Good morning friends! We are about to go on a journey of wild speculation. On this journey I am going to talk about a lot of events that happen in the Witcher video game series, namely the third outing. If you have not played this game and are spoiler sensitive, then today’s post might not be for you. If you have played the game or simply don’t care… then join me on this ride. On March 21st, CD Projekt Red released this teaser image on twitter along with a link to a blog post outlining a few bits of information. Firstly this is the official confirmation of what pretty much everyone assumed… that there is another Witcher game in the works. Secondly it announces that effectively after Cyberpunk, all future development will be abandoning their custom REDengine in favor of Unreal Engine 5.
This is probably a good call honestly. Let’s talk about this piece first because it is maybe the least speculative. Based on past experience with studios that insist on building their own engine… the track record is pretty spotty. For example a good number of the problems associated with both Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem came down to them struggling to master the Frostbite engine produced by DICE and originally designed for first person shooters. Similarly the REDengine itself is known for more than a little bit of jank associated with it. Companies roll their own engines largely in an effort to avoid having to pay a license fee on each copy sold of the game. However it is starting to seem like maybe having a highly optimized engine right out of the box is worth the fees associated with it. I personally think this is a great move.
Next up we have the sigil/talisman being shown. It is very clearly from the School of the Wolf or any of the “known” schools that are either from book or game canon. What I thought immediately was that it seemed like it was maybe a Lynx with the way the ears were shaped. While there does not exist a canon “School of the Lynx” there is one in fan fiction. Now I have some personal problems with the way this school is described, so I highly doubt that CD Projekt Red is borrowing a note from “fic” directly. Per the wiki page, this school is said to have been formed by Lambert and Keira Metz. At the end of Witcher 3, the School of the Wolf is in shambles and the remaining Witchers all go their own ways abandoning Kaer Morhen.
Lambert specifically does in deed couple up with Kiera Metz as she talks about some plans for which she would need a Witcher. It is assumed that the two of them go off together, but to the best of my knowledge there is no specific place that they were said to be going. In the “fic” the author sees them going south and forming a new Witcher school. So this is entirely probable because it seems like it is easy enough for any sorceress to recreate the reagents needed for the Witcher process. However why I find this deeply unlikely is that it goes against every fiber of Lambert’s being. In the books, the games, and even the Netflix series he is characterized as being severely scarred by the “Trial of the Grasses” and is vehemently set against the creation of new Witchers. I just cannot see him willfully founding another Witcher school period, regardless of how cool the Lynx sigil is.
The only other thing we have to go on from the teaser image is that there is a lot of snow. In what I consider to be the best ending of the Witcher 3, Geralt and Triss Merigold retire to Kovir. In the plot thread of helping the various magic users escape Novigrad, they boarded a ship bound for Kovir where Triss had secured their safety. Even before this image I assumed that the next game would be set in Kovir given that it is an area of the world we have yet to explore in the games. While Yennifer is the “book canon” lover of Geralt, the games have always favored Triss so I feel like the “official” ending of the third game is going to be way more likely to follow that path.
The other part of the “best” ending for me personally is when Ciri follows in Geralt’s footsteps and officially becomes a Witcher. While she has never undergone the trial, her natural magical aptitude more than makes up for any of the “official” Witcher abilities. So if Geralt ended up in Kovir, I find it highly likely that Ciri would head that way as well. With the effective death of the School of the Wolf, it does make me wonder if together they form their own School that follows a different path allowing men and women both to become Witchers. I think Geralt will have a very minimal role in this new saga because effectively the “child surprise” saga has been wrapped up neatly. I wonder even if they might go so far as to kill of Geralt and use his death as a call to action.
Ultimately I think we are headed down a path that is going to give us a game that starts somewhat similar to Cyberpunk. I feel like we are going to take the role of an enigmatic character that allows us to effectively “design a Witcher”. Representation is super important and giving folks the ability to play someone other than a very specific Male archetype would go a long way to making folks feel more comfortable in the setting. For awhile I thought that maybe the next game would simply give us a choice of playing as Geralt or playing as Ciri, however post Cyberpunk I think this path is going to be more likely. My only hope is that they leave the genitalia choices out of this character creator because they just ended up being super creepy.
