Guild Wars 2

I logged in today to witness the sandstorm in Dry Top for the first time.

While a very small part of Guild Wars 2, it felt

SUPERBLY AWESOME.

I get the feeling that if Arena Net implemented Dynamic Environments, it would further complete the game and hold its place for years to come.

Actually, what I’m about to post here is a bit different from just Dynamic Environments.

Creating a world of Adventure in Tyria. Take a further step from traditional systems of old MMOs.

For example, making the open world dangerous.

This is the most overlooked feature of any open world, and is mostly ignored.

All enemies can be seen from far, far away. If there are a group of hostiles, most ignore you while you hack their buddies to death.

Everything except a select few types of mobs (champions) are easy to kill. They are playthings against your mighty sword or bow.

Everything feels static.

Guild Wars 2 is a position where these kinds of things should (I hope) further support their view of what I believe is “a living, breathing world”.

So, a small picture:

Imagine Jormag. About 50 people doing it, lovely. What if there was a blizzard? It’s harder to see, your view distance and ability to target far away has been decreased greatly. Your character is losing HP slowly and moves a little bit slower.

What if it was night time and just absolutely POURING in… Eternal Battlegrounds? Commanders would have to take into account weather conditions. Less visibility, puddles that form across the land that can be used as water fields. Dynamic Environments. What if lightning strikes a tree (for gathering), destroys it, and makes a small fire field around while the broken part will deal 15k+ damage when it lands on people in a random direction?

Dynamic Environment Conditions, or DEC for short. I believe this is the last piece of the game that the open world is missing, and would complete it, at least in terms of having a living, breathing world.

It consists of three things: Weather, Light, and Habitual.

Weather is straight forward. It’s raining. It’s snowing. There’s a sandstorm. There’s a heat wave. These add a constant condition for a long time that players in that zone need to deal with. Mechanically, it doesn’t do much. Maybe visibility and target range is reduced, but visually, it would be amazing. Mobs would have a lower aggro range at night than day?

Light. Is it day time, morning, night? Again, with visibility. Imagine Frostgorge sound: Its nightime, and there’s a blizzard brewing. How awesome would it be to go around doing the champion train like that?

Habitual. What if the champion train could only be done in 1 zone, which changes, every day? Meaning, you can’t go to queensdale and just train your way to easy money. You’d need people to scout the world, find the champions, set up, then do it that way. Of course, changes in champion mob spawns would have to change for certain areas. And every day, it might be a different scenario as well.

One day, the train is in Kessex Hills doing their regular train. Sometime next week, the train is back in Kessex Hills again, but its raining, and its super dark. The next time, it might be just dark, normal, in the morning with a mist, etc. Sometimes its in Dredgehaunt, where the sun is shining down and everyone has a movement speed buff. But another time, there’s a heavy blizzard slowing down everyone’s movement, which applies a blindness that lasts 10 seconds, every 10 seconds.

Having the same environment, but in a different condition, is important in keeping a world alive. You don’t even need to update it. This kind of thing will last forever and could liven up old content without actually changing it.

But enough of repeating the same thing over and over again (ironically), there would be some things about this people would not be happy about:

Change. A lot of people hate change. Enough said here. Maybe I’ll be wrong this time.

All of their old, easy stuff now made complicated.

Why did you take away queensdale train blah blahblabhlabhah.

But its these kinds of things that I see a lot of people also complaining about: All we do is champion train and its boring.

In the end, you’ll be feeling a lot better traveling all over the world, always changing, always with a different condition, despite the fact that its the same queensdale, its the same frostgorge, its the same map in the same spots.

With this system, it wouldn’t be a daily routine you repeat: although you do, the routine must be fine tuned every day. Your days of mindlessly repeating TOSB would be over. People would need to scout (for the beginning only. How epic does that just sound: Sending scouts to every corner of Tyria), people would need to be ready to deal with environmental hazards such as blizzards, heatwaves, and sandstorms, people would need to come together and play together. Regular questing would be a different experience for everyone: The first heart quest in queensdale? Some people may have experienced it normally, others had to do it in the pouring rain. Some had to fight piranhas in a lake, others had to do it while it was pitch black shudders. Maps that people hardly visit get populated. Every day, its a zone map. There’s reason to places, and it changes every day.

That would be like having an adventure in Tyria, no?

Queensdale Champ train? No such thing. ; )

OP, that sounds really cool in one’s mind and perhaps on paper, but in reality, such extremes especially in low lvl maps may prove very detrimental for new players. I’m all for dynamic weather but u have to consider how tiring it may become having to battle it all the time, where it actually debilitates you to such an extent. However, being randomly generated, it may work.

I tell you one thing, in gw1 The Realm of Torment, it was an area where Abbadon was imprisoned and it had several maps, most of which had different environmental conditions and people hated them. Granted, these conditions were not generated by the weather, but were just there, so adding weather to that aspect may prove very immersive.

Ultimately, i’m all for more of dynamic and severe weather effects in gw2, but another thing u also may consider is the performance. I for eg; lag bad enough at jormag event as is, add more effects and ur performance drops further, but at the same time, your idea sounds really cool and i would like to see something like that happen.

Tiger Ashante.1792:

OP, that sounds really cool in one’s mind and perhaps on paper, but in reality, such extremes especially in low lvl maps may prove very detrimental for new players. I’m all for dynamic weather but u have to consider how tiring it may become having to battle it all the time, where it actually debilitates you to such an extent. However, being randomly generated, it may work.

I tell you one thing, in gw1 The Realm of Torment, it was an area where Abbadon was imprisoned and it had several maps, most of which had different environmental conditions and people hated them. Granted, these conditions were not generated by the weather, but were just there, so adding weather to that aspect may prove very immersive.

