It was there that I started chatting with my old gaming pal, Ellie aka Clever Clara, who has been thoroughly enjoying the World vs. World PvP in GW2 for several years now. Lord Spode of Team Spode also mentioned that he still drops in daily to collect his rewards in GW2 . . . and he's been doing this for 3 or 4 years. He logs in, he grabs his stuff, he logs off. Amazing, the dedication on that one.
The Heart of Thorns beckons you deeper into this tangled web of a blogpost.
This got me to thinking about my Necromancer in Guild Wars 2, so I loaded up the game and logged in. It immediately struck me all over again just how pretty this game is . . . especially after playing the visual mess known as Project Gorgon for so long.
Here it's as if I'm constantly running and jumping through a concept artist's portfolio, leaping from one page to the next. It's such a pretty game.
The level of detail in Lion's Arch is staggering.
It was also then that I remembered I haven't picked up the Heart of Thorns or Path of Fire expansions, and lo and behold a THIRD expansion is now in development!
That's a perfect storm: friends still playing, tons of content I haven't explored, a visual feast after a season of starving, and promises of a bright future. SOLD!
So after picking up the HoT/PoF expansion bundle, I jumped into the new content only to remember . . . oh crap, combat in this game is lengthy, I don't remember anything, and there's a bunch of "things" now like wings and mounts. Oh man, what have I done?
In fact, I spent a few days just logging on, playing 15-20 minutes, and logging back off in frustration thinking perhaps I made a mistake . . . until last night.
I'm in blue and that's my crew!
Clara gathered the troops yesterday, and soon I was playing GW2 with my old podcasting friends of Ravenwood Radio and Spiral Radio fame. Yup, Steve, Icy, and John . . . all in one group!
I can't even explain what a relief it was to get on a Discord call and have John talk us through the UI, new features, and the world event in the Verdant Brink. A little handholding and laughs between old friends goes a long way to establishing some hope.
We played around for a couple hours and broke the group for dinner, but I logged on later and did just a bit more of my story quest, just enough to take on this wicked vine beast.
Scary vine wyrm thingys are scary!
So there you have it . . . I'm back in GW2 for a bit to explore new content, hang with some old friends, and learn new tidbits of information: things like, Friendly Necromancers can now wield giant two-handed swords! Looks like it's the season of the Reaper for me in Guild Wars 2.
Yup, that's about the size of it.
Happy Dueling!
2 comments:
I had no idea you were a member of Team Spode. I used to follow your DCUO adventures on West Karana when Tipa chronicled them. I wish she'd blog again.
Compared to DCUO, which at the levels Team Spode operated always sounded terrifyingly difficult, I would have thought open world content in GW2 would feel about as challenging as eating a donut while watching tv. I've been playing GW2 since launch but even when it was all new to me I thought it was a ferociously easy game, even by the relatively low standards od difficulty of the genre.
There was (still is, in some quarters) an opinion that Heart of Thorns content was "hard" but I never found it anything other than very accomodating. A doddle, mostly, although it's true some classes had advanteges. Path of Fire, which was widely praised as a return to a more casual, forgiving style of gameplay, I found far harder, although the difficulty came from the extreme levels of annoyance and irritation rather than any highe skill floor (there was none).
Anyway, welcome to the creaking old bus. It's been in freefall for a couple of years but it may just about be starting to pick itself up off the floor. Wow, that's a string of mixed metaphors to relish. The expansion's probably a couple of years oway so don't hold your breath but what they have planned for the next couple of updates looks interesting.
Yup! Agreed on several fronts, and I miss Tipa's blogging too.
DCUO (at least the raiding) seems to be far more difficult than GW2. After I posted this, I spent an hour playing "follow the Dorito" in a raid group waltzing through the Tangled Depths. Easy peasy, guild wars squeezy.
I guess it's more about returning to the game after having 3 years off and being lost in both UI and the events going on around me. I felt very disconnected until my friends helped piece it back together, and that was the most confounding part: reconnecting.
heh. Thanks for the welcome back. :)
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