Guild Wars 2

Chain’s are solid, cycle’s are consistent. Those are some nice qualities to Dynamic Events. The flip side of those is that DE’s are linear and quickly repetitive. I think it’s worth investigating multipath DE’s. Why? Choice, people like it. You know it, I know it.

I’d like to see events where players have to perform multiple objects simultaneously different consequences. Say we have two positions to capture, but only the resources to hold one. People do their thing and try to capture one of the places. The first place that get’s captured gets held, but later (when there’s more reinforcements) on there’s an event to try and capture the other.

Another example. Lets say there’s something time sensitive, destroying 3 “magical” capacitors at roughly the same time, because they repair each other or face the wrath of some kind of consequence… powerful evil magical creature, saving a town from a giant magical weapon firing or it has to be rebuilt, an asuran gate opens allowing reinforcements to push back the pact… you know normal magical fantasy stuff.

Let’s start to see the Evolution of the Dynamic Event (I know it’s been one month and I’m already saying “show me more” even when I’m not finished with anything other than having a char at max level, but hey I have high expectations). Good start with the linear and cyclical stuff. Pictures start with basic shapes, now that you have the basics start making some “masterworks” (zing); oh and doing all that other important stuff too like bug fixes, exploit closing, profession balance, holiday events, working on expansions, rolling out free content, and new features…

yeah…
Good luck with all that, but definitely focus on evolving DE’s too.

Thanks!

Too many events are “defeat x waves”, so I wouldn’t mind a bit more variety in the event department.

I had thought that DEs were supposed to work the way you described and was quite surprised to find out they were just Chains with a Good and a Bad consequence. They considered that “branching”, but I don’t.

It would be very nice to see dynamic events have multiple paths to choose. This would increase the replayability of the DE and provide more depth to the “X waves of y”. I’m not exactly sure how this would work. I’ve stumped myself coming up with a good example, but this is what I have so far:

DE has 2 goals: Destroy attacking enemy forces, keep your lord alive. If the lord dies but you kill all of the defenders, the town is safe and a DE is spawned to get revenge. If the lord is left alive but the village destroyed, a DE is spawned to retreat to safety. If the Lord is alive and the town saved, a DE is spawned to go destroy stuff.

The potential problem here is that they already had some branching events early in their initial testing. Apparently it created player conflict, as some people want to see event X, and therefor do everything they can to make sure that event takes place, which often meant yelling at other players I guess.

So I definitely see the merit to this, but it would have to be designed carefully not to repeat this mistake that they felt they had to avoid.

I will admit, my favorite DEs are ones where failure spawns a sort of “make it better” DE, or where it has an impact on the world, e.g. when the pirates blow up the bridge in Lornar’s Pass.

If that’s really an issue then go with the option that gives players multiple sub-events to take part in, but all sub-events are required for the event to fully succeed and design it so it’s not feasible for players to take part in more than one sub-event at a time.

Depending on the success/failure of each sub-event have different scenarios that can play out.