Ultimately, i’m all for more of dynamic and severe weather effects in gw2, but another thing u also may consider is the performance. I for eg; lag bad enough at jormag event as is, add more effects and ur performance drops further, but at the same time, your idea sounds really cool and i would like to see something like that happen.

I think new players would actually find it really cool. In fact, this would be detrimental to existing players because its a change. Too used to sunny skies every day 24/7 for the past 2 years. As far as “extreme” goes: the content at the beginning is laughably easy.

As far as graphics go, the sandstorm is an example. If no one is having trouble with that, I’m sure it shouldn’t affect any other area as much. That or have a separate slider for weather as well. Not too sure on this one.

I think environmental conditions could be left out, such as a blizzard applying a -10% movement speed debuff or something. But if anything: the weather conditions cannot do damage, it must be possible for someone to just AFK anywhere not near mobs.

Something I noticed myself, there is no real weather in GW2. I noticed a what supposed to be a rain while waiting for Teq but was more like someone taking a leak from a plane. The snow is the same, it’s like 2 flakes per square meter with all details cranked up, would be cool to have snow blizzards that reduce visibility the same way the dust storms do in Dry Top.
I won’t go as far as OP’s idea of dynamic weather events since that would be alot of work for the devs, but dynamic weather at least would bring up some freshness to the existing zones. Yet again, all the cool weather effects are DX11, but I would be happy with the stylized DX9 they are using right now aswell.

I think having some environmental hazards would be nice, or simply more realistic nights in some zones. Perhaps if they add something like a light-source back item made specifically for these things, such as a torch etc could also help in the dark caves we have in some places of the game. One of them is in Dry Top where you can grab a torch and also in the wvw puzzle. Replacing the item kit with a back item or something else would allow players to still fight normally, except in a dark cavern or night. However, weather that slows people down and deals damage is probably not such a good idea because it would just become an annoyance if you play a game for so long. They could add the audio/visual effects, perhaps even the water fields you mention during heavy rain. That way it would be more of an added thing rather than a win/loss situation.

On another note, to reduce lag issues they could perhaps add an option to hide weather effects for people with non-gaming PC’s.

WEXXES.2378:

I get the feeling that if Arena Net implemented Dynamic Environments, it would further complete the game and hold its place for years to come.

This very much this. There was a thread many moons ago when the suggestion forum still existed that basically revolved around night time being different from day time, adding new mobs or events etc. Although there’s a wealth of other things you can do under the title of dynamic environments.

WEXXES.2378:

Habitual. What if the champion train could only be done in 1 zone, which changes, every day? Meaning, you can’t go to queensdale and just train your way to easy money. You’d need people to scout the world, find the champions, set up, then do it that way. Of course, changes in champion mob spawns would have to change for certain areas. And every day, it might be a different scenario as well.

The Champ train isn’t an intended or supported feature.

Tiger Ashante.1792:

Ultimately, i’m all for more of dynamic and severe weather effects in gw2, but another thing u also may consider is the performance. I for eg; lag bad enough at jormag event as is, add more effects and ur performance drops further, but at the same time, your idea sounds really cool and i would like to see something like that happen.

Implementation is probably the reason make or break thing here. I imagine to implement such a system on all maps would be a massive effort on ANet’s side.

WEXXES.2378:

As far as “extreme” goes: the content at the beginning is laughably easy.

The focus shouldn’t be on difficulty (or rather solely on difficulty although adding new challenges would be welcome) it should be on variety of experience. Environmental conditions changing mobs and which events spawns it far more interesting then a snow storm that gives conditions. If the champ train has taught us anything that players will always gravitate towards the easiest content that is the most rewarding. Adding system that increase difficulty would be something players would actively avoid. Adding a system that changes and alters how players experience and enjoy a given map is far more appealing, and yes these experiences could include more difficult challenges but should not be designed with difficulty in mind.

CureForLiving.5360:

The focus shouldn’t be on difficulty (or rather solely on difficulty although adding new challenges would be welcome) it should be on variety of experience…

I think you misunderstood my intention with that part.

I was quoting the other guy earlier on how he said having dynamic weather in low level areas might make it too difficult to do anything, in which I replied the content at lower levels is laughably easy and if it did become a bit more difficult (which I doubt, it doesn’t add combat advantage to mobs and at most, it just limits visibility), it still wouldn’t be enough to make it impossible.

As for implementation of this system, Guild Wars 2 has high hopes of having such a system. If you notice when you enter a cave or something, their lighting system is client based. That means it depends where you are standing, changes the light source around your character, etc. You can test this when you enter the cave in Dry Top: as soon as it goes dark, turn around. The outside will be dark as well, indicating its client based. It wouldn’t be difficult to do that based on a timer for an entire map. It would be difficult and time consuming if it were based on where you were standing, but we are talking about whole zones here: the only places they would have to disable a feature within a zone are places where you have to go inside something. And there’s not too much of that is there.

And lastly, concerning the champion train: it is not a supported feature or anything, true. That doesn’t change the fact hundreds of people do it every day in the same maps. What ANet could do here is, even without the weather system, turn that champion train into a better feature. It’s already part of a daily, how about a reward for making one full round? The catch is that the champion mobs only spawn in maybe 1-2 maps only for the day, or maybe even for only 3-4 hours at most, or maybe even just a few rounds only. The idea behind this is to turn something we already have, make it a little better, and make people go around all over Tyria, including the least favorite and least populated maps, a lot more often.

Having weather change would further make it feel different every time, despite them being on the same map.