Guild Wars 2

INTRODUCTION:

many of us really liked Living World Season 1, and would love to see it come back in some form or another. while many would like to see new fractals or dungeons based on LW1 events, others really want to see the Zerg aspect return as well. My guild and i were discussing this one night after Guild Missions in mumble, and we think that combining EotM and Fractal technology and lore could be the answer to give us the zerg aspect.

SUGGESTION:

rifts would open up all over Tyria (like Mad king Labrynthe doors), along with a portal in Lion’s Arch, that would allow players into a a past event (like Battle for LIon’s Arch) on a zerg scale.

RELATED LORE:

Fractals are essentially “echoes” of past events, accessed through a specific doorway provided to us by the Consortium. The deal is, we secure the fractal for the researchers, and they let us keep all the loot we find.

we have asura gates to the Eternal Battleground in the Mists, as well as the borderlands and the Edge of the Mists.

in LW Season 3, small rifts appear in Bloodstone Fen (mainly to port players to other areas of the map), as well as ley line anomalies all over Tyria.

What if these rifts would spawn all over Tyria, give us random temporary access to echoes of the past… say Living World Season 1 events, and the Ley Line Anomaly is the Gate-Keeper?

RELATED TECH AND MECHANICS:

Can be inferred from the lore section. but this could essentially be an additional SUB-PvE game mode.

~ Essentially, a complete copy of the main Tyria Map would be created, but instead of being a direct copy, it would contain the LWS1 versions of maps, especially of the events. (like Tower of Nightmares in Kessex Hills, Marionette in Lornar’s Pass, Scarlett’s Invasions in various maps, Rescue in Lion’s Arch, Assault to take back Lion’s Arch, though the gate events in the surrounding zones in order to gain access to the city would be dropped)

~ This copy would be saved on a different hardware server (like Edge of the Mists), and would spawn new maps the same way EotM does, when needed for growing population

~These maps would be able to handle 150 players, even if they were only instances containing only the event area (like the related lanes for Marianette, but not the rest of Lornar’s Pass)

~ Now, rifts would randomly open up all over Tyria, (like the doors for mad king’s labrynthe) and would give access to ONE LWS1 map/ event for a week (or 2 if it better synergizes with the 2 week update cadence)

~ A Ley Line Anomaly could guard each rift when it spawns, during the initial introduction of this feature… and then, after we prove that we are worthy, the Ley Line Anomaly opens a permanent portal in Lion’s Arch (like the Asura Gates to WvW, PvP, Fractals, etc) this LA portal would always lead to “this week’s” event.

~ Rifts would open up in the respective areas of “this week’s” event… for example:
~~ a rift near the camp on the hill to enter the Tower of Nightmares
~~ a rift near the ruins of the Marionette
~~ a rift outside the gates to LA when the LA events would be active
~~ a rift in southsun cove for the one time legendary karka event
etc…

PROS:

~ devs would not need to rebalance the fights for smaller groups.
~ everyone could re-experience these large scale events
~ could be used for future large scale events
~ one past event would be available per week (or two week) so that player base wouldn’t spread out too thin
~ since one event would be available at a time, it offers additional content to be rotated in the game.
~ one step closer to bringing back LWS1

CONS:

~ takes dev time to adapt the current systems, which might slow down other development
~ maybe need more hardware to dedicate to the rift of the week concept

This would be really cool, but I doubt it will be implemented

CONS:
~ takes dev time to adapt the current systems, which might will slow down other development
~ takes dev time away from current projects which will slow down those developments

ftfy

Sounds interesting. Maybe sometime when they’re not working on the next expansion, new maps or the next set of living story episodes will be a good time for them to take on new, large, time consuming projects.

Whilst I would prefer the story journal adaptation version to appear, this is def one of the better ideas for re-introducing it as an open world series.

i’m honestly hoping that this would basically be a fancy copy pasta… ‘cept of course they’d have to change an x to a y here, add some cayenne pepper and oregano there. and of course, don’t forget the garlic. can’t forget the garlic when talking pasta. ;-)

of course, i could be be drastically under-estimating the work to be done for something like this. i know it wouldn’t be as easy as adding a glider skin, for example. I’m just hoping that it could be done in someone’s spare time over a few months, instead of having to dedicate a whole team to it for years on end.

speaking of ends, i think i’m out of bacon. D’oh!

PS: Flesh Wound, since you failed to mention bacon in the “fixed” message, i hereby diagnose you with Bacon Defeciency Disorder. i highly recommend taking two strips of bacon before each and every post. just don’t take mine. i’m all out anyway. :/

Forgotten Legend.9281:

i’m honestly hoping that this would basically be a fancy copy pasta… ‘cept of course they’d have to change an x to a y here, add some cayenne pepper and oregano there. and of course, don’t forget the garlic. can’t forget the garlic when talking pasta. ;-)

of course, i could be be drastically under-estimating the work to be done for something like this. i know it wouldn’t be as easy as adding a glider skin, for example. I’m just hoping that it could be done in someone’s spare time over a few months, instead of having to dedicate a whole team to it for years on end.

speaking of ends, i think i’m out of bacon chocolate. D’oh!

PS: Flesh Wound, since you failed to mention bacon Chocolate in the “fixed” message, i hereby diagnose you with Bacon Chocolate Deficiency Disorder. i highly recommend taking two strips of bacon bites of chocolate before each and every post. just don’t take mine. i’m all out anyway. :/

FTFY!

But more seriously, I think you should read Illconceived is Na’s post in Living story season one. It’s about bringing the LS1 back and he points out a lot of problems with bringing it back. He’s talking about as a personal story but part of what he says pertains to any method of having it in the world again. Serious enough problems that would mean it’d be a full scale project and not something done by someone on their spare time. Most especially these points of his post.

“The original instances were designed for the mechanics of the day. They were designed to be temporary, so little thought was given to making them last. That means: they’d have to be redone, nearly from the ground up.
There were dialogues that took place in the open world, in areas that don’t exist anymore (or have different NPCs, foes now). Those would have to be turned into instanced content.
The open word battles would have to be included somehow, so that’s new cinematics or entirely new encounters meant to model the idea, with shorter cinematics to show the impact on Tyria.
To do all of the above requires rewriting parts of the story, rewriting the instances, redesigning encounters, adding new cinematics. All of that would need to be translated into French, Spanish, German, and Chinese. Some of the voice actors are no longer available, so ANet would have to hire substitutes (and decide whether to redo old dialogue or not — probably not).
In short, it’s an enormous amount of work to get us … another Living Story, which some people have already seen (and can’t possible meet expectations for epic-ness).”

These Dev quotes don’t pertain directly to this suggestion, but can give an indication that things are rarely as easy as forum-developers might envision:

…veritable bugfest that would ensue from altering a system that has years of work built on top of it…

…players clamoring for every fix/feature under the sun so we have to do a ton of prioritizing. Game development is never plain and simple…

…encounter a ton of programing challenges and bugs from altering a core mechanic of the game and the years of code built on top of it. Every player and many npcs use items, so the wrong bug slipping through can have a major impact on everyone in the game. Not to mention finding that bug could be like searching for a needle in a haystack…

Just as it took years to bring back SAB (which is in its own instance/map) because of engine changes and code written on top of the initial implementation of SAB, I fear the same sort of obstacles would be encountered for something like this.

Could be a cool idea, but unlikely to be something someone could ‘work on in their spare time’ or could be featured any time in the near future.

Good luck.

If the next expansion doesn’t require a massive rework once it’s released, like what happened with Heart of Thorns, then maybe the devs could fit something like the ability to replay parts of LS1 in their busy schedule.