Just because a jaded veteran posts his opinion, doesn't mean it's negative.
Just because a jaded veteran posts his opinion, doesn't mean it's negative.
Well, this time it is. But not because I'm a jaded veteran!
On a more serious note: SotO is about to be the first major release after the NCSoft coup of Anet's leadership, and all signs and patterns point at a major disappointment.
Here are a few examples of said signs:
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Pre coup: Wedding Attire, 1000 gems, elaborate designs, different per race and gender.
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Post coup: Leather Straps, 800 gems, literal leather straps, minor differences if any at all
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Pre coup: /rockout, /shiver, /shiverplus and more as ingame rewards
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Post coup: /sipscoffee for a 20-30€ merch collab, /serve for 400 gems, /magicjuggle as part of a pack for a 2000 gem deluxe upgrade
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Pre coup: big expansions with industry defining features (PoF mounts) and/or complete reworks of the entire fucking game (HoT systems) for like 30€, Living World for free* and paid for by the cash shop
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Post coup: Half an expansion for 25€, freemium-design fishing as an expansion feature, no more Living World, cash shop as free extra money
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Pre coup: big Living World maps with their own reward structure, masteries, not rarely major releases like Rewinder, Beetle, Skyscale, mount mastery skills that completely change the dynamic, and so on, and so forth
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Post coup: half a map, the Strike version of the endboss fight of the flushed second half of the map ham-handedly turned into a Fractal.
So this is a pattern the MMO industry has shown for decades now. These are the signs of a MMO in its twilight years. No, not dead, not even specifically dying. But less content of lower quality for higher prices, and without the care and love that comes with a product with a vision. Instead it's just work now anymore. Shit like action cam, dolphins, SAB? Gone.
So what does that mean for SotO?
That it will be utterly underwhelming. There will be two maps like announced, one will be the not-Dalaran, one will be a rehash of existing assets. That's it.
Anet will concentrate on Skyscale because it's cheaper to consolidate all mounts into one instead of giving every mount its own use and abilities. Classes will homogenise because it's easier and cheaper to balance. Specializations will be replaced with weapons because it's easier and cheaper to create.
Easier and cheaper. Lesser.
It's important to understand the nuance between easier, cheaper & lesser and dying, bad & dead. GW2 is not dying, will not become bad and certainly is not dead.
But this is the end of an era, and there will be no return. There almost never has been.
Bonus info: NCsoft is known to nuke perfectly viable MMOs for not making enough money. (CoH. Never forget. Forever fuck NCSoft.)
My prediction is that like Blizzard is dead and is now ActiBlizz and no matter how disgusting it becomes people won't be able to look past the logo, Anet has been couped and is now NCNet and no matter how far down this new beginning leads down the road, people won't be able to look past the logo.
Five days until Anet will prove me wrong and blow us away with their magic they never lost.
a lot of negativity without any real experience with the addon...
I also think that the addon will not be as good as path of fire, but I will not call out "the end of an era" like a doomsday prayer without proper experience with the actual game...
SOTO itself might not have a lot of gameplay content, but overall changes due to relics and wizard vaults will have higher effect on the game in the long term than entire EOD.
Correct, and tragically achieved via the cheapest, lowest-effort way possible of hacking into pieces what's already there. We will never again see releases like Season 4 or PoF.
I dunno where you are getting this coup narrative, but the NCSoft layoffs of arenanet happened in 2019, long before EoD and the current leadership is Colin Johanson and Josh Davis, long time employees from gw1 days.
As for your "coup" examples, let's break them down.
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The wedding outfit is literally the only outfit that does this. You are also comparing a one of kinda outfit to pieces are armor, something the community wanted.
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Emotes? Really?
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Are you saying not relying on the cash shop, a near constantly criticized system, ....is bad? I too want a big expansion that touches on everything, but HoT was widely criticized for its unliked WvW map, unliked PvP mode, and guild halls are currently forgotten content. At least now Anet has made plans to look back at older systems and refresh or improve them, just that it won't be done in one big chunk, which seeing how HoT ended up....may be for the best.
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I won't really defend Gayala or Silent Surf but that strikes me as current leadership shifting from a supposed Season 6, straight to expansion instead. A similar messy shift from Living World only back to expansions that occurred halfway through Icebrood.
To be fair, I liked the Expansion to Living World Season to Expansion pipeline, but hey times change.
