Guild Wars 2

I’ve been thinking. What if instead of Living Story Arena net would improve storytelling in Tyria through adding more and more Dynamic Events in each location? Increasing them? Would it be more like “Living World” than through LS?

I think yes, but I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something. Let’s talk about it.

For example these Centaurs in Kryta. What do they do? Repeatedly attacking. But is it in any way change the situation in location? I think no. It looks like repeatable, over and over and over again content without any real consequences. Just stupidly repeatable over and over again, Dynamic Events.

But is there a real thread? Can we loose all we fight for in this location? No. All these DE are pretty superficial. So called breathing world are not so breathing. I don’t feel it.

Arena could do so much more by adding chains of DE in each location, increasing and storytelling and motivate spending time in open pve, instead of dungeons, fractals.

For example if we let it, Centaurs could have taken almost all location.
Let’s imagine that they have taken Gendarran Fields. All is left it’s Vigil Fortress and it’s under the siege.
Let the Vigil Fortress be the only one, what Centaurs can’t take, and you can retake Rendarran Fields starting from pushing Centaurs away from the Vigil Fortress.
Or they can take Vigil Fortress as well…

All of it is just an example, how Arena could improve the living world by adding more DE chains in locations, instead of making these LS with stupid temporary stuff.

I my point of view, what I’ve described, is what Arena should work on, for increasing content, not on this Living Story with its temporary stuff.

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe it’s impossible? Or possible but is much harder to make? If much harder, personally I don’t see it as the reason not to do it.

I’m a proponent of developing story through the evolution of a living world that doesn’t come and go in monthly installments. I was very happy to read some of Colin’s thinking on this in his latest blog post (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/) and recent interviews. I’m looking forward to more focus on a permanent living world going forward.

I’m actually game for both. (Both! Both is good). More in depth, rich DEs and LS.

That sounds great on paper, if mobs can capture key areas and you have to take them back from the mobs, but it doesn’t work so great in practice.

Imagine that the centaurs manage to push all the way through to queensdale and then take queensdale, well that’s the starting area, now a new player is starting in an enemy controlled area. So what, most of the waypoints are contested and doing any renown heart turns into a real pain in the kitten because you not only have the mobs for the renown heart, you have the centaurs to deal with too; and then what happens over the years when the game loses popularity? Yeah people will still play it but not nearly as many. Most people will be level 80 and focusing on end game content. Then you have this new player that comes in to try the game and has to take on the almost entire centaur controlled queensdale by himself because none of the level 80s care about a low level area like that. And with how farmable queensdale is, maybe it’ll never get like that with dalies, but what about wayfarer foothills? Who really goes there, and if you go there, do you ever go to the level 5 area there? No you dont.

The war with the centaurs is done. Through the dynamic events you can see what happened. With the influx of new recruits and volunteers (the players) the centaurs slowly got pushed back from queensdale to their home, harathi hinterlands and ultimately defeated. Very few centaurs actually survived and some seeing their race nearly destroyed have tried to make peace as evident by presence of the centaur ambassador in LA. Most centaurs still resent humans and want to fight but realize that if they continue fighting they will face extinction.

TL;DR if you look closely enough you actually end two wars in GW2.

I agree events need to be deeper and more involved. Make them more epic, make them world changing. Make them go beyond those 4 crappy southsun settlements. Make the impact felt in other zones. Anybody remember back all the way back to beta. Anybody remember those surveys they had in the beta about the events. They would ask you questions about the events and one of the questions was “did it feel like it impacted the world around you?” The answer I always gave was NO. NO NO NO. They have failed to make their dynamic events impactful. Make it feel like God kitten Sauron is building an army at freakin mount doom and if people dont stop him then divinities reach will fall to the blackness. Then when your rockin self comes along and stops him (or the Karka Queen, or whatever) Anets needs to make the town people remember you and how awesome you are.

I think the towns people remembering your actions and making stuff cheaper for you to buy from them or cheaper way point cost or whatever because of how awesome you were for saving them from impending disaster would be a good start. Hopefully they come up with something to further the reward system that deepens the story or the lore and doesnt make it give you more gear with higher stats on the armor or weapons or trinkets.

