“My potions are too strong for you, traveler.”
Potion Sella
Potion Sella
Living Story Season 1
It’s a massive undertaking. It could never be re-released as it was due to the open world format and due to the way the game is coded + resources being put into future content- it would take months to make S1 into the format of S2 and S3. You have to remember, S1 was mostly events and festivals and big open world zergs, so some of the stuff needs rebuilding, if not all of it (since code has since piled on top of it all)
The devs have addressed it as something they’d love to do and we all recognise it as a ridiculous hole in the story that needs better filling than the cutscene we have, but this not a quick or easy piece of work sadly.
While it’s possible; it’s not practical.
Mike O’Brien responding to the comment, Will season 1 ever be playable? There are players like me who would love to play it and even pay for it.
It’s a question that comes up a lot. I have favorite moments I’d love to play again too. But we researched it a while back and realized that restoring and updating Season 1 content, and putting it into episode format, isn’t particularly easier than making new episodes. And we think the community is better served with new episodes.
I don’t think people recognize just how much effort it is going to be to make a repeatable version of LS1. Of course it’s possible; it would just take an enormous amount of resources. And that seems like an unnecessary distraction, given that people are already jealous of ANet diverting any resources to anything that doesn’t fit their idea of a better game.
Out-of-Game, Historical Context
LS1 was designed and implemented as temporary content. It was part of a (since-discarded) plan by ANet to constantly introduce new content and gradually evolve the game, so that many existing maps would be unrecognizable (in terms of challenges, foes, etc). The idea was: much better use of resources to re-use the same zones and so much more exciting to keep adding new life to the existing world. Hence: the term Living World.
It was a great, epic idea and I wish it would have worked. I think part of the issue was ANet’s implementation (they bit off more than they could chew and there were lots of scaling, technical, and reward issues to start with, leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths about the concept). Part of the issue is also what we’re used to: we like repeatable content. We like being able to be absent from a game, without feeling that we missed something important (reward and lore both). We like having the chance do ALL THE THINGS in the game.
LS1 disrupted all our expectations and its implementation was rough (whether flawed or just slow to get going no longer matters). And ANet, sensibly, dropped the idea and turned LS2 into repeatable content.
Background, In Game Experience
There are three aspects that made LS1 epic:
- It was not repeatable. You had to be there at the right time. (Notice this is exactly one of the primary issues that got ANet to drop the original concept: it was both a great idea and a fatal flaw.)
- The open-world battles were epic. Unlike Auric Basin (which has an achievement for defending the city one hundred times), getting in a single victory was a combination of great mapwide teamwork, individual skill, and a bit of luck. It felt amazing each time (compared to DS, which feels disappointing if it’s not over quickly enough).
- The instanced content was extremely challenging for nearly everyone. People scrambled like crazy to find ways to beat it. Depending on who you talk to (and how good their memories are), many would say it’s comparable to today’s fractals (perhaps T3-4 or less).
Final Background: To Make it Repeatable
To make it repeatable, we’d have to drop all three of the things that made it epic: it won’t be dynamic, it won’t include open world mega battles, and it won’t be super challenging for five people. So let’s presume that the only thing we can get is a facsimile of the story, told in chapters.
The original instances were designed for the mechanics of the day. They were designed to be temporary, so little thought was given to making them last. That means: they’d have to be redone, nearly from the ground up.
There were dialogues that took place in the open world, in areas that don’t exist anymore (or have different NPCs, foes now). Those would have to be turned into instanced content.
The open word battles would have to be included somehow, so that’s new cinematics or entirely new encounters meant to model the idea, with shorter cinematics to show the impact on Tyria.
To do all of the above requires rewriting parts of the story, rewriting the instances, redesigning encounters, adding new cinematics. All of that would need to be translated into French, Spanish, German, and Chinese. Some of the voice actors are no longer available, so ANet would have to hire substitutes (and decide whether to redo old dialogue or not — probably not).
In short, it’s an enormous amount of work to get us … another Living Story, which some people have already seen (and can’t possible meet expectations for epic-ness).
