Guild Wars 2

Something which has bothered me about open-world, and is the primary reason I don’t participate in it any longer, is the lack of lengthy chain events.

Because of the mostly unlinked and short-lived nature of the current dynamic events players often quickly complete an event, than just wander around looking for another or wait for the ones they have just completed to revive. This not only makes leveling up tedious (especially in lower event density areas), but creates a lower replay-value once the player has completed an area.

Then you have the rewards. Farming the same events over and over in Orr can be decent money and karma, but as stated above this is dull. Temple events on the other hand can be fun due to longer, yet still short, chains as well as a boss at the end, yet the rewards are somewhat lacking. Dragons take the worst part from both of these with extremely short chains and generally poor rewards, yet the scale of the fight can be fun.

Something which addresses both these things, and is what I strongly feel we need to improve open-world, is the karka event that took place in the lost shores map. This event had a very long event chain with the end result being a boss followed by good rewards. Sadly this was a one-off event and the map is now considered dead content for the most part.

This formula needs to be repeated again in many of the open-world maps. The long event chain would keep people interested as they wouldn’t have to stand in place waiting for events to revive and given the length of the event chain you can give strong rewards at the end. However, one change I suggest would be making the rewards based around how much of the event chain you have completed in order to stop people from just jumping in at the end for full rewards.

These long chain events could possibly be added to extend current event chains, or entirely new ones could be added, and having multiple of these throughout the game would allow players to be constantly engaged in meaningful content rather than sitting around waiting for something to happen.

I think a lot of what you’re saying is true. I also think the devs know this and are trying something different with the living-story content which will play out over a long time and have many things to do and events to come.

On the other hand I do think a lot of the events have very little impact on the world besides this waypoint not being teleportable to or you can’t buy stuff from this temple etc. I think it’d be nice if they had more large events like the karka event which had really good rewards and I think they could even make those events run once every week or something and it wouldn’t be too imbalanced.

They could even make some large-scale events that take like 50 or 100 people to queue up like the start-up events do in WvW and that’d be cool because with the guesting system the way it is now, people could oragnize raids (oh yeah, raids) to do them like, for example, the dragon bosses only on a grander scale.

I have a dream of a large-scale PvE map LIKE WvW where cross-server people could go to fight a never-ending opposing force (the dragons?) and camps and things had to be constantly guarded and stuff and where depending on how the battle was going it’d actually affect the world…

Then again, that might be really hard to implement and a lot of people might hate the idea… maybe I’m just rambling.

I’d rather have these events run frequently allowing players to cycle between multiple lengthy chain events eliminating wait times. If they were weekly you’d have to be on at a specific time or you’d only be able to participate in the repeatable event once per week for decent rewards, defeating much of my reason behind this.

Your idea of a PvE area that resembles WvW sounds pretty cool. Perhaps this could be similar in WvW in the fact that you fight and progress for a week then it resets. It would be pretty awesome for a server to work towards progressing to fight the dragon, every day having new objectives and the progress of previous days having an impact on the battle. At the end of the week the boss fight could commence and after that it would reset.

Thinking of that more, I think something like that would have been far better suited for things like elder dragon fights. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t done it yet, but the role your character plays as well as the means of taking it down all felt disappointing. In GW1 you felt like the hero that took down the lich, shiro, the destroyers, and even a god, but in this game it really feels like you are some lackey. A World versus Dragon system where the players of the server have to team up to progress and take down the dragon would have made it much more satisfying.

Anyone else want to give their opinion on this?

Well, they did say that they are working on adding more events into the game now, I bet some of these will be chained, so there’s a chance some will be longer that the ones we see now.

Yes, I would like more, longer, event chains.

6-12 events all chained, that tell a story along the way. Doesn’t after be a big, significant story, just a story, a good bit of comedy is good too…