Guild Wars 2

Hi.

So one of the things that kept me from getting more involved in GW2 earlier in its lifespan was the temporary nature of the Living Story content. I had always been mystified about Arenanet’s decision to rely on temporary content to keep people interested in the game, so I was really excited to hear that they would be adding a feature that would allow you to replay the living story on your own time! It got me back into the game.

However, with this latest ‘feature pack’, content that I thought was going to be permanent has been removed. Entire swaths of the personal story have been obliterated, creating weird plot holes and inconsistencies. Heart quests have been shuffled around, simplified in order to prevent new player ‘confusion’, often to the point of removing a lot of flavor from the game. A lot of non-essential NPC gossip and dialogue is mysteriously missing now too.

Now I find myself once again hesitant to play because I’ve missed out on so much, and because I really don’t want to invest a lot of time in a character in order to reach a certain part of the game when it could just be removed on a whim by Arenanet. I like a lot about GW2 but there are so many other games where the creators don’t remove content – they only add to it. If some of their older content is not as good as the newer stuff, they might set it off to one side and more heavily promote the newer stuff, but they don’t nuke it out of the game. I wish GW2 was more like that.

Thanks for listening.

You… don’t read a lot of the stuff that’s been going on, do you?

All the living story for Season 2, and everything going forward with Living Story, is permanent content. You can access it all through your story journal, any time.

For Season 1 content, they’re looking into having it added in the future, but there are problems preventing them from implementing it right now. In the same token, they’ve discussed doing the same with the Personal Story, but that’s something they haven’t even really started discussing internally yet.

As for the Feature Pack, that’s something different entirely. They removed some content, yes, but it was only in the starter zones. Everything past that has remained untouched. (Aside from a potentially missing couple of story quests in the Orr areas, but it’s really up in the air as to whether that’s actually removed or not.)

ShadowDragoonFTW.3418:

You… don’t read a lot of the stuff that’s been going on, do you?

All the living story for Season 2, and everything going forward with Living Story, is permanent content. You can access it all through your story journal, any time.

For Season 1 content, they’re looking into having it added in the future, but there are problems preventing them from implementing it right now. In the same token, they’ve discussed doing the same with the Personal Story, but that’s something they haven’t even really started discussing internally yet.

As for the Feature Pack, that’s something different entirely. They removed some content, yes, but it was only in the starter zones. Everything past that has remained untouched. (Aside from a potentially missing couple of story quests in the Orr areas, but it’s really up in the air as to whether that’s actually removed or not.)

Hi! Yes, I have read that about the story journal. That’s why I mentioned it in my second sentence. How about you, how much do you read? :P

I haven’t read anywhere that they’re planning on adding back in the removed personal story parts. Can you link me?

Thanks!

From what I’ve remember of reading forums and other sites (will try to find sources but I’m at work so can’t dwell too long on it), they’re already working on fixing the living story problems created by the last patch, plugging the holes, and when they announced the journal feature, they specifically said that they intended to add season 1 to the journal so we could replay it, but it isn’t easy because when it was made, it wasn’t made with the journal in mind so they don’t have an ETA of when will it happen.

locoman.1974:

From what I’ve remember of reading forums and other sites (will try to find sources but I’m at work so can’t dwell too long on it), they’re already working on fixing the living story problems created by the last patch, plugging the holes, and when they announced the journal feature, they specifically said that they intended to add season 1 to the journal so we could replay it, but it isn’t easy because when it was made, it wasn’t made with the journal in mind so they don’t have an ETA of when will it happen.

And living story 1 was all open world, not mostly instances. So they have to take bosses designed for zergs and rework them for solo to five man group play.