Secrets of the Obscure Retrospective

The next GW2 expansion, Janthir Wilds, is launching soon. I've posted a bunch of stuff about SotO on fedi, but I should organize my thoughts about that in one spot. Fair warning: most of my thoughts are rather critical.

There will be spoilers for the SotO story in this post!

Going in, I wasn't sure what to expect from the expansion. It promised a new story arc for Guild Wars 2¹, and a new model for delivering the game.

In the lead up to launch, they didn't want to tell us much about the story. There would be some mysterious wizards, a wizard tower², and the staple of any DnD campaign where the characters have overstayed their welcome: an extra-planar threat.

Peitha

I can understand not wanting to spoil things, but they took it too far. Let me illustrate: they introduced a major SotO character in an announcement about their new merch store. All three post-launch story updates focused completely on her, and this is how they chose to introduce her to the players:

The Shadow of Nayos Statue — A beautiful figurine made in the likeness of an enigmatic character who features heavily in the Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure story.

I though this was weird at the time of posting. They introduced Peitha -- without telling us anything about her -- as a $150 purchase. I guess it's not unheard of for the marketing team to put the cart before the horse ... but it seemed a bit off.

At the end of launch week, this made even less sense. Peitha was part of the initial SotO story, but not as a major character. She was a mysterious voice that popped up about half way through, and a hook for the next three story updates. This left me even more confused: why didn't they make a statue of Lyhr, Zojja, or R'tchikk & Glade -- characters who were actually in the story.

There were people who really liked Peitha. I was not one of them, mainly because she's voiced by Patty Mattson. I don't have anything against Mattson personally, but she voiced another character and that brought some, uh, negative feelings towards Peitha right out of the gate.

But for a less-ridiculous reason: I got the sense that the writers wanted Peitha -- and all the kryptis -- to feel like aliens. They were people, but totally different from Tyrians. Their different world, society, and physiology was meant to show us another mode of existing beyond what humans do.

For example: Peitha kills her cousin and we ask if she's grieving. She tells us Kryptis don't do that and she's not sad, then goes in the corner to sulk about her dead cousin. So instead of feeling alien, they just felt like emotionally-underdeveloped children.

Nayos Civil War

They did start delivering on "an enigmatic character who features heavily in the Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure story" with the three story updates: they were focused entirely on Peitha, to the exclusion of all the other newly-introduced characters. This arc focused on going to the extra-planar realm Peitha came from (Nayos), organizing a rebellion, and deposing the king of demons so she can run the whole place.

It was the most boring, predictable story arc imaginable. Peitha told us where to go next. We'd recruit somebody or kill something. Rinse and repeat.

The demon king we were rebelling against was a nobody. He had some perhaps-interesting backstory where he tried to join the wizards, but got rejected. He handled this rejection by becoming the demon king and wanting to take over our world so wizard-senpai would finally notice him.

He represented a big threat in the initial SotO story arc, where demons are popping into Tyria all over the place -- but after the pitched battle at the end, this stops being a factor. We go to his realm with Peitha, and from this point on, the demon king might as well not be in the story. He represented no level of threat, and us murdering him was a forgone conclusion.

One of GW2's highest points was All or Nothing. We spent years raising a baby dragon to oppose the Elder Dragons, and in the final assault against one of them, she gets fuckin' murdered like it's nothing. All hope is lost, and it ends on the player character admitting that there is no Plan B, we have failed, and everybody in the world is going to die in the near future.

That represents the highest stakes we've seen. The SotO story arc is as far from that as we can get: an absolute fucking nobody harasses some towns with fucked-up looking monsters, so we go obliterate him on the way to buy some milk and cigarettes.

Boring.

They did try to develop the demon king's character a bit, with journals in his palace. This made the situation even worse, IMHO: the demon king was built-up as this Big Evil All-Consuming force, and then you read these and he's basically a 4-year old who doesn't know anything about anything. Then we go upstairs and essentially kick the shit out of a toddler for misbehaving.

It felt a little weird. Yeah, this dude has been eating people in front of us. But: we're beating a toddler to death. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Kryptis in General

Entirely looking at this as a game now: the Kryptis were visually boring. They had a ton of unique kryptis monster designs made by taking existing creatures, applying one (1) mottled texture to them, and covering them in extra eyeballs and spiky bits.

It led to everything having the same visual identity. If you look at a group of kryptis enemies, it's just a bunch of monotone amorphous blobs with the same features. Some of them are bigger and some of them are smaller, and you know they're kryptis, but beyond that, none of the creatures had much of an identity. Some of them had different abilities, but eh, continue spamming 12345 and they'll die all the same.

Individually, they're cool. But somebody missed the forest for the trees and failed to consider how it looks when you're fighting twenty of them.

