Guild Wars 2

Something I’ve been wondering since the Beta.

You know those traditional MMO quests – “Go kill X”, “Get X”, “Protect X”, “Do X”.
Everyone in GW2 seems to dislike them.
But, how are GW2 Events and Hearts any different?
Centaurs are attacking, go kill them.
Dredge are attacking, kill them.
Escort allies and and kill the enemies.
The only thing that’s different from traditional quests is that you don’t have to take them or talk to NPC to get the reward.

Admittedly there are some unique events and hearts too, but they’re far too few.

I dislike hearts and avoid them, but on the topic of events, many of them are interesting, you don’t have the competing over mobs like in other mmos that makes me so mad either.

I just like the idea that seeing another player on your faction should never be a negative.

Most events are dynamic. While not as much as most people hoped for, they usually trigger other events according to if you failed or succeeded. This progression changes the area in which it occurs, sometimes contesting waypoints and making them unusable, or disabling NPCs until the area is cleared out/event is successful (e.g. harpy feathers, among other items or simply vendors). There are also examples of areas being accessible by doing an event, by a door that is now open or a bridge that you helped build. Some of these events are part of a very long chain (as happens in Orr) that can culminate in larger group events and bosses.

Heart quests are less different from traditional quests. While a progress bar is almost the same as a kill count (kill 10 rats), you can usually fill out that bar in different ways other than killing. Most of us opt for killing mobs since it adds loot to the quest. There’s situations, however, where it is much faster to collect something, water some plants, feed some rabbits, etc. Not only that, sometimes the objectives of a heart quest and a dynamic event overlap – killing a certain mob can contribute to both.
To me, it makes a huge difference that heart quests are triggered just by walking into an area. Talking to the NPC isn’t necessary to get the quest or to be rewarded for it, saving time and the boredom of walking back and forth unnecessarily.

Hearts were added because people got lost without them and didn’t know where to go or what to do. The goal was to guide people and make them stick around a little for a DE to pop out.

As for DE being different from traditional quests : well you see the event. You see for yourself that something is going on. When you are asked to kill centaurs, you don’t have to wander in the woods looking for immobile centaurs. You are in a camp that’s being attacked by centaurs or you are trying to attack a centaur camp.

I still fail to see how are events dynamic.
Lets say it’s a generic MMO “X” and instead of taking quests, they randomly activate/spawn all over the world and everyone can participate without talking to any NPC.
Is the fact that they activate “randomly” what makes them dynamic?

Nick.6972:

I still fail to see how are events dynamic.
Lets say it’s a generic MMO “X” and instead of taking quests, they randomly activate/spawn all over the world and everyone can participate without talking to any NPC.
Is the fact that they activate “randomly” what makes them dynamic?

Guess that the dynamic part is that completing an event can open another… and completing that can open another… or failed one can open another.
All of them involve killing thing mostly. But hey! Killing things is fun!!

Like the Nabo Terrace, failing to defend it open the save the prisioner event, and then the retaking.
It’s fells more… lively than your average MMORPG.

But, nothing wrong with regular quest either.

Yesterday after that Liadri burned me out of the game I played Tera for a while. With my cute elf archer I rode to the next quest hub. Gatherer all the quest and went to commit genocide on the local fauna.
Was fun.
It’s more static that the GW2 experience. But it’s fun either way.
Specially the BAMs. As an archer. As a warrior they’re a pain in the kitty…

Hearts are traditional quests that you don’t have to hand stuff in, in order to finish it. Even at the peak of GW2 hype I think most people saw this. I’ve always maintained that Hearts were a mistake and GW2 would be a better game if the whole game focused your attention more on meta-chains

What makes Dynamic events a bit better is context.

Here:
Dynamic Event:
NPC: “Centaurs are attacking, kill them!”
Player: “Why?”
NPC: “Cause they’re attacking the village!”
Player: “…”
NPC “They’ll contest the waypoint!!”
Player: “NOT THE WAYPOINT!!”