One of my big concerns however is that it seems like CD Projekt Red is not learning from their own mistakes. In 2013 we saw the very first teaser trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, and it was December of 2020 before we saw the release of the game. In those seven years a toxic amount of hype was allowed to build for this game, and it would not have mattered what was released… it never would have been able to live up to expectations. I figure the best case scenario is that we are at least three years out from being able to download and play the next Witcher game. That is still a very long time for excitement to build… and I fear we are going to have a repeat of the same doom cycle that followed Cyberpunk 2077. I personally loved the game and had a great experience, but I also played the game on a beefy PC. I think the expectations are even going to be higher for the next Witcher game, and I think it is a bit of a mistake to throw out a teaser image so early when we all know the game is still MANY years away.
That said… it is somewhat fun to speculate and it allows me to write a post like this.
The post Wild Speculation and Witchers appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Last night I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine as they struggled to figure out which class that they wanted to play in Guild Wars 2, and it reminded me of something that I did not talk about yesterday. This is potentially the largest challenge that I had to overcome, and it is wrapping my head around the concept of class as it relates to this game. World of Warcraft and Everquest before it poisoned the well when it came to thinking about what a class means. For me each word associated with a class meant something specific, and this ultimately will set you off on the wrong foot when it comes to understanding Guild Wars.
Going into this game I brought with me a lot of assumptions about what each class available meant. I am going to share with you those assumptions and then the reality check that I had to have in order to wrap my head around the truth. Here goes some bad takes:
Elementalist – Glass cannon caster that hurls fireballs at things and falls over if anything looks at them wrong… aka WoW Mage.
Engineer – Ranged class that maybe uses mechanical pets or traps. Basically an old school survival hunter from WoW.
Guardian – The Paladin, tries to be a Warrior but mostly fails and is resigned to a support role.
Mesmer – The illusionist… essentially the Everquest Enchanter.
Necromancer – Squishy caster that only really survives because of their undead pets that they summon.
Ranger – Ranged pet class aka the WoW Beastmaster Hunter.
Revenant – Seems a lot like a Frost Death Knight from WoW.
Thief – Lightweight melee class that relies on stealth and sneak attacks to survive aka WoW Rogue.
Warrior – Tank or at least a Tanky DPS. High survival and can just soak damage.
Talking with my friend last night, it sounds like they also made some of these assumptions because it is what we are used to thinking when we think of “class”. However while you can effectively play each of them as the thing I said… they are so much more than that. Guild Wars 2 specifically uses the term profession instead of class, but I have to admit that I did not catch onto this because I already had my mind set down a specific path. The truth is none of the professions have a fixed path that you have to or are supposed to follow. They are instead a combination of choices made in your build, the gear that you are wearing, and most importantly the weapon combinations that you choose to be using.
Instead it is best to think of the “classes” of Guild Wars 2 as classes from Dungeons and Dragons or any other pen and paper roleplaying game. They are archetypes but do not dictate the role that you will play. For example in Dungeons and Dragons it is super easy to create a Cleric and turn them into a murder machine on the battlefield… or resign to the back line as their more common role of the healer or combat medic. Cleric is less a specific role that is played and more a style of magic that is used, and for the most part this type of mindset translates over to Guild Wars 2 very well. Your profession dictates the types of abilities that you are going to have access to, but not necessarily what you do with them.
So for example if we go back through the list of professions, here is a more truthful statement about what they represent. Granted this is my understanding and it might conflict with yours… so bear with me.
Elementalist – Has access to elemental magic fire/ice/lightning etc and things related to that.
Engineer – The tinkerer or artificer that has access to things related to machinery and technology based attacks.
Guardian – I mean it is a Paladin but think of it as a Holy Warrior archetype with access to auras and holy magic.
Mesmer – Illusionist is correct but way more broad and adaptable with the ability to bend reality.
Necromancer – Anything related to Death, Blood, or Curse Magic is its jam which of course also includes reanimating dead things to fight for it.
Ranger – Deep affinity with nature magic and its pet bond, with a wide variety of pets to choose from.
Revenant – Draws strength from the ancestors and what that means is determined greatly by which ancestor you are choosing to channel.
Thief – Relies on Agility, Stealth, Surprise and an acrobatic fighting style but can go in a bunch of different directions.
Warrior – Adrenaline fueled combatant that relies on shouts, banners, and rage style mechanics to command the battlefield and also buff the party.
