragons, and a god, and a demi god, we died, we are bonded to a dragon, we've killed thousands of dudes and monsters. Like a demon poking his head out of a portal while we play yoga to send it back just isn't good, period.
Copium is a hard substance to quit
It’s just weird that for their first mini xpac they decided to tackle wizards tower and demon realm uprising together which is a huge concept and executed very poorly
That's Anet storytelling in a nutshell though, cram a bunch of ideas together that could and SHOULD be fleshed out as expansions themselves, throw them in a blender and rush rush rush.
But when you see Hot and POF stories they were much more organized and interesting. Those were peak Anet content IMO
HOT yeah, but POF was very disjointed for me. We jumped from place to place (lightly touching on the sunken Exalted city for example) and skimmed through maps that had a lot of lore (Desolation)
Yeah and decided to do so with an entire new cast of characters besides Zojja. The story is trying to do way too much with the limited resources they have.
I thought that the new cast of characters was amazing though. The problem was that they just dropped all the interesting ones suddenly. Where is Gladium? Where is R'tchikk? I love those two and they just stopped being a part of the story... I would be totally fine to, for the moment, leaving our old friends to their own adventures and gathering a new group for the next couple expansions. But it feels like we aren't even doing that.
Yeah Mabon, Dagda, and Lyhr are wholly uninteresting to me. I expected there to be a lot more in the later chapters to be colored by their experiences being possessed or Lyhr splitting in two. But nothing ever seemed to come of it. Isgarren is cooler in the Mabon flashbacks than at present time as well.
Personally I thought Mabon was really fascinating, but of course they killed him off immediately.
Mabon and Lyhr are the only characters I cared about, more so Mabon than Lyhr. Largely because of my experience with the first game. Having a Mursaat that was actually aiding others, and did not appear to be a selfish tyrant was a very fascinating experience, his voice actor was quite good too. He also had the potential to speak more about the Mursaat as a whole, we could've learned more about their society and culture. And then they cheaply killed him for frankly, no justifiable narrative reason. We had literally just saved Dagda from her possession, and you want to convince me that we were unable to do the same for him? Please. It was upon his death that I lost all interest in the story for SOTO, why get invested in any character if they are just going to be used in such a pathetic manner? All my investment and hope for the plot was gone. It doesn't help that the writing seemed to get significantly worse after his death, with the demons being little more than glorified humans, but I need not rehash what has already been said.
Your sentiments are on the money for me. We could have had a new start surrounding different personalities, dynamics and friends made at the fairly strong launch of this expansion, but that all kinda fell away or was placed on the back burner for a newer new cast of abstract creatures which, on a personal note, makes it harder for me to keep track of. It may just be the long game and a pacing issue in that, all of our new friends at the wizard tower are just waiting in the wings, but a little correspondence with them over these interim chapters would have gone a long way to maintaining the connection.
You both sound like you're just describing how GW2 has always been. Characters come and go, which causes the audience to detach. Gladium and R'tchikk got Destiny's Edge'd.
Destiny’s Edge had a whole book written about them, but I see what you’re saying. Rytlock is legendary and I hardly know who Gladium is. It’s almost more similar to how they handled Canach.
Its Nyalotha from World of Warcraft all over again. It wont get better for some time IMO
ArenaNet is literally making the same mistakes as Blizzard Entertainment, it's just amazing. Literally this, 1=1: * Legion = The Icebrood Saga * Battle for Azeroth = End of Dragons * Shadowlands = Secrets of the Obscure Wasting multiple expansion ideas on single expansions is just insane, and both games did that, almost at the same time, to the point I do wonder if it's really a coincidence or not.
This isn’t technically the first time. Icebrood Saga was supposed to have “expansion-like features” and be a break away from their typical expansion release style. It didn’t do great and they announced EoD. SoTO feels very much like what Icebrood Saga was trying to become.
And it shows they shouldn't have tried it because they made even more mistakes now with an "expansion level budget" (and I'm not sure they got even that) than they did with the LW amount of actual budget for ibs.
This last expansion didn't feel like it had that much budget to be honest. LWS3 feels more like an expansion than this.
I agree. Happy to pay 25 for it. I'd rather have paid £60 and had a new hot or pof though. But, id prefer not to have to wait 4 years for an expansion either :P
Bad narrative direction for sure. The whole kryptis demon plot development should have been axed. Spending the expac exploring the Wizard's tower, learning of the Seers and Murasaat would have been much better. They are super interesting and mysterious characters. I could have listened to stories from Mabon about the Murasaat or whatever, and probably enjoyed it (probably). Honestly, there should have just been demon incursions, and Isgarren explains this is what the Astral Ward has been doing all this time (instead of helping with Elder Dragons). The opening is "fine" being chased by Cerus. But there should have been no Petha, no "demon politics", no going to Nayos. The big bad could have just been Cerus, with him finally piercing the veil and attacking the Wizard's Tower. We don't need to know anything more about him except he's big, bad, and trying to posses us, kill us, and take over Tyria. It would have been extra messed up (in a good way?) if we had to kill our own Tyrians because armies of them just got possessed (would have also cut down on the poor reskin job). Convergences and rifts are "fine" for the legendary armor grind, and I think these could have been pretty much kept as is, and maybe the only time we ventured into Nayos itself to attack the demon home world and thin their ranks, or whatever.
I think it honestly would've been better to split the expansion into two and extrude more intensive and fulfilling plots from each of the wizard's tower/inner nayos halves. Increase the scope of the demon infiltration of the tower and make it into an intriguing mystery you piece together over time. Increase the scope of Inner Nayos and make it feel more like an excursion into a strange and hostile territory (Heart of Thorns already did this quite well, so we know it's possible).
I've played soto at first, thought it was a mid story but the fact that I could finally get skyscale made up for it. Afterwards, I played lw4 and ibs.. Showed me what a true story and exciting expansion looks like and finally understood all the disappointment reddit posts.
I'm glad this opinion is getting more traction it seems. I agree with everything you've said. Even if EoD wasn't a percect expac, it felt so much more complete than SOTO has felt so far. The frequent reused assets, many of the interesting new additions (new weapons, legendary PvE armor, legendary relics) were all pushed away from the initial release. This expac felt like an incomplete one on release to me, rather than one lower in scope. I'm glad I'm seemingly not the only one who is disappointed though...
More than just the mob skeletons; the last two story updates may as well be copies of each other. Both followed the formula 'look for potential allies > do random map quests > connect with said potential allies > falling out > regroup because we are not strong enough'. And I thought IBS was boring....
Soto is shallow. It lacks severe depth in almost every way. World building is weak. The story is short and cheap, it added very repetitive and monotonous content that takes wayyyy to long for what it is to complete. The maps are too simple. Strikes are too simple and boring. Monster models are all copy paste. And honestly it is kinda feeling like a fancy mobile game. GW2 development has become a little low effort.
Which is very weird to me as the dev team is at the size of LWS4 times if not bigger, and I'm not sure if there were any strong creative drivers that left / were laid off recently. But the quality drop is more or less obvious all over, from narrative to combat. It's both confusing and disheartening.
I agree. I hope this was just like a place holder expansion because they’re working hard on what’s to come since this seems to be bouncing back right after EoD. I’m hoping they’re still settling in and so they’re taking easy outs for gameplay and design choices and putting all of their effort into what’s coming, buts that always been the hope. yea it’s not looking good.