Traditional quest:
NPC: “Help! Centaurs are attacking”
Player: “You sure cause they’re kinda standing there…”
NPC: “No… they’re burning down the… village… maybe”
Player: “I don’t see them doing that”
NPC: “Well I’ll give you some EXP if you kill them”
Player: “K Then”

I mean the end result is the same but the small amount immersion and consequences make it a bit more fun to play them. They also chain together often so you usually get a full mini-story as you kill stuff on the way.

The dynamic events aren’t all random, some can be triggered and some are chains, it’s not as dynamic as it could be but it’s a huge step in the right direction compared to traditional questing.

I think the main point is: when you log in the state of the zone isn’t always exactly the same.

This is why I like Gw2 hearts and events better than the usuall quests.

In Lotro wich game I have played longest of every Online game so far, they have ordenary quest chains. At the end of my time playing lotro I started playing GW2, but a few month after GW2 release Lotro had an expansion and I started playing it. It was okay, but the quests they where the same old ‘I need help prepairing rations for the troups will you get the ingreediensfor me?’, ‘The troups are down, they need someone to give them back their will to fight’, ‘Some soldiers are wounded, please have a look at them’ and ‘We are ready to go, will tell the troups to move out?’. For almost 30-60 minutes I spend at a camp talking to soldiers seeing what they have to say with no voiceover reading reading reading stuff I don’t care about… I don’t wanna know if that soldier met Boromir a day ago and so on. Finally I stop reading and just skip skip skip and the quests becomes just like farming exp by talking to people.
The expansion promo is like;’ all 600+ quests!’ And 550 of the quests are just tedious chores and when it is some quests where you have to go kill something it is like; Kill 20 Sapper, 5 Warmasters and 3 Defilers and when that is done I have to go back to questgiver (Most of the time) and hand in the quest, get a new quest where I have to go back to the Orc Camp and kill 1 Uruk-hai Leader and collect his medalleon.

The Events and Hearts in GW2 is more like; To compleate this Task(Heart) Kill stuff, Water plants, Block skritt holes, throw stuff and so on and that is for one task and most tasks are made on the fly. But sure there is tasks that are tedious too like the one where you have to trade stuff with the ettins. But there are like 10 tasks like this in the whole game and point number two what makes it special is that I don’t have to do these tasks to level up but in other games it is more or less important to not skip quests since then you will not be level enough to do next lines of quests if I don’t go out and level on killing stuff for a year.
Why I like Events, just as my second point to why tasks is better that quests, I don’t have to do them to level up to be able to do other Events somewhere else. The only event’s I don’t like is like the once where you have to collect # stuff and bring it to the guy with an arrow in a basket icon. But the best stuff with events is that if they are booring thare are more or less always other players working on it and can help you doing it and it will go faster. But quests in other MMO’s are mostly non-group friendly and usually non grouped players can interrupt your questing buy collecting or killing the guys you where going to get or kill.

I hope you get what I mean, but I can count even more reasons why GW2 system is so much better but these are the biggest reasons.

But there is one thing the usuall quests system leads to wich I do miss in GW2 and that is more Mini-Dungeons ( A little dungeons with small puzzles and a little boss at the end), There are a few but I would like more.

Its all about presentation and context. At the end you’re right you’re doing the same actions. IF you dig deep enough you’re doing the same thing in every game.. pushing buttons or changing resistance on potentiometers but you wouldnt say a driving game is the same as an adventure right? why? you’re still pushing buttons in both games? cause presentation and context is the core of the experience.

Like others pointed out there is a big difference between being told stop the centaurs attacking the village when all you see is the centaurs standing there and if you let the game running for 10 years and do nothing about them centaurs they’ll never so much as scratch the paint on a single building to what you get with dynamic events.

In Dynamic events then centaurs actually march in, try to kill everyone, start fires etc.. and if you fail they’ll kill off a bunch of npcs, take some prisoners and occupy the village. Then you’ll have to free those prisoners and free the village. Things happen in a logical flow. At the end of the day sure you’re still killing centaurs but the experience of killing those centaurs is very different.