Thanks for reading.

TLDR; Anet please, make events more fun, like what you started doing back with the cursed shore.

I agree with ya OP, that they would’ve done better to build upon existing DE’s.

If, as Rainbow says, that the humans defeated the centaurs, then that should be an area for change. The now hostile (red) centaurs should be neutral (yellow). They could have a LS type event where peace is made and new DE’s could then replace the old ones (maybe helping keep the peace and helping to rebuild both human and centaur settlements).

At which point are the dragons going to be gone? Since they are supposedly defeated according to any player who has actually fought and defeated them.

Is that not was a persistant world really is? You do something that makes a lasting impact on the game world and in doing so, you open up a door to something new to experience?

Why not have deeper and more engaging DE’s that help tell the story of the LS? i.e. Telling the story through gameplay, not cut scenes.

You have to understand what anet was going for. They wanted every player to experience the war, not just the few that were playing at launch, because not every player has defeated the centaurs. It’s like what you said with the risen that they keep spawning after you defeat zhaitan even though they technically couldn’t. Other players will go through that area that havent defeated zhaitan and they’re the hero of the story.

It’s impossible to have a world that actually changes with you as you play in any open world game, much less an MMO. It all has to be programmed into the game, they have to plan for every single thing you would do. And with thousands of players you can’t code for everything they might or might not do.

TheDaiBish.9735:

Why not have deeper and more engaging DE’s that help tell the story of the LS? i.e. Telling the story through gameplay, not cut scenes.

They tried that at first, having one time events, but many people complained, myself included. I have to go to work so I have to miss this one time event so I can eat. Again, great idea of paper, doesnt work in execution.

The big centaur meta in harathi is my fav event chain the game, even more so in an on level group. A big hectic brawl, it lasts for a while giving that epic feel. It then uses that epic feel to tell the story. No cutscenes, no bloated blurb. But, you feel like you won a major battle. Megadestroyer much the same (still no bonus chest tho!!)

More of this is very much welcome. Tequatl, behe, shatterer. All would benefit from greater lead in and storytelling from enhanced DEs

OP, your thread title is non descriptive. Couldn’t make heads or tails what DE or LS even meant since no one ever talks extensively about them to the point of needing to abbreviate them.

Title should have been something like “Dynamic Event vs Living Story”.

As for the topic, the two are meant to serve different purposes. One is to provide playable content for leveling purposes while the other is an aversion to keep veteran players logging in. Granted the two have overlap, but the purpose they are created for is different.

One has to ask, what limitations are reached with the content. You want events to ultimately result in contested or commandeered settlements, but what does that ultimately accomplish? What happens when players participate in the content (like some do now)? As is, with the Centaurs, the events lead up to a group event. I can solo a lot of the events leading up to the end but after I reach the end that has multiple champions and field effects all over the place that it takes a huge hassle to solo, I either wait for more people to join or i don’t do it. Results: Centaurs are pushed back by the efforts of a few but they cannot seal the deal alone. i.e. status quo.

If neglect of content resulted in Divinity’s Reach being taken over (extreme example), that would require players not participating in the content. That’s like an anti-incentive to do the content. Just because you want something different, you yell at all the noobs trying to level to stop participating?

The Living Story feels like a story on rails. It proceeds regardless of your participation but never the less, it moves forward and changes. It’s suppose to embody the fact that, the world is alive and it changes whether you’re there or not which is true for the real world as well. Relying on players’ actions to change the overworld is a double-edged sword.

What happens if one server makes a huge group-wide organized effort to alter the world in an extreme way while other servers just do whatever and change the world in another way? Would be cool if that actually could happen but it’s beyond the limitations of the current MMO systems.

A decent compromise would be, taking the war with the centaurs again, if in a new update, the centaurs are completely defeated and all the events in the affected zones are changed to bandits/white mantle/primordus attacks and the centaur forces make war in a new zone with different factions to show “the war happen and now this result is permanant”.

