Guild Wars 2

Excelvior.8520:

date set?

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/11006/Guild-Wars-2-Living-Story-Season-3-Out-of-the-Shadows-Begins-July-26th.html

And they couldn’t have said that on the forums? Sheesh.
Communication…

Teniz.5249:

Anyone here that thinks they can manage to make a comeback with living story #3 after the expansion flop? (Serious Question)

I kinda lost all my hope and faith in the development of GW2

Just because you say “expansion flop”, doesn’t mean others agree with you. I have gotten a lot of hours of enjoyment from it, and am sure to get more with LS3. They might have made a bad decision here or there, but tell me who doesn’t do that in life?

Thanks for the update Mo, looking forward to what you have in store for us.

Astralporing.1957:

Excelvior.8520:

date set?

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/11006/Guild-Wars-2-Living-Story-Season-3-Out-of-the-Shadows-Begins-July-26th.html

And they couldn’t have said that on the forums? Sheesh.
Communication…

And they may have jumped the gun on releasing the article since the information it is referring to was given during E3.

Excelvior.8520:

date set?

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/11006/Guild-Wars-2-Living-Story-Season-3-Out-of-the-Shadows-Begins-July-26th.html

As I thought.

Also there will be a new Fractal and it looks like that Fractals will get their own Storyline. This could also be interesting.

Walhalla.5473:

Excelvior.8520:

date set?

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/11006/Guild-Wars-2-Living-Story-Season-3-Out-of-the-Shadows-Begins-July-26th.html

As I thought.

Also there will be a new Fractal and it looks like that Fractals will get their own Storyline. This could also be interesting.

I didn’t see anything in that article about fractals. Where did you get it?

Berelious.3290:

Walhalla.5473:

Excelvior.8520:

date set?

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/11006/Guild-Wars-2-Living-Story-Season-3-Out-of-the-Shadows-Begins-July-26th.html

As I thought.

Also there will be a new Fractal and it looks like that Fractals will get their own Storyline. This could also be interesting.

I didn’t see anything in that article about fractals. Where did you get it?

There was some info way earlier, but it was at best at “definitely maybe this year. Or not.” status.

Leaa.2943:

Ok i am baffled at the answers here. People are complaining that there are only one episode coming and i wonder why? I can understand if this is the first time you will interact with the living story and don’t get how it is working, but if it is not then why the complaints?

Every living story comes in episodes and have since the first season. This is how it is done and how we want it to be done. This is what makes it special. How about you adjust to how this game is making things instead of jumping on the whining train before you even get to try it?

Anyway back to topic, and it is great to finally hear something and i look forward to play through it.

I’ve been here since before day one. The reason this is not how living world has been handled before is the cadence going from a 2 week cycle to who knows what release.

Saying this is how it’s always been makes you sound like the new kid on the block.

Buy Heart of Thorns and we’ll scrap the release cycle was never said, not even once. Buy Heart of Thorns and have access to future content was, but it’s been a LONG time waiting and this is what we get?

“Nostalgic” about the 2 week release cycle? Anet never once said that was going away while they flogged an over priced expansion that now officially is worth even less.

New player if you’re unhappy? No, try old school.

Berelious.3290:

Walhalla.5473:

Excelvior.8520:

date set?

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/11006/Guild-Wars-2-Living-Story-Season-3-Out-of-the-Shadows-Begins-July-26th.html

As I thought.

Also there will be a new Fractal and it looks like that Fractals will get their own Storyline. This could also be interesting.

I didn’t see anything in that article about fractals. Where did you get it?

http://massivelyop.com/2016/07/12/a-sneak-peek-at-guild-wars-2s-living-world-season-3-episode-1-out-of-the-shadows/

There are different News Sites now reporting about it. The Embargo seems to be lifted.

Figured that the NDA dropped at UTC 0 with MO’s post. So 6 months/26 weeks after the Winter Quarterly Update.

“Out of the Shadows”. I better hurry up and do the mini content.

Rose Solane.1027:

“because we sacrificed so much to be able to ship that frequently” is the part that isn’t clear to me. What does Mo means with that? But reading all the other comments I realize that there is a lot more in MO’s post that can be interpreted in many ways.

I think that is in reference to horrible bugs we saw in some of the chapters of LS1 and 2. Bugs they couldn’t fix due to the ephemeral nature of the LS1 (they only persisted for a month) and waited until LS2 was finished before having time to fix.

Emperor Ramzort.8043:

All I read is “we have done a lot of work and it’s not ready yet. It is big though, but we will be bundling a bunch of other stuff in there that is not Living Story. Oh, and it won’t be coming this month.” Nice PR piece.