I have been spending most of my time playing Necromancer of late so let’s use that as an example. When I first started playing the class I was using more of a pure caster build where I stood back and cast spells with my staff and let the pets do most of the work. When I learned the Reaper elite specialization from Heart of Thorns, I transitioned to playing more of something akin to a World of Warcraft Death Knight or Everquest Shadow Knight. This allowed me to be a big tanky melee with a great sword and hacking the enemies up while my pets kept me healed. Yesterday I finished learning Harbinger the specialization from End of Dragons, and it allowed me to start playing a sort of gunslinger build where I fire pistols at my opponents and the bullets ricochet through the entire pack. These are three wildly different feeling builds, all out of the same class… and I am certain there are other builds I could have gone with that would have taken it in wildly different directions.
It was a hard fought realization, but the truth is the weapons you decide to bring to the battlefield and the abilities that you pair with them are what makes your character… not your class. As a result I spent a decade trying to make this game fit a model that it just did not. I kept trying to make the Warrior be this uber tank, when it was way more suited to being something completely different. I can of course BUILD the Warrior tanky… just not in the way I wanted it to be, and it will never be the tank archtype from other games either. It was not until I pushed myself completely out of my comfort zone with a “finger wiggler” class that I started to understand that my preconceived notions were getting in the way of my enjoyment.
This is just a me thing but mentally I started thinking of it in terms of Diablo 3, and how I build characters there and how wildly different a Barbarian can be for example depending on how you gear them. A Barbarian is no more tanky than any other class in that game, but it can take on that role if geared and built correctly. Guild Wars 2 essentially works in a very similar pattern and placing the game in that sort of headspace helped me to really engage with it. I am not sure if this will help anyone out there who has tried and failed to engage with it, but this is what worked for me. Based on a few conversations last night, it sounds like some of my friends are also standing on this precipice as well.
The post The Class Conundrum appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I had something happen this weekend that made me realize something about me and Guild Wars 2. I am having a blast right now and even though it took me ten years to really get the hang of things, I do now firmly believe that the game is something more people should play. However I have come to the realization that it isn’t really something that I can recommend without a lot of asterisks behind that statement. With Final Fantasy XIV I could openly suggest that game to new players knowing that so long as they followed the Main Story Quest that they would be fine. The game is structured in a way and the community has been set up to create the optimal experience for on-boarding someone who knows nothing about the experience. While it does not guarantee that every player is going to fall in love, it does sorta put its best foot forward in both the story and the content design.
Guild Wars 2 however does not do this. It is an obstacle that needs to be conquered and your knowledge of the game feels hard fought. The contrarian design ethics feel like the deck is stacked against anyone who is not extremely motivated to learn the game. The recent Siege Turtle nonsense has exposed that there is a deep rift in the community between those who have attained mastery over the mechanics and those who are just sorta doing their own thing and expecting it to work. The problem is that there is this gulf of information that can only be obtained if the player is motivated enough to dig for it. There is a good reason why the /wiki command exists, because the official Guild Wars 2 wiki is for better or worse required reading. All of this adds up to an experience that makes it extremely hard to gain new players without the scaffolding of a preexisting community that is bought into holding their hand through the rough spots.
This morning I thought I would talk about some of those “asterisks” that I have when it comes to suggesting Guild Wars 2 to a new player. Don’t get me wrong I now feel firmly that it is worth the effort, but there is a large amount of “buy-in” required for the player to really get to a point of enjoying this game fully. Essentially there is a good reason why the lions share of the “WoW Exodus” found a home in Final Fantasy XIV and not Guild Wars 2.
The Missing Story
This one is probably the single biggest issue for me personally. There is a chunk of much needed story and characterization that is just forever gone to the sands of time. When Guild Wars 2 initially released it wanted to change the way in which we play games, namely it wanted to present an ever changing world. This meant that its long tailed story delivery was done through a series of permanent content updates that changed the state of the world. The easiest example of this is that the Lion’s Arch that you see in the personal story for example is wildly different from the Lion’s Arch that you walk into on the map. The reasons behind this and the sacking of Lion’s Arch and subsequent rebuilding all took place during this first “Season” of the Living World content.
The bigger problem for me however is that your personal story is very much about you coming up through the ranks of this new world order and operating in and around the members of Destiny’s Edge. These were all established in universe heroes, and Season 1 was also the time of setting up the NEXT group of heroes… the folks that would eventually become known as Dragon’s Watch. The problem that happens now however is you go from having your personal story and interacting with Destiny’s Edge and then zoom forward at the beginning of Living World 2 to already having an established band of characters that follow in your wake with no real explanation of who the hell any of them are. All of that time spent getting to know Braham, Gorrik, Taimi, Rox, Kasmeer, and Majory took place during this missing first season of content.