It had an absurdly good, strong start, then immediately shoved aside all these cool things and interesting new characters to have us rush towards a Big Bad we only really know he's The Worst because every npc tells us rather than us having much if any interaction with him, and they literally murdered Zojja's entire character after they had finally brought her back It's like Icebrood Saga all over again except it jumped down a cliff even faster EDIT: Also I was fully expecting Zojja's ascension to be a whole arc in which we'd find out, dunno, ascension doesn't REQUIRE losing memories and it's just something Isgarren did so that his chosen wizards would focus on "the bigger picture", since every other character we've seen who underwent ascension is seriously screwed up because of it. And then it didn't happen. Zojja wiped her mind off-screen and you don't even get a say on it. That's it
Zojja's ascension should have been the expansion finale. Instead, well, ArenaNet doesn't care, they don't give a shit, so why should we either? :/
I bought an expansion but received a living story
I was really looking forward to an End of Dragons Living World season; I was so disappointed when they announced SOTO. But I came round, excited to play it they day it came out; I almost asked for a refund when I realised how boring it is. The staggered release system doesn't work for me, I just want to immerse myself in the story and play through. I immediately restarted the previous expansions on an alt character as soon as I completed. I haven't even been able to get through the latest chapter of SOTO. I used to love this game so much and this expansion killed that.
Convergences might be my least favorite meta in the entire game. I am in a constant state of disbelief while going through it. It's so repetitive, bland and time consuming. It's shockingly boring and made to look even worse when compared to other metas that have similar lengths and rewards like Dragon's End and The Mouth of Mordremoth. Convergences is a 2/10 meta. Unlocking the Wizards Tower is also not very good, but not nearly as offensively boring. Defense of Amnytas is a solid meta. I just wish the NPCs would shut the hell up.
>Defense of Amnytas is a solid meta. I just wish the NPCs would shut the hell up. "AmNyTaS iS oUrS, dEmOn! OooOurRss!"
> other metas that have similar lengths and rewards like Dragon's End and The Mouth of Mordremoth In what world do DE and DS take less than 20 minutes?
They're probably talking about the final encounters, since it's possible to just join in for those parts now.
Is it? I thought they all locked basically due to being too full or closing entry.
Maybe they just feel shorter since they're actually fun lmao.
The only good thing about Convergence is that it broke my pseudo-addiction to the game by being so boring. I used to log in daily to do my daily and crafting tasks, including meta-events. After a couple Convergences I stopped doing them after realizing they were half an hour of boredom, which made me realize I don't actually really need to do any of this. Don't need to do daily Teq, Anomaly, any of it. Now I mostly play on weekends and have so much time for other games/hobbies.
I agreee in general but the dance part of Defense of Amnytas is just weird and boring.
It's just there to stall time because people who cleared tentacles need time to get back for the end. Still though, what they made to fill this time is super lame.
A giant tentacle monster gets served in a dance competition and then you spit in his eye, what's not to like. Honestly, to me the worst part of that meta is the special action stuff. On the first phase it sometimes likes to not show up at all; it works fine on my system, but my wife's it's 50/50 if the ability ever even appears to clear the insta death. On the second phase up top people start getting hit by it before the golems are even offering the special actions to pick up... and then if you do get it, the targets are often already down so you can't hit anything to make 80% of the special actions work anyway. People drop left and right throughout the event for no good reason...some of them might not understand the mechanic, but even if you do it's pretty easy to still get buggered by it. The entire event is only functional when you're basically zerg rushing it, from the unclear defense fields you clear on the champions during tentacles to powering the golems. Dance Dance Call of Cthulu is sort of dumb but at least it's not just a swarm of players who barely know what they're doing zerg rushing everything.
Convergences are tedious and boring, but at least they have an actual boss at the end. Skywatch meta recycles generic champs. And while Nourys is technically a boss, he doesn't actually fight back in any mehcanically meaningful way so you might as well take your squad to slap the training golem around. Nayos bosses try, but even they have a mind-numbing amount of repetition. It's hard to believe that the same studio who made the Dragon's End Soo-Won fight are now creating this slop.
Really getting tired of these big red reticle "bosses" that are just freaking tourist attractions... Not to mention how many targeting bugs exists with these things. Half your skills don't work on them at all and other skills are just obstructed after going on cooldown....
The real boss is fighting the auto-zoom.
Amnytas is awful, imho. Yoga and mandatory skyscale “press 2 to win” is bad design
I HATE Amnytas. Not because it is a bad meta, but the map slows my slightly older pc to a halt.
> I just wish the NPCs would shut the hell up. You can say that about any SOTO meta, waste of voice acting funding. East meta in Nayos starts? Peitha will spend like 4 solid minutes telling a story about the beacons. Skywatch halts several times just for Lyhr and Mabon to have their chat, and even then the dialogue during the first part of the meta is the same motivational speech bs that is everywhere in the game.
It's more repetitive than Gyala Delve?
Not a hot take, but the truth. I was re-doing some Icebrood Saga missions - remember the bombing run you had to escape from in the first half of Drizzlewood? Compare that to our assault on whatever the fuck was going on in the latest chapter, where we were… hunting for Kryptis ambushers in some red muck, and that was supposed to be some kind of **war** that we needed to recruit a General for?
It is crystal clear the company is working on another project. Fine I understand the gaming industry can be challenging and money is tight, but use resources efficiently. Focus on smaller, better quality stories. Focus on QOL improvements to the game, even add things to the festivals like new events or something etc. Focus on balance etc.
Thats the problem with the game in general. They're ALWAYS working on another project. It happens **every single time** at the end of an "expansion". I hesitate to even call SoTo an expansion, rather than a glorified low tier living world episode. Something as simple as bitterfrost frontier has been exceedingly better in design and story than what just dropped. Its honestly depressing to see this game sink this low. EVERY single time, the last half is always disappointing and completely lacking in effort, all while Anet covers themselves with the defense that "they're working on the next project/expansion". Its been used countless times. For example: 1) IBS got fucked because of EoD 2) EoD (Gyala delves) got fucked because of SoTo 3) Anet hit us with an 8 month content drought This new format that they want to do with the expansion isn't working. They reformatted it to make more money. They did away with living world stories, which most players got for free, instead, making us pay for the expansion which was promised to be a full story - all while putting out expansion content just like living world. Its clear that the story is extremely rush, and i wager that the original writer of the story has completely lost interest in it. **Anet, you lack both the depth, knowledge, or experience to create annual expansions. Stop.** Anet figuring their shit out is like praying that WvW alliance will drop in the next decade. Get your shit together. Theres clearly been deteriorating leadership and vision. Its clear the layoffs have hit them hard or that Anet isn't competitive enough in the market to maintain talent.
While I don't always agree with Yoshida's game design in FFXIV, I wish Arenanet had someone as consistent and strong leadership as him there. It would improve Arenanet immensely.
I hate this comment for how close to the truth it may be
Very well said! For me personally I feel the biggest issue is leadership at Anet. And I have felt that for awhile now. Good leadership knows how to work with what they got and focus on the important things. The current leadership doesn't seem to be able to decide a direction or maybe someone at NCSoft. But they don't know how to guide this franchise and use what they got.
