Guild Wars 2

A friend of mine back at 2015 suggested me to try out Guild Wars 2 because it had just turned free. I had a different game on my radar at the time, so I did some browsing and came across my share of Living World trailers and even some interviews with Tara Strong. The game looked promising, so I downloaded it and started playing. I am a slow player, so for a few months, I thought that Living World Season 2 was related to this. After some proper research, I discovered that I was wrong.

I can’t help but say that I’m disappointed. This might be an unpopular opinion nowadays, but I can’t be the only one who really wants to see this content back in the game? I understand it would be no easy task due to its massive event range and the need for group content, but dumbing down some of its difficulty or even turn it into some kind of Dungeon would most likely help it. The season itself already has its big share of instances. And we all know that the old Lion’s Arch is still accessible.

Hell, I even like Scarlet. There was always this whole shroud of mystery surrounding her. Never managed to properly face her off and her character was greatly improved in Season 2. Her damage was also noticeably and it was thanks to her actions that we got an expansion. I’m also a big fan of her voice actress, Tara Strong.

But seriously, are we ever going to see this back in the game? We’ve had some altered versions that worked out as Fractals, but they’re not… the same thing. Yes, a lot of players got to play it back in the time, but how many of these players are still around? How many of them still vividly remember these events? How many players have been left out of such experience?

Season 1 had 25 episodes. It’s probably one of the biggest story contents that the game had to offer and it appeared to be more gritty and mature than everything else the game has shown to us. Heart of Thorns started out dark and intense, but it slowly lost its main focus along the way. Personal Story and Season 2 simply appear to be more… kid-friendly with its weird dialogue and constant comic relief. This season also had a lot of mysteries surrounding some of its events, and it seemed like it was fun to explore them even outside the game.

The best thing about this season is that ArenaNet took risks. They put their all into it, trying new ways to surprise their players and implementing new mechanics and maps. Who can disagree that the Marionette and the battle in Lion’s Arch weren’t amazing? There is only a small recap at the start of Season 2, but it’s honestly not enough. Some players play the game for its story, and this season was crucial to the plot. Many of its events and locations are no longer present in the game as well…

It would also be a great chance to put the back the old human female idles that the Staff has been promising to bring back since their removal in 2014. I only with someone from ANet would just give us some kind of answer regarding this topic; some kind of news… instead of “we’re slowly working on it”. I would rather have the next pushed back a year to have this content back. It would also benefit the team behind the expansion because it would give them proper time to properly balance things out and polish the final result.

I guess that this is all a fantasy that won’t ever come true?

What when have they said they are slowly working on it?

All I seen is -We want to bring it back but its not happening at this moment.

There’s a current thread in the Living World sub-forum, should you seek more opinions.

Good luck.

Right now I actually would rather have LS1 back than have new content. There is so much wasted content there and even though I played through it all on release I have forgotten most of it. I know its alot of work but hopefully after the next exp they can fix s1 as a prequal to s4

The bottom line—they don’t have the expertise , just like the forums (expertise, desire and wanting to spend a penny). See you in 72 hrs—lol

The Devs (Mike O’Brien, specifically) have already stated that Living World Season Four Episode 1 will follow the release of the expansion nearly within the usual 2-3 month release cadence. (It could be longer due to the expansion release logistics.)

Thus, unlikely for a prequel in that short amount of time. (In fact, the Team responsible is probably already working on it.)

I don’t think people recognize just how much effort it is going to be to make a repeatable version of LS1. Of course it’s possible; it would just take an enormous amount of resources. And that seems like an unnecessary distraction, given that people are already jealous of ANet diverting any resources to anything that doesn’t fit their idea of a better game.

Out-of-Game, Historical Context

LS1 was designed and implemented as temporary content. It was part of a (since-discarded) plan by ANet to constantly introduce new content and gradually evolve the game, so that many existing maps would be unrecognizable (in terms of challenges, foes, etc). The idea was: much better use of resources to re-use the same zones and so much more exciting to keep adding new life to the existing world. Hence: the term Living World.

It was a great, epic idea and I wish it would have worked. I think part of the issue was ANet’s implementation (they bit off more than they could chew and there were lots of scaling, technical, and reward issues to start with, leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths about the concept). Part of the issue is also what we’re used to: we like repeatable content. We like being able to be absent from a game, without feeling that we missed something important (reward and lore both). We like having the chance do ALL THE THINGS in the game.

LS1 disrupted all our expectations and its implementation was rough (whether flawed or just slow to get going no longer matters). And ANet, sensibly, dropped the idea and turned LS2 into repeatable content.