Thought exactly the same, “Hey guys, we’re still alive and doing some stuff just so you know, and it’s gonna be big stuff, really, but we also throw in so other stuff, because you know, the one big stuff actually isn’t that big so we need the other stuff to make it actually look like big stuff. And as always, soon™.”….

Thank you for the message, Mo. Looking forward to what the teams have accomplished with their hard work!

Aidenwolf.5964:

Buy Heart of Thorns for living story (as we knew it) and new legendary weapons… Fail, best of luck selling me another xpac.

So true… and the last content draught was when HoT was coming!?

I know GW1 isn’t GW2 but at least I knew what I was getting (maps/professions/ lengthy story). I feel kinda tricked at buying pre HoT because they didn’t deliver.

nevertheless.. something is coming and we should be happy about it instead of pulling his post to pieces and dwelling on the past.. maybe they will surprise us in a good way

Aidan Savage.2078:

Assuming each line’s an average of 15 words, that’s 1500 lines, 40 repetitions, for a total of just under a million words. Assuming a modest conversational speed of 1wps, that’s still 250 hours of recording to be done. Even at a pace of 4 hours a day of perfect takes, that’s over 2 months of voice recording if done as a single session per day. In order for them to finish in a week (5 days), it’s going to take 13 recording sessions per day for them to finish the voice recording alone. Text stuff would likely take 1/5th as much effort, so add one more day. Integration and testing will likely take AT LEAST as long as that, so we’re looking at the end of July in a best case “a wizard did it” scenario. Mid-August is probably more reasonable.

I think they can record multiple lines concurrently, I don’t expect all the voice actors to be in the studio taking turns

MO’s posts tend not to be a bullet list of what’s coming. The Spring Update message included a heads up about a few changes that players may want to consider doing before the update hits.

Thank you…appreciate the communication on this!

Hmmm “buy now” at the end of that trailer just seems wrong……
I am assuming they mean for players who have not bought HOT yet right?

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

I signed off on the first episode of Living World Season 3, and we’re getting ready to announce the episode and its release date. I’m super proud of the team for hitting this milestone. Over the past few weeks the team has been processing up to a hundred pieces of feedback each day, working to get all the details right.

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.

With this release, we’re bundling a Living World episode with additional content for other areas of the game. You’ve seen that we’ve been following a pattern of releasing a bundled update each quarter; this is a content-focused continuation of that kind of thing. Of course, we’ll give this release a name, not “July Quarterly Update”. And we may be able to increase the pace, ramping from four bundled releases per year towards six, so we’ll move away from calling these “quarterly”.

Some of you may look back nostalgically at 2013 when we shipped updates every two weeks. That year we shipped a wide variety of things: nine or ten releases that we’d today call a Living World episode, plus updates to systems and content for other parts of the game, plus festivals. So it was the extreme unbundled version of this. It was nice that there was always something new, but I’m personally not wistful of that cadence, because we sacrificed so much to be able to ship that frequently. With Season 3 our goal is to deliver content sustainably, at quality, establishing a pattern we don’t have to take breaks from.

It feels great to be shipping Living World again. Thanks for your patience through the recent content draught. Having been through it, I’m sure you understand why I’m focused on sustainability.

Stay tuned for a more formal announcement, and for more details from ArenaNet and our partners.

Mo

I’m sorry but did you really just use voice acting as an excuse for being so silent for so long regarding updates to the game? I’m extremely excited about LWS3, but don’t give us excuses about why it took so long

Thanks Mo, Looking forward to it. Now have a reason to push alts through the story and get ready for the next one.

OriOri.8724:

I’m sorry but did you really just use voice acting as an excuse for being so silent for so long regarding updates to the game? I’m extremely excited about LWS3, but don’t give us excuses about why it took so long

No, I think he’s using it as an indication of the size, something he inferred a couple of more times in the post, compared to the size of the LS chapters we saw in the past. Which in turn, the size, is a reason it took so long to push this out.

Paulytnz.7619:

Hmmm “buy now” at the end of that trailer just seems wrong……
I am assuming they mean for players who have not bought HOT yet right?

Which would be pretty awesome for a new player!

Let’s hope scraping legendary weapons was worth it, some how I get the feeling it wasn’t.

