Guild Wars 2

Since story missions are extremely segmented, i think ArenaNet missed out on a lot of opportunity to make the story consistent and engaging as group content. If i wanted to play solo, i wouldn’t be playing an MMORPG. I don’t consider zerging alongside other players to be playing WITH them, i consider it to be a cop out to the depth of the first game.

With that said, i have an idea to implement open world event chains that start from any portal leading to the given area except the portals that lead to higher level zones. The purpose, of course, would to have more flow, direction, and story to each area. If there are multiple portals from lower zones into a given zone, the paths should meet up somewhere in the map and perhaps cascade into the next zone or any number of zones to give more of a “living world” feeling. I really, truly feel that there is some untapped depth to this system than can be unlocked through these concepts. This idea could even tie into the production of the scavenger hunt quests that are hopefully being conceptualized at this point.

Ideally the events would explain a lot about the landscape, the politics, dangers, lore, and other various tidbits about the given map. I think this would give players a better opportunity to feel like they are playing with each other and experiencing something meaningful in the open world that isn’t just people meeting up, zerging an event, and then scattering like selfish little pigs.

I think it’s important to have this injection of story depth and directional flow to the world. Perhaps these chain quests could be scripted as character-based as to not jeopardize their impact by repeating over and over. Like instance content, but not.
There’s just too many breaks in the action for most areas.

This idea is a bit incomplete so i welcome any advice, criticism, additions, or feedback.

I’m sure more DEs will be added. I don’t like the idea of mixing personal story and DEs though, seems like a bad idea.

It wouldn’t be personal story, it would be a more focused map story that would run throughout the map and give players more direction and backstory to what is going on. It could either be added as 5-man instance content in a map-story format or just in the open world as a very long chain of events that spans an hour or more and directs story across the map. Ideally, this would cause people to look for groups, actually stick together to experience something in the open world rather (through reward and story intrigue) than zerging an event and running off in all directions afterward. Currently, areas feel disjoint and mish-moshed together…skritt and pirates right next to each other, it makes the world feel like it’s thrown together rather than naturally existing and alive. I feel like this would help direct gameplay a lot better if done well.