#inner nayos

[fainttwinkling]

Inner Nayos brings such a nice feeling of serenity. I just want to lay among its bluish tall grass and listen to it gently murmur..

Taking calm deep breaths and just existing.

Commander of nothing really and Wayfinder in the Obscure.

[charrior-of-ash]

Aladra Truefury, Olmakhan Necromancer Sandshifter I might like Ali's new-old outfit a little bit too much... The dull colors suit a necromancer much better and look more like "natural" dyes the tribe in Atholma would probably use. (i'm very much obsessed with the color combo feathers+cape ._.)

[legendaryskyscale]

You know what, Kanaxai's design should've been an inspiration for Eparch

Got that humanoid shape and still looks awesome. He don't got them silly twig legs. This is a Kryptis I'd fear and respect.

Also

grabbing him own tiddy

[cat-bit]

'The realm of dreams' is an apt moniker that shit do be dream-like

[achromant]

Inner Nayos hits like a truck in terms of color palette. so fucking beautiful.

I wish we could dye weapons. The Defiant Glass weapon set is MADE for this T-T

Also, weirdly sexy Oneiros Spun Armor? Well, count me IN dangit. I'm SO gonna do a slutty, slutty painting of the full set at some point!

[Art sponsored by ArenaNet]

[i-mybrunettelady]

gw2 screenshot ask game

Do we have gpose/photo capture mode? No, unfortunately, but it doesn't stop us from taking beautiful screenshots and gifs and making beautiful kiddos and dressing them up! In honor of that, I'm borrowing an ask game I once saw on the ff14 side of things - send someone a character you'd like to see and one of these prompts below! Screenshots and gifs are all welcome! I'll try to cover most of the game, too! Let's show how gorgeous Tyria and gw2 can be <3

Screenshot associated with base game (Central Tyria maps)

Screenshot associated with LWS1 (Southsun Cove)

Screenshot associated with LWS2 (Dry Top and Silverwastes)

Screenshot associated with Heart of Thorns (Verdant Brink, Auric Basin, Tangled Depths, Dragon's Stand)

Screenshot associated with LWS3 (Bloodstone Fen, Ember Bay, Bitterfrost Frontier, Lake Doric, Draconis Mons, Siren's Landing)

Screenshot associated with Path of Fire (Crystal Oasis, Elon Riverlands, Desolation, Domain of Vabbi, Desert Highlands)

Screenshot associated with LWS4 (Domain of Istan, Sandswept Isles, Domain of Kourna, Jahai Bluffs, Thunderhead Peak, Dragonfall)

Screenshot associated with Icebrood Saga (Grothmar Valley, Bjora Marches, Drizzlewood Coast)

Screenshot associated with End of Dragons (Seitung Province, New Kaineng City, Echovald Wilds, Dragon's End, Gyala Delve)

Screenshot associated with Secrets of the Obscure (Skywatch Archipelago, Wizard's Tower, Amnytas, Inner Nayos)

Screenshot associated with racial cities (Hoelbrak, Divinity's Reach, Rata Sum, Black Citadel, Grove + Lion's Arch)

[writheworm]

illustration of inner Nayos

[rytlockdripstone]

inner nayos

[lunod]

I have somehow already finished the update despite not playing that long or rushing through it (I actually played a couple parts twice already) and I just don't feel good about it at all, from honestly any angle.

Gameplay wise, a bunch of the story is having you to basic exploring that I feel like players outgrow by the end of the PS. Not as in "go to new location for story" but as in "view these 3 vistas to proceed with story, no there is literally nothing there" and it just feels dull and like they needed to make you do menial tasks to stretch out the game content. Why do I need to be wrangled into map comp when I have presumably played core and the other expacs by this point? The enemies including the boss are reskins with nothing new to them.

Story-wise it's a mess. There's some interesting stuff, don't get me wrong, but it all feels like you won't get to find out much about it, because most of the interesting tidbits are delivered through random unnamed NPCs you overhear. The pacing is all over the place. It honestly feels like YouTube content for children where they just toss a bunch of new stuff your way every 2 seconds without elaborating on anything in an attempt to keep you entertained. You don't get to figure out the people you're with at the beginning, because you get introduced to new people from within the Wizard's Tower and you don't get to figure them out either because you get new people from Inner Nayos, and throughout all this you have characters introduced to you and you're going "okay cool let me remember this person" and by the time you turn around they're dead. And the thing is their deaths don't impact me at all because I have not formed any feelings about them! I don't know them! I don't get to feel sad or angry or bittersweet or relieved about their deaths because I have spent all of 30 seconds around them.