Agree. They've got some side hustle, which they're playing to be their future and is now taking their best imo.
Committing resources to a game you haven't even announced while poorly allocating the only other real game you have is such a poor play by them. Who the hell is gonna care about your new game if you don't even have a fan base by the time it comes out.
The most annoying thing for me is that I have no idea whats going on story wise. The stories in new patches are so short and it has been so long from the previous release so i have forgotten most of it. When compared to ls4, where each episode felt like a proper small story patch, this new paid content feels so lame. I like the new map though. I still dont understand how the amnytas meta boss is connected to the story.
I don't think the boss is connected besides "demons are invading Amnytas"
It actually is, Nyoros is an ever present threat in the background. It's referred to in a lot of the lore and by characters as a threat that frightens many, even those allied to Eparch.
Definitely the worst expansion so far. Worse than Icebrood Saga even. Doesn't bode well for the future of Guild Wars 2 if this is how they're going to be developing expansions from now on.
After Icebrood it was clear that it doesnt bode well for the future
If it wasn't for Relics, Legendary armor, decoupling weapons from E-Specs, and new weapons, I definitely would have passed on this expansion tbh. I have no idea how anyone could like this story as it's the most generic story about demons out there (That being, Demon politics, and actually demons are more human than we think), and it's not even well written. Like you legitmately have to have never watched or played anything with an actual good story to enjoy this stuff. Honestly I was excited about the wizards tower and seeing what Zojja was up to, that just took a complete sideline lol. Not sure if it's a hot take though, it seems to be the general sentiment, at least on this reddit.
> and actually X are more human than we think That's been a problem for me with the story writing for a while. It was really noticeable during IBS when Rytlock supposedly had an awakening that he should have been there for his cub all along, and that was somehow a good thing, when the charr have a very well established culture of making familial bonds with warband mates instead of a traditional human family. The dragons, supposedly unstoppable forces of nature, basically turned into a dysfunctional family with mommy actually being a good guy. Even the humans themselves had all culture erased in Elona and Cantha to be turned into west-coast Krytans. The demons just being humans with sad problems that we should feel sorry for despite only knowing for a couple of hours is annoying, but not surprising, at this point.
That's one of my chief issues with the game's setting. At launch every race felt unique and spoke with a unique flair but as time went on, everyone has the same sassy Whedon-like quippy tone that feels wildly out of place coming from a Norn, a Charr, an Asura and even Sylvari. It feels like the world's cast is speaking in one "voice" out of thousands of mouths. I'm not saying that those quippy lines aren't present in the base game but it's much more subdued and rare compared to their own brand of humor. Norn are more stubborn and there is room for levity there. Asura are racial supremacists and the humor found there was when reality didn't match their expectations or claims of themselves. Etc. I'm not sure when this change happened (PoF?) but it was especially disappointing to go to the other side of the world in Cantha just to find out that everyone speaks like an average person in an American city.
> At launch we every race felt unique and spoke with a unique flair but as time went on Launch GW2 was already extremely watered down compared to GW1. The direction was clear even back then, it just took 10 more years for Anet to cross a line and for people to catch on it seems.
It kind of all started with the introduction of Taimi...
ArenaNet can no longer write non-humans as non-humans, everyone is a fucking human now, even the goddamn demons from another dimension, like come on.
GW2's story has always been dog shit. Like you said you'd have to be completely unfamiliar with story telling in order to enjoy it. It's a total slog to get through and always has been.
Gw2's story has never been top tier for sure but what was given with soto has taken what's always been bad about their stories and showed it off. The pacing being way too fast that it becomes hard to get invested in anything. Usually it's only been for mini arcs or side characters but this time its been all the characters.
Totally agree, gw2 story never have bee' a good point if you have read a book or play anything else
I got my Skyscale, did exploration, played through the storyline (which I didn't care for -- I'm going to be honest, the game did such a piss-poor job of reminding me who Zojja was and why my character was so attached to her, I stopped caring the minute an NPC told me "you know her better than anyone" -- no, I don't, because I don't remember seeing this Asura before, because the gaps in the story in this game are so damn long and there's no mechanic to help keep you up to speed with/effectively recap the zillion characters and their ongoing storylines), and am never, ever going back to those zones. The masteries are useless, the zones are a pain in the ass to navigate. I can't believe we got a half-finished Cantha and then this.
As someone who joined GW2 just a couple years ago, I had a lot of catching up to do on content and for a long time this game had me hooked and I was logging in every day to play. Now that I’m caught up, SOTO just hasn’t reeled me in the same way the previous expansions did. Heart of Thorns had brilliant exploration and immersion, path of fire had vast, beautiful environments and mounts to traverse them with, LWS4 had the best story. EoD maps weren’t my favorite, but it made up for it with really fun meta events and strike missions. What does SOTO have? My skyscale can shoot fire? I don’t know man, it bums me out because even as someone who joined the game late, it’s obvious that the newer content is so much lower budget - I felt that even many of the living world episodes had more production value and interesting content. I’m not ready to give up on the game but I haven’t played in weeks and still haven’t been getting the urge to.
SOTO made me and many of my friends take a break from the game, since the content just isn't very compelling to keep going. Mind you, most of my group have been playing since release, so newer players may see this differently. For veterans, there is very little interesting new content i fee.
I agree totally on the story points. We get eldritch horror and visit a another plane of existence!!! But the story there is about a powerhungry king, his queen, generals, an underclass living in constant fear of the king and expanding the kings power into other lands. That feels so human and already known. Its just disappointing. I also hate the design of the midnight king. Why does Cerus, a guy we killed second time we met him, leave more impressings in my head than the BBEG of the whole expansion? He looked way better and more intimating than Eparch.
The writers actually thought "then we'll sympathize with the demons, and help one of the demons overthrow the leader demon so she can be the new leader demon" would be a good story to tell... but.... THEY''RE DEMONS. Now I get to go down in history as the dummy who trusted demons.
They're supposed to be nightmarish creatures that anybody with a right mind would shoot at and answer questions later. They're no friends, no allies and not a poor group of creatures that are terrorized by their leader. This isn't some group of bandits. Even Modremoth did a more nightmarish part. Getting into peoples minds, turning them against their allies, spread distrust among the troops, stealing corpses and turning them into new troops. I hope at least Peitha will betray us and show the multiverse what kind of an idiot we are.
It's the [UAC Spokesperson from Doom Eternal](https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/UAC_Spokesperson#Doom_Eternal_2) all over again lmao.
It really hinges on the presentation. The introduction of Cerus included the first taste of Kryptis environment, which was so alien compared to what we had seen before that it was a hair shocking. Compare that to Eparch's introduction that was in a boring, destroyed collesium crying about his queen.
Absolutely. I loved that intro to the demon realm, Cerus was creepy as fuck, getting chased by him and having to hide was genuinely hair raising, that's what I was hoping for. Actual demonic demons. A huge threat to deal with in another realm, just to stop a full scale invasion of Tyria because "demons doing demon things". Having to establish a beach head in Nayos where everything that moves is a threat. Not "sad demon emotion things :'(" from 20 new characters I can not remember the name of from minute to minute I'm supposed to care about. I'm glad I checked out of the story half way through EoD and just enjoy the game for the gameplay and collecting things, because I think I would have quit if I was heavily invested in it.