Ah the old class homogenization. Do mesmers steal? Do guardians burst? Do thieves have a pet? Anet has always been about playing whatever class and being able to play the way you want. This is still in line with that goal. If I wanna bring quickness to a group, I have way more options per class than I ever have.
Despite my arguments against your points.....I still expect many people to be disappointed and are rightfully concerned, as this new expansion will be slow going. We won't get all the cool stuff on day 1. It's a change of pace that people are not used to. But I expect people to look back when it's all said and done and generally like it overall.
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Even if it's end of era, that doesn't mean it's bad. How many end of eras has GW2 went through already? It's a 11 years old game
I mean yeah, but what do you wanna do about it? It still has some positives to keep me around and playing, more than many other games, so while I wish there was more I think it's healthier to just be happy about the little that it is there. It's their own loss if they can't figure out how to make it more lucrative, years ago I'd buy the ultimate expansion editions of HoT and PoF and now I'm fine just getting the bare minimum and then spend the rest on other games.
I definitely feel the lack of ambition and/or budget from their side but literally nothing we do can affect that. Even if the entire gaming community of lemmy/kbin/reddit/twitter united and complained, it'd be a drop in the ocean compared to the overall casual market and be barely a blip on NCSoft's radar.
As with most things in life, enjoy the things you love, try to find the positives and don't lose sleep over things you can't change. I don't know if GW2 is going to be around in another 5 or 10 years but for now it's enjoyable enough and I'm looking forward to SOTO even though it's not as much as I'd like to get.
True, true.
What is this coup you are talking about?
When NCSoft ousted the leadership, the leadership left behind a hand-picked replacement, who mysteriously vanished and got replaced with some new guy under whom the game development has been nuked from orbit and utterly restructured. You can see it happening during the phases of Season 4 -> IBS -> EoD.
Assuming you are correct that the "ousted" leadership left behind a handpicked successor why the hell would NCSoft leave that person in the role?
"Some new guy" being who exactly?
The guy who was the original game director and is now one of the two studio directors?
The other studio director that's been at it for like 2-3 years now?
The current game director that worked there from 2013-2016 and came back in 2021?
Guess why the game development had to be nuked? Because it turned to garbage after the release of HoT.
Guess who was game director at the time of HoT development? Same guy who is one of the studio directors now.
Guess who is game director now? The dance guy who worked there from 2013-2016
Since the content following HoT has consistently been bad it kind of makes sense to return to the people who were part of making HoT so good.
Yeah, the writing's on the wall here. The only problem with the HOT-POF LS3/LS4 model for players was the release cadence for raids/fractals/new metas. Anet has fixed this by just not releasing those things ever anymore. We're getting single boss Strikes instead of a multi boss raid wing or a boss + event Fractal. Outside of the elite specs, the Dragonfall episode of LS4 alone added more meaningful content to the game than EoD did.
cHalLenGinG ConTenT never has been worth the manpower in history of MMOs. Difficulties, story mode, implementation of the Fractal-system would all have been ways of varying effort to make it worth the investment, but raiders and developer both were very outspoken against filthy casuals staning the hallowed halls of raiding with their unworthy presence. I'm very clearly remembering both reddit as well as dev posts. While I'm not surprised to see that opinion in the active-on-social-media part of the playerbase, I was quite impressed that the devs would unironically rather stomp the entire content branch and replace it with strikes than to give access to raids to a wider audience. While I may not agree, I can respect them being consequent in their design philosophy.
But yeah, those things won't be an issue anymore. Extrapolating the path taken since IBS I doubt that Anet will ever put that much effort into the game again. And what you said about 406 is both hilariously true and absolutely mind-blowing.
I've thought about it, and I tend to flirt with the opinion that we lost 90% of the effort. The overwhelming majority of SotO is rehashing existing stuff and the rest is consolidating too broad a game into more narrow, easier to manage paths. E.g. classes, mounts, etc. It's crazy to think back that once upon a time Anet put so much time and effort into the game that their devs had the room to solo things like Action Cam or SAB. Bloody hell, Exordium alone is worth like five EoD legendaries. Nowadays the best they can come up with are fishing, more skills for Skyscale and decoupling T6 rune boni. Makes that 90% unreasonably reasonable.
GW2 will be able to exist for years on this level, but it's going to be just another MMO.
Well, let's see if my prediction comes true, we'll know more after the SotO release.
Edit: damn, that turned into an essay. Apologies! :D
SAB gone? We just had a map demo recently, after nothing for 10 years-ish.