Guild Wars 2

BIT OF SPOILERAGE

Just like the mission in Orr during the personal story, supposedly the land would start being cured, and the magic would start cleansing Orr of the corruption. But this is not happening, and may never happen simply due to how the Personal Story is designed for the players journey.

Will HoT be another one of these? Will we one day destroy Mordremoth and reclaim the land, but it will forever be under its influence with no sign of reclamation? Silverwastes seems to employ the technology that would help this NOT happen, but for the sake of “story” there may just be areas that stay the same, corrupted, never fixed, nothing we can do about it.

I am hoping this is not the case, but it is a slight fear of mine. Those pact ships will never reach the ground, the mordrem will always remain, and we will get some cinematic that shows otherwise, like a dream, we then get pushed back into the reality of it not meaning a thing (the players influence)

I would think the lands will have to remain “frozen in time”. How else will the players who start after us and who get there 1, 2, or 3 years from now, follow the story line if all those events are gone? If the events are gone, the story doesn’t make sense, or at least isn’t supported by what’s going on outside the instances.

If we can no longer have ‘temporary’ content, as we did in LS1 (such a loss, imo), how can lands ever change? They must stay the same to be permanent. Players have made their desires known, and now things are mostly permanent. /shrug

They tried the temporary, land will change thing. People said they wanted permanent stories and they wanted an expansion. Can’t have a Living World and Permanent both together. So don’t expect the lands to change. They need to stay the way they are to support the permanent story line in each one.

A (real) “Living World” influenced by the players, I like that.
I remember something similar in the quest line for the second expansion in WoW, when I used to play, the player would cleanse the land piece by piece of the undead and opening new faction outposts that would stay there for the rest of the game.

Hwrs Xander.2845:

A (real) “Living World” influenced by the players, I like that.
I remember something similar in the quest line for the second expansion in WoW, when I used to play, the player would cleanse the land piece by piece of the undead and opening new faction outposts that would stay there for the rest of the game.

Yeah and that awesome “phasing” technology would then later pop people in your party that were on a different quest stage out of your world into a different dimension at the worst moments for no reason other than being not useful in a multiplayer environment.

I think people do not have really anything against the world changing, they just do not like older world states and event content to go away and not be available for replay.

So maybe easy proper solution would be just to have the colleges of Rata Sum invent some time travel device, so you could just travel to zones, events and instances as they were in the past to replay old stuff if you want to.

New players will first always go to the original old time limes of a zone for living story, later then to the current one.
Veteran players and probably public guild events may use asuran time gate maschine to open up portals to other event states from previous Living Story Seasons, like for example Marionette Fight.
A Guild could just spawn a public portal in Lornar’s Pass and thus create and instance of the Marionette Fight. Everyone in the “now”-time could just use that portal to join in. Also such a portal should be noted in the upper right hand zone wide event indicator.

Anet has already demonstrated that they are both willing and able to give old maps new faces. I love Kessex Hills. When it started, it was a plain map with some Centaurs and Bandits. Now it has redesigned Krait, Nightmare Court and the landscape was altered. I love it when that happens, in my opinion, that is great game design and a map I would visit again!

It doesn´t even have to be big changes.
-Scrap the Jofast´s journey event(it´s just exploited anyway) and make Jofast waypoint permanent in the control of the pact with Risen attacking the waypoint then and when. Add an event to actually have something to do behind the waypoint as compensation. I am pretty sure that everybody has visited the road behind the waypoint, but only for farming reasons.
-Replace one of defense the waypoints events at the start with a permanent camp. As comensation, add a champ knight with a plan(Hostages, Experiment, etc etc).
-Let single risen escape the waning control of Zhaitan and do their own thing. Pirate ghost ship attack would be great.
-Let the pact build a camp where the gladiator champ is now. This event is up for hours sometimes, with people having zero interest in it.
-Replace the Risen between the point of entry and the fort with another faction that wants to loot Orr like the Inquestur are already attempting to. Pirates, Bandits, Krait, no matter.
-Slightly different vegetation at the start. Replace dark brown green with lighter djungle green or something.

tl: dr It´s easy to let people do the personal story but still add more control over Orr for the pact. Orr is great and should neither stay stagnant nor abandoned.

Inverse.2967:

Hwrs Xander.2845:

A (real) “Living World” influenced by the players, I like that.
I remember something similar in the quest line for the second expansion in WoW, when I used to play, the player would cleanse the land piece by piece of the undead and opening new faction outposts that would stay there for the rest of the game.

Yeah and that awesome “phasing” technology would then later pop people in your party that were on a different quest stage out of your world into a different dimension at the worst moments for no reason other than being not useful in a multiplayer environment.

I think people do not have really anything against the world changing, they just do not like older world states and event content to go away and not be available for replay.

So maybe easy proper solution would be just to have the colleges of Rata Sum invent some time travel device, so you could just travel to zones, events and instances as they were in the past to replay old stuff if you want to.

New players will first always go to the original old time limes of a zone for living story, later then to the current one.
Veteran players and probably public guild events may use asuran time gate maschine to open up portals to other event states from previous Living Story Seasons, like for example Marionette Fight.
A Guild could just spawn a public portal in Lornar’s Pass and thus create and instance of the Marionette Fight. Everyone in the “now”-time could just use that portal to join in. Also such a portal should be noted in the upper right hand zone wide event indicator.

Currently the events on the map support the story line. if the events are changed so that they no longer support the story, then the story quickly becomes “isolated.” It will tell of a horrible disaster and the surrounding events will be telling some another story. There will be a huge disconnect between the two.

If instead it’s put on its own map, how can a solo player or a group of 5 realistically handle the necessary events to support the urgency of the story? It would have to be very watered down if one to five people are trying to do a map’s worth of supporting events.

I wonder how long the game would last if every event, heart, etc was removed from the game upon being completed for the first time.

As others have said. What are the options?

• Players defeat Mordy in a one-time event, after which the land changes. Anyone who misses the event rages. Anyone who buys the game later feels cheated.
• Players defeat Mordy in a raid. Depending on how hard the raid is, some percentage of people will be unable to complete it. Those players rage. The zones have to remain the same. Some players rage about that.
• Players defeat Mordy in personal story. Likely anyone can do it, but the zones remain the same. Some players rage about that.

ANet will take the least rage option. That, unfortunately, means the zones will remain the same.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Currently the events on the map support the story line. if the events are changed so that they no longer support the story, then the story quickly becomes “isolated.” It will tell of a horrible disaster and the surrounding events will be telling some another story. There will be a huge disconnect between the two.

If instead it’s put on its own map, how can a solo player or a group of 5 realistically handle the necessary events to support the urgency of the story? It would have to be very watered down if one to five people are trying to do a map’s worth of supporting events.

You are right the Orr zones were in the first designed with something else in mind and thus are now an ever static problem.
I personally don’t mind with some zones being in a different time frame. Just adding some kind of date information to them whenever you step into them would be just ok for the zones that are not feasible to have a “current time” world state added.

Yet that does not invalidate time travel device to enable player initiated creation of past zone events world states. This could also replace the world boss spawn mechanic for guilds that are currently in place. Instead of spawning Teq/Wurm onto an existing public map, if would spawn a new instance and place a public portal into the existing public map.
Would help a lot with creating clean map instances for organized big event fights and also open up access to older cool events like Marionette or LS1 events.