What exists now instead is a sort of narrative history lesson about Scarlet Briar and her “War” on Tyria. However the story content just doesn’t exist because it was not initially told in the manner that Living World season 2 was told, with a series of repeatable instanced content. However the end result is that there is this giant hole in the story that just cannot reasonably be bridged and leads the players to struggle to really care about this cast of characters. I know it took me until the end of Heart of Thorns before I finally felt like I had enough of an understanding of current events to get hooked on the story elements. Essentially Season 1 is never going to come back unless serious effort is put in place by ArenaNet to recreate all of this content and present it in a manner that allows for the players to experience it. I am not sure if that is going to happen, but so long as this gap happens it will always be an obstacle to new players.
Lack of Direction
This next bit is both a positive and a negative. Guild Wars 2 really doesn’t give you any hand holding when it comes to leveling or progressing through the game. You have your personal story which is derived from the choices you made during character creation, and it acts as a vague scaffolding to move you through the game. However it is space out enough that the player is going to be left to fend for themselves for large chunks of time. Upon creating a brand new character you are directed to find a Scout, and so long as you remember this advice it is going to keep pushing you towards new objectives. However there lacks a general sense of focus that moves you through a zone, and for someone coming from a more traditional MMORPG experience it is going to feel completely rudderless.
I know I struggled with this starting in alpha where I could not figure out where the “quests” were. The “hearts” didn’t feel like a reasonable replacement for that experience and while the open world events felt great, they also didn’t seem to be what I was seeking either. What I was ultimately looking for was something that moved me through a zone and told me the story of what was happening there. That more or less does not exist without a lot of reading between the lines. I think that maybe Guild Wars 2 takes the training wheels off a bit too soon and doesn’t wait until the player is already grounded in the experience of playing the game. However again since the entire design of Guild Wars 2 is contrarian in nature… it is absolutely fitting what the initial goals were.
Decisions without Adequate Advisement
While leveling through the game you have a lot of decisions thrown at you, and at any given step it is very hard to understand how many of those things are actually important. What happens to many players is that they level their way to 80 and end up with a mixed set of orange and yellow gear, that and some choices made… that don’t actually equate to a “Build”. So unless you are extremely lucky it is pretty easy to create something that is nigh unplayable when it comes to more serious and organized content. Admittedly this is also the problem with a game like Diablo, where you are asked to make a number of decisions without much explanation given to the consequences to any of those choices.
This was also a huge problem with Rift, in that there were so many possible options that it was extremely easy to create something that was mostly unplayable. Over time that game developed a template library with a handful of suggested builds, and so long as you followed one of those you wound up in a pretty good place. I would love to see Guild Wars 2 develop something similar where a build template not only tells you what abilities you should favor but also the types of gear that you should be seeking. Fixing your abilities is extremely quick and does not cost anything, but completely changing your gear is a wholly different proposition.
I get that the general answer is to “go to the wiki” but that is the WRONG answer when it comes to on-boarding a new player into your game. Wikis are things for players who are already bought into the experience of playing your game, not a training vehicle.
So Many Currencies
Guild Wars 2 is an extremely overwhelming experience to play cold. There is a truly staggering amount of content to complete in this game, and with it a whole bunch of systems that only make sense within the context of a specific zone. Along with this are a staggering number of items and currencies that you will collect along the way. Sure there is an endorphin hit each time you see something scroll past that you have looted… but most of the time you have no clue what any of it is actually used for. Again the stock answer is to go to the wiki and in fact you can Shift Click an item and feed it into the /wiki command to make it easier to look things up. However still getting used to all of these currencies and how they interact with each other is… “A LOT”.
Part of the whole process of getting into Guild Wars 2 is learning what is useful, what is valuable, and what are things that you should just instantly salvage. For the most part all of the currencies that you get will have a specific purpose, but also be something that you can ignore until you realize what that purpose is. However it does feel weird when the game feeds you things like Mystic Coins and Laurels without really explaining why these are useful things to be obtaining. With Mystic Coins I am pretty sure that a lot of players get these and immediately cash them in given that they were worth a chunk of gold… not realizing that there is going to be a time when they need large quantities of them later. Similarly you can buy a lot of cheap things with Laurels without understanding that they become your single best way of obtaining Ascended quality accessories.
Guild Wars 2 throws a lot of seemingly random things at the player, and that in itself can be a massive turn off. Especially when you consider how limited your bag space, and how relatively expensive it is to do something about that. Again this is one of those things when you really need a veteran player at your disposal that can answer your random questions, rather than being expected to go to the wiki for everything.
