Live letter is almost here

[Wyssahtyn]

hopefully they nixed that idea of subverting expectations with boss design the director mentioned previously. i want nophica and halone to look as expected.

[Cleretic]

hopefully they nixed that idea of subverting expectations with boss design the director mentioned previously. i want nophica and halone to look as expected.

Which is a bit of a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation, because honestly, the fact that all the Aglaia bosses were nearly exactly what we expected (barring some minor misreadings of Nald'thal) is why I'm not excited about the next alliance raid. I can already imagine all of Halone's fight if she's like we expect, and I don't find her particularly interesting, so why should I care?

Aglaia was well-made in terms of combat design, and In The Balance is good, but given 'good combat design' isn't exactly inherent to the concept and anything they could be making would be about as good, what is there to grab me?

[Iscah]

I can already imagine all of Halone's fight if she's like we expect, and I don't find her particularly interesting, so why should I care?

The mystery is in the surrounding plot – whatever is going on with Deryk.

Sometimes it's okay for a battle to be exactly what people are anticipating it to be, and in any case it's not immediately obvious what the fights will be like.

It's not exactly edge-of-my-seat anticipation, but I'm sure it'll be enjoyable when I play it, and I don't feel a need to look forward to it more intently than that.

[Cleretic]

The mystery is in the surrounding plot – whatever is going on with Deryk.

Which I also don't really care about yet, and I and plenty of others assume will somehow be an avatar of Oschon. I feel like the Myths of the Realm and Pandaemonium raids have different veins of the same problem for me: the first leg failed to give me reason to care about the rest beyond 'it's there and you'll get loot'. With Pandaemonium it was 'I don't know what's going on but none of the individual elements are interesting', and with Myths it's 'I can see exactly where this is going and I don't feel I need to be here to see it'.

I hope the live letters will ease that, because right now it's in that terrible situation of 'the exact last thing on my new patch to-do list', which feels terrible to do to a raid; those are a lot of work for the developers, and doing that early when everyone's fresh is an experience that you don't really get outside of that first day or two (admittedly, in alliance raids I find that experience more tedious than fun). It feels like something's gone wrong when I'm prioritizing, like, special delivery NPCs over it!

[Iscah]

...

I can't say I'm excited by Deryk either, but NieR set the bar for coherent storytelling so low that I'm just glad to be getting a story with a start, middle and (presumable) solid ending with maybe some lore drops along the way.

Also, I didn't like G'raha at this equivalent stage in the Crystal Tower raids, but I liked him by the end. So maybe Deryk just needs some time and development too.