And by the way even 2 different MMOs that employ traditional questing can be different from each other. The storyline in a quest can also have an effect on context and experience. If the story falls on to generic excuses it will be way boring then if you have a story you actually care about even if in both games you’ll most likely be doing the same stuff. killing 10 mobs cause you need meet cause you’re hungry is much worst then say kill 10 mobs and take their blood so we find whats causing the rabbid like diseases. In both cases you’ll be doing the same thing but in the 2nd you’re at least left with a mystery you might want to solve and thus you’d have that anticipation of finding out what comes next while kill 10 mobs for food would have no such motivator.

The difference is it really is dynamic.

I can be at some small outpost, talking with a vendor and unpacking my bags, just minding my own business. Next thing I know, the outpost is under attack – huge herds of Centaurs are galloping through, careening and skittering around, killing the NPCs, yelling their war cries. The NPCs pick up arms to fight them back, some die. The vendor I was selling to has run off with a sword in his hand, crying to us to rally to him. Now more players are showing up and the event scales larger and larger, bigger attacks, champs instead of veterans. I can pick up arms and choose to join the battle at hand or run off if I feel overpowered. If I run off and they lose the battle, that outpost will be destroyed. I may see the smoking ruins from the distance, for the time being I can no longer sell my wares there.

When you understand that this event is part of a series or chain of events, that it was triggered by a smaller event on the other side of the map – I mean it could be something as simple as a player losing a snowball fight with some children, then you really understand how very different it is from exclamation points NPCs pinned to a map.

Nick.6972:

I still fail to see how are events dynamic.
Lets say it’s a generic MMO “X” and instead of taking quests, they randomly activate/spawn all over the world and everyone can participate without talking to any NPC.
Is the fact that they activate “randomly” what makes them dynamic?

“Lets say it’s a generic MMO and then have the quests not behave in any way like generic MMO quests, yet say they’re the same anyway!”

Heart quests are superior to standard MMO generic quests in that there are multiple ways to complete them, and you don’t have to run back+forth to a questgiver.

The bigger appeal of events isn’t just that they can be dynamic and change the state of the zone, but that they put the Multiplayer back into MMO – everyone in an event area is on the same page, doing the same thing, and on the same step along the storyline. No phasing, no “Oh, I’ve already done that quest”. And, you know what’s going on as soon as you enter an area. They make the world feel more ‘alive’

I can’t help but compare Guild Wars 2 to Everquest 2, the other MMO I play, and WoW, which I used to play.

In EQ 2, there are a lot of questlines that would work much better as GW2-style events or renown hearts, just from starting zones alone! New Halaas opens up with you trying to protect a band of refugees trying to make it to New Halaas, with orc attacks against the refugees, and a war front between the Orcs and Frost Dwarves. Unfortunately, the “Run Along the Next area”, exposition requiring talking to NPCs, and static set pieces going around don’t really leave the player with the feeling they’re actually accomplishing anything.

That said, traditional quests can improve diversity in content – Instead of having a collection quest be “Everyone run around grabbing as many of X item as possible!”, they can have “Grab 1 each of 7 different types of items” or similar.

…actually, now that I think about it, you CAN have events be more deep and diverse than GW2 makes them. The potential is VERY much there.

Hearts are effectively the same as those old-style generic quests. The thing that makes hearts better is that they are streamlined.

Generic quest:
1. Find NPC
2. Talk to NPC.
3. Accept quest.
4. Read quest journal to figure out what to do.
5. Run possibly miles to a specific location to do the quest.
6. Do the quest.
7. Run all the way back to the NPC.
8. Turn the quest in and get rewards.
9. Repeat for each and every individual task in the area.

Heart:

1. Wander aimlessly into the area.
2. Do a variety of activities in the area, each one corresponding to an individual task (or quest) that counts towards the heart. Anywhere from 1 to 10 activities (or quests) may count toward one heart.

tl;dr: do w/e you want in the area.