The Cash Shop
I have mostly made my peace with the cash shop and Guild Wars 2, but upon experiencing it for the first time it can be a bit of a turn off. It is this weird mix of completely useless things, extremely valuable things, and a bunch of traps that you should never purchase. For example there is a thing called a Black Lion Chest that you are going to need to purchase keys to unlock. You should never do this. Buying keys is a complete waste of money and you are almost never going to get anything useful from them. Completing content is going to give you a smattering of keys so that you can experience this on your own for free. Sure I managed to pull a unicorn from one of mine and got the Permanent Bank contract… but you are not going to have that luck and are instead going to pull a bunch junk that is going to clog your bank.
Then there are things that you absolutely do need… but are charged an exorbitant price for like individual shared inventory slots, build/equipment templates that are on a per character basis instead of account wide, and more bank storage. One of the saving graces of the Black Lion Trading Company or “Gem Store” as it is more colloquially known… is that everything can be purchased with in game currency. There is an exchange rate that lets you trade gold for gems and gems for gold, so if you find a way to farm gold you can ultimately buy anything you want from the store without spending a dime. I had a realization the other day that I had never seen a gold spammer in game, and effectively it is due to this conversion going both ways and the legitimate price of gold driving third party sellers out of business.
The biggest problem that I have with the cash shop however is that even if you guy deluxe boxed editions of the games… you are going to ultimately need to purchase Living World content. Granted if you purchase the Ultimate Edition of the game they give you more than enough cash shop currency to buy all of it… but the game doesn’t exactly indicate that maybe this is your best use of that windfall rather than buying other junk. If you are actively playing when new Living World content is released, you get access to it for free. However if you are playing catch up it is usually 200 gems per episode within a season or roughly $2.50 per story chunk. Again not too bad considering there is no subscription fee, but it also doesn’t feel great either.
Positives Outweigh the Negatives
I would definitely say that in the end the positives of the game outweigh the negatives, but this morning I am largely talking about the obstacles to adoption. What Guild Wars 2 gives you is a choose your own adventure experience, where almost everything that you could be doing is at least somewhat useful. It is also a game that has many different paths that lead to the same equivalent results. If you want gear you can go down the path of Raiding, Open World Bosses, PVP, World Vs World, or just ignore all of that can craft your way to glory. The end result from all of these paths being effectively the same set of gear with the same stats and same potential. It feels really good to know that what you are working towards is not going to be washed away when the next expansion releases.
However this also can sorta be a negative to new players as well. I know that I am personally so far behind in the horizontal progression that it can feel bad when you have this mountain of things that you need to do to truly “catch up” to the rest of the players. With a traditional expansion model, every few years there is a reset that takes everyone back to equal footing. That doesn’t really happen in Guild Wars 2, but also you are never going to have a moment when everything you have worked towards is washed away. Everything I have done remains as useful as it was the moment I accomplished it. Every piece of gear that I have put work towards is still viable, and since effectively everything is account bound I can use that to funnel things to other characters making the entire experience extremely “Alt Friendly”.
Guild Wars 2 is a game that deserves way more attention than it receives. The challenge however is that it requires a lot of work on the part of the player to really engage with the game fully. It took me ten years of failed starts to finally arrive here, and I am not sure how many people would keep bashing their head against this wall like I have. For some the game clicks immediately and presents them with the experience they have always been wanting. For the large swath of players who view the world through Warcraft colored lenses however… I am not sure if the adoption rate is going to be so quick. GW2 is this immensely rich and varied environment with a truly staggering amount of content, and I just wish it were a little easier to love.
For all of these reasons… I am not sure I will ever arrive at a point where recommending Guild Wars 2 won’t come with a long list of caveats.
The post Challenges with Guild Wars 2 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Friends! It is finally that time where we record our big full spoiler show for Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker expansion. It has become tradition to record one of these when all of our crew have played through the expansion and yesterday afternoon Kodra finally finished it. We also ended up recording for far longer than we have EVER recorded for one of these shows. We started about an hour early and still finished up two hours late for a grand total of around four hours of podcast to edit.
The end result is that we are chopping this down into three separate shows which is a first for us. We have a storied history of double episodes but never a triple. Hopefully you enjoy the show, and if Final Fantasy XIV is not your jam then I guess we will see you hopefully in four weeks?
Belghast 
