EVEN MORE Living World Season 3 “Flashpoint” Press Release Photos.
With “Flashpoint” going live yesterday, ArenaNet has given the press even more screenshots for players to look at. While all these images can be found on the “Release page”, some of them are quite small. That is not the case with the ones above.
I promised I’d do one of these, and here it is! I have a lot of thoughts on the latest Flashpoint episode and I’m not going to lie to any of you: it’s not really all that positive. Of course, as always with these sort of posts, this is just my personal opinion and experience; plenty of other people might feel totally different and that is a-okay. My inbox is always open to asks if people have questions or want to talk about it, and I try my best to keep an eye on replies, so if anybody reads this and wants to open a discussion, you’re welcome to. <3
And as always, posted under a read more so it doesn’t clog up anybody’s dash if they aren’t interested.
But we’ll preface with a summary: what the fuck is going on with the writing in this living story? Also: spoiler warning.
Flashpoint has left a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve never been so quick to put down Guild Wars 2 after an update (I played it on release day and the Wednesday that followed and I haven’t touched it since,) and I’ve also never found myself so oddly jaded. I actually said to myself that if episode six doesn’t actually start making some goddamn sense in any respect and answering an increasing number of questions, I might not even buy the expansion.
Honestly, truthfully?
I don’t like the direction that Guild Wars 2 seems to be going in these days. Of course some of this ties into the big ol’ leaks going around, and I won’t discuss these on my blog at all until ArenaNet confirms them because I believe in confirmation from developers rather than taking leaks at face value, but I have some real concerns. Ever since Colin left, the direction of the Guild Wars 2 flagship has been slowly changing... and I kind of wish Mike would find somebody to permanently replace the position he’s temporarily put himself in in Colin’s absence, because truthfully I think he’s better at running a company than he is at implementing good game direction.
The biggest stickler for me that I’ll open with, as a really big Charr player : why are the Charr following Balthazar?
I haven’t, in my admittedly short time playing the game, seen any given reasoning for Charr to be following a human god. And I emphasise both of those things, because of all the known Charr factions that we have, not one of them fit the profile for following Balthazar.
The Flame Legion were the legion that spearheaded the Searing. They are Charr as we knew them to be in the first game: they’re sexist, they’re a cult that will believe in deities where there is some good profit to be seen in it for them, and they are incredibly racist. Now while some people claim that Balthazar, as a god of War and of Fire, would appeal to the tastes of Flame Legion, I want to contest this with the fact he is a human god. If any deity in the world were to be the one deity that the Flame Legion deem to be inconsequential and not worth following, any human deity falls into that category. I find it extremely unlikely that they would ever, even in desperate circumstances, come to align themselves with the god of the one race in Tyria they spent so many years fighting.
Our regular Citadel Charr are equally unfit to follow a human god: because they’ve cast aside deities entirely. Embittered to the notion of religion as a whole after the antics of Flame Legion, Citadel Charr out and out do not recognise gods in any form. Things can be big, and powerful, and in some cases beyond complete comprehension, but they aren’t gods. They’re just big, powerful and sometimes beyond comprehension - and also potentially killable. They wouldn’t put their faith blindly into anything claiming to be a deity, never mind a human deity. And sure, sure, there’s a truce right now that they’ve actively fought to keep alive, but just because there’s a tense peace treaty that doesn’t mean that Charr are about to abandon their history to go and follow a human god. Flame Legion have proven time and time again why gods don’t work: Citadel Charr outright say they killed their gods. Nothing is infallible.
The only other known faction of Charr are the somewhat disorganised Renegades. And I shouldn’t need to explain why these Charr - you know, the human hating Charr that strive to rekindle the fires of war between humans and Charr - wouldn’t suddenly start following a human god.
So again: why are there Charr in these mercenaries? I haven’t seen any Norn, for example, and this makes sense: Norn don’t recognise the human gods as gods. So why would they follow Lazarus or Balthazar? Naturally they wouldn’t. No sylvari either, from what I’ve seen, and this also makes sense: if Batlhazar is so gung-ho against dragons, he probably doesn’t want dragon minions in his mercenary army. (You know, despite Mordremoth being dead at this point.) It just makes no sense to see Charr there at all, and while I was playing I could see no reasons given or stated. (If somebody has found any dialogue clips, by all means please share them with me!)
I feel much the same way about the appearance of the Inquest, too, but at least the Inquest can be half-assed into the mercenary army through the use of Zinn and his research. No, they don’t recognise Balthazar as a god either, but they stand to gain from Balthazar’s actions via getting access to all manner of research that at one point was probably considered lost to the ages. It’s a flimsy excuse, I feel, but at least the excuse even exists.
Secondly: Balthazar’s entire scheme makes very little sense.