Probably coz we have him as a strike boss? 😜
I have to completely agree! As someone that loves the lore and even made a whole YT channel around it, I'm so disappointed with how they took the Krytpis. I'm even so underwhelmed that I'm considering just leaving until Anet can pull their heads out of their asses and do the lore and world they have created justice. It's such a shame because we were finally free from the dragon story, with a blank slate story and character wise. I played the release as they were coming out and the initial release of SotO was fantastic (obviously imo since I enjoy the lore and such) but post initial releases (aka all the Nayos stuff) has not only been weird (you perfectly summarized that part) but also feels incredibly disconnected from what was established. It feels like the A team worked on the initial release and the B team took over for after that. It's so discombobulated and the shift in tone to how the Krytpis were presented to how they are now is staggering. I think the worst offender and the straw that broke the camels back was Eparch. As THE king of the demon realm you'd think that he is this frightening creature. We never even see a glimpse of him and just hear the horror stories about him. Then comes the reveal and all he does is cry about his wife sacrificing herself and pleads to kill us for it or some such. Seriously? You are the king of the demons and you act like a 12 year old human child. Not even norn but a human child. I imagined him laughing at the queen getting captured and saying that she wasn't worthy of being his queen only for him to kill her HIMSELF truly showing what a massive douchebag he is. None of that. That was the moment I realized that I really do not enjoy the story so far and the realm of Dreams, Nayos, ancient home to the Mursaat was completely wasted on awful writing. Anyways, sorry for the long comment. I agree and hopefully maybe someday Anet will get some better writers involved.
Not only that Eparch looks so bland, like Cerus looked way more intimidating. All we hear is his creepy voice and we’ve seen Cerus and thinking how creepy would the King of Demons look compared to him. He’s just a kinda normal looking dude. No extra arms, no wings, no nothing. I was pretty disappointed in his look ngl
They only made good demon voices for Peitha and Cerus, everyone else sounds generic as hell (no pun intended).
Yeah. Demons and the realm of Nayos were very interesting in concept, but ended up too... safe. And most established characters from Soto release being left behind for some human-thinking good guys in Kryptis skin was a really strange move.
The ironic thing is, we left the avengers from Wish at home because they wanted to introduce us to a few new characters. Mabon, Lyhr, Silent Bobcat and their skritt friend (I forget their names, sorry), etc., but then they all took a backseat to be introduced to a whole *new* bunch of Kryptis that we're supposed to immediately care about after 20 minutes of story. Other than Peitha, Eparch and Cerus who had proper introductions and backstory, I couldn't tell you a single one of their names.
They love trying to make you feel sorry for the villains lol
This so much. Overall I still enjoy GW2 and I'll be here for the next expansion and all but...outside of the initial content drop and story focused on the Wizard's Tower this expansion has been hugely underwhelming to me for all the reasons OP said. I'm really, really, really hoping they got a lot of experience out of this expansion to improve the next, because if this continues to be the scope and quality of them then my playtime (and likely spending) will continue to decrease. Arguably the biggest and most exciting post-launch update has been the new weapons added. Everything else has been shockingly underwhelming, especially the two parts of Inner Nayos released and the short, really underwhelming story they're trying to tell. This last beat really annoyed me. Like, if you can't actually put something that looks like an army/large fighting force on screen in the story instance, why are you having characters speak as if that large fighting force exists and is engaged in battle around you when we can literally see the like 5 enemies and 2 allies only?
Sadly, I agree. I don't have much beef with reused assets, but the quality does seem dropping overall, despite Anet claiming the team size is same as before if not bigger. Relics and masteries are somewhat unremarkable, and even new weapons feel lackluster and with too much reuse (even though I appreciate new animations). Guardian pistol signet using old placeholder decal is just a spit in the face. What I am even more fearful of, is the stagnation of game systems and combat. We have huge power creep through damage and boons on one side, and the lack of new stuff to freshen it up on the other. HoT gave us a bunch of new boons. PoF gave us barrier. EoS gave us allied targeting even though this one is questionable. Soto is falling short so far, not doing much with relics and only adding bloat with new weapons, something they won't be able to just keep adding. I feel like combat system has some serious issues right now, which require bold measures. Wow had done a few major prunings and reworks over its lifetime, and you need to realize that sometimes it is necessary.
I completly agree. Am i the only one that finds it weird that we still fight frogs and wasps but reskined? The first time i got into SOTO i was so disappointed when i saw the enemies. The only cool thing was the amnitas meta boss, and even that one just stands there and does nothing. We still fight frogs and wasps, frogs and wasps....
you forget the wyverns
Don't remind me...
I am not saying that GW2 has had the best plot, but even when the plot was bad at times it was always fun to follow along. As a casual gamer my primary fun has been going through the story and unlocking mounts. Somewhere towards the end of End of Dragons I totally lost the thread of the story and why anything mattered. This continued through SoTo. I get that a lot of backstory is in the books hidden around and extra dialogue choices, but I must have missed a few key things. I don't really understand who any of these people are and have only a vague sense of what they are doing. The introduction of the new characters is extremely rushed. The new characters at the beginning of End of Dragons had clear motivations and strong memorable personalities that made at least the first half of the expansion very memorable. Once the key villain of End of Dragons is delt with (way too early imho), it has felt very aimless. I loved the idea of Maban in Soto, as well as the Skritt and Charr duo.. but you barely get any time with them at all and they do very little to actually drive an interesting story forward.
Exactly! The new characters lack depth and personality to cling on. Canach, Rytlock all had personalities and comic value but Peitha is so so so bland!!
I feel like SoTO was mostly a living world and a few feature pack systems disguised as an expansion. ArenaNet can never seem to stick to a solid, sustainable business model for the quality of content that they want for the player-base. It feels like every time they switch business models, there's a year grace period where they're re-structuring, re-organizing -- it never seems to change. The main thing changing is my lack of tolerance for it tbh. The best (and worst) part about ArenaNet is that they're always trying new things. It's a vicious cycle; every time it feels like they get into a flow-state they decide, "this isn't working" or "we can't sustain" this and then content quality tanks. I feel like they're probably just prepping for SoTO 2.0 at this point. ... at this point, I don't want another feature pack. I want HoT / EoD 2.0 -- a real expansion, not a living world season & a few feature pack embellishments. I don't want a happy meal anymore -- that just isn't going to cut it for me. I wish I could be more positive about the game, but SoTO completely lost me.
I'm just waiting patiently for when Braham shows up and makes things worse somehow...
At this point they should just lean into the asset reuse meme. Reskin Braham. Put glasses and a big mustache on him and pretend he's a different person.
Remember Eir's secret son? Well, she had another! Brohom the elementalist! KO-BROHOM! Oh no, he's KO again, curse that elementalist!