3. Have rewards mailed to you as you run to the next area.

Notice with hearts there is no backtracking and no need to talk to an NPC. And again, multiple activities count toward a heart. If you hate collecting X things, you can kill X things instead. It’s simpler, faster, easier, more convenient, and less tedious.

It was mentioned once, but I’ll mention it again. Hearts were added late in beta as a way to coax players to areas where events where taking place. They aren’t quests, they aren’t meant to be quests. They just a way to slow you down for a moment.

As far as I know the dynamic in dynamic events alludes to scaling. They are dynamic in that the amount of enemies available changes based on the number players in the area. The only game that I’m aware of that had anything like this was City of Heroes, where mission instances would scale up if you brought a party with you.

As far as why this is better than ordinary quests from previous MMOs, it isn’t and no one who implemented it has ever claimed it was better. It is simply different. If you don’t like quests then you might like this. If you do like quests you still might like this. Different means different, not better, not worse, just different.

Well, hearts do equal quests and they are the same thing as traditional quests (kill X, gather Y, defend Z, etc).

However, hearts do it much differently than traditional quests and the way they are presented cleverly masks that it is a “traditional” quest so by doing it a player never feels like it is a quest.

For example, in a traditional quest you have to go to someone, pick up the quest, go to an area to do it, walk back and turn it in. It can, therefore, feel like a chore. Since hearts don’t require you to do that because they can be activated upon entering a certain area and most hearts often have multiple things to do in said heart, the game cleverly and effectively masks the fact that it is a “quest”. It doesn’t feel like a quest because you didn’t pick up anything from anyone and you simply walked somewhere and decided to help an npc by doing your own thing.

IMO, GW2’s heart system>traditional quests. It’s one of the things Anet nailed when they created this game.

Kal Spiro.9745:

As far as I know the dynamic in dynamic events alludes to scaling. They are dynamic in that the amount of enemies available changes based on the number players in the area. The only game that I’m aware of that had anything like this was City of Heroes, where mission instances would scale up if you brought a party with you.

Dynamic also refers to the way that events can spawn/cause more events and possibly change the NPC distribution and control depending on how they pan out.

However, Guild Wars 2 only scratches the potential of dynamic quests and events – part of it is caused by how simple they are (Go to circled area and perform single assigned task when the time comes, and usually only one event in any given area at a time – if there are two in an area, they’re usually completely independent and accidental.

The only thing that kinda bothers me in GW2 is the quest reward system. On one hand, it’s nice that quests don’t give what amounts to Vendor Trash you may or may not need – but the universal “Quest Award Currency” (Karma) feels less like surrogate quest reward allotment, and more like just another currency, and the economic problems that entails – Why buy the quest award you just earned when you can instead save it for the next one, or for the items that seem to be divorced from quest rewards entirely?

I keep reflecting on how Everquest 2 would look like if it took its questlines and turned them into GW2 renown hearts and dynamic events, because traditional questlines tend to be more complex and nuanced than current dynamic events and renown hearts.

The “dynamic” part of alot of this ultimately falls flat on it’s face because…
(Psttt….here’s a little secret…)
Some events will replay itself, over…and over…and over…and over.
It being started at random doesn’t make it dynamic, just makes it random, IE: without purpose.

It’s less a problem of GW2 and just a problem of MMO games trying to be a unique experience 100% of the time. You just can’t do it, unless you’ve programmed an infinite amount of choices and if the AI is very, very smart.

For example, centaurs rushing the village at a random occurrence rate, burning down housing, getting chased out and doing that cycle over and over again is NOT dynamic…it’s just 1 event repeated.

However, it gets dynamic when centaurs rush the village, burn down housing, get chased out THEN doing something truly different.
That’s the hard part.

Kal Spiro.9745:

It was mentioned once, but I’ll mention it again. Hearts were added late in beta as a way to coax players to areas where events where taking place. They aren’t quests, they aren’t meant to be quests. They just a way to slow you down for a moment.

