Guild Wars 2

so excited for LS3!

IndigoSundown.5419:

What’s more important, in my mind, is just how much will LS3: Ep 1 contain when compared to LS 2, and will it include a new playable area like the SW in addition?

Well it has to contain a new area and was presented as being bigger than LW2. I mean it has to provide content to keep coming people coming back 3 months later and it’s certainly not an instanced single-player story that will do that for a MMO.

It’s probably a part of HoT that they didn’t have time to finish, just like SW looked like a part of HoT they released early.

Personally I was one of the person that wanted expansions, and now I regret it since HoT. I think regular episodes was just more fun. I may reinstall for that.

I wished they were more communicative. The trailer contained a bunch of spoilers and didn’t say anything about the content. With ESO for example you know half a year in advance what the dlc will contain, the amount of armors, dungeons, explorable areas, etc. They have teasers and present the content to the community months before it’s released.

Anyway at the moment this is really positive as they are finally moving away from raids.

So, I’m unclear here. When you say that this release is akin to 9-10 of the biweekly releases, does that imply we’re looking at what, in S2, would be considered basically half of the season?

If so, this seems like a reasonable pace for quarterly-or-more updates. I’m inferring one complete world zone (honestly, this seems like a better way, releasing the zone as a whole, as I know it couldn’t have been easy to design it in pieces before) with several instances, all with their own mastry achievements and a chapter mastry chest?

I’m also going to assume this means a new world boss, either as the cap of a zone meta-event, or as a scheduled part of the new zone like the release world bosses.

Alternately, it may be just the zone, with the world boss being a specific plot hook that isn’t added to the zone until the next update (so you have a full zone to explore and get to know until a world boss comes and shakes it up to start off the next episode/lead to the next zone)

I wouldn’t hope for new maps yet. We don’t know if there is going to be even 1 new zone. They could make a LOT of content by simply creating new event chains in old zones, moving NPCs around and creating whole metas in not-so-populated areas.

If, in the end, there are new maps, I’ll be happy. But I’m not going to have expectations for that.

the news on rata novus is exciting to here from our observerand interesting to here a little about caithe https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/notes-from-rata-novus-partone/
looking forward to july 26th excited to know the news

Ardid.7203:

I wouldn’t hope for new maps yet. We don’t know if there is going to be even 1 new zone. They could make a LOT of content by simply creating new event chains in old zones, moving NPCs around and creating whole metas in not-so-populated areas.

If, in the end, there are new maps, I’ll be happy. But I’m not going to have expectations for that.

I’d say it is pretty likely there are going to be new zone(s)

Mike O Brien.4613:

Reaching sign-off on an episode doesn’t mean we’re done. Now we integrate the episode content with the other updates that ship in this release, and with localized text and voice-over, and we do final testing of all that. To give a sense of the scope of this process, this update has about 1,500 distinct lines of new voice dialog, each of which must be recorded, integrated, and tested in each supported language. For the player character’s voice, we separately record each race/sex combination in each language, so that means 40 actors for each line.

When I read this, the first thing that came to my mind was, how is that not done yet? Trying to juggle 40 people’s schedules and make appointments for them all in two weeks can’t be easy. Never mind that there may be changes to the script which could call for one or more to rerecord their lines. Do you give these guys some warning that they’re going to be called in for such-and-such a time frame?

I think I’ll have to save this question for the next AMA.

Sariel V.7024:

Mike O Brien.4613:

Reaching sign-off on an episode doesn’t mean we’re done. Now we integrate the episode content with the other updates that ship in this release, and with localized text and voice-over, and we do final testing of all that. To give a sense of the scope of this process, this update has about 1,500 distinct lines of new voice dialog, each of which must be recorded, integrated, and tested in each supported language. For the player character’s voice, we separately record each race/sex combination in each language, so that means 40 actors for each line.

When I read this, the first thing that came to my mind was, how is that not done yet? Trying to juggle 40 people’s schedules and make appointments for them all in two weeks can’t be easy. Never mind that there may be changes to the script which could call for one or more to rerecord their lines. Do you give these guys some warning that they’re going to be called in for such-and-such a time frame?

I think I’ll have to save this question for the next AMA.

I don’t believe Mike said that the VOs weren’t done yet. He said that all the components of the release needed to be integrated. The content, game elements, VO, localization, balance, new this or that, updated that or this, etc. — all tested together and made ready to ship, in these last weeks.