…or we can just demand Anet get their servers on the cloud so they can make astronomical leaps in potential game features because we lack all knowledge of the technical limitations. Your choice.

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

TheDaiBish.9735:

Why not have deeper and more engaging DE’s that help tell the story of the LS? i.e. Telling the story through gameplay, not cut scenes.

They tried that at first, having one time events, but many people complained, myself included. I have to go to work so I have to miss this one time event so I can eat. Again, great idea of paper, doesnt work in execution.

It doesn’t need to be a one-time event. Look at the events that were specific to Flame and Frost. Sure, they weren’t all that difficult, but they still told the player something is happening; they complemented the overarching story through gameplay.

I agree… but…

First It’s IMPERATIVE that they give their players some sort of /bugged switch or something that when cast by a majority of nearby players around the Dynamic Event, triggers it to restart itself or force itself to start when it’s clearly stuck. ..The Northern Pact route in Straits of Devastation for example has been getting stuck every night since 2 patches ago and they’re not addressing it.

Every major patch brings atleast a few of these bugs up when there’s no logical explanation for it and no evidence that their Live team even touched any of the triggers for those events. They seem to just break on their own after certain patches and their whole Test Krewe only seems to be PvP’ers so any Balance problems or Show-Stopping bugs just go right through their testing process like a sieve b/c no one’s looking for them and the test server isn’t Public like it should be

See that’s the issue that needs to be thrown away. This idea that every person who buys the game gets to experience the exact same content regardless if they bought it at launch or a year later. As long as you maintain this status quo, you can never have a game that allows the player to have a meaningful impact. Either the game world never changes until the developers make that change with a update or new expansion (even then, this has been nothing more than adding more while leaving the original content there) or they develop a game where players can make a lasting impact and no two people experience the game in the same way, even if they started it at the same time.

Unfortunately GW2 can’t do the latter because it is designed to be static. The developers take the time to develop the next ‘chapter’ to the living story. Where that’s all it is. A story they are telling and the players have limited interaction. We are being fed this story chapter by chapter with enough time between releases to not only allow for development but enough time to allow the majority of players to experience the same content.

It is what it is because for it to be anything else, they would have to redesign the game. They would have (should have) to design the game to be ‘self designing’. That the game engine itself is capable of reacting to the choices players make both on an individual level and on a mass group level and make changes to the game accordingly.

All the designers would need to do is design the building blocks (models and textures) for the game to use. Whether this is something as simple as a house built/ruined or something bigger and more complex like an entire zone remodeled to show a large crater where a dormant volcano used to be after it blew up.

ilr.9675:

I agree… but…

First It’s IMPERATIVE that they give their players some sort of /bugged switch or something that when cast by a majority of nearby players around the Dynamic Event, triggers it to restart itself or force itself to start when it’s clearly stuck. ..The Northern Pact route in Straits of Devastation for example has been getting stuck every night since 2 patches ago and they’re not addressing it.

Every major patch brings atleast a few of these bugs up when there’s no logical explanation for it and no evidence that their Live team even touched any of the triggers for those events. They seem to just break on their own after certain patches and their whole Test Krewe only seems to be PvP’ers so any Balance problems or Show-Stopping bugs just go right through their testing process b/c no one’s looking for them.

That’s just the nature of any program. One line of code wont agree with something else and will break something completely unrelated. It takes time to find and fix these bugs.

ilr.9675:

Every major patch brings atleast a few of these bugs up when there’s no logical explanation for it and no evidence that their Live team even touched any of the triggers for those events.

TheDaiBish.9735:

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And that’s EXACTLY what I’m saying… Is give the PLAYERS the ability to work around the bugs directly. That way it doesn’t matter so much when it takes them 2 weeks or 2 months to get around to fixing the Broken D.E.’s

ilr.9675:

TheDaiBish.9735:

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And that’s EXACTLY what I’m saying… Is give the PLAYERS the ability to work around the bugs directly. That way it doesn’t matter so much when it takes them 2 weeks or 2 months to get around to fixing the Broken D.E.’s

Providing it’s done in a way that isn’t exploitable (continuously resetting the event / portion of the event for lootz), I agree.