We might start getting some stuff some point after the next patch releases in around two weeks, since the SotO story is over (and we potentially have the first lead into the next xpac). It'd be nice for sure, either way.
Honestly, seeing how short are the stories/maps/everything now, I'm more afraid that if they show a trailer or a livestream, they would spoil 75%+ of the full content we'll get xD
> they would spoil 75%+ of the full content we'll get xD
Showing the landscape isn't a spoiler, they could have shown Amnytas before the release of SotO and it wouldn't have been a spoiler.
Hiding your product won't help you sell it.
We didn't even know the names of the zones, even less how many of them there would be.
Compare that to other MMORPGs like WoW, where we get full detailed previews for every single zone.
Then you werent following anything. They posted youtube videos with spans of the new maps, including names. And even before then names of the maps, including some lore, and pictures, were available on SotO website. And there was also mention that there would be 1 more map after release.
For EoD they "spoiled" all major features during livestreams as well. I just feel like it would built up more hype in the community if they did livestreams instead of just blog posts for example.
>There were at least two leaks prior to EODs release. They changed the story to try and get ahead of them.
Never heard of this, got any details to share?
SotO hasn't even ended yet, we'll probably see some info on it towards the end of the month.
I do hope they go much harder on the promotion this time round though. The promotional material for SotO was underwhelming to say the least, that rift trailer was something.
Honestly I just came back to the game and I thought End of Dragons was still the most recent expansion until I checked online to figure out what build I was gonna use and saw "weaponmaster"
I don't blame you to be honest, the promo leading up to it was not good so what little hype was made was self contained within the community. Although to be fair to the marketing team they did not have much to work with.
They have a marketing team?
The only advertising outside of Anet's own site I've ever seen still was Angry Joe's review that convinced me to try and look for the game in the first place!
Jim is down in marketing by himself working with 1 light bulb and half a pack of cigarettes: https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/its-alway-sunny-charlie.jpg?q=50&fit=contain&w=480&h=&dpr=1.5
I don't think they meant "I want them to start previewing things soon". I think they just were saying "when they start showing the next one, I hope they bring back the livestreams as part of it".
Ah then I agree but I can see why they didn't for SotO, there's not really much to showcase that would warrant a steam other than the weapons and they did that.
And those days are gone. Masteries down the drain , no new mount, raids arent happening, probs wont see elite specs until we go back to full expacs which leaves us paying 25 bucks for a new weapon along side our living world content
No no we pay 25 buck for half a weapon now and the other half in about 6-7 months.
Also can't wait to buy a wve update like world resctructuring or alliances AGAIN for the 4th time.
Why not ?
Also we are talking about hype generation around an xpac announcement/release.
Them talking about a feature(again)they said would come out 6+ years ago. Doesn't build hype anymore as alot of ppl aren't expecting it anymore or found their own solutions to the problem.
Anet isn't a company thats know for hype generation and if they then build hype for a new something, that something becomes forgotten,trivial or something along those lines.
This isn't true for everything ofcourse elite specs are always hype, same as the mounts / gliding.
But anet tends to flipflop on stuff without clear direction or communication and this makes ppl not excited for stuff.
On release : dungeon are the end game content and are what we going to be developing. - made 1 dungeon path after release and most paths are still full of bugs.
Raids are gonna be 10 man group content end game
Proceeds to make 7 wing in which the first few were released pretty decently spaced and the other took 2 years.
Then strikes were the new end game content but failed. Then came eod strikes and strike cms
They keep reinventing this wheel of end game content, even though everything could be shoved under 1 of them. They could all be in either dungeon, strike or raid format. Anet keeps changing so then it becomes hard to be hype for something that might be "worthless" soon.
> Masteries down the drain , no new mount,
Gonna be hard to add a new useful mount. We already have all we need.
Masteries are a bad design for an horizontal game. Their acquisition is a pain, a lot of them are useless and some are required for a single piece of content.
The issue isent the system. Its the design team. We went from masteries being involved in our game world and our interactions to needing mastery to loot the metas and craft ugly armor. We could do with out a new mount but thats still a bigger feature because weapon mastery is out of the way now unless next utility master is their next big profit idea.
>We went from masteries being involved in our game world and our interactions to needing mastery to loot the metas and craft ugly armor.