They also added them to increase the requirements for area completion as before adding the hearts, most areas could be run thru and completed in a matter of minutes. I recently cleared all 3 Orr areas (no Hearts) on a character and it took less time than Queensdale.

Kal Spiro.9745:

It was mentioned once, but I’ll mention it again. Hearts were added late in beta as a way to coax players to areas where events where taking place. They aren’t quests, they aren’t meant to be quests. They just a way to slow you down for a moment.

As far as I know the dynamic in dynamic events alludes to scaling. They are dynamic in that the amount of enemies available changes based on the number players in the area. The only game that I’m aware of that had anything like this was City of Heroes, where mission instances would scale up if you brought a party with you.

As far as why this is better than ordinary quests from previous MMOs, it isn’t and no one who implemented it has ever claimed it was better. It is simply different. If you don’t like quests then you might like this. If you do like quests you still might like this. Different means different, not better, not worse, just different.

Dynamic events are called dynamic because their progression isnt static (scaling is part of it in a way) like traditional quests. In your typical quest you always have the same flow. Kill 10 bears for juicy bear steaks so we dont starve in the winter. If you do that quest a million times you will always kill 10 bears and npc will never starve for winter. Dynamic events are different. if you do them a million times you will have many variants some subtle differences such as having to kill a different amount of bears because of scaling like you said. Some because of the outcome. We might fail to kill enough bears and then the bears end up attacking the village who wanted the meat and suddenly instead of well fed npcs we got npcs fighting for their life not just against hunger but also bears. Its the flow that can potentially change each time you play it that makes it dynamic.

nethykins.7986:

The “dynamic” part of alot of this ultimately falls flat on it’s face because…
(Psttt….here’s a little secret…)
Some events will replay itself, over…and over…and over…and over.
It being started at random doesn’t make it dynamic, just makes it random, IE: without purpose.

It’s less a problem of GW2 and just a problem of MMO games trying to be a unique experience 100% of the time. You just can’t do it, unless you’ve programmed an infinite amount of choices and if the AI is very, very smart.

For example, centaurs rushing the village at a random occurrence rate, burning down housing, getting chased out and doing that cycle over and over again is NOT dynamic…it’s just 1 event repeated.

However, it gets dynamic when centaurs rush the village, burn down housing, get chased out THEN doing something truly different.
That’s the hard part.

dynamic ,random and triggers are entirely different things.

All dynamic events are cyclic in nature and they’re cleverly designed to be that way.

Centaurs rushing the village burning everything getting chased out over and over again would not be dynamic you’re right but thats not how it is in gw2. Unlike traditional quests where it would be impossible for the centuars to ever win the fight and actually not be chased out that can very well happen. In most cases the fight begins even prior to that.

Lets take an actual example Nebo Terrace.

At its core The siege of Nebo terrace has 3 dynamic events associated with it who’s flow will change depending on the out come of each. You got the actual siege if you succeed it stops there the attack is repelled. naturally after some time the centaurs will regroup and try again (more on this bellow *1) And btw this cyclic system isnt wrong, no war is given up just because 1 battle fails. If you look at strategic cities like Jerusalem and such They have been conquered and reconquered back a lot of times. Never mind how many times a siege failed and the attackers tried again later. Anyhow back on subject. If the centuars actually succeed in taking over Nebo terrace you’ll have to liberate nebo terrace and rescue the prisoners the centuars took when they captured the town.

Thats the core of it but there are events that happen at the periphery of all of this as well.

There is one event far to north in the centuar encampment where you can kill the harathi bombardier and warmaster. If you manage it stops there if you fail they setup trebuchets sites that will bombard nebo terrace until they’re destroyed making the defence trickier.

There is also another event in the same area *1 attacking the rock dogs being trained by the centaurs. If you succeed then when they invade they will have no rock dogs with them, if you fail they will have rock dogs with them.