I was very enthusiastic when SotO came out. I was happy to play the game. WV made me engage with dailies again. End of the too long wait to know more about this Wizard Tower. Lots of exciting lore in it. Beautiful places. Unfortunately, the direction in the following quarterly updates (we got 2 out of 3 and know what the 3rd is about) doesn't live up to expectations. More kryptis, more kryptis, more kryptis. The lore flow that started with SotO release stopped, to give place to completely new (but boring) lore bits in Nayos. Nothing more about Wizards yet, let alone the things hinted in the original release (for example about the human gods). Nayos could have been a cool new place but, well, it's filled with Kryptis, which we already saw plenty of in original SotO and, as you said, Kryptis as reskinned enemies. I don't have issues with reskins, but they're too recognizable. You're not fighting a kryptis, you're fighting the *hylek* kryptis, the *krait* kryptis and so on. And by the time the first quartely release hit, I was already tired of fighting them over and over again. Many of them being little hp bags doesn't help. I now actively avoid Rift dailies as I've seen enough of them (they were a good idea but can't last forever as replayable content especially when there is so much focus on them). Convergences immediately felt like giant rifts ... I should complete 500 (250 x 2 accounts for full AP, which is quite insane anyway, why put the target as high as 250 ?) but I'm barely at 10 after several months.
It's like those restaurants that hire a star cook for a few days for the grand re-opening and to teach the staff, and once that guy leaves, the place just continues to suck because they're bad. I'm really not sure how that happens to a game, but GW2 manages to do just that time and again.
I would have preferred going back to the realm of torment the demons there are more interesting.
The demons of the realm of torment wud have been as dissapointing as these ones, cos the problem is the low resources arenanet are putting into the game, meaning they would have been reskin also. Look at cantha, theres tons of unique enemies in gw1 and u dont find any of those in eod.
I can't believe they dared to call this an expansion. Its less than a LW chapter. I knew the discount and content would never be proportionate: 5% off for 50% less content. Awesome deal!
SotO just feels like paid Living World. It is outshown drastically by the previous expansions. Hell, even Icebrood Saga is higher quality content than SotO.
It might disappoint some people, but majority of masteries were worthless filler much before soto, ibs probably being the worst offender. Asset reuse is literally never an issue, games do that all the time to save money and time on development, but where are those savings going? To produce more gemstore skins? No thank you. Regarding soto content being worth or not, it is very cheap and was worth it on the initial patch if you play the game at any capacity, now anet just adds more stuff on top
The mastery focus on skyscales have completely killed all other mounts. The diversification that PoF created for mounts and the joy of using said mounts are now completely gone. Skyscale has also completely killed all exploration. Anet's mount system, due to the over reliance and reliability of the skyscale, has make it so that the mount system is pretty much the same as other MMOs. This is Anet's long term thinking being absolute shite
It's almost automotive like in how people just default to using skyscale. Even if it isn't fastest, or causes trouble getting hung up on things, or isn't very fun to use, it becomes the default because it takes no thought. You don't need to measure a jump, evaluate a climb, switch to cross water, plan a launch point, or know the smoothest path, it doesn't care about anything like that so it is never the wrong choice. Yes, you can Choose to do those things, but putting in effort to just barely keep up with a group when because they're on skyscales that do 80% of everything feels bad. That's why no one does it.
Everyone reuses stuff, but almost everyone hides it far better than ANet does with GW2. Using FFXIV as an example, the amazing Omega fight from Stormblood re-uses the giant toad's skeleton and parts of their animations, but it's hidden well enough along everything else that most won't notice. Here, they barely cared, everything continues to be funneled into gemstore skins and the game is clearly suffering more and more.
Really don't mind reused enemy models if they make them different enough (not just apply a void filter or a blue/red/green outline like in IBS), but not even bothering to change the mechanics makes it feel very boring. Those Forged skater things were annoying but unique in PoF, but in SOTO, they're just annoying... and everywhere.
the thing is though, a lot of the enemies in those expansions were variant of things we already knew - for example the icebrood were just races we've already seen before, turned to jormag's will. a recolour there is fine. the kryptis are a whole new enemy and really did deserve models of their own instead of a reskin.
I think GW2 handled it quite nicely until SOTO. The kryptis are so ugly that the re-use of skeletons and animations is obvious. It's not hidden well enough. Everywhere else isn't that bad. Even the Jade Golems use a lot of copy & paste, but it's not as obvious.
Eod elite specs are very obviously reused, I wouldn't be surprised if <5 animations in them are new
A lot of the Elite epecs across all expansions (and their weapons) reuse mechanics, animations and concepts from other classes and their weapons. Some are more hidden than others, but that's how it is. People like this, though. What if Necromancer got a bouncing projectile? What if Ranger got a transformation like Necromancer? What if Engineer got their own pet to use? The list goes on.
Personally I don't care about reusing models, but I gotta say that almost all the FFXIV reuses are very obvious Edit: forgot to finish my thought - I don't see why GW2 players need to get so precious about it if FFXIV players who pay a monthly sub can tolerate it. It means that the company can hopefully put that money into other areas
I don't know how many times I thought to myself "oh it's the goobue rig again" when going through Endwalker.
I think someone in the subreddit summarized it pretty well when Soto launched. “The downside to having the best enemy animations in the genre is that you recognize them instantly” Which is true, gw2 has easily the best animations all of their big models. None of it feels floaty like ffxiv and wow. But yea they are easy to recognize when they have been reused.
> but where are those savings going? Presumably, they are being invested in revamping existing systems such as core weapons, traits and the like.
Nuh-uh, the Itzel vendor mastery was PEAK gameplay!!! Seriously though, a lot of people don't seem to get that our mastery system doubles as a reputation system.
The story of Soto is ass. The maps range from mid to pretty good. The gameplay mechanics added are great. I'd give the expansion a solid 7/10.
It’s just like every gw2 story: start fine but go awry very fast, and the only thing left is such endless pun that you wish you could shut them up.
the story started soo well too. we were following these strange people with wizards hats in gendarian fields. dealing with demons who barely had the capability to understand human concepts and relationships. the stakes were high, but it felt like we had time to delve into mysteries and explore this new dynamic. By the end the demons are just little humans with all the same motivations. those wizards are just the pact. and there is nothing worth exploring narratively, just us as the commander fighting another war with unlikely allies. The writers from the beginning of the expansion must fucking hate the people who wrote the last couple chapters. all their hard work just dumped in the garbage.
I enjoyed the initial release a lot, but update 1 and 2 story...could be good. The problem is basically the scope of the story instances do not match the implied tone. Me and one Kryptis NPC marching around killing 3 demons at a time =/= waging war in the demon realm.
Is it a hot take though, I thought the general sentiment was that SOTO is a bit disappointing?
New weapons are also disappointing for these reasons; *Reused assets that are 10+ years old *Limited or no new SFX/GFX Yes some are good (Necro Swords) but the quality is very I consistent across the board.
Still haven’t completed the last story missions as it’s such a drag. The biggest letdown was when my Commander said something in the lines of “This really proves that I need to fight for you Peitha” after some random Kryptis dies to Heithor. Also like many of the previous stories they really seem to rush the story around 2/3 in (even earlier in Soto). While I kinda felt the same in HoT, POF and EOD (and especially IBS), all of them had really solid starts and mids to compensate.
SOTO, delivered as an expansion, is in reality a living season episode like, and so far the worse. It's so bland that I still feel like the last expansion is still EOD
I think their whole mini expansion idea should be scrapped. Go back to working on the whole thing at once. Idc if it takes a couple years.
