Guild Wars 2

One of the greatest things I noticed in the ramp up to Guild Wars 2 Launch was that Guild Wars 2 would deliver news of what was happening in a new way. NPC’s would approach players to warn that their town was under fire, for example. Let me pull from the GW2 Manifesto a bit to lay the ground for where I am going with this.

Some games mostly tell story through quest text. But we’ve all clicked so many exclamation points and accepted so many quests in our lives that we’re pretty immune to quest text at this point.
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Let’s say a village is being terrorized by bandits. You don’t want to find out about that because there’s a villager standing there motionless with an exclamation mark over his head who says when you click on him, “Help, we’re being terrorized by bandits.” You want to find out like you would in GW2: because the bandits are attacking, chasing villagers through the streets, slaying them and setting their houses on fire.

When you examine the way that invasion information is being handed out to players it’s being done in the same way we’re alerted to server maintenance. A bright yellow message beamed onto your screen exclaiming that Scarlett’s Minions are assaulting such and such zone. While this may be an effective stopgap, it is not immersive.

My suggestion is to re-examine how you deliver this message to the player. Possibilities could be having an npc that already approaches players on other events let players know. Or to have Scarlett (AI) private message people. Perhaps when players look at the map screen, invasion zones could even flash red.

I think there are different ways this could be communicated with players in a sense that wouldn’t break immersion, than what we’re currently looking at.