Background, In Game Experience

There are three aspects that made LS1 epic:

• It was not repeatable. You had to be there at the right time. (Notice this is exactly one of the primary issues that got ANet to drop the original concept: it was both a great idea and a fatal flaw.)
• The open-world battles were epic. Unlike Auric Basin (which has an achievement for defending the city one hundred times), getting in a single victory was a combination of great mapwide teamwork, individual skill, and a bit of luck. It felt amazing each time (compared to DS, which feels disappointing if it’s not over quickly enough).
• The instanced content was extremely challenging for nearly everyone. People scrambled like crazy to find ways to beat it. Depending on who you talk to (and how good their memories are), many would say it’s comparable to today’s fractals (perhaps T3-4 or less).

Final Background: To Make it Repeatable

To make it repeatable, we’d have to drop all three of the things that made it epic: it won’t be dynamic, it won’t include open world mega battles, and it won’t be super challenging for five people. So let’s presume that the only thing we can get is a facsimile of the story, told in chapters.

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).
———————————————
So, sure, it’s possible. It’s just not practical given the pressures on ANet at this time.

Developer Quotes
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5dk50e/the_return_of_living_world_season_1_is_important/da5sxjx/

Without saying anything definitively about a re-packaging of Living World Season 1 (because that’s the domain of studio heads to make such decisions) I just thought I would chime in as a story team lead to say that the work to do this would be a significant undertaking, and may in fact be harder to do than creating a new Living World season, given how much has changed in our pipelines since then.

A simple, but specific example is how we do all our VO, which is now in a totally different format that is a lot more flexible for us (it’s how we got player VO back, as well as the ability to have characters walk and talk). Going back to those old content objects and converting them over to the new format would be weeks of work by themselves, not to mention we’d probably want to add player VO to get around the awkward way we had to tell story in that season.

I’ve also taken a look at what it would take to update all the story beats and convert them from using the special event UI to living in the journal and since none of those objects exist (Season 1 didn’t use QuestDef’s which are the objects that show up in the journal) there’s weeks of work there too, as the quests would all need to be created now, and everything would need to be unhooked from the event system and plumbed into the story journal, which on some levels is starting over from scratch given how the underlying story structure is scripted. Some of the gameplay can just get ported over without too much trouble, other things rely on actions/skills/etc. that we’ve since deprecated for perf reasons or to address bugs, so even the idea of copying and pasting encounters isn’t “free”.

I don’t say all this as discouragement for those who would love to see a Season 1 Redux – but I just wanted to clear up any misconceptions that the community might have about the challenges that such an effort would entail. To my knowledge this is still something that we’ve kept on our backlog as there are plenty of devs who also want to see us make such an investment someday. As some have pointed out, we haven’t said no to this, but it hasn’t yet risen to the top of our priority list given our other releases and plans for Guild Wars 2.

I hope that offers a bit more insight into this question.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5dk50e/the_return_of_living_world_season_1_is_important/da5trw2/

To add to Matthew’s point, IF we were to undertake such a project I would like to revise, add to, or rewrite sections of that story to make it stronger (similar to how we improved the Personal Story last year). These things take time. Just including voice-over on a project instantly adds two-to-three months for recording and localization and doesn’t include things like prototyping, iteration, script revisions, etc. We couldn’t (and wouldn’t even if we could) simply “port” Season 1 into the new framework. There would be a substantial amount of revision involved. Anyone who thinks it would be “easy” to redo Season 1 doesn’t fully understand the process or the time investment. I wouldn’t expect them to.

Recent Quotes:
ANnet Ben

It would [take] longer than 6 months.

ANet Ben

If things went smoothly, with the entire living world team plus extra veteran developers working on it, maybe 6 months is theoretically possible. But with old content, things rarely go smoothly. Issues pop up that you weren’t expecting that increase the amount of time required. And even if it was feasible in 6 months, taking all those developers off of new content just isn’t worth it IMO. We have way cooler things that we can work on.

ANet Ben

one of the problems is much of the content is not instanced, and theres also a TON of bugs in that content that would need to be fixed, since our game code and tools have changed so much since then.

ANet Ben:

Question: If it had been even a minor priority when this was first requested back at the start of Season 2 — nearly three years ago! — it’d have been done by now, surely?

Answer from ANet Ben: That would have pushed back everything a lot. Season 3 would be behind, the expansions would have been behind, new content is a better use of developer time. I wish Season 1 had been built differently, but alas it was not.