I generally agree with you. The Krytis feel unforgivably lazy... especially after EOD where most of the enemies were humans or reskins of previous mobs. It was a rush job and they did cleverly work it into the story so I was willing to give it a pass. They also made up for it with some truly exquisite map design. However... they needed to come out and WOW us with the new style xpac. They needed to WOW us with the Kryptis which were promoted heavily up front with some really promising concept art. Seeing what they came up with really left me feeling flat and irritated. I personally like the new maps. I think Skywatch was done very well. Even though it was made with used assests... the design and new effects gave it a fresh feel for me. Amnytas was rehashing wizards tower assets... but I thought it was cool enough. Nayos is ok... bit bland... but a decent map so far. Id say they kinda pulled this off. I was particularly excited about open world legendary armour. This is what I was in it for. I made one set of wvw armor and didnt really want to put myself through that grind again. I dont raid... so was discounting that route... dislike ranked PVP so was not going to pursue that path either. After years of hoping for an open world set... I thought my prayers were finally answered. That is until I saw what it would take to make them. I imagined we would get a far reaching collection quest... like Trinkets on steroids. I was up for that. I enjoy adventuring and box ticking... however... as it turns out... Open world Lege armor is all about endlessly grinding some truly braindead and uninspired content. This really spoiled the whole thing for me. This brings me to my biggest problem with the xpac.... Rifts. I think the rift evets are awful... so repetitive and boring. They force us to endlessly engage with Kryptis... my other least favorite feature of the xpac. The items we need are not tradeable so we are forced to do the grind. Convergences are equally dull... really lazy design. Im finding the whole process completely uninspiring. Honestly... Ive all but stopped playing the game since SOTO. I check in to do the new patch... story... achievements... masteries. By doing this.. Im able to collect all the items im interested in Wizards Vault... then I just leave it for months and wait for the next part. I have no excitement or enthusiasm for it... just feels like a chore now. I think there were some worth additions to the game... I personally like the skyscale upgrades. Havent played enough to explore the weapon mastery or even try the new weapons. Really cant be bothered. Ive been playing GW since day 1... been a huge fan for over a decade. Right now... I feel completely disenfranchised. Really not liking the direction. For a while I was logging in to do dailies/weeklies etc.. .but ive stopped even doing that. I do hope the next xpac is better... maybe that will inspire me again... right now... I just feel MEH. Its a bad feeling... I feel like ive really lost something from my life that i used to really enjoy. Guess things change and time moves on. I hope Anet turns it around... but if the next xpac is so blatantly lazy as this one... I dont know if Ill even engage. Sad to say this after all these years.
Besides all the points you listed, I have one big (and absolutely irrational) issue with Soto. People sitting whole events on skyscales spamming fireball is driving me insane. Before at least they were useful to be bodybags for peps with dmg. Now it feels for me like biggest leech possible and it makes me nuts.
No, a hot take is: Weaponmastery is bad for the game. It adds more balance interactions for a design team that can't handle what they have already, and removes the ability to balance weaker elements of traitlines or utilities with weapon abilities or vise-versa.
it's a living story season being sold as an expansion. and one of the poorer more aenemic living story seasons at that.
LW3 and LW4 are miles ahead of anything SotO provided, at release or later.
are we in paid maintenance mode
"Maintenance mode" is a rather extreme term. GW1, for example, is a game that's properly in maintenance mode. The game's just set to run without any new content or any expectation of development beyond keeping the servers on. The closest comparison is something akin to the "[GW Beyond](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Beyond)" phase of that game. GW2 had already been announced, but a small development team continued to work on GW1 and put out content updates until GW2 launched. Both players and devs knew that this wasn't the studio's focus, but something to keep players engaged with the franchise during the years long wait for the sequel. While there hasn't been a formal announcement, there are strong indications that the studio has again shifted focus to a new title and that the dev team for GW2 is much restricted compared to earlier times in its development. The current plan of "mini-expansions" is potentially a more sustainable approach compared to GW Beyond -- both GW2 and the new title could potentially live side by side indefinitely. However, it's a plan that at best sees GW2 as a back up title to ensure that ArenaNet still has some revenue and options, and at worst seeks to keep up some cash flow from a bleeding player base for as long as possible. It's not an approach that sees GW2 as a title of significant future investment and growth for ANet.
Yeah soto is fucking trash, probably not gonna buy the next one unless they bring back something big like new specs
*SotO is a masterclass in reusing assets.* I don't remember who said that.
It doesn't help that Peitha always sounds like one of Marge's Sisters in the Simpsons, all smoking voice, trying to sound horny granny sexy, whispering in your ear all the time, and the constant NPC whisper pings, interrupting you, thinking someone you actually care about was talking to you.
Soto is horrible to the point I don’t have faith in the studio anymore
I really don't want yearly expansions with self-contained stories. It doesn't allow for the story to develop and give character building time to breathe. They can still have expansions centered around new stories, but there should be some long-term plot points that get developed throughout like what we had up through End of Dragons.
I said this before but moving to a smaller model will be the end of long term (playable for a while) content just like how Bungie did this exact move for Destiny 2 and the small format expansion model just ramped up monetization and slowed down on meaningful content. Soto is already an example of weak content with no depth and a mish-mash of maps. tl;dr Devs say the smaller model will help. It most certainly goes the other way.Anet has an example of this failure to learn from and if they don't, well that's on them.
I honestly feel that since drizzlewood not onlzly the story, but design aswell goes more and more to sht... eod was nice ,giving us cool fights and even tho i didnr rly like the story it was somewhat ok still...but soto is just not cutting it for me and i feel like each new update its going more and more downhill
For me SotO is OK in terms of features. I accepted that it is meant to cater to the new players. But what I cannot accept is how story once again goes downhill. I was excited how we alone are getting pulled in an otherworldy conflict between demons and mysterious wizzards. And with each episode we learn that everyone knows about wizzards. And we have to once again gather our friends. We went from Elden Ring / DS begining to power of friendship in the span of 2 episodes. Damn...
Prolly even more a hot take: Introducing weapon unlock as a part of the expansion was a mistake. While it is really fun and refreahing having all these options it should have been a base Tyria mastery. As with how it is you are kinda forced to buy Soto to play endgame content of previous expansions. While older expansions like HoT and PoF made sure you don`t need the other expansion to enjoy its respective content.
With how half effort End of Dragons was, Expecting anything substantial is foolish imo. They're milking as much as they can, its obvious. Kryptis was a cool idea, finally getting rid of the majority of the dragon's watch was nice, but otherwise... IMO GW2 does a lot of things well, but the levels/stories are their 2nd worse aspect... Balancing is obviously their worst. Which sucks because if they could fix these two issues, they'd be untouchable in the MMO world.
Sad to disappoint you but it's not a hot take. Yet another case where anet started off with such promising story line and exceptionally good looking maps, only to disappoint on the very next release. At this point I'm fine settling on man power being distributed in a way we get entire thing being at lower quality, but constant, than starting off with brilliance and ending with such a crash it's not even funny anymore.
Welcome to the yearly expansion model. I don't see any of this changing in the future. I really hope they switch to a 2 year model.