And to be frank we know SO LITTLE about any of the people we're around that it's shocking we aren't getting any sort of feedback at all from Anyone about trust. Nobody's asked why we, the player, want to get involved in this at all. We, the player, have not questioned the wizards or their motives, we didn't question Zojja's decision (honestly Zojja's whole Thing is a writing AND a marketing issue), we have not questioned Peitha or her motives, we have not questioned whether we should be putting Peitha in power at all especially when we know nothing about Kryptis culture or politics (and let's be real we know SO little that we don't know if the issue is even as black and white as needing to choose between Peitha or Eparch), we haven't questioned whether Nephus is going to be reliable given he has openly stated he was forced into this, we know nothing about anyone we're putting not just our own life but Everyone's lives on the line for. Especially when a lot of the dialogue should give us pause, like the way Nephus makes it clear Peitha has no real experience with what she's doing and that what she IS good at is manipulating people and coming up with speeches on the fly. Or the Wizard's Court in general and as a whole honestly.

I honestly haven't felt this flat about any of the GW2 story besides IBS, and IBS still had some parts I didn't feel flat about.

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

ok so I actually completed SotO's new story chapters on day 1, but I've taken a little while to put my thoughts together on it. some of it's good, some not, but I did my best to be fair and direct on it.

so anyway here we go, major spoilers under the cut!

The Good

I like the map, I like the writing direction, I like the lore. I liked most of what we got, honestly. dungeon fixes, customizable character screen backgrounds, bugfixing the new 'green circles' mechanic, and adding a mount ley-line toggle are also all huge things that people have been wanting, and I'm very very glad they listened.

Peitha is shaping into an absolutely fascinating character too, and it's getting a lot more obvious why she connected to the Wayfinder so quickly... they feel very much cut from the same cloth, two strong leaders fighting to make their worlds better. and yet they're also burdened by the weight of that choice, and the sacrifices that must be made for their vision to be made into reality.

moments like this hit me like a bag of bricks; there's so much going on in the Kryptis homeworld. it's fascinating starting from the perspective of the Ward, seeing them all as just these vicious invaders... to now finding out they have names, ambitions, homes, maybe even families. we're told time and time again that their motivation is fear. the Wanderer, Irja, the little grunts we kill en masse to power the beacons, even Heitor herself.

'There's a version of this world where she joined us.'

like... just thinking about that. man. a version where Heitor hadn't lost hope so completely that by the time we come along, Peitha informs us that she wanted to die-- if only because she knew that at least we'd make it quick. it's horrifying to think about on its own, but the reality that it didn't have to be that way makes it so much worse.

it's... such a clear illustration of why their world has to change. they're fighting and dying to preserve the status quo not because it brings them comfort or privilege, but because they've been living in hell for so long that they don't believe an alternative exists. for as alien as the Kryptis seem to us, we're every bit as alien to them.

it feels like there's a really solid direction here, and I hope that it continues being solid through to the end. I could talk WAY more about my feelings on the story, but I'd better keep going.

I also like the Convergences; they're fun and I hope they survive. having public vs private instanced content seems to cause issues with publics staying populated long-term though, which... concerns me. I STRONGLY prefer publics just because you can bring Jade Bot protocols in, which makes it easier to travel freely and keep boons.

and now that I've dug into all that, uh... let's get to the less fun stuff.

The Bad

there's a lot of things to like about this release, but there's also a lot to... Not. the main 'drop' for Convergences outside of raw essences are Concealed Unstable Kryptis Essence Coffers... lootboxes which can only be opened with an Unstable Kryptis Motivation, which at the moment costs... upwards of 10 Gold per pop if you buy them off the TP. the only other way to get them is grinding tier 2 and 3 rifts, and good luck getting one because they're RARE.

I do not like this direction, for a LOT of reasons. the biggest one should be pretty obvious: it's making a portion of the victory rewards inaccessible to players who can't shell out the gold or the rift farm time to get the keys OUTSIDE the Convergence. the other is that the rewards aren't even worth 11 Gold anyway, so the coffers are dropping rapidly in price while the keys stay high. at this point it's arguably better to just sell the keys on the TP than to ever actually use them. the market on these is gonna get wacky I'm sure.

I don't want to see that become a trend. just.......... no.

the other main gripe I have is that... there's no portal of entry in and out of Inner Nayos. no, really. you can't get in and out at all without porting one way or another. it's right next to the Wizard's Tower but there is no entry point connecting these two maps. I thought I was going insane at first so I turned on the story again while in the Wizard's Tower to see if it'd point me towards a door. nope! it just sticks the story star icon on the Inner Nayos map and calls it a day.

aside from making travel in and out unnecessarily irritating and costly, this also means that you can't easily get alts into the dang map without a TP to friend. otherwise you have to do the story on them, whether you're ready and willing to or not.