Thats not all there is yet another event to the north The tamini commanders are trying to rally re-inforcements if you kill them they will not manage if you fail then the siege on nebo terrace will have extra groups of centaurs .

That means each time you come across nebo terrace dynamic events you can have quite a variety of situations the out come if far from simply centaurs come in burn everything and you beat them out. they could have rock dogs with them or not. Their numbers could be greater. You might come and find nebo terrace occupied. you could be walking north of nebo terrace and come across a bunch of centuars escorting nebo terrace prisoners. you could find trebuchets bombarding the city. You could find yourself facing tamini reinforcements and thats what makes it dynamic. its not the same static sequence each and every time it varies depending on what happens not just in the area itself but also elsewhere.

Nick.6972:

Something I’ve been wondering since the Beta.

You know those traditional MMO quests – “Go kill X”, “Get X”, “Protect X”, “Do X”.
Everyone in GW2 seems to dislike them.
But, how are GW2 Events and Hearts any different?
Centaurs are attacking, go kill them.
Dredge are attacking, kill them.
Escort allies and and kill the enemies.
The only thing that’s different from traditional quests is that you don’t have to take them or talk to NPC to get the reward.

Admittedly there are some unique events and hearts too, but they’re far too few.

Actually, a good portion of hearts allow to finish them without ever killing anything. It’s just that most of the time you don’t bother, because going for the pacifist approach takes way longer than just mowing everything down that counts towards it.

As for events, yes, quite a few just involve killing stuff or gather Y amount of something. But I think that’s just credit due to the open world. Whenever anything requires some coordination that goes beyond ‘slay X of Y’ or ‘gather X of Z’, you see quite a few people not being able to grasp the concept of what to do.
Open world content is supposed for everybody, so Joe the GS warrior with his 100b spam should be able to contribute as well, without having to wrap his head around something more complex.
How exactly would you go and design events that don’t involve a) killing mobs, b) gather things, c) destroy things. What else is there to do with the game mechanics? Usually it just boils down to one of those.
Or you make things like having the mobs invulnerable and have them be distracted, as opposed to being killable. But then Joe will whack away at the mob, not knowing why it doesn’t do anything, still contribute to the scaling of the event and have it fail (and don’t tell me you don’t ALWAYS see quite a few people starting to attack invulnerable mobs, they don’t get it).

What I rather dislike is
- event scaling
- event respawn

Those are often quite broken and ALWAYS way too fast.
As in, defend this caravan. But oops, there are 8 players in vicinity, which means we will just quadruple the enemy spawns, uplevel them, upgrade their ranks but leave the escort NPCs the same, which means they’ll get instagibbed from the mob 4 levels higher than them*.
(*slight exaggeration to get a point across)
Or the fact that I can solo an event easily in about 10-20 seconds, but if I want to be social and call it out or someone else is there, suddenly the scaling makes the same task take 1-3 minutes. So I either do it alone, because it’s a lot less annoying and faster, or just hand in one thing / kill one mob and leave again. Truly epic.

Lastly, the event respawn being a solid 10 minutes for most events. Which means I do an event, then roam a bit, find another one, do that, look at my inventory and bam, the first one is back. It truly feels like my deeds did a difference. I’m such a hero.
Even better are the huge event chains that would be awesome if they had any impact whatsoever to get their story across.
‘Oh woe, we are being terrorized by X, we should start a counter attack!’, and you gather, and you push, and you defend, and you push further, allies gather, you make the final break, kill the enemy leader … and the friendly NPCs declare victory, walk back to their original location and are ready to go again.
I remember killing a champion shark in Timerline Falls with a guildie. The fight took us a good 3-5 minutes, as we were only 2 and levelling. We were victorious, checked inventory and made some space, not even ONE MINUTE later the shark was back up again. Sigh.

Especially with megaservers I understand the idea, but seriously. Make event respawns slower. It feels so futile and breaks what little immersion this game has.
Plus, it would seriously increase replay value for alts if you didn’t already know 95% of all events on a map since you casually walked by and they threw themselves at you.