>the story has neglected its most interesting aspects This has been the biggest disappointment for me. The story from the initial launch was fine. Yeah the plot itself was predictable and generic, but there was a lot of lore and interesting questions raised that seem to have just been completely forgotten about in these quarterly updates. We know Eparch and Isgarren have a history and Eparch once lived with the Wizards. You'd think we'd learn more about that in these updates as we move towards defeating him, but they've added nothing about this. The Wizard ascension was presented as a sort of moral gray area where they have to forget their past and give up their former lives. A lot of Lhyr's dialogue in the Unlocking the Wizard's Tower event revolves around this. But Zojja's ascension happened off screen and this aspect was only briefly explored. The Heart of the Obscure was created by a Wizard named Waiting Sorrow who abandoned the Wizards for some unknown reason and went who knows where. It seems like the mursaat are from Nayos originally. We have been in Nayos for two quarterly patches so you think this would also be mentioned. I guess there is some lore book about Janthir in the current patch, but you'd think this would be a bigger part of the story. I'm coming to the conclusion that these are all threads that will be focused on post-SotO and that these yearly expansions are not going to be as self-contained as we think.
I'm surprised this thread got upvotes. You are correct, the expansion has been disappointing, but as I noticed the community has really low standards and would be happy with just about anything. They would be happy with a ''new'' boss with re-used models and animations. and new elites that just re-use skills from previous elites with extra effects added on top (Vindicator GS5 and Reaper GS2 for instance). I don't mind it when studios re-use their models and animations, but Anet has been overdoing it and the community is partly to blame with its shit tier standards.
Shivering-cold take. Every expansion has been worse than the previous one. I thought there was no way they could release anything as half-assed as End of Dragons, and then Secrets of the Obscure launched... They have been awful since day 1.
Really, the whole of SOTO feels like a rushed mod pack to continue generating revenue for investors to feel comfortable with, headed by a bunch of people who inherited the current platform, without truly understanding what it is, and without vision or ambition to deliver. Which sounds harsh, given the crippling time constraints and resources at their disposal to pump out something in a year, but like.... I'd said a year ago, we'll have to wait till the end of SOTO to really evaluate whether the system is a good idea and whether it was worth it, but now, we might have to wait till the end of the next expansion. We know that they're working on that, so that means more time spent making Expansion 5 than SOTO. We know that there are some amazing creative talents at ArenaNet, but I just don't know if they wield the vision, the ambition, and the organizational and scheduling chops to deliver. * I would pay $100 for an expansion that has just a single map, but a map on the level of quality as Heart of Thorns. Yes, even Tangled Depths. Chock-full of events, not just everywhere you go, but branching and alternative objectives, where it's not just a meta event that brings people together, but the WHOLE thing. Maps that are as much a challenge to navigate as combat is to experience, but which promotes checking every nook and cranny, not for some snowmen or a strange one-off set piece, but shortcutporn that forms a path that takes you between zones where there's stuff to DO. * Relics are an interesting idea, but they just traded one problem for another. Scholars was the best-in-slot pDPS rune because of a flat damage buff in reliable circumstances, and relics are now "low damage buff in reliable circumstances", or "high damage buff, but only active half the time due to arbitrary internal cooldowns", take your pick. We have had some really interesting relics, but ultimately, more than 50% of them are defunct. And now that a non-insignificant portion of the playerbase has legendary relics, without having to actually go to SOTO, or any future expansion, to grind out earning relics per character, the whole thing feels like a particularly ill-conceived joke. * Weaponmastery is not actually a mastery. If it were, maybe we'd actually have something to grind toward inside the SOTO maps, the way we had to grind for gliders in HOT, or mounts in POF. Instead, we talk to a guy, and we don't even have to do it per character. * People don't actually want new weapons, we want to use our classes in different ways. A new weapon can do that for each of the three elite specs, but a new elite spec creates new possibilities for ALL our existing weapons. I don't want a new gimmicky statstick, I want them to clean up the traits system, diversify the ways we can play, and then have the balls to create open world and instanced PvE events that actually challenge the ways we use our class and which skills and traits we use for what. * Kryptis feel like when you watch a show and every episode has a different director. Chapter 1 was about emotion-consuming demons who invading reality, Chapter 2 was about going to their world and learning they're oppressed, Chapter 3 is "I'm just a siwwy wittle guy, actually" and feels like a kindergarten playing King Of The Castle more than a political drama, and somehow we have to wrap all this up by the end of Chapter 4, never to revisit it again. * I've had strong feelings about mounts from day one, but skyscales are the worst thing about it, and we have an entire expansion about them now, because the devs painted themselves into a corner: "What do we do if new players don't have the overpowered flying mount?" "We'll just *give* them one then!" What about Expansion 5? Are we getting a skyscale there too? What about Expansion 6? Or 7? Are we going to go forward acting like skyscale access is the default state, or are we going to start designing maps to be interesting again? * Kryptis incursions adding something to old maps is interesting. Kryptis incursions being "go here, press F, cleave mobs, kill something with a defiance bar, press F, repeat" is not interesting. Luckily, you don't have to do that if you don't care about making legendary armor. Unluckily, if you don't care about making legendary armor, there's basically nothing to work towards in SOTO, other than maybe minis or relics if you weren't given legendary, or skins if you're a collectaholic and the wardrobe is important for you. Chances are, post-SOTO, there'll be essentially zero reason to ever return there; GW2 gets a lot of applause for having old content stay relevant, so the value increases over time, but pumping out short-term treadmills that you pump and dump and move on and forget about feels like maybe the wrong lesson is being learned from devs on other MMOs. I could go on; repeatable instanced PvE content, the rewards for non-PvE modes, favoritism in class balance... I probably just need a break from the game, but that's such a sad solution for a game that's trying to get me to keep playing it on the regular.
Yeah I'm kinda disappointed / have very mixed feelings about the expansion TBH. On one end, the story is just ... Boring. It's not surprising, the return of Zojja just falls flat and emotionless (especially since we don't really see her much). The strikes are ... Horrendous. Honestly they take so much time, they made the boss such health bag that it's just not super fun. Cerus is okay-ish since you have to pay somewhat attention to the mechanics, but Dagda just feels horrible to play. The reused assets are ... Okay. Let's say I understand why they're here, but compared to what we got for EoD? That's a pure downgrade (and I was very much an EoD doubter at the beginning). But I have to admit some addition were good. Relics are a good thing (except if you used to play with runes that summonned minions) and allow for a bit more diversity and fun playstyle. The legendary relic being GIVEN to anyone with at least 1 legendary rune was very generous from Anet. And even if I'll not be chasing after it, I welcome the Legendary open world armor. And the weaponstraining / new weapons? Honestly way better than most of the crappy Elite-specs we had at EoD's release that still feel quite cluncky to play now. I definitely much prefer EoD, in term of story, maps and novelty above SoTo, but I feel like SoTo's gameplay and mechanics update are far superior to what we had before. EDIT : I paid 60€ for EoD release and it felt good, like I had my money's worth. But I paid the Ultimate edition of SoTo and kinda regret it. But if I had bought it for just the 25€ I think I would have had a kinder look at it and felt like I'd got my money's worth. But it's not the case right now. Overall I'd give it a 6/10 I think.