ANet Ben

Question: Any chance that we as players (and surely lot of us are programmers, 3D modelers and coders) could help?

ANet Ben’s Answer: As cool as that sounds, there’s a lot of logistical issues with something like that, and it would still require a lot of dev time to coordinate. Plus, more leak potential.

From your posts and dev reports, I can see that the chances of any of us ever seeing Season 1 again are slim to none. I even recently watched that detailed 3-hour video that explores the entire season. It’s really such a shame to see such inspiring and awesome thing to just be left forgotten…

Just another thing to add to the list, I guess. I’m really, really sad that I never managed to get into this game sooner. What ANet did was probably one of the worst decisions I’ve ever seen in a video-game.

I loved Season One, and it’s delivery system. I think it’s one of their best ideas. It’s unfortunate players were dissatisfied, and it was too much of a work-load for the Devs.

RandomWolf.3986:

From your posts and dev reports, I can see that the chances of any of us ever seeing Season 1 again are slim to none. I even recently watched that detailed 3-hour video that explores the entire season. It’s really such a shame to see such inspiring and awesome thing to just be left forgotten…

Just another thing to add to the list, I guess. I’m really, really sad that I never managed to get into this game sooner. What ANet did was probably one of the worst decisions I’ve ever seen in a video-game.

It is a shame. Even the developers would love to find a way to make it happen.

The reality is that we players have no idea just how much is involved in putting together the Living World Seasons. I’ve done the research for these posts and I am pretty sure I barely have a clue of how involved it is.

Of course, at some point, LS1 might be old enough to inspire the same level of nostalgia-gasms that we’ve seen about Elona and Cantha… and people might prefer to go back rather than forward. As it stands now, there is a strong core of people wanting to see LS1, but there is a much much larger group that wants something new.

LW1 had its share of dungeons and standalone instances. Couldn’t they bring back the dungeons at least? Have some NPC fill in the holes before the party gets inside. It can’t be that hard… at least it would be something.

I mean, they kept one of them in Caledon… Why?

RandomWolf.3986:

LW1 had its share of dungeons and standalone instances. Couldn’t they bring back the dungeons at least? Have some NPC fill in the holes before the party gets inside. It can’t be that hard… at least it would be something.

I mean, they kept one of them in Caledon… Why?

Aside from Twilight Arbor Path 4. the other dungeons and their main bosses are replicated via fractals

- Molten + Molten Boss
- Aetherblade + Mai Trinn
- Nightmare Tower (altered and scaled down, with story removed)
- Thaumonova (which was always a fractal anyway)

There were other instances (not dungeons) including either Scarlet boss fight, one of which was solo, one of which was large zerg and could conceivably we reworked for a smaller group and be quite a fun boss fractal and also the fight versus Canach.

I understand it would be a lot of work and they can’t justify doing that, but I’d love to see it happen and I keep hoping it will somehow return one day.

Of course that seems extremely unlikely, but then I’ve spent this evening finalising plans for next week when I’m going to see a band who I was convinced for years would never tour again, so I’m in an ‘anything can happen’ mood.

Randulf.7614:

RandomWolf.3986:

LW1 had its share of dungeons and standalone instances. Couldn’t they bring back the dungeons at least? Have some NPC fill in the holes before the party gets inside. It can’t be that hard… at least it would be something.

I mean, they kept one of them in Caledon… Why?

Aside from Twilight Arbor Path 4. the other dungeons and their main bosses are replicated via fractals

- Molten + Molten Boss
- Aetherblade + Mai Trinn
- Nightmare Tower (altered and scaled down, with story removed)
- Thaumonova (which was always a fractal anyway)

There were other instances (not dungeons) including either Scarlet boss fight, one of which was solo, one of which was large zerg and could conceivably we reworked for a smaller group and be quite a fun boss fractal and also the fight versus Canach.

Only parts of them are in the Fractals. They’re not complete. The Nightmare one wasn’t even available in LW1.

But honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing LW1’s best moments back on the Fractals, but somehow I doubt we’ll see anything like that soon…

RandomWolf.3986:

The Nightmare one wasn’t even available in LW1.

Parts of the interior of the Nightmare Tower are present in the Nightmare Fractal. The non-CM bosses have similarities to foes fought in Tower instances. It’s definitely not a close match, like we find with Molten + Molten Bosses & Aether + Aether Boss (aka Mai Trin).