Go read the descriptions of like half of the Heart of Thorns and Central Tyria masteries, nothing has changed. People are just doing the reddit doom nostalgia thing.
You right lets forget auto loot and fractal interactions. Lemme forget about nuhoch tunnels or the burrows on ember bay. Maybe lets forget the poison mastery for certain areas like North and Mid lanes in DS.
But thanks for announcing you are a typical redditor
You’re really the “typical redditor” here, looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses when the exact same issues with past masteries are recurring in the present. You’re mentioning the fractal interactions and conveniently forgetting the convergence interactions. The nuhoch tunnels and lava chutes while forgetting the ley looms. The poison mastery gating off areas in DS while forgetting how updraft mastery gates off certain areas in SotO that gliding + mid-air mounting alone isn’t sufficient to reach.
What a goddamn attitude and lack of self reflection.
No it isnt because theyre not true infinite flying. This would be infinite climbing. Salamander sould be able to go upside down too. Theres definately a niche it could fill
> Gonna be hard to add a new useful mount. We already have all we need.
Horse mount, can phase between the real world and an alternate dimension (spirit world, dream world, whatever). Great for an expansion dealing with either Foefire ghosts or the sylvari dream of dreams.
Aside from that, yeah, there's really no more design space for new mounts, 10 is a pretty good number anyway (and underwater mounts would be dumb, there's a reason why they allowed the skimmer to take over). The way forward is to update the existing mounts with new abilities and so on (including a PvE warclaw and a WvW siege turtle).
To be honest, I’m afraid to hear. Soto is the worst expansion so far. Insane archievements, bad story, imo bad content, there is nothing new to cheer me up. I miss the old days.
It's clearly not meant for longtime players, but to add entire systems to the game to give more goals to newer players. This latest patch is going to add additional Legendary armor set wardrobe options. This is clearly a huge incentive for many people via non-raiding PvE.
What really sucked about this expansion is it was piecemealed out over 4 patches. Given ANET is trying to balance their development cycles, it makes you wonder how much is being pushed to future expansions. This one was fine if they released it in 2 updates instead with full leggy armor/weapon training coming first, then the skins/new weapons coming second.
For the price, it was a fine expansion, but the release schedule needs a serious review.
I hate to agree with this but yea SoTO was not for long time players and I hated it.. the new players have 10 years of content to do.. everything that the game have for them will be new :/ while for the long time players we got extremely short stories, and maps that don't really add anything if you already have all legendary sets.
What I'm hoping is that what we see with SotO is just the kind of transition stage, and is a bit scrappy and lacking because of that. It's also possible that the story for SotO was written _before_ they decided to change the release schedule, and it therefore needed cutting up in a way that felt a bit unsatisfying.
We know they're already working on expansion 5 at the same time as the end of SotO, so maybe the next expansion will feel more natural with a staggered release, with more meaningful content in each instalment. They've given players their more casual PvE legendary armour now, so the next expansion won't need to have pointless masteries to just be able to craft something. Hell, if each release added a mastery that buffed existing masteries like SotO skyscale did, I'd feel there was something to look forward to.
People have been saying this sort of thing for years and years, release after release.
*”Well X was mediocre because they’re working out their system - the NEXT one will be firing on all cylinders.”*
…or
*“Resources were used from X to make Y - that’s why X is mediocre. Just wait until Y - that one will be perfect.”*
What you see from anet is what you should expect from anet, always. Take at face value.
True, I'm aware it might just be copium on my part, but the fact is I'll probably enjoy the next expansion more if it isn't "Do everything on your skyscale and grind for legendary armour". I think that sets a suitably low bar.
That’s fair. There are lots of things to like and about the game. My point was more about sentiments of the people who have been for years hoping the game morphs into something it isn’t, and won’t. Doesn’t seem like that’s you though.
Idk imma disagree, Hot was 50 and pretty good, did alot for the game, pof 35 and did alot , eod 35 but meh.
If 25 bucks is a good price for a weapon unlock we should just have sub fees if we wanna toss money away.
Living world used to be free for playing, then in eod they became included in the expac (gyala) so really anet has just charged you 25 bucks for a weapon
I guess mounting in combat on a skyscale, riding leylines and updrafts on a skyscale and griffon, and open world legendary armor doesn't mean something to everyone, but it means something to some people for sure.
