Guild Wars 2

I had an idea of how GW2 could improve it’s overall immersion, add more entertaining game play and still maintain it’s current system without an unreasonable overhaul. I tried to keep in mind that resources might be scarce and budget may not be high, therefor this is meant to be filler, which takes advantage of ideals that many of us still want to see more of, without hefty requirements.

If you like this idea, then don’t forget to +1 and also provide helpful criticism to how this system could improve without taking up resources etc.

The Concept
What if our heroes were able to interact with the open-world enemies on a more personal level? A system that starts by interacting with an NPC which gives you an option to “fight the good fight” by selecting a certain race which you then must go out and battle.

For example, let’s say you decide to take on the centaur menace. After committing to that choice, you’ll be tasked to go around the map and fight against any centaurs you find. This would be centered around the PvE map, so that way people are encouraged to not just hunt down centaurs but even complete events already out there – to get people going out to explore etc.

Now for the interesting part. As you start fighting centaur tribes, you’ll build a meter. After killing a certain amount, this meter will start to display your threat level. This is when things begin to change. The centaurs will take notice (figuratively speaking). We can’t have all of the NPCs suddenly change with you around, that’s clearly game-breaking. What will happen, however, being a threat to the centaurs, they’ll send out little mercenaries or gangs to try and take you on. So in other words, you’ll be out gathering or traveling and then a group will spawn to try and kill you.

So it’s basically adding personal dynamic events that’ll spawn around you. Now of course these events will have to be restricted to certain areas of the map and won’t trigger if you’re in the middle of a boss event etc.

Key Points

• Rewards and titles can be acquired upon defeating x-amount of merc groups.

• Essentially all of the main “intelligent” enemies will be choices (Svanir, Centaur Tribes, Inquest etc).

• Only one choice while building up a meter to make it feel unique and personal.

• The threat level should have various tiers for rewards and challenge. So the first tier is common foes. Then it grows to vets, elite and so on – ending with the death of a legendary.

• You should be able to replay these options, for entertainment values.

• This system can always be expanded on, if desired. For example, you can always create new dialog from the enemies that spawn. This system could even lead to a story line if you wanted. There are plenty of ways to go beyond a generic form.

• The groups that spawn will be fairly random. Again, it’s to encourage people going out to explore. Having people wait at a certain destination or for a certain time will just defeat the purpose by taking away from the whole immersion etc.

• To prevent people from hanging out in one location to build their meter, there could be a requirement of defeating higher leveled foes for each tier. Additionally, given a more story-driven system, each region could offer specific terms to be met in order to build a meter.

Thoughts? Wanna add more or change things? Just keep in mind that this basically needs to be possible with Anet’s current team. I figure it’s possible even with just a Living Story team.

I like the way you think. Would love to have a system like that, though I find it hard to believe it would be implemented.

On the scale of things to make, this kind of system wouldn’t be too difficult. Probably a few months worth of effort, which should fit with how they rotate teams.

Overall though… I’m just trying to find ways to improve immersion and take our heads out of the ‘rewards mentality’. The only way I can imagine that happening, without massive changes, is to focus on character interaction and merge that with combat etc.

Perhaps, the one of the rewards could be the Weapon family associated with said chosen foe group. Those weapons that are needed for the current or a future set of Collections. Another reward might be a set of Dyes associated with the foe group, with one or two ‘special’ colors of dye in the loot table. This set would only drop from these special random DEs. Maybe a chance at some Ascended gear (Armor or Trinkets) in the Legendary loot table? Lol, just trying to think of items that would cause no to little extra development resources.

There are already some ‘personal’ spawning Dynamic Events associated with your particular choice in the Personal Story, so this kind of thing seems ‘doable’.

Interesting . . . a few more options for depth:

- When the ambushes succeed in downing and killing you, you need to start over from the bottom. This would encourage you to travel with friends or stay near people who could help.

- Tie it into the Slayer achievements. For each rank you have, when an ambush event spawns on you increase the difficulty base one step. Again, this encourages you to keep people nearby who can help. Similarly, you could weight each person at the event differently for the ranks of Slayer relevant to the ambush . . . meaning everyone running around with maximum Centaur Slayer could have a problem event spawn, but it also encourages them to fight it off since the rewards could be more useful.

- Link each enemy to a race who deals with them the most. Centaurs are linked to humans, ogres to charr, dredge to norn . . . you get the picture. Similarly, bounties for dragon minion types are linked to the Pact primarily. Each bounty hunter NPC offers weapon skins which are like normal skins (say the kitten cultural weapons which drop in the wild) but with differences or effects on strike.

- Culminate where if the threat level hits maximum and an ambush is beaten, a legendary opponent is after you and will ambush you instead of the usual ambush event in a zone where the enemies normally hang out (so no centaur ambushes in Orr). Defeating them triggers a hidden achievement with a reward item unique to them. Perhaps it could be added as a zonewide announcement to recognize it was done. “The Centaur Warchief has been slain by [playername]!”

Just spitballing here, since we’re talking hypotheticals. Notably, this could make for a wonderful feature filler patch

I love this idea. Especially if the enemies will scale in power each time you defeat them, and so will rewards. We already have a “Mercenary” title, but I’m sure it’s not too hard to come up with more.
Rewards could also depend on what you kill. For example – killing Skritts would grant you mostly items (blues, greens, rares, exotics); killing Centaurs would grant you mostly karma; so would killing Zhaitan’s minions.
Speaking of which, it could be a really cool mechanic if Zhaitan got angry at you after you murder too many of his minions or complete too many of events destroying his plans.
Just a suggestion though.

If mobs now come to your location and your rewards scale with the amount of mobs you kill, this is very easily exploitable by farmbots.

Wanze.8410:

If mobs now come to your location and your rewards scale with the amount of mobs you kill, this is very easily exploitable by farmbots.

Also very easy to find the farmbots then, isn’kitten

I mean, you have a point and when you start running this through the paces of testing to see how it breaks the game? It starts breaking it on small but fundamental levels with the “ambush retaliation” concept.

Wanze.8410:

If mobs now come to your location and your rewards scale with the amount of mobs you kill, this is very easily exploitable by farmbots.

That would depend on the rewards and how they’re implemented. In addition, there’s other ways to treat the system in order to stop bots as well as encourage exploration for normal players.

This is actually an added part I’ll throw in the key points section, but there would probably need to be something that requires players to seek out enemies beyond solitary areas of the map. It would be far too easy and even tedious if players could just hang at the front of Divinity’s Reach to fight Tamini.

So one way to adjust this issue is by requiring higher leveled enemies for higher tier meters. This would help push low-leveled players out into the map, yet that’s clearly a small part of the problem.

Next is to guide 80’s into searching the world and without forcing them or turning it into another scavenger hunt kind of thing. This is where it becomes a tad bit more program-heavy as Anet would probably need to create further systems to drive depth and complexity.

On the other hand, you could always allocate tiers based on the levels of map. Even more! There could be unique NPCs per region; which all offer unique circumstances given the story & conflict of that area.

This also doesn’t include how often mercs would spawn or when. So it’s still rather unpredictable for bots.