Alex Shatter.7956:

Aidan Savage.2078:

Assuming each line’s an average of 15 words, that’s 1500 lines, 40 repetitions, for a total of just under a million words. Assuming a modest conversational speed of 1wps, that’s still 250 hours of recording to be done. Even at a pace of 4 hours a day of perfect takes, that’s over 2 months of voice recording if done as a single session per day. In order for them to finish in a week (5 days), it’s going to take 13 recording sessions per day for them to finish the voice recording alone. Text stuff would likely take 1/5th as much effort, so add one more day. Integration and testing will likely take AT LEAST as long as that, so we’re looking at the end of July in a best case “a wizard did it” scenario. Mid-August is probably more reasonable.

I think they can record multiple lines concurrently, I don’t expect all the voice actors to be in the studio taking turns

Actually there are quite a few VO actors that have a studio or studio like area in their house and just do the VO and then email it off. I know we have one and I know several other VO actors over here in the LA area that just record in their house and email it off to whomever needs it or wants it. It’s quite easy to do several versions of whatever also.

Emperor Ramzort.8043:

All I read is “we have done a lot of work and it’s not ready yet. It is big though, but we will be bundling a bunch of other stuff in there that is not Living Story. Oh, and it won’t be coming this month.” Nice PR piece.

It’s coming on the 26th…

Mike O Brien.4613:

With Season 3 our goal is to deliver content sustainably, at quality, establishing a pattern we don’t have to take breaks from.

I’m very glad and relieved to read that. I don’t think anyone wants more 9 month gaps in content.

I hope that this LS3 episode is sufficiently “meaty” but 1,500 lines of spoken dialog makes me think it might be.

Edit: 26th of July eh? Enough time to bring another character through LS2 and the HoT story, I think.

All aboard the HYPE TRAIN choo chooo

Rose Solane.1027:

“because we sacrificed so much to be able to ship that frequently” is the part that isn’t clear to me. What does Mo means with that? But reading all the other comments I realize that there is a lot more in MO’s post that can be interpreted in many ways.

I believe it means when they worked on the living story on a two week cycle, it affected development in every other part of the game, because they had to go full force on LS to maintain that pace. We have also seen what happens when they went to develop the first expansion, it basically slowed development for all other content during that time as well because all the updates were being made for the expansion.

Now they’re trying to balance that out by having a team on the expansion already, while also trying to develop other parts of the game, raids, living story, wvw improvements, a new fractal, etc.

The big mistake they made during the first season, was not setting up more of the festivals to be permanent events every year. If they had setup the foundation for that and had something running every other month, we wouldn’t be sitting here complaining about not having anything to do. It really doesn’t need to be completely new every year, just a couple new rewards and achievements to work for.

P.S
So wait.. Mike comes in here with this post and wouldn’t say the date, and yet hours later the sites put up their stories with it being the 26th, he couldn’t say that in his post? That’s the thing that’s maddening about Anets communication, it’s like something good or bad happens and you learn about it on the news, rather than someone more personal.

http://dulfy.net/2016/07/12/gw2-living-world-season-3-starts-july-26/

Well done, well done amazing tease at the end…powerful and scary. I really did shed a tear of happiness (or two…..okay, it was at least five)

Re: 1500 lines of dialogue. Is that actual separate lines of info, or is that 1500/40 to allow for the race/gender/language variations? (I’m not whining, merely trying to grasp the true scope).

I have a ton of alts finished with Hearts and Minds now, as I wanted to complete the ley armor collection without relying on DS RNG. I still need Migraine and Flights of Fancy so I’ll be happy to help others in need

And one thing interesting in the two articles linked on page 2 of this thread that I have not seen mentioned, the answer to a long standing question about LS3 access. You don’t have to own HoT to get LS3 for free, you just need to own it to play LS3. So if those two separate sources are accurately repeating what they learned at E3, players can make sure to log in during the chapter release and “bank” the episode for later play once they own HoT. However, it’s not clear if that includes F2P accounts.

Donari.5237:

I still need Migraine and Flights of Fancy so I’ll be happy to help others in need

I need Migraine on my 2nd account. Drop me a line and I’ll hop in and help out.

Aidenwolf.5964:

“Nostalgic” about the 2 week release cycle? Anet never once said that was going away while they flogged an over priced expansion

The two week schedule had been long gone before the expansion launched. Season two did not follow the season one release schedule.

Was that bit at the end of the trailer related to Fractals?

It looked like it with the floating islands, and the post did say there’s new Fractals stuff coming, but the video itself seemed to be mainly focused on the main storyline and Fractals isn’t usually part of that.

Living story 3 trailer btw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctl3QNjj4bA

If you have QOL updates already available (which i would hope deal with WvW, PvP, meta balance, etc…) and are planning on “dropping those in” when you deliver the LS3 update….don’t you think it would be a good idea to add those now?
Or should quality of life be less until ls3 arrives?