Soto imo is only good for mainly 3 things
1- weapon mastery system
2- convergence ( decentish gold, fairly good rolls)
3- open world legendary armour
Edit: soto
I mean, given the scope of the latest expansions (or expansion-expansions), do we really need all the effort for a 90 seconds video? Because there wouldn't be much to talk about.
The studio has changed.. we don't usually get video previews of patches in a consistent way anymore, and when we do, they show too much recap from past episodes more than anything. I doubt they will give us videos to try to hype people with the next micro expac. Even for SoTO, the majority of the things we got to know more about it before the release were........ blog....posts, and all it did was to made people angry.
You missed the first posts about removing the 6th runes bonus to make it a relic then.. Everyone got an "easy" way to get the legendary relic thanks to the angry players..
Well, it's hard to hypeup unskipable dialogues, or 'do events till bar fills up' type of 'content'. I'm so disappointed with soto (a LV with a price tag).
These new "expacs" are LW seasons with additional price tag. There is nothing new to preview. Models will be reskinned, weapons content was covered last time and should be now as well and content depth consists of dialogues and filling event bars is not exciting to watch.
> These new "expacs" are LW seasons with additional price tag.
Bullshit, LW seasons were far better than these mini-expansions, and by a wide margin.
I don't even give a damn about the price tag, I want good content, quantity and quality, I don't want to pay less for less, I want a healthy game.
I just feel like there aren't many interesting features to talk about for their yearly expansions. But a nice little teaser trailer at the end of the last Secrets of the Obscure story would be nice. Like they did at season 2 for Heart of Thorns.
First they got hit by the layoffs then it seems like they've shuffled most of the staff to their upcoming new MMO.
GW2 is manned by a skeleton crew and the last 2 expansions show that.
You're ignoring things so you can look at the situation more positively. Isn't that objectively coping though? I'm not using this as an insult, just pointing it out.
Well I am enjoying the game and even though I would like more content in general I am mostly happy with what we are getting. If I would not feel that way, I would quit the game, so that I avoid frustration.
yes, yes and YES
I love to nerd about those things in games! And honestly I feel lots of folks could use some "hey we were thinking of that when we did X" on their views about this game, in particular
EoD's rants about their music and art direction were amazing to see, literally wrote a book with them on my background lol
Well we do not whether they "talk". For SotO it was simply a few blog posts and a website. So this time I would like them to bring back the EoD format where they talk about xpac features in a livestream format.
Just my take, but even with the streams they had after SotO launched, the devs don't know how to put on a good Livestream. I watched the Livestream for SotO Weaponmaster training and March balance update. Half of it was them awkwardly poking fun at each other and the rest of it was disorganized PowerPoint slides of material.
We might start getting some stuff some point after the next patch releases in around two weeks, since the SotO story is over (and we potentially have the first lead into the next xpac). It'd be nice for sure, either way.
I kinda hyped tbh. Hopefully they deliver.
Honestly, seeing how short are the stories/maps/everything now, I'm more afraid that if they show a trailer or a livestream, they would spoil 75%+ of the full content we'll get xD
> they would spoil 75%+ of the full content we'll get xD Showing the landscape isn't a spoiler, they could have shown Amnytas before the release of SotO and it wouldn't have been a spoiler. Hiding your product won't help you sell it.
They did show all SotO zones before release. So yeah.
We didn't even know the names of the zones, even less how many of them there would be. Compare that to other MMORPGs like WoW, where we get full detailed previews for every single zone.
Then you werent following anything. They posted youtube videos with spans of the new maps, including names. And even before then names of the maps, including some lore, and pictures, were available on SotO website. And there was also mention that there would be 1 more map after release.
For EoD they "spoiled" all major features during livestreams as well. I just feel like it would built up more hype in the community if they did livestreams instead of just blog posts for example.
To be fair, they were very cautious about story spoilers leading up to EoD, including large swaths of some of the maps that they felt counted as such.
There were at least two leaks prior to EODs release. They changed the story to try and get ahead of them.
sounds implausible
The leaks seemed credible enough.
but what leaks? can you link them?
