I haven’t been following the general reactions to the new patch, but fair warning going into this that I personally was pretty disappointed in it from a story standpoint.
I was very pleased with Soto overall, and I think they seriously improved on many of the issues I’ve had with the writing over the years, but I can’t help but feel that somehow it has regressed in the newest patch.
The crux of my issue is that I want to distrust peitha and keep her at arms length, but it really feels like the story is making it crystal clear that I’m not allowed to feel that way. The speed at which not just my character, but even the astral ward, an organization dedicated to stopping her kind for thousands of years, is happy to not only help her, but to frequently espouse how much they trust her completely. I don’t think I’ve ever felt less connected to my character.
I was hoping for the story to keep her in a suspicious and interesting place, where we’re helping her for now but no one is sure what to think yet. Instead we’re back to the often hamfisted story telling of the end of dragons era, where it feels like every character is to be taken at complete face value.
To be honest I hope she does betray us, because that would at least be an interesting direction, and something to shake my character’s naive level of confidence. Though if they do go that way at this point they laid it on pretty thick with the implicit trust angle.
I’m curious if anyone else feels the same, or differently. Would love to hear other’s takes on it.
I feel exactly the same way. It’s like the story in both updates was written by separate teams. The first one laid great foundation and innovated a lot in comparison with stories from the past of the game, while the second team kind of took it and rushed to nail one point of trusting Peitha in our heads. No side stepping to elaborate, very poor presentation of another, unknown dimension, very loose attempt to make you somewhat empathize with it’s inhabitants. It felt very much like regress to the level of season one of the living story. Especially the steps where you enter separate instances for a dialogue with an NPC and then leave immediately. It was super short too, and pretending that there were three separate “chapters” is really embarrassing. Each one is like 5 minutes of actually something happening, and the rest is patting for time, like walking slowly to destinations etc… Not even filling a progress bar with completed events could mask the scarcity of story content, and it’s sad that they even considered it a valid technique to use. The only good thing is the work of voice actors, you can tell they care and are well directed. The rest looks like somebody took all the assets, got an order to take the story from point A to point B, and just winged it. I really hope it’s the suits decisions, and not the devs will.
I had my doubts about pre-ordering SOTO after EOD, but after initial update they were mostly gone. It had it’s own issues, like heavy asset reuse etc. but you could tell there were passionate devs working with what they got to create best thing they can. The second update made me decide to not pre-order any more expansions. I will consider buying after reading reviews, and after an xpac rolls out in its entirety.
I think main issue here is lack of resources when they are working on expansion. This is just best they can currently do because expansion is so soon. There is always hope that in time, they will be able to increase length of the story in quarterly releases. I would say that it was already better than EOD’s three last updates. I would say it’s good enough for a start, but it depends if expansion will actually release in 9 months, and if expansion quality is equal or greater than SOTO
This take really worries me, because if that’s true it means every new story will begin well and end poorly. That’s a very bad paradigm.
I just want to point out here that asset reuse is not a bad thing. It’s just a freaking smart use of dev time. The time it takes to create and rig a proper model, and then add textures that don’t look weird is way too long for the release cadence ANet is going for with the team size that they have.
People always point out asset reuse as a bad thing and I don’t get why that is so high up people’s list for some reason…