Guild Wars 2

Anyone else notice that they haven’t mentioned Living World / Living Story recently?

It’s always “Guild Wars 2 Live”, “Live”, or “Live releases”.

My gut reaction is that this is motivated by a shift in their release strategy, downplaying the focus on story and including a greater variety of content in their regular releases.

I hope so. It’d be great to see more PvP maps, PvP modes, WvW maps, raids, fractals, dungeons (naaaah), etc instead of only linear, “highly accessible” story content and open-world PvE farms. It took three years, but maybe they finally started listening?

Actually, they mentioned the Living Story this past Saturday on the live stream.

It will be coming back later on most likely. I would say they will use it to continue the story after people work through the expansion story, and it will most likely be used to prepare for the next expansion when it is time.

Living world is going nowhere.

I may be wrong but I think ‘live’ is an industry term for things which are actually in the game.

For example Live releases are when things are actually added to the servers, before that it will have been designed and tested on internal servers, and then it ‘goes live’ when it’s made available to players.

That’s certainly how I’ve seen it used on other games forums, to distinguish between things which are on their PTS and in the game.

“Live releases” is a catch-all term that encompasses living world releases, feature patches, and pretty much any additional content.

“Living world” is a type of “live release” content specifically focused at extending the personal story experience and advancing the lore-based narrative of the world.

“LIVING WORLD

Of course, the story of Tyria will continue beyond the launch of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns.

If you own the expansion, you’ll be able to simply log in to the game to gain free access to upcoming Living World releases!"

http://heartofthorns.guildwars2.com/game/maguuma

I’m sure they’ll still continue with the Living World, but it doesn’t seem like the sole focus of the future content. I’m hoping against my better judgement on this one, but it seems like they’re planning to focus on producing more varied content as part of the “live” releases.

And yes, ‘live’ is typically used to distinguish internal/testing servers and production servers. But the context that it’s been used in e.g. the Raids announcement seems to refer specifically to the regular releases that were previously only referred to as “Living Story” in previous years.

Just an interesting shift in language IMO.

Not all of it was referred to as living story

The terms “feature pack” and “event” were also used for mechanical and seasonal updates respectively.