Twilight Arbor Sneak Peak Video

If you’re on a budget of >$60 M, though, you can probably afford to record the lines 5 or 6 times until they come out right.

They changed (at least some of) the animations in this stress test, BTW. The characters now face each other a bit more, and they have some secondary motion (dangling their arms, etc.). Unfortunately it tends to make their hands clip through the armor.

Anyway, the main problem with the story isn’t the cutscenes, it’s the actual story.

The books aren’t about me. The story is supposed to be (and that’s one of its mistakes). 

The plot is cheesy and patronizing, praising me before I’ve achieved anything, and treating me like the most important person in the world right from the start.

It’s like a story written for 6 year olds (by someone who doesn’t even respect their intelligence).

And it’s immersion-breaking, since it clashes with the game world, which is why it has to be kept inside separate instances.

It has other problems, too, such as having its main choices take place before you even start playing, and being bound to your race instead of your class (let’s face it, more people will play three Asuras of different classes than three warriors of different races), but those are just “mechanical” flaws. 

The real problem is the narrative structure (no sense of achievement; you’re “the great hero” after a fight you didn’t choose and cannot lose) and the fact that it’s a (bad) single-player story tacked onto a multi-player game. 

It’s a flaw in making the most of the assets they have. Since people are more likely to play multiple classes of the same race than multiple races of the same class, they’re not maximizing variety for players.

And putting the most important choices before the game starts makes those stories feel less interactive than if they added those choices in as part of the story (same total number of branches, but they’re gimping the feeling of interactiveness). Being given a choice during the story makes it feel a lot more personal an “alive” than having a choice before the game even starts.

So, in both cases, the options don’t affect the narrative directly, but they affect the level of interactivity and variety of the story, which also influences player experience.

Your race is obviously going to determine where you start, etc., but currently your class has no influence at all on your story, which is just silly. 

One of the main complaints new players have is that there’s no “class tutorial” in the game. The personal story would have been the logical place to put that. It would also ensure that if someone plays multiple characters of the same race, they would get different stories regardless of their “biography” choices.

Watched the video again, seemed a little easier to follow the second time.  Probably didn’t help that the QA was racing through the encounter.  For the boss fight, couldn’t tell if the Guardian was simply not taking damage, or quickly clearing conditions. He didn’t seem to be dodging damage.  Also seem there was a Asura ultimate attack(?) Golem and what looked like a Necro.