———————————————
So, sure, it’s possible. It’s just not practical given the pressures on ANet at this time.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
Developer Quotes
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5dk50e/the_return_of_living_world_season_1_is_important/da5sxjx/
Without saying anything definitively about a re-packaging of Living World Season 1 (because that’s the domain of studio heads to make such decisions) I just thought I would chime in as a story team lead to say that the work to do this would be a significant undertaking, and may in fact be harder to do than creating a new Living World season, given how much has changed in our pipelines since then.
A simple, but specific example is how we do all our VO, which is now in a totally different format that is a lot more flexible for us (it’s how we got player VO back, as well as the ability to have characters walk and talk). Going back to those old content objects and converting them over to the new format would be weeks of work by themselves, not to mention we’d probably want to add player VO to get around the awkward way we had to tell story in that season.
I’ve also taken a look at what it would take to update all the story beats and convert them from using the special event UI to living in the journal and since none of those objects exist (Season 1 didn’t use QuestDef’s which are the objects that show up in the journal) there’s weeks of work there too, as the quests would all need to be created now, and everything would need to be unhooked from the event system and plumbed into the story journal, which on some levels is starting over from scratch given how the underlying story structure is scripted. Some of the gameplay can just get ported over without too much trouble, other things rely on actions/skills/etc. that we’ve since deprecated for perf reasons or to address bugs, so even the idea of copying and pasting encounters isn’t “free”.
I don’t say all this as discouragement for those who would love to see a Season 1 Redux – but I just wanted to clear up any misconceptions that the community might have about the challenges that such an effort would entail. To my knowledge this is still something that we’ve kept on our backlog as there are plenty of devs who also want to see us make such an investment someday. As some have pointed out, we haven’t said no to this, but it hasn’t yet risen to the top of our priority list given our other releases and plans for Guild Wars 2.
I hope that offers a bit more insight into this question.
To add to Matthew’s point, IF we were to undertake such a project I would like to revise, add to, or rewrite sections of that story to make it stronger (similar to how we improved the Personal Story last year). These things take time. Just including voice-over on a project instantly adds two-to-three months for recording and localization and doesn’t include things like prototyping, iteration, script revisions, etc. We couldn’t (and wouldn’t even if we could) simply “port” Season 1 into the new framework. There would be a substantial amount of revision involved. Anyone who thinks it would be “easy” to redo Season 1 doesn’t fully understand the process or the time investment. I wouldn’t expect them to.
Recent Quotes:
ANnet Ben
It would [take] longer than 6 months.
If things went smoothly, with the entire living world team plus extra veteran developers working on it, maybe 6 months is theoretically possible. But with old content, things rarely go smoothly. Issues pop up that you weren’t expecting that increase the amount of time required. And even if it was feasible in 6 months, taking all those developers off of new content just isn’t worth it IMO. We have way cooler things that we can work on.
one of the problems is much of the content is not instanced, and theres also a TON of bugs in that content that would need to be fixed, since our game code and tools have changed so much since then.
ANet Ben:
Question: If it had been even a minor priority when this was first requested back at the start of Season 2 — nearly three years ago! — it’d have been done by now, surely?
Answer from ANet Ben: That would have pushed back everything a lot. Season 3 would be behind, the expansions would have been behind, new content is a better use of developer time. I wish Season 1 had been built differently, but alas it was not.
Question: Any chance that we as players (and surely lot of us are programmers, 3D modelers and coders) could help?
ANet Ben’s Answer: As cool as that sounds, there’s a lot of logistical issues with something like that, and it would still require a lot of dev time to coordinate. Plus, more leak potential.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
the prob is ALL LS1 majority atleast was in the OPEN world as events not instanced….
This…
Is actually a common misconception. Most events were as relevant to the story as Iron Marches mordrem events are to Season 2, without the story step forcing you to do them all. Or even how relevant the Season 3 maps and their events are to the main Season 3 story – ultimately, it’s just world lore building and not “the main plot”.
There are a total of 33 instances which is the main story of Season 1, and with exception of The Lost Shores, Escape from Lion’s Arch, and Battle for Lion’s Arch, this constitutes for about 80%+ of the main storyline. Everything else was just ambient lore, really, and could be re-added without much if any continuity error (especially now that we’re “officially” in a stance of “maps are stuck in time”).
