Guild Wars 2

Firstly, it’s important to point out that as it is it’s not Living Story, it’s Living World, now before I get blasted for being pedantic let me explain why I think the distinction is important.

With the Personal Story the idea was to track and guide you through a particular story and that worked well because you were in control of progression so you obviously had to be present for every step of the story and as a result you couldn’t miss parts of your story.

With the Living World it carries on regardless of what you’re doing and doesn’t wait for you to be around, you can miss whole sections quite easily (if you’re away for a week or two because of work, for example).

Now, ArenaNets intention is to give us a reason to log in now, not next week or next month and that’s not a bad goal, the more people playing the better, but it doesn’t do much to entice people back, it’s been said many times already but if someone were to log in now what would you see in the living world? A few festival events in the “Living World” and enough “Living Story” to take about an hour. You would even miss some previous parts of the story (like talking to the councillors) already before it the event actually ends. I think this is too much miss-able content.

In order to “fix” this I would love to see them split the whole Living World concept into two sections, Living World and World Story.

• The Living World would be the events and activities that come and go, the holographs, the pinatas, the effigies, all that stuff. This is the account wide, temporary content that you log in now or miss. This would typically run for the duration of the release and would not tend to contain very limited time content.
• The World Story would be handled like the Personal Story. ArenaNet would take the story elements and handle them like they did the Personal Story, adding more steps so that it would tell the story in-game rather than through the website or through the emails or heralds, this would run alongside and separately to the characters Personal Story. Like the Personal Story this would be permanent, one-time per character content. This could either run from the very start to the end chronologically or be organised into it’s natural story arcs.

This way the amount of content available constantly grows and so if someone either joins or rejoins the game in a years time they can play through both their Personal Story and their World Story.

I started playing Guild Wars about a year before GW2 launched and the amount of content in the game was fantastic because it had seven years of content added to it (including the campaigns and expansions of course). Now which would be better, if in seven years time someone joins GW2 and sees seven years worth of World Story content and the current Living World content or someone joining GW2 and seeing that months Living World content with no way to experience all that had gone before?

Being told you missed great content is a poor alternative to actually playing through that great content on a character.

Living Story is supposed to be different from the character Story.

It was introduced to slowly apply small permanent changes as well as leaving some items to the players testing new features in short time watching for opinions of the players themselves.

“Living Story” means it’s a story that is progressing in “live time”.
If you miss something you obviously missed it usually for forever.
If you miss a certain event near you then you missed it.

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

Living Story is supposed to be different from the character Story.

It was introduced to slowly apply small permanent changes as well as leaving some items to the players testing new features in short time watching for opinions of the players themselves.

“Living Story” means it’s a story that is progressing in “live time”.
If you miss something you obviously missed it usually for forever.
If you miss a certain event near you then you missed it.

It’s Living World not Living Story.

I know all that I acknowledge it in my post. This is a suggestion about changing it to build up content that can be enjoyed now or years into the future.

It’s a living story because it’s telling a story that is progressing over time.

The story that is being told has it’s own life. It does not depend on me, you or anyone. It depends on itself.

Personal story depends on you because it’s the >>personal<< story.
Living story depends on nothing because it lives itself.

Living world is what we already have. Dynamic events, world bosses, event chains etc. that is living world. A world that lives on it own changing without the player required.
The only thing missing to make living world complete is that NPC’s are able to do quests themselves just as well. Getting a balance between good and evil. That’s what would make the living world perfect.

From my understand and how I would interpret the developers opinion and decision.

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

From my understand and how I would interpret the developers opinion and decision.

Again I know what it is, I know what the differences are between the Living World and Personal Story and how ArenaNet have designed them to work, I’m just making a suggestion about a change I’d like to see.

Now, I fully understand if you like the way it works already but this is a suggestion that I think would improve the game.