I don't like that shift either, and really hope they remedy it when the 'under construction' gate opens in the future. that said, that should have been made available as soon as you finish the story.

and now the final segment, you know where this is going.

The Ugly

it's... short. really, really short. like, no, really. I finished all the story chapters in an hour and a half tops. now at maybe three, four days in I already have enough mastery points to top off the last mastery in the new line. I've map completed the new zone twice. both of the new Vault tasks are done. everything went so so so so fast.

and for reference: this cycle is going to last even longer than the last, based on the Vault reset time period.

additionally, the weaponmaster training underwent a stealth change: the new weapons can no longer be equipped on characters under level 80. this was not listed in the update notes. while that didn't affect me, it does seem kind of cheap to pull the rug on that when a lot of players were using that to level their characters since, well... a lot of core weapons just aren't that great. I can't really blame anyone who would rather use weapons that don't hit like a wet paper towel.

there have also been some... interesting bugs on release, of which the biggest one was unlimited hero's chests per day from the Inner Nayos meta. some people got a month's worth of chests in one day before they turned the chest drops off entirely to fix it.

they're back now, but that was still... something to behold.

I've also heard rumors that the new Legendary Kit from the Vault may be bugged; some players are reporting opening the kit and getting nothing out of it. I can't confirm how frequent that issue is, but... yeah that's a little concerning. I'll hold onto mine for now, just to be safe.

Overall Impression

despite the many sore points mentioned, overall I'm... okay with it. I like what we got, but I wish there was more there to like. from the much smaller Vault selection, to the shorter story, to the single-waypoint but otherwise very cool map that feels like it could have more going on in certain areas... I dunno.

but on the other hand... if my biggest complaint is that I like it enough to want more of it, that's an alright problem to have when we know we're going to get more. I'd be more worried if what we got was a miserable slog and I didn't even want to return to the maps-- and in fact, the opposite is true! I want to return to the map frequently and I want more to do in it-- and mostly I want easier access to it.

my hope is that the slowdown is an indication of resources being put into other backend work, such as the dungeon fixes, the character select screen, and so on. because, realistically, if they can fix up the core more, that would streamline their workflow a LOT and make it easier and quicker to work on things in the future.

I guess in short, my impression is... tentatively optimistic.

that's all I've got on it for now, maybe I'll talk about story more in-depth in the future though because boy I do have a lot of thoughts on that-- which... is part of why I had to redo this post like 6 times. it kept getting way too long and rambly over story. (oops)

[gwtoomanyalts]

I was at the art party on Johanna for most of the night, but switched to Eira as my ex-mordrem there at the end. However, I realized I hadn't updated where she was in the story, or her looks, for quite a while. So, I decided she'd since joined the priory and was exploring the Inner Nayos area for them. God I love how well that oni hand blends in but gives her claws on one hand.

[nice-profession-mechanic]

Nayos is known as the realm of dreams...I have a suspicion the whole realm will transform into less of an eldritch horror landscape once the one guy torturing the world gets killed.

If you lived in a living nightmare and fed off the emotions of other creatures you'd probably not enjoy everyone fearing for their lives and having a king who might one day swoop down from his throne and eat you.

Am a bit curious about the various bits of real architecture and how Starkly they stand out from the natural landscape of outer and inner Nayos.

[legendaryskyscale]

Some doodles of Hass (Has Seen Things)

Hass accidentally ends up in Inner Nayos through one of the rifts that opened in Tyria and now terrorizes the local eyeball kryptis

I had a lotta fun sketch these

[artoriyasart]

I found two npcs that patty mattson plays in guild wars 2 other than peitha....one is a sylvari Astral ward mage, the other one I'm not sure where she is. But both are in inner nayos. I'm glad they are giving her more characters. I'll try and get videos or a voice recording.

[just-eyris-things]

okay soto thoughts but like not very spoilery? teeny tinsy bit spoilery about 3rd map (first part) and how you get there.

so when you get to inner nayos, you start under...a tree? and ngl when i saw this, as a sylvari main i thought oh it looks like the pale tree's roots--DOES SHE REACH SO FAR WITH HER ROOTS THAT SHE REACHES FUCKING DEMON REALM HOLY SHIT IM--

and then i remembered thats not possible. but peitha said that nayos resembles tyria to some extent. so my brain went NAYOS DEMON SYLVARI!??!??!

but of course not :( why would we get such a fun piece of lore

also asura corrupt government storyline when.

[vyleriagw2]

Free from Inner Nayos until the next batch of requirements T.T