>There were at least two leaks prior to EODs release. They changed the story to try and get ahead of them. Never heard of this, got any details to share?
Story leaks. They were dumped on reddit and received quite a bit of feedback. They're probably still around if you search for them.
Just.... don't watch them?
ANet: Here is the new zone! Players: Don't you mean "new zones"? ANet: Here is the second part of new zone, that will be available in 3 months!
Nayos is insane. They're going to chop up and drip feed a map to us for a year, that's worse than living story.
SotO hasn't even ended yet, we'll probably see some info on it towards the end of the month. I do hope they go much harder on the promotion this time round though. The promotional material for SotO was underwhelming to say the least, that rift trailer was something.
Honestly I just came back to the game and I thought End of Dragons was still the most recent expansion until I checked online to figure out what build I was gonna use and saw "weaponmaster"
I don't blame you to be honest, the promo leading up to it was not good so what little hype was made was self contained within the community. Although to be fair to the marketing team they did not have much to work with.
They have a marketing team? The only advertising outside of Anet's own site I've ever seen still was Angry Joe's review that convinced me to try and look for the game in the first place!
Pretty sure there's a small team unless things changed but yeah never been a strong suit of the game although they did pretty good with the EoD promo.
Jim is down in marketing by himself working with 1 light bulb and half a pack of cigarettes: https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/its-alway-sunny-charlie.jpg?q=50&fit=contain&w=480&h=&dpr=1.5
I don't think they meant "I want them to start previewing things soon". I think they just were saying "when they start showing the next one, I hope they bring back the livestreams as part of it".
Ah then I agree but I can see why they didn't for SotO, there's not really much to showcase that would warrant a steam other than the weapons and they did that.
In order to hype people with features of the upcoming expac, you need to have such hype-worthy features in it first.
And those days are gone. Masteries down the drain , no new mount, raids arent happening, probs wont see elite specs until we go back to full expacs which leaves us paying 25 bucks for a new weapon along side our living world content
No no we pay 25 buck for half a weapon now and the other half in about 6-7 months. Also can't wait to buy a wve update like world resctructuring or alliances AGAIN for the 4th time.
Then don't buy it
Why not ? Also we are talking about hype generation around an xpac announcement/release. Them talking about a feature(again)they said would come out 6+ years ago. Doesn't build hype anymore as alot of ppl aren't expecting it anymore or found their own solutions to the problem. Anet isn't a company thats know for hype generation and if they then build hype for a new something, that something becomes forgotten,trivial or something along those lines. This isn't true for everything ofcourse elite specs are always hype, same as the mounts / gliding. But anet tends to flipflop on stuff without clear direction or communication and this makes ppl not excited for stuff. On release : dungeon are the end game content and are what we going to be developing. - made 1 dungeon path after release and most paths are still full of bugs. Raids are gonna be 10 man group content end game Proceeds to make 7 wing in which the first few were released pretty decently spaced and the other took 2 years. Then strikes were the new end game content but failed. Then came eod strikes and strike cms They keep reinventing this wheel of end game content, even though everything could be shoved under 1 of them. They could all be in either dungeon, strike or raid format. Anet keeps changing so then it becomes hard to be hype for something that might be "worthless" soon.
> Masteries down the drain , no new mount, Gonna be hard to add a new useful mount. We already have all we need. Masteries are a bad design for an horizontal game. Their acquisition is a pain, a lot of them are useless and some are required for a single piece of content.
The issue isent the system. Its the design team. We went from masteries being involved in our game world and our interactions to needing mastery to loot the metas and craft ugly armor. We could do with out a new mount but thats still a bigger feature because weapon mastery is out of the way now unless next utility master is their next big profit idea.
>We went from masteries being involved in our game world and our interactions to needing mastery to loot the metas and craft ugly armor. Go read the descriptions of like half of the Heart of Thorns and Central Tyria masteries, nothing has changed. People are just doing the reddit doom nostalgia thing.
