Guild Wars 2 trailer signals end to Living World arc

If you've missed out on any of the Guild Wars 2 story, a new trailer helps catch you up. And you'd better catch up, because the end of the Living World storyline begins on January 21.

7

ArenaNet has been tireless in its efforts to bring bi-weekly updates to Guild Wars 2, with each one slowly moving the game's storyline forward. That story is about to come to a head, as a new trailer recaps the surprisingly-complex narrative up to this point, before revealing that the end of the current Living World storyline is at hand.

The video below explains the story Guild Wars 2 has unfurled since launch, beginning with December 2012's Wintersday update and culminating with November's The Nightmares Within update. Every chapter has uncovered a new piece of sylvari villainess Scarlet Briar's master plan, revealing unlikely alliances and an army prepared to overrun all of Tyria.

This sets the stage for the storyline's finale, which will unfold over the course of four updates, beginning on January 21.

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?

Filed Under
From The Chatty
  • reply
    January 7, 2014 4:00 PM

    Ozzie Mejia posted a new article, Guild Wars 2 trailer signals end to Living World arc.

    If you've missed out on any of the Guild Wars 2 story, a new trailer helps catch you up. And you'd better catch up, because the end of the Living World storyline begins on January 21.

    • reply
      January 7, 2014 4:09 PM

      Hey you know this game about giant Dragons? Well fuck them here is a generic "evil I am super smart and can do anything" cartoon villain that is all the game is about for the past year. Scarlett is bad fan fiction and is terrible in every regard the sooner they get rid of her as a character the better which of course means she is going to end up being the main villain until Guild Wars 3 comes out

      • reply
        January 8, 2014 10:23 AM

        "Thump, Thump. Time to jump.
        Wipe all resistance from your mind
        There’s a secret deep below to find
        If you’d only seen the things I’ve seen
        You’d wake up screaming from The Dream
        This next part will sting, but it brings me joy
        Sometimes to change you must destroy
        A fire is rising you cannot contain
        Tyria will burn, while I remain."

    • reply
      January 7, 2014 5:12 PM

      Have they done anything to improve this game's awful, awful combat?

      • reply
        January 7, 2014 7:15 PM

        combat is fine, go play WoW or some shit

      • reply
        January 7, 2014 7:16 PM

        [deleted]

      • reply
        January 7, 2014 7:17 PM

        I'm so glad I don't echo your opinion. Far better than the absolutely terrible combat in games like WoW and other cookie-cutter MMOs.

      • reply
        January 7, 2014 7:32 PM

        Actually it's one of the few games I've played that really rewards knowledge of ones character and punishes you for being a newb .. and what makes it really impressive is it does this be it 1v1 or zerg vs zerg.

      • reply
        January 7, 2014 7:40 PM

        What makes it awful?

      • reply
        January 7, 2014 10:16 PM

        [deleted]

      • reply
        January 7, 2014 10:47 PM

        combats awful? how bad were you?

      • reply
        January 7, 2014 10:51 PM

        To clarify: The game emphasizes movement and identifying telegraphs as the most important aspects of combat. That's great in principle, but so many of its combat elements fail to support this goal.

        The telegraph ground indicators are thin chalk-like outlines which are easy to miss depending on texture color scheme, uneven terrain, cramped camera angles or character overcrowding.

        The amount of visual noise anywhere near melee range with a mob is absurd, completely obscuring important indicators if there are multiple people hitting it. Being any kind of melee-focused character in a group is treacherous as a result.

        Telegraph enemy animations are awful. Rather than being a steady swing that gives you some sort of natural indicator of how close an ability is to firing, most enemies will quickly pull their weapon back and then hold position perfectly still for a certain number of seconds before suddenly finishing the attack. If you miss the initial few frames of the animation you'll have no way of knowing when the proper time it is to perform a block or dodge, and even then you'll need to have memorized the exact amount of time he's going to hold that pose. Which leads me to my next point:

        The interface is awful. The developers talked about not wanting the player to "play the interface" before release, yet critical information on the HUD is scattered along the edges of the screen and away from the action at the center. Any time you glance down to see your remaining cooldown, or to the left to see if you need to clear a partymate's debuff, or up top to see if you need to refresh an important debuff, you risk missing a subtle texture or animation shift that will result in you getting one-shot. Simply moving the elements closer to the screen would be an easy solution, but that nothing in the interface positioning is customizable. Ability hotkeys aren't customizable either, which is completely unacceptable.

        Group dynamics are awful. I get it, they wanted to get rid of the "holy trinity", but all they've done is replace it with a system that offers less depth and is has even more stringent group makeup requirements. The most important aspect of your party lineup is what buffs and debuffs you bring to the plate? Seriously? The supposed lack of roles has led to something completely arcane and unintuitive. There is clearly a "right" way to build a party, but damned if most people know what it is.

        There's more, like the terrible visceral impact the game's autoattack and downing system has, but this post is long enough as it is.

Hello, Meet Lola