Wizard's Court

The first bit of SotO was the big dump of story episodes when the expansion launched. There was a lot going on here: we met a dozen new characters! The only returning cast member was Zojja, who had been out of focus since ~2015, so there was a lot of setup that we had to do.

Two of the new characters were in the driver's seat: Mabon and Lhyr. The basic story was the Head Wizard had been kidnapped, but as soon as we got him back, he'd fix the extra-planar demon incursions without breaking a sweat.

This was fun and interesting! We even met a skritt wizard who was BFFs with a mute gladium. Skritt are funny, and this one had an entire museum of powerful creatures and artifacts to curate. She -- and everyone else we meet during this part of the story -- gets sidelined for the next eleven months, and that was a crime. Bring back R'tchikk!

We do get the Head Wizard back at the end of the at-launch story episodes. He's a cranky old guy, which was funny because Peitha liked to troll him. I was stoked to recover him, since he's a seer and Mabon is a mursaat -- these two species being friends is notable because the mursaat successfully Did a Genocide on the seers.

People have headcanon'd Isgarren (the Head Wizard) and Mabon as an old married gay couple based on how Mabon talked about Isgarren during the story.

This would have also been funny, but alas, it was not to be. After spending the entirety of the story developing Mabon as a character and turning him into our new Bestest Friend, he gets killed.

I guess they needed some kind of emotional bang to end the story on, but this was a miss for me. They pitched SotO as a chance to build a new cast for our Next Epic Story Arc, started doing that and ... immediately threw their setup directly into the trash. What were they thinking?

The emotional gut-punch could have been Isgarren getting killed, since we did not meet him until the very end. He's led the wizards for hundreds (thouands?) of years and his loss would throw them -- and Tyria's future -- into turmoil.

Or it could have been Zojja opting for her mind-wipe to become a Full Wizard: our friend from 2012 decides to make a great sacrifice, so we have to be happy for her, but also, she doesn't remember us. They held off on this and made it into a non-event, which was kind of shitty too.

But they instead killed one of the two developed characters off. The other character that was in the lime-light was Lhyr, who is relegated to being a vendor for legendary armour components after Mabon's death.

Heart of the Obscure

Early on in the story, Zojja gives you a relic called the Heart of the Obscure.

If you look up "MacGuffin" in the dictionary, you will find a picture of the Heart of the Obscure next to it. It has minimal explanation and a wide range of powers that conveniently fit whatever situation we're in.

Look at the wiki page for it. It's literally only two sentences:

The Heart of the Obscure is a mysterious, magical object crafted by Waiting Sorrow, which has the ability to both open and seal rifts, as well as translate certain languages. At some point, Zojja found it and began studying it, and she later handed it over to the Pact Commander while pointing out that she was still learning the depths of its power.

I feel like I need a section for the Heart because the ridiculousness of "here's a MacGuffin we can use to hand-wave anything we find inconcenient".

It offends my sensibilities. But there is not actually anything to say about the device, despite it being part of the expansion's title.

The State of WvW

As much as I like Tyria, I am primarily playing GW2 for World vs. World: a week-long three-way massive PvP war. This is why I bought the game, and this is where most of my game time has been spent.

In 2018, after the first couple³ WvW tourments, Arenanet identified a problem: teams were based on what servers people picked, and the population was wildly imbalanced. The 24x7 nature of a global game made the problem even harder, since a team losing all their upgrades because they had 3 players in Australian timezones vs. the other team having 300 had a big negative impact on matches. They needed to balance teams across every region.

They announced [a solution to this problem would be forthcoming] on January 31st, 2018. It went live during SotO -- that's six years later -- so I want to include some thoughts on this too, even though it's technically got nothing to do with the expansion.

When this was announced, I hated the idea. I understood the rationale for it, but Fort Aspenwood was (at that time) a six-year-old community. These were people I'd been playing with for years, and "we're dissolving your gaming community" was a terrible doom to have foretold. The fact that they left that sword of damocles hanging over our heads for six years was also a spectacularly shitty thing to do. Doubly so when they immediately halted work on the project and didn't bother mentioning that to us for four fucking years:

To clarify, World Restructuring hasn't been actively developed since its original announcement in 2018. Previous studio leadership deprioritized the project shortly after it was announced. We put a team back on it last year. The idea has existed for 4+ years, but meaningful progress has mostly happened over the last year.

— Joshua "Grouch" Davis, June 5 2022

They finally delivered this on June 14, 2024. They are pretending this is a "beta", despite having six years to work on it and this being The State of WvW.

But the doom of Fort Aspenwood happened. I didn't like it much; by that point, these were people I'd been playing with for twelve years. But they didn't ask for our opinions on whether this was still a good idea, and here it is.

It has mostly been fine? Putting people on the correct team with the guild seems to regularly break, and any time they try to make changes they break something spectacularly, but overall the matches have better balance for raw player counts, I guess?

