In regards to the living story content: unless you’ve read up all the stuff online about the history/background/characters of the Living Story, you’d be completely clueless. I even HAD read up on the background for Southsun Cove but still when I went through the Portal at LA to the Cove I felt lost/confused/no idea what was happening (story wise).
For example, I see the short stories released on the website which giver deeper lore/backstory. My suggestion is – can’t you just make some type of cinematic in-game for this? Maybe not the short stories but at least for a general overview of what the heck is going on. Like, when you first talk to the main person or when you first go through the portal? (NOT one of those unexciting ‘person on the left, person on the right, blurry background’ dialogue cinematics, but the one’s where you change the angle of the camera and zoom-in-out on things.). In fact, before you released GW2 I remember the video’s where you displayed different character class skills. Those were EPIC! Who was responsible for ousting those? You guys had a great idea going with these but it seems like every interesting piece of story in the game gets replaced with either wall of text on the website, or loads of ‘trahearne’ style in-game emotionless dialogue
Seems like a better option than manually having to talk to every NPC just to figure out what the heck is going on. And I know there’s the old ‘oh we don’t have the resources to do this, etc’, but it’s obvious you already have the technical tools to make the camera magic happen ingame (exactly what you did with the pre-release character skill videos. Also like what you did with sections of Fractals and Frost&Flame dungeon.) Don’t make it some long complicated cinematic, something short and to the point but helps the player understand.
If you’re interested in the player base really ‘feeling’ like part of what’s going on in the Living Story, I would suggest something along these lines.
Thoughts? ANET?
tl;dr – use short cinematics to give us an idea wth is going on with living story releases