Guild Wars 2

So the other day, I was playing an alt. on the first real order of whispers quest (apple merchant). As I showed up in destroyed lions arch, and entered the instance, I noticed the ‘Apple merchant’ standing in the middle of the abandoned road with his cart of apples. When my character brings up that I need to contact a whispers agent, and the merchant yells to a nonexistent crowd that’s he’s only selling apples, nothing more. Later, he talks about the tavern that we were both in, even though neither of us ever went near an inn. This broke a lot of immersion for me, and I would have hoped that arena net would’ve fixed it :/

It gets better when a several-mission section of the personal story is dedicated to defending Lion’s Arch, complete with heroic sacrifices.

Whoops.

It is not a mistake though.
It is simply the fact that they can’t/won’t store multiple versions of the same map on the server, and as such the personal story uses the “live” maps for there missions.

They have commented on this earlier and said something about it being explained in the future.

I noticed this as well when doing the personal story on alts. I was surprised there was no pop up message to explain the destruction of LA. If any of you recall from GW1, if you were say a Nightfall or Factions character going to Prophecies and doing one of the earlier missions there, you’d actually get a message saying you were about to relive events as they happened long ago. Of course that would only work here if the pre destruction LA map was used.

That is pretty embarassing. Time to introduce some phasing…

They are poison apples now and everyone who bought them fell into a coma and disintegrated.

I like to imagine that Tybalt was driven mad by the destruction of Lion’s Arch, as he already had a bit of a tenuous hold on his sanity, and he is just speaking to people who aren’t there or perhaps their “spirits”

It’s a pretty goofy situation. My guardian recently returned to LA after the Battle of Claw Island, and the next step was fighting off Risen on the beaches of a totally abandoned town. Fort Mariner is in ruins, and it was equal parts hilarious and pitiful to see the Vigil NPCs milling about in a literal crater.

I’m sure there are reasons why they’re using the live version of LA instead of a historical version, but in-game, it makes absolutely no sense. While I’m sympathetic to the problems of having the Living Story and Personal Story take place both simultaneously and one-after-the-other, problems like this aren’t a surprise, and I’d expect them to be better planned-for.

fnordette.4139:

I like to imagine that Tybalt was driven mad by the destruction of Lion’s Arch, as he already had a bit of a tenuous hold on his sanity, and he is just speaking to people who aren’t there or perhaps their “spirits”

Saaaaadd faaaaacce. T_____T

Players always used to complain that nothing ever changed, the world was at war but nobody died, and so on. Nothing ever changed because it would louse up the personal story of course. Nonetheless, players kept complaining and kept pressing for the world to change and now you have it, in your personal story. You can’t blame Anet for not wanting to rewrite, recode, and retest the personal story just to put in a near identical personal story that would be thrown away again after a month.

Wanting them to use Lion’s Arch (Non-Destroyed) for personal story instances there instead of Lion’s Arch (Destroyed) is hardly the same as wanting them to substantially rewrite the personal story. Silly as defending an empty Lion’s Arch is, it’s not practical to rewrite around it, but showing the story instance of the zone the way it was makes a lot more sense. I might know that, outside the instance, the city is abandoned, but at least I wouldn’t see Tybalt shouting to an empty plaza.

NEVER, EVER break character. The show must go on!

In my opinion it is not up to date with other games’ technologies. Blizzard introduced phasing in 2010. With this method it was possible to have altered versions of the map even when other players were around. And anet doesn’t even manage to have this with an INSTANCED version. It’s embarassing and doesn’t fit a AAA game. It’s goofy and not well-thought-out.