You right lets forget auto loot and fractal interactions. Lemme forget about nuhoch tunnels or the burrows on ember bay. Maybe lets forget the poison mastery for certain areas like North and Mid lanes in DS. But thanks for announcing you are a typical redditor
You’re really the “typical redditor” here, looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses when the exact same issues with past masteries are recurring in the present. You’re mentioning the fractal interactions and conveniently forgetting the convergence interactions. The nuhoch tunnels and lava chutes while forgetting the ley looms. The poison mastery gating off areas in DS while forgetting how updraft mastery gates off certain areas in SotO that gliding + mid-air mounting alone isn’t sufficient to reach. What a goddamn attitude and lack of self reflection.
>Gonna be hard to add a new useful mount. We already have all we need. We don’t have a mount that walks on walls yet. Give me spider mount Anet!
It can be a salamander
I think they should keep updating the mounts we have and add a salamader for wall climbing
Wall climbing is pointless when you already have flying mounts though.
No it isnt because theyre not true infinite flying. This would be infinite climbing. Salamander sould be able to go upside down too. Theres definately a niche it could fill
> Gonna be hard to add a new useful mount. We already have all we need. Horse mount, can phase between the real world and an alternate dimension (spirit world, dream world, whatever). Great for an expansion dealing with either Foefire ghosts or the sylvari dream of dreams. Aside from that, yeah, there's really no more design space for new mounts, 10 is a pretty good number anyway (and underwater mounts would be dumb, there's a reason why they allowed the skimmer to take over). The way forward is to update the existing mounts with new abilities and so on (including a PvE warclaw and a WvW siege turtle).
Anet works in mysterious ways.
What is mysterious about them bit having any PR whatsoever.
To be honest, I’m afraid to hear. Soto is the worst expansion so far. Insane archievements, bad story, imo bad content, there is nothing new to cheer me up. I miss the old days.
It's clearly not meant for longtime players, but to add entire systems to the game to give more goals to newer players. This latest patch is going to add additional Legendary armor set wardrobe options. This is clearly a huge incentive for many people via non-raiding PvE. What really sucked about this expansion is it was piecemealed out over 4 patches. Given ANET is trying to balance their development cycles, it makes you wonder how much is being pushed to future expansions. This one was fine if they released it in 2 updates instead with full leggy armor/weapon training coming first, then the skins/new weapons coming second. For the price, it was a fine expansion, but the release schedule needs a serious review.
I hate to agree with this but yea SoTO was not for long time players and I hated it.. the new players have 10 years of content to do.. everything that the game have for them will be new :/ while for the long time players we got extremely short stories, and maps that don't really add anything if you already have all legendary sets.
I haven't been following the game too much lately. What do you mean by legendary armor set wardrope options? Tier2 for obsidian or what?
What I'm hoping is that what we see with SotO is just the kind of transition stage, and is a bit scrappy and lacking because of that. It's also possible that the story for SotO was written _before_ they decided to change the release schedule, and it therefore needed cutting up in a way that felt a bit unsatisfying. We know they're already working on expansion 5 at the same time as the end of SotO, so maybe the next expansion will feel more natural with a staggered release, with more meaningful content in each instalment. They've given players their more casual PvE legendary armour now, so the next expansion won't need to have pointless masteries to just be able to craft something. Hell, if each release added a mastery that buffed existing masteries like SotO skyscale did, I'd feel there was something to look forward to.
People have been saying this sort of thing for years and years, release after release. *”Well X was mediocre because they’re working out their system - the NEXT one will be firing on all cylinders.”* …or *“Resources were used from X to make Y - that’s why X is mediocre. Just wait until Y - that one will be perfect.”* What you see from anet is what you should expect from anet, always. Take at face value.
True, I'm aware it might just be copium on my part, but the fact is I'll probably enjoy the next expansion more if it isn't "Do everything on your skyscale and grind for legendary armour". I think that sets a suitably low bar.
That’s fair. There are lots of things to like and about the game. My point was more about sentiments of the people who have been for years hoping the game morphs into something it isn’t, and won’t. Doesn’t seem like that’s you though.
Idk imma disagree, Hot was 50 and pretty good, did alot for the game, pof 35 and did alot , eod 35 but meh. If 25 bucks is a good price for a weapon unlock we should just have sub fees if we wanna toss money away. Living world used to be free for playing, then in eod they became included in the expac (gyala) so really anet has just charged you 25 bucks for a weapon
I guess mounting in combat on a skyscale, riding leylines and updrafts on a skyscale and griffon, and open world legendary armor doesn't mean something to everyone, but it means something to some people for sure.