Of all the disguises that Balthazar could have used to come down to Tyria with and amass an army using, he chose a Mursaat so that he could employ the use of the White Mantle. You know... the one human group that doesn’t recognise the human gods as gods. Of all the humans in the world that he could have chosen to utilise, he used the only one that would have gone immediately rogue if they found out who he actually was. Instead of appearing to Separatists for example, who are begging for a war with Charr and would have probably thrown themselves at Balthazar’s feet as long as he promised them their war, or even just regular Krytans who are dealing with the war with centaurs and would have also likely been keen to at least listen to their god, Balthazar chose the White Mantle. And... we have no explanation why. Beyond that, he then had to hire mercenaries because he was concerned the White Mantle would discover his deception and no longer follow him - something he could have avoided if he had appealed to any other group of humans in the entirety of Tyria. It makes just no sense.
Beyond that, we really have no evidence that any of the human gods were involved in setting up the White Mantle to be able to even think they could find the aspects of Lazarus. So from where I’m sitting, not only did Balthazar choose arguably the worst human group to try and manipulate, but he did so simply because “Oh hey, I guess I could do this.” Now maybe there’s more to it than that, as the developers have said that his story arc isn’t over, but right now I’m just... not impressed. For saying he’s a god with some considerable power at his disposal - you’d think - he’s made a lot of stupid choices.
Thirdly: Balthazar didn’t make an intimidating foe... at all.
The last time we were dealing with a rogue god, it was in Guild Wars 1 and it was Abaddon. And I didn’t even play much of GW1, but you know what I remember? There was an entire campaign based around that. Abaddon was an intimidating villain simply on the principle that the original plan was to, you know, prevent the release of Abaddon. When that failed, the last ditch option of desperation was to defeat him outright - and that took some serious firepower that included the blessing of all the other gods. The threat was very, very real.
Balthazar... yeah. Not so much, huh?
We dispel his illusion through the use of Kasmeer, who admittedly may or may not be far more powerful than we know in fairness, but that means we pretty easily smash through a relic enchanted by Lyssa herself. Well, okay. How about Balthazar, then? Well, his puppies aren’t shit, frankly. You beat them down into submission and then utilise Taimi’s machine to completely destroy them, but the fact you physically beat them down so easily is... underwhelming. Haha, humans, not only was your racial elite skill trash in the first place but it’s now just been officially murdered in the game? Honestly. And as for Balthazar, while we know he hasn’t been destroyed and will likely resurge at a later date to continue what appear to be nefarious schemes, he just never felt threatening. You just blew up the machine he had sort of put himself into an oh, hey, I guess he’s just gone for a bit now.
What?
The human gods were never fully elaborated on at any given point in time, but Guild Wars 1 made it extremely clear that they were powerful. Extremely so. So unless Balthazar was half-assing his own plan and not using his full power, or unless he’s been somehow weakened by something happening on Tyria, his appearance has been critically underwhelming. Hell, it took more effort to defeat Zhaitan - and I remember that boss fight, I just pressed 1 a bunch. Yet somehow Zhaitan still made a more imposing threat, because it took serious work and preparation to even face him. You didn’t just talk so some slightly irritable druid spirits, get a nice fancy shield so you could jump into a volcano and then throw a bit of dragon magic at an Asuran machine to watch it go pop.
I have more gripes with Flashpoint beyond these three things, including the fact I think the new map is a good-concept-gone-horrifically-bad and is possibly one of the worst maps in GW2 since Tangled Depths and the utterly boring set up of one tiny but mildly intriguing instance, one bad map and then one tiny, eye-searing instance with a clusterfuck fight giving no real payoff considering how close to the end of the living story season we are.
Frankly, ArenaNet...
If you want me to buy your expansion hot off the press, this final episode of Living Story better see some real improvement when it comes to writing and see some genuinely good answers to these questions. I’m getting real tired of investing in your stories only to have you leave them half fucking finished and glaring lore discrepancies and plot holes that you then just never come back to.
Legendary Armor goes live May 2nd with “Flashpoint”
A long time in the making, but Guild Wars 2 has announce that Legendary Armor will enter the game May 2nd with the Living World episode “Flashpoint”.
“We’ve never produced any armor set as complicated as the legendary armor,“ Arenanet Raid Producer Paul Ella bragged on her announcement post on GuildWars2.com.
Ella stated her team got near its goals in creating the legionary armor sets and the artists and devs have done their best to limit clipping; make the armor easy for the player to use and be worth gaining though the games raids
Legendary Armor at a glance:
Legendary Armor is the is part of the raid rewards.
The armors are designed to make sense with game lore and will “transform” when the player enters combat:
Heavy Armor is meant to invoke the look of knights and iron clad soldiers
Medium armor looks as if crafted from the “bones of legionary foes.”
Light Armor uses crystals that will charge and “manifest and electric aura”
Designers looked to limit clipping as much as they could but still had to make some compromises
Each peace of Legendary Armor can have it’s stats selected separately from each other.
Legendary Armor allows the player to also swap runes. Applying a new rune to a piece of Legendary Armor will have the old one return to the player’s inventory.
Living World Season 3 “Flashpoint” Press Release Photos
Along with its press release, ArenaNet pushed the following out images out to the press. We thought you might want a closer look at them as you hunt for details everyone else missed (Or zoom in on the second picture to get a better look at Kasmeer’s new outfit)