Yay! That’s mean it happening the day before my birthday!!

There is a blog now.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2s-living-world-returns-on-july-26/

It confirms that you can unlock access to LS3 by logging in even without HoT.

Danikat.8537:

Was that bit at the end of the trailer related to Fractals?

It looked like it with the floating islands, and the post did say there’s new Fractals stuff coming, but the video itself seemed to be mainly focused on the main storyline and Fractals isn’t usually part of that.

Yes, I recon it was from the new fractal island

Donari.5237:

There is a blog now.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2s-living-world-returns-on-july-26/

It confirms that you can unlock access to LS3 by logging in even without HoT.

To clarify, you can unlock it but you cannot access it until the expansion is purchased.

If you don’t own Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, you can still log in to unlock the episode for free—it’ll be there waiting for you once you purchase the expansion!

So the trailer told us one thing we didn’t know, the date it was coming out. The rest we already knew.

I been looking forward to this release for the last 40 years, and I’m only in my 20s.

Doggie.3184:

I been looking forward to this release for the last 40 years, and I’m only in my 20s.

Careful. High expectations are just premeditated disappointments.

No matter how good S3 is (and I do think it will be good), it might not live up to your expectations if you raise them too high. Reality often doesn’t live up to what our imaginations can conjure.

~EW

JustTrogdor.7892:

Donari.5237:

There is a blog now.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2s-living-world-returns-on-july-26/

It confirms that you can unlock access to LS3 by logging in even without HoT.

To clarify, you can unlock it but you cannot access it until the expansion is purchased.

If you don’t own Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, you can still log in to unlock the episode for free—it’ll be there waiting for you once you purchase the expansion!

Thanks — I did actually say that in my first posting of it but the forum did the “hey, you want to post something, log in” hiccup and I lost it so I rewrote it in a hurry. That is a very important point.

Personally, I feel you guys need to find a plan and stick with it. You’ve changed how and when you release content, how much and what type of content so much it is extremely inconsistent.

I think Quarterly Updates were a nice medium, if given enough content to make up for the lack of updates. Good luck with the new format I hope you find something you can stick with.

Riku.4821:

Personally, I feel you guys need to find a plan and stick with it. You’ve changed how and when you release content, how much and what type of content so much it is extremely inconsistent.

I think Quarterly Updates were a nice medium, if given enough content to make up for the lack of updates. Good luck with the new format I hope you find something you can stick with.

Like it or not, a part of what changed things was forum goers complaints… ya know… Anet listening?
Maybe Anet should be more selective at listening and some forum goers should figure out what it is they want?

Just a thought. Not directed at you specifically, just in general.

CMM.6712:

Riku.4821:

Personally, I feel you guys need to find a plan and stick with it. You’ve changed how and when you release content, how much and what type of content so much it is extremely inconsistent.

I think Quarterly Updates were a nice medium, if given enough content to make up for the lack of updates. Good luck with the new format I hope you find something you can stick with.

Like it or not, a part of what changed things was forum goers complaints… ya know… Anet listening?
Maybe Anet should be more selective at listening and some forum goers should figure out what it is they want?

Just a thought. Not directed at you specifically, just in general.

Would be nice, never going to happen though.
Also thanks for the heads up about S3.

Ashen.2907:

Aidenwolf.5964:

“Nostalgic” about the 2 week release cycle? Anet never once said that was going away while they flogged an over priced expansion

The two week schedule had been long gone before the expansion launched. Season two did not follow the season one release schedule.

Season 2 was broken into 2 parts because of a feature pack and shadow of the mad king. Double check your facts on the release schedule as if you’ll recall we had 2 weeks from the start of each to claim them for free.

Yes it had a break but that was for more content and a festival.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Wow. Some of these comments are really ugly. Seeing a reason why they rarely say anything now.

On a side note, I’m loving the new trailer. More than happy Living World is returning.

I agree , sometimes I find it hard to keep from being infracted for speaking my mind. It seems some people are impossible to make happy no matter what happens.

That said, I am looking forward to the Living World Season 3, excited it’s finally almost here!

deep disappointed sigh Nothing for updates today? And now it’s looking like it will be Late July?

grabs sneakers and water bottle See you later, GW2. I’ll be back with the next update (weekly or otherwise). Until then…. I’ve gotta go catch ’em all! Pokemon Go music begins

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Wow. Some of these comments are really ugly. Seeing a reason why they rarely say anything now.

Agreed, all the sour grapes is sad. And you can’t get lemonade from it either, only wine.

But there are still plenty of us who strive to look towards the positive, too.

~EW