We have to assume that if they were to bring back S1 (which, as noted above, they aren’t going to this before 2020), they’d be making wholesale modifications to many of the encounters — first, because the gameplay is different today and secondly, because it was designed to be temporary, which makes a lot of assumptions about difficulty and replayability compared permanent content.

In other words, yes, Nightmare Fractal is different from Nightmare Tower instances & open world… and that might be exactly the sort of thing we’d find in a restoration.

Well, I’ve finally accepted that I won’t ever seen this content live. I did myself a favor and watched everything I could about it online. At least there’s that. Frankly, I’ve already given up on ANet. Honestly, LW1 was the only thing sparking my interest for a long time. I’m not even looking forward the next content. The game hasn’t been able to show me an interesting story and content since LW2…

At the very least id like to see a majorly dumbed down story where we are introduced to the main characters of destinies edge 2. Especially rox and braham. Even just 1 LW episode where we play through the moment of meeting and befriending each one. Its so jarring to see them in LW2 acting like best mates if you have no idea who they even are before that.

All this talk about difficulty of recreating it doesn’t really matter

The question is whether the game will be healthier going into the future with what we have right now or something more indepth.

Heck all these kill Braham and Majory comments we’ve seen over the year are tied to the fact that these people are strangers. I don’t care if any of them do die because according to my own story they kidnapped me and tried to fill my head with nonsense about me being their boss.

New players have issues regarding the story and that will reflect itself in retention. If there going to use these characters then one would think they’d need proper introductions first.

However I and no doubt others feel like the damage is already done the game needed something years ago and at this point nothing will save this story for me. It’s all about the gameplay as people debate more over the balance of the game than they do the story because they don’t care about the story enough to argue over it.

Some of the content was already brought back. And some other content wouldn’t be too hard to bring back.

Example:
- The marrionnette. Make it a world boss that spawns every X hours just like TEQ or TT, where’s the trouble? Is it lore related? Because in this case, Tequalt shouldn’t spawn since Zhaitan has been long time dead…
- Toxic Tower: Well we already have the fractal for it, it’s not as big, but it’s something.
- Molten dungeon/Aetherblade: Same thing, turned into fractal while skipping the boring parts. So it’s “in game” already.
- Ascalon battle: Yeah that one… why not make it a festival? Beating up Scarlett again would fill me up with joy xD
- Jubilee/Four Winds: Why not bringing back these festivals?

RandomWolf.3986:

But seriously, are we ever going to see this back in the game? We’ve had some altered versions that worked out as Fractals, but they’re not… the same thing.

And that’s the reason why you won’t ever see LS1 in the game. Because, in order to be able to put it back, Anet would need to alter it first at least as much as they did with those fractals (And, in many cases, much more).

It will never be the same thing, because LS1 was too heavily dependent on it being placed in Open World. You will never be able to get anything close to those numbers again (that was only possible due to LS1 being a time-limited event), and thus, to have anything that you could actually play, the content would have to be heavily redone. And for many parts it would make them only a pale shadow of the original content.

Astralporing.1957:

RandomWolf.3986:

But seriously, are we ever going to see this back in the game? We’ve had some altered versions that worked out as Fractals, but they’re not… the same thing.

And that’s the reason why you won’t ever see LS1 in the game. Because, in order to be able to put it back, Anet would need to alter it first at least as much as they did with those fractals (And, in many cases, much more).

It will never be the same thing, because LS1 was too heavily dependent on it being placed in Open World. You will never be able to get anything close to those numbers again (that was only possible due to LS1 being a time-limited event), and thus, to have anything that you could actually play, the content would have to be heavily redone. And for many parts it would make them only a pale shadow of the original content.

I already accepted that.

Doam.8305:

All this talk about difficulty of recreating it doesn’t really matter

Of course it matters — I think the point you make later is that other things also matter.

Doam.8305:

The question is whether the game will be healthier going into the future with what we have right now or something more indepth.

Sure, that’s in fact one of the questions that the developers addressed when discussing LS1 — according to them, there are more people interested in new stuff than in seeing a repeat or even just going backwards.

In other words, they believe the game would be healthier going forward.

Doam.8305:

Heck all these kill Braham and Majory comments we’ve seen over the year are tied to the fact that these people are strangers. I don’t care if any of them do die because according to my own story they kidnapped me and tried to fill my head with nonsense about me being their boss.

Actually, I can’t agree. Some people who participated in LS1 never had any warm fuzzies for some/any of the NPCs. Scarlet, in particular, was fiercely hated by many during the time of LS1. (Hated as an idea, not as one hates a well-written antagonist — that was the critique, although I enjoyed her as the villain.)