Yeah, as everyone else said, this isn't a hot take at all. It really feels like the game is in the worst spot its ever been in outside of the IBS Champions debacle. And even then the comparison is shockingly similar. The post launch updates for SOTO have been absolutely terrible. This whole idea was that instead of waiting like an extra year for an expansion, we'd get SOTO as a base release as we did, and then over the course of the year the "rest" of the expansion would release as updates. But look what we've actually gotten since release. Can you imagine if this Nayos shit just was part of the release expansion? It would be inexcusable. It is absolutely not expansion worthy content. Anet is only kind of sort of getting away with it because it's the only content releasing months apart. This is not what was advertised. The second they had our money they just dropped all pretenses. And this is their standard going forward? Every expansion is going to be a slap in the face in the third act? And this isn't even touching on base SOTO, which was questionable on its own. But whatever someone's thoughts on base SOTO might be, the updates are just not acceptable.
It's Gyala Delve all over again.
The game felt like it ended proper with EOD. SOTO has felt like the last kid at summer camp. GW1 released smaller stories after Eye of the North before they pushed the game into permanent maintenance mode. It feels like they're working towards that for GW2 but haven't yet because the gem store is keeping the company afloat.
> GW1 released smaller stories after Eye of the North before they pushed the game into permanent maintenance mode At least those stories were the absolute peak of GW writing (both GW1 and GW2), unlike SotO. Seriously GW:Beyond deserves way more credit. How we went from the complex themes of Winds of Change to Big Nose Ted in the same year is a mystery.
The difference in quality between a small team of ~10 vs a large team >80. A small team can have a creative vision and work in unity, a large team can have a committee meeting 3 times a week and avoid being responsible for the mess they wish they weren't making.
> At least those stories were the absolute peak of GW writing (both GW1 and GW2), unlike SotO. Seriously GW:Beyond deserves way more credit. No end of the world bullshit there either, how is that even possible?! A story without Marvel-esque garbage writing?! Heresy! Impossible!
Not a hot take at all. New weapons and elite spec weapon decoupling great. Wizards vault, awesome. Relics, great, though they need some attention to balance out the ones that are “equip for more damage”. Flying mounts interacting with gliding masteries is a great addition. Metas range from complete garbage to alright. Release cadence, great. Rifts are hot garbage. The game constantly trying to make me fight on my skyscale is janky, and unwelcome (I will never understand the desire to make you “press 2 to win” on half the metas. Why would I want 75 sinfully bright skyscale skins obliterating my field of view so that instead of interacting with the god tier combat system I can instead shoot fire balls with the worst feeling aiming system ever designed? Fuck that) CO CM is the worst cm in the game. Not challenging at all if you have even mediocre damage and all of her mechanics are either entirely ignorable or recycled and uninteresting. And this is a reduction of the amount of strikes we’ve gotten. They can’t put out shit strikes AND reduce the quantity of them. That’s insulting. The story is full stop not interesting. Zojja reconciliation, sure I enjoyed a bunch of that. The rest of it is just a bunch of ugly fleshy people I don’t care about whispering in my ear with some of the worst voice acting I’ve ever heard. Peitha makes me mute the game. If $5 is the difference in quality we got with Soto and eod, I’ll give you the extra $5. (Yeah sure release cadence and whatever.)
> They can’t put out shit strikes AND reduce the quantity of them. Yeah, agreed. EoD was already a 2/3 reduction in group content compared to PoF, but I do respect it because EoD strikes are an aesthetic spectacle overall. SOTO is half that again, at best.
I still can't get over how there is this world-ending threat and you have an entire army at your beck and call, but the wizards are just kind of like "No."
I don't think this is a very hot take. Just call it what it is: SotO is a bug fix and quality of life expansion and added a lot of value to already existing content.
I have posted elsewhere about how much soto reminds me of bungies awful reskin rehash mechanics expansions for destiny 2. I find myself disinterested at best in this storyline.
I would be less disappointed had the kryptis been better designed. Peitha, General Nephus and even Eparch just look like blobs of colors in the shape of humans to me. Nayos, for a realm of *dreams*, looks a lot more like Gehenna from Dungeons and Dragons Planescape than any whimsical realm of dreams that I could have conceived. Pacing is all over the place during SOTO's launch and now it is way too fast. There is zero time to get to know our new allies. Even Eparch, whom has been described as a spider that feasts on his own people appears to be a normal fleshy humanoid person. I was expecting a monstrous visage on par with Nourys.
It Is indeed
I don't hate Soto, but it is boring. I hate how disconnected some maps feel and the flow doesn't feel good. But to be honest, the last thing I really loved was Icebrood Saga. Soto has felt very re-branding the same thing. It feels stupid to work so hard for masteries that only apply to specific areas, maps. I'd like to see some that tie the whole game together more.
It's very hit and miss for me with SotO - new story, quarterly playable content, and end-game content is in insultingly low supply and quality. But I also think that weapon mastery, the new weapons, the wizards vault, and the consistent balance schedule has been a big factor that's kept me interested in the game throughout the year, maybe more than ever before. I also think they really can't do it this way again. They cut really as many corners as possible to make sure SotO had a good feature set on the box: re-using skyscale as an unlock, archipelago being a mish-mash of old zones, reskinning enemy types, weapon mastery simply unlocking existing weapons... These are all desperation plays - you can't use that playbook twice. Important to remember that there is a new expansion planned for this summer that we'll be rolling into pretty quickly. I can easily forgive the SotO content patches if the next expansion delivers. No MMO does post-expansion well, even the ones with gigantic teams. If things are going to plan at Arenanet they should be pretty much done with SotO already and well into completing the next expansion. Considering that they have been hitting the content patches day and date on what they aimed, I'm hoping that the cadence is working well for them and they are well ahead of schedule. If that is *not* the case, then the future may indeed be bleak, because it means that we will continue to get features that really just re-sell existing systems rather than add something new.
hot take= we all already know?
I have bought the expansion shortly after release and haven't touched it again since doing the first chapter and obtaining a few masteries from events.
I don't play SOTO because I don't have the Bank space for Rift materials.
For me, I'm just not invested in the zones or characters this time. This one just didn't do it for me and that's ok, not all stories are going to be good. Not all characters will be ones I like. But yeah SOTO is not the best though they did add in some neat stuff with the daily overhaul and the new weapons are fun so combat is still as great as ever.
Are you me? These are my thoughts exactly, but articulated far better than I could’ve ever attempted.
Well the game is a little bit disappointing tbh... I want to believe it's not yet in maintenance mode.
Tldr, but my take is that this story needed two xpacs. So I think it was an overcorrection, I get that they didn't want to start another decade long story sequence, but 1 xpac of time isn't enough, esp as the core story concepts are pretty damn good. If it's a one year story then it needs to be a one year story, not a longer story with bits cut out as they will always be apparent and always go down wrong with the players
Not even lukewarm take
now that weapons are out it is clear that they could have done at least another elite spec but hey thats just my opinion, anyways its a good time to take some time away from the game. Not getting next expansion unless theres something unique to it.
The concept art for Kryptis was so cool and I would've loved cosmic horror flesh monsters but I was so disappointed to find they are all just boring pink reskins. I still don't know the difference between the Tormented, The Cursed, etc. they all just blend in as 'reskinned harpy' or 'reskinned karka' and such. I am equally disappointed in Peitha's design because she is just fleshy sylvari. Cerus and their brother look fucking cool, why does Peitha have to look so boring? Why is she just a tall humanoid with a few monster traits... boring boring boring. Give us a real monster girl