I don't know if this project was worth it. We'd made our peace with losing stuff during the night, or being outnumbered some mornings. It was fine; winning or losing the match was ultimately irrelevant, and the whole community understood this. It was more about having fun and whether you could hold an objective or win a fight in the moment.

The immediate crisis this was meant to solve back in 2018 was that imbalanced teams made it impossible to have meaningful WvW tournaments. For those, your overall score mattered. But we have not had a WvW tournament since alliances were announced. There are no plans to resume them.

In my view, they burned the community down for no reason, and have wasted their time on developing the new matchmaker.

WvW Christmas Exploit

For posterity: on boxing day, a new glider skin was released: the Giant Folding Fan Glider. This is a premium cosmetic; they release new ones on most Tuesdays. It came out, and the studio shut down for their holiday break.

Unfortunately, equipping this cosmetic and gliding in WvW in the presence of an enemy team would cause the entire enemy group to crash-to-desktop. People began exploiting this immediately: who needs to fight an enemy zerg when you can yeet them out of the game and wipe their lifeless bodies for sweet, sweet bags.

I dunno why this particular glider caused it, but whatever, no software is perfect. We waited patiently for a fix, since there's no way they could leave an exploit like this in WvW for more than a few hours.

They proceed to do nothing about the actively-being-exploited-in-a-competitive-environment bug for the entire duration of their holiday break. I guess there's no such thing as an ops team over there anymore. That made for a fun week.

Mid-afternoon on January 2nd, we finally got something: they disabled gliding entirely in WvW as a solution. They didn't turn off the one premium cosmetic wrecking WvW: they turned a major feature off instead.

And left it off for another week. This was resolved on January 9th, about an hour into the WvW Rush event.

The Rise of Lil' Mini Events

This may have started prior to SotO, but something they've done regularly throughout are week-long mini events to fill in gaps between holiday festivals. Stuff like returning to Heart of Thorns, with a handful of achivements and some bonus loot to incentivize people to go bag the octovine, check out some less-popular area from yester-year, or spend some time in sPvP/WvW.

I love these events. Everything in GW2 is evergreen and there's always people doing things from past expansions, but it's fun to have 150 people turn up to obliterate events in starter zones, or to make queue times in sPvP drop to nothing because absolutely everyone is queuing up at once.

There's usually a cool skin as a reward for finishing all the achivements too.

It's such a nice little community thing. They seem to be continuing to build out new mini-events to put in rotation too -- we had one for the swim speed infusion treasure hunt a couple months ago.

The WvW event can be a little annoying because the maps fill up, but the Call of War buff let's me get massive amounts of ranks and reward track progress. These weeks are when I make sure to stack every possible booster at all times.

Conclusions

In Arenanet's own retrospective, they admit that their writing was a shitshow:

The conclusion of the Elder Dragon saga in Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons® presented us with a unique opportunity to delve into a different kind of storytelling. We aimed to focus on deeper narratives grounded in the characters and circumstances around the player character. However, with SotO our ambition led us to take on a broader scope than was feasible. We introduced a lot of new characters, and the plot was too complex for what can be reasonably handled within an annual expansion. This left some character interactions feeling rushed and story threads unexplored. More isn’t always better.

I am glad they recognize that this was a misfire. But I remember Heart of Thorns misfiring in the same way -- less severely, mind you -- where you could feel they hit crunch time and had to cut a bunch out of the story they meant to tell. So it's kind of shitty that they needed to re-learn this lesson eleven years into GW2.

Some of the things in their retrospective are them choosing to stick their head in the sand. This part really rustled my jimmies:

Over the last two years, we’ve put much more of a focus on upkeep and iteration of systems and avoiding unnecessary bloat where possible. We put more of a focus on maintaining live game systems, and with SotO we even went to the extent of entirely reworking existing features to make room for more modernized solutions. The Wizard’s Vault is a good example of this strategy working out well for us, and you can expect to see a new system being introduced in expansion 5 that adds a meaningful new way to spend your time in Guild Wars 2 while using this as an opportunity to greatly improve the player experience with related, existing game systems.

The Wizard's Vault is specifically not an example of simplifying an existing system or removing bloat. It made this problem worse.

Before SotO, your daily objectives were achivements. There were a bunch of categories, with the important one just being "Dailies".

You don't see "Dailies" listed in my picture, because that's a screenshot from today. Their "simplification" of this system was to take one category of dailies out of the achivements panel and give it a separate UI:

The other categories of dailies are still in the achivements section. And that "Special" tab in the new UI: half the time, it's telling you to go complete achivements, referring you right back to the original UI:

The weekly objectives tab isn't "new" either -- it just added a new, separate set of weeklies to go with the ones already in the achivement UI. One set of which was added seven months prior to SotO -- so they had to have known they were putting in this new weekly objective UI and explicitly chose to continue doing both.