Further, we see figures in the original personal story that generate their own negative critiques. If you play only humans, you don’t get any strong sense of Zojja or Eir, so they both seem whiny in dungeons and during the final fight against Zhaitan. Trahearne, of whom we learn much more, was particularly disliked as a character.

In other words, the absence of LS1 isn’t the reason that people don’t care about some NPCs — there are all sorts of story-driven and/or story-writing reasons for that.

Doam.8305:

New players have issues regarding the story and that will reflect itself in retention. If there going to use these characters then one would think they’d need proper introductions first.

I agree with this — I just don’t agree that revamping S1 is the best way to do that.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Doam.8305:

All this talk about difficulty of recreating it doesn’t really matter

Of course it matters — I think the point you make later is that other things also matter.

Doam.8305:

The question is whether the game will be healthier going into the future with what we have right now or something more indepth.

Sure, that’s in fact one of the questions that the developers addressed when discussing LS1 — according to them, there are more people interested in new stuff than in seeing a repeat or even just going backwards.

In other words, they believe the game would be healthier going forward.

Doam.8305:

Heck all these kill Braham and Majory comments we’ve seen over the year are tied to the fact that these people are strangers. I don’t care if any of them do die because according to my own story they kidnapped me and tried to fill my head with nonsense about me being their boss.

Actually, I can’t agree. Some people who participated in LS1 never had any warm fuzzies for some/any of the NPCs. Scarlet, in particular, was fiercely hated by many during the time of LS1. (Hated as an idea, not as one hates a well-written antagonist — that was the critique, although I enjoyed her as the villain.)

Further, we see figures in the original personal story that generate their own negative critiques. If you play only humans, you don’t get any strong sense of Zojja or Eir, so they both seem whiny in dungeons and during the final fight against Zhaitan. Trahearne, of whom we learn much more, was particularly disliked as a character.

In other words, the absence of LS1 isn’t the reason that people don’t care about some NPCs — there are all sorts of story-driven and/or story-writing reasons for that.

Doam.8305:

New players have issues regarding the story and that will reflect itself in retention. If there going to use these characters then one would think they’d need proper introductions first.

I agree with this — I just don’t agree that revamping S1 is the best way to do that.

Of course current players want new content there current players the issue is that for any game to be healthy it needs a constant stream of new blood.

They don’t have to revamp S1 all they’d have to do is revamp the S1 movie as it only addresses Scarlet. They’d have to go no further than provide the backstories behind all the featured NPC’s in the story and why your character went from being called commander down to simply boss. They could even do it with still images and text boxes if they wanted too. Oh they should probably explain all the junk too because S1 left a lot of junk scattered across all the maps. Either that or clean up the piles of rubble, nodes, and whatnot.

Doam.8305:

all they’d have to do is revamp the S1 movie

That would be a good thing.
I’ve been asking for this since S2 began (long before there was an S1 movie) — the in-game recap barely covers what happened.

I’m not sure why they couldn’t have done what folks did in the various vids that someone collated together into an hour or so recap. Presumably, the cutscenes still exist, as do the 30-second previews. The NPC in LA could show each one in turn as part of the mini-achievement.

As much as I did like the changing nature of the world in S1, I did not like the pacing at all. Every 2 weeks was new content, and usually it replaced previous content completely. So I started to feel burned out because if I took a break I felt like I was going to miss something I could never see or do again. Looking back at my historical achievements you can see the burnout setting in, at first I was getting them all, eventually getting enough to finish the meta, and later still just enough to get through the story critical parts. By this time the nightmare tower rolled around I was becoming more actively aware of the burnout and was getting ready to just call it quits, but thankfully, they slowed things a bit for the holidays, took a break and then finished up S1 a bit slower. When they started releasing the S2 episodes in the current format I was relieved and started playing at a much more relaxed pace. I really prefer just logging in to get the new episodes unlocked and playing them whenever I want to.

If they could capture that feel of S1 without the frenzied pace of S1 I would love them to do that. Story wise S1 was terrible but gameplay had tons of great moments.

As achievement hunter, I would love to see the Season 1 returned as I missed all of it including the chance to unlock the achievements within.

I started a thread just a couple of days ago:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lwd/LW-Season-1-had-the-best-story/

Doam.8305:

They’d have to go no further than provide the backstories behind all the featured NPC’s in the story

iirc, the NPC who shows you the recap movie actually has dialogue options to tell you this very thing that pop up after you watch it.