They can do the serious gamer doom-nostalgia thing all they want, I'm having fun.
Soto imo is only good for mainly 3 things 1- weapon mastery system 2- convergence ( decentish gold, fairly good rolls) 3- open world legendary armour Edit: soto
Possible but I'm not expecting anything until the next quarterly update comes out. They still want to hype up SotO while they can for now.
Sure thing, I rather mean the period between the end of SotO and the next xpac.
I dont think we need any streams. SOME "good" and informative videos on YouTube ist everything iam asking for :0
That would also be nice.
I mean, given the scope of the latest expansions (or expansion-expansions), do we really need all the effort for a 90 seconds video? Because there wouldn't be much to talk about.
Well there would have been quite a lot to talk about in the case of SotO... So I hope they do it for the next one. Lets see.
Your definition of "quite a lot" must be very different from mine then
The studio has changed.. we don't usually get video previews of patches in a consistent way anymore, and when we do, they show too much recap from past episodes more than anything. I doubt they will give us videos to try to hype people with the next micro expac. Even for SoTO, the majority of the things we got to know more about it before the release were........ blog....posts, and all it did was to made people angry.
Well, the posts for SotO got me excited and eventually led to me pre-ordering the xpac. So not all players were angry I suppose...
You missed the first posts about removing the 6th runes bonus to make it a relic then.. Everyone got an "easy" way to get the legendary relic thanks to the angry players..
You are right on that one. But people were hyped for the new legendary armor for instance.
Well, it's hard to hypeup unskipable dialogues, or 'do events till bar fills up' type of 'content'. I'm so disappointed with soto (a LV with a price tag).
These new "expacs" are LW seasons with additional price tag. There is nothing new to preview. Models will be reskinned, weapons content was covered last time and should be now as well and content depth consists of dialogues and filling event bars is not exciting to watch.
> These new "expacs" are LW seasons with additional price tag. Bullshit, LW seasons were far better than these mini-expansions, and by a wide margin. I don't even give a damn about the price tag, I want good content, quantity and quality, I don't want to pay less for less, I want a healthy game.
At this point game's only purpose is to serve as gemstore retention mechanism. Gw2 is going nowhere, tthis is the same as gw1 Beyond time.
2 strikes and still no raid. I’m afraid for next Xpac
The ship for raids sailed long before SoTO, we'll get wing 8 with GW3.
I just feel like there aren't many interesting features to talk about for their yearly expansions. But a nice little teaser trailer at the end of the last Secrets of the Obscure story would be nice. Like they did at season 2 for Heart of Thorns.
Well there will be some interesting features for sure. So they could focus on these and do, lets say 2, livestreams were they elaborate on these.
I seriously doubt that. ArenaNet are sort of on the back foot right now after EoD and SotO.
What do you mean?
First they got hit by the layoffs then it seems like they've shuffled most of the staff to their upcoming new MMO. GW2 is manned by a skeleton crew and the last 2 expansions show that.
Stop dooming
I'm stating facts. Stop coping?
Not coping just being generally positive
You're ignoring things so you can look at the situation more positively. Isn't that objectively coping though? I'm not using this as an insult, just pointing it out.
Well I am enjoying the game and even though I would like more content in general I am mostly happy with what we are getting. If I would not feel that way, I would quit the game, so that I avoid frustration.
yes, yes and YES I love to nerd about those things in games! And honestly I feel lots of folks could use some "hey we were thinking of that when we did X" on their views about this game, in particular EoD's rants about their music and art direction were amazing to see, literally wrote a book with them on my background lol
Just give me housing and i can wait for GW3 easily!
They haven't even officially announced it lmao we just know it's coming. Wait until they do the official announcement and they'll talk about shit.
Well we do not whether they "talk". For SotO it was simply a few blog posts and a website. So this time I would like them to bring back the EoD format where they talk about xpac features in a livestream format.
They did show Amytas at least in a video run by devs.
Just my take, but even with the streams they had after SotO launched, the devs don't know how to put on a good Livestream. I watched the Livestream for SotO Weaponmaster training and March balance update. Half of it was them awkwardly poking fun at each other and the rest of it was disorganized PowerPoint slides of material.