Guild Wars 2

When being bored on internet after playing the game, I came upon the article that talks about the idea that ANet is considering or going forward with the strategy of fully replacing the process of expansions with what we know as the “Living World”. You can find it here if you need to catch up:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-03-its-unlikely-guild-wars-2-will-ever-get-an-expansion-pack

This lead me to find a topic made by player dark shadowes.4081 on the forums about a month ago in response to this statement. The topic made an attempt to start a very well structured debate of whether or not the playerbase finds the idea of the living world as a decent or effective substitute for expansions. I thought it was well made and would provide a good starting point for a discussion. Sadly, it was placed on the Suggestions area and died there with no replies.

Hopefully I’m not committing a forum sin, but I want to revive it here and see where it goes….I believe it needs to be intelligently talked about; both expansions and the living world have a fair amount of pro’s and con’s, both for how we experience content and how new players may or may not be introduced to the game. I am curious to see what you guys find to be a better fit for the coming months and years for this game.

Here it is:

dark shadowes.4081:

I’ve been hearing recent rumors of possible gw2 expansions being possible, and now we get informed of the concept of the living world replacing the idea of an expansion.
Link:
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/07/03/guild-wars-2-might-never-have-an-expansion/
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/07/05/guild-wars-2s-zadorojny-clarifies-that-cantha-and-elona-are-sti/
I do enjoy the living world concept and how its played out so far, but I just want to throw my opinion out to why having it take over instead of an expansion is a bad idea…

The living world keep players actively playing the game. We are hooked onto a new problem we face in the game every two weeks now, which is great! But, using the idea of the living world for expansion material is not a great idea. What makes expansions great is the vast amount of new content we get when they come out.
Examples:
New continents and zones
New weapons and armor
New skills
New factions
New storylines

We are hit by this all at once. The fact that we don’t know what to expect throughout an entire expansions gameplay is what makes it fun. It is so big, it keeps us hooked for months simply exploring all of what is new.

Why not use the living world concept for expansion material though?
Because we can complete this content relatively fast. Once we complete it, we wait until the next thing. There is no rush to explore, or material that takes us a long time to complete. While these mini updates ( some not so mini) are exciting, they are nothing compared to the hype of a large expansion.

In closing: The living world will keep the game running strong, but what will make the game last for a long time and not become drab is expansions full of material for us to explore. I do believe expansions are inevitable, but I want to point out, from a costumers standpoint, ideas such as the living story only work for so long before we want something else bigger.

That is just my two cents, tell me what you think!

I think, and hope, that what we’ve seen of the Living Story is only getting things moving in much bigger directions. There have been some hints here and there recently of this from ArenaNet guys, and while I’m not expecting too much, I am hoping that they aim to affect larger swaths of the game world with the Living Story. They currently have 4 teams, I believe, working on this stuff, which makes me hopeful that it’s not all separate for each new piece of content, but an interconnected web of content to be rolled out. What we’ve seen so far has, I guess, been done by fewer and perhaps smaller teams, making them a bit rough as they get into it and figure out how they want to do them.

With more teams and hopefully more people, this may lead into taking what they’ve introduced and weaving it into something not necessarily to scale with an expansion, but maybe something close to it.

I’m fairly content with this model for now, personally. I know how expansions tend to go. A burst of excitement for maybe three months, possibly more, then it’s back to wondering when the next bit will come out. At least with this, we know when to expect things more and it brings some life back into parts of the world.

(Ideally, this will last until they’ve refined the base game enough to where they’re willing to roll out their larger expansion-style content release.)