On top of that, except for the three aforementioned releases, most of the open world content that was part of the main story were in the form of idle dialogue – the only real notable exception on top of those three releases, would be the Twisted Marionette (where we first meet Taimi) and Rox’s involvement in Tequatl Rising (which is not really necessary for the main story except for a couple side comments between Rytlock and Rox about all the tasks she’s doing for him).
However, the reason why Season 1 isn’t being refurbished isn’t because of the open world status, but rather because the instances are designed fundamentally differently, and to re-implement them in the story journal would mean rebuilding them from scratch. On top of this, we’ve been told, the sound files have been changed in how they do things, so they would need to re-record all or most of the voiced lines.
Ultimately this leads ArenaNet to the perception that it’s best to keep dredging ahead heedless of the fact that new players are left lost, missing a sizable chunk of the story as well as the main reason why anyone cares about Dragon’s Watch, which has really been the primary story on the protagonist side. They’re continuously responding with “we’d rather get to the future plots, which are awesome and cool” but forgetting the very simple question to ask themselves: is it cool for them, or for the player.
And without knowing why we should care about Braham or Kasjory, the things like Braham’s emotional issues around his mother’s death falls dramatically flat, leaving these “awesome and cool” stories to feel bland, boring, contrived, and forced upon players.
I have good memory, especially when it comes to stories, and even I’m starting to forget why I ever liked Braham when he was first introduced.
Dear ANet writers,
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
the prob is ALL LS1 majority atleast was in the OPEN world as events not instanced….
This…
Is actually a common misconception. Most events were as relevant to the story as Iron Marches mordrem events are to Season 2, without the story step forcing you to do them all. Or even how relevant the Season 3 maps and their events are to the main Season 3 story – ultimately, it’s just world lore building and not “the main plot”.
There are a total of 33 instances which is the main story of Season 1, and with exception of The Lost Shores, Escape from Lion’s Arch, and Battle for Lion’s Arch, this constitutes for about 80%+ of the main storyline. Everything else was just ambient lore, really, and could be re-added without much if any continuity error (especially now that we’re “officially” in a stance of “maps are stuck in time”).
On top of that, except for the three aforementioned releases, most of the open world content that was part of the main story were in the form of idle dialogue – the only real notable exception on top of those three releases, would be the Twisted Marionette (where we first meet Taimi) and Rox’s involvement in Tequatl Rising (which is not really necessary for the main story except for a couple side comments between Rytlock and Rox about all the tasks she’s doing for him).
However, the reason why Season 1 isn’t being refurbished isn’t because of the open world status, but rather because the instances are designed fundamentally differently, and to re-implement them in the story journal would mean rebuilding them from scratch. On top of this, we’ve been told, the sound files have been changed in how they do things, so they would need to re-record all or most of the voiced lines.
Ultimately this leads ArenaNet to the perception that it’s best to keep dredging ahead heedless of the fact that new players are left lost, missing a sizable chunk of the story as well as the main reason why anyone cares about Dragon’s Watch, which has really been the primary story on the protagonist side. They’re continuously responding with “we’d rather get to the future plots, which are awesome and cool” but forgetting the very simple question to ask themselves: is it cool for them, or for the player.
And without knowing why we should care about Braham or Kasjory, the things like Braham’s emotional issues around his mother’s death falls dramatically flat, leaving these “awesome and cool” stories to feel bland, boring, contrived, and forced upon players.
I have good memory, especially when it comes to stories, and even I’m starting to forget why I ever liked Braham when he was first introduced.
Well said. I’ve been trying to address the misconception of it being mostly open world. I honestly think they need to make doing this more of a priority than they seem to be doing. As time goes on, the % of players that experienced any of season 1 shrinks, and season 1 did so much of the setup work for what we’re doing now, including introducing major NPCs and a lot of world building, that not having it be available in the story is a gaping hole that results in a lot of cognitive dissonance for anyone who cares about lore and story.
I think they need to stop making excuses and do it.
I have good memory, especially when it comes to stories, and even I’m starting to forget why I ever liked Braham when he was first introduced.
Oh I have a good memory of why I never liked him. It’s mostly that I’m not a fan of how he’s been portrayed, both the acting (or direction; hard to know which sometimes) and some of the writing is …awkward (in a bad way).
I think they need to stop making excuses and do it.
Try reading some of what they have actually said about why they aren’t planning on doing it, before claiming they are “making excuses.”
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”