Guild Wars 2

We all want to see progress in Orr, but we don’t want old Orr to be instanced and (un)death and lose so much content.

Well, why not instance Cleansed Orr, and keep Corrupted Orr as a regular map.
It makes more sense really:

1. they can progress it more easily (as the story progresses, more green grows, more buildings are build).

2. Old Orr is about the invasion and NEEDS events with a lot of people to tell the story, while New Orr would be almost as safe as a city.

3. All new Players experience Orr first like it used to be, and get access to New Orr Later on, so you don’t get these weird anachronisms like in LA.

I’d love a rebuilt Orr in all of its former glory. I can’t imagine the work that would have to be put into it though. It would really be a site to behold and one I’m sure the devs would love to do if they had unlimited time and resources. it’s certainly on my wish list but not one I expect anytime soon or ever.

It would be a nice common ground however to potentially have a set of Orr based fractals that involve a predestruction Orr so we can see a glimpse of how magnificent this city would have been.

Perhaps one based on each path, such as the jotun, the forgotten, the seers, and the mursaat. Possibly even one during the end days with the vizier and the destruction of Orr/awakening of zhaitan.

I also would love to see Orr progress. The idea of instancing it, however, likely won’t take hold because ANet doesn’t want players in the same map unable to see each other (as discussed in previous threads about a cleaner Orr).

I’m sure there is a technical reason for this, but why can’t they just do what they did for WoC and have a simple switch that one can flip to go between different versions of the same map?

What I mean is, in WoC you could switch between normal enemies and WoC enemies just by taking or removing a quest.
A similar thing could be done here, right?

We didn’t completely uncover Orr yet, there are still large parts of Orr which don’t exist in the Open World – including Arah! They could leave the old maps as they are and open up parts of Orr to the east of Cursed Shore, including Arah as either a cleansed instance hub city or an explorable Open World map after the events of the Arah dungeon.

Honestly, I’m not sure that a “purified Orr” would look like what people hope. All the buildings would be destroyed still, and the soil would still be full of oil and coral from its long submersion underwater.

All we’d get is clear skies and some regular vegetation strewn across, with fewer risen.

What it seems people want is rebuilt buildings and fixed landscapes – basically a pre-Cataclysm Orr. But that’s not what a purified Orr is.

@narwhalsbend: Keep in mind that GW1 was instanced. Every single zone was an instanced zone, altered based on the furthest progression of any party member, ever since, well, technically ever if you count quests but since Nightfall otherwise.

@Shiren: Those large parts, however, were covered in Arah dungeon – both story (southern and eastern edge, kinda sorta on the second) and explorable (the entire middle). Just look at that_shaman’s historical map where he added the story and explorable dungeons to the open world since they overlay perfectly in size (unlike most dungeons – only four really do that: Caudecus’ Manor, Citadel of Flame, Arah, and Aetherblade Retreat).

That’s what Shiren’s saying, Konig- since Arah the dungeon is an instance, there’s nothing stopping Arah the cleansed zone from occupying the same map space, since none of Arah’s content requires a persistent shard. It’d be a bit like how they’re handling Lion’s Arch in the PS now.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

@narwhalsbend: Keep in mind that GW1 was instanced. Every single zone was an instanced zone, altered based on the furthest progression of any party member, ever since, well, technically ever if you count quests but since Nightfall otherwise.

Yes, I know, but it would just be another copy of the map overlaid in the same place, talk to some NPC to switch back and forth. That sort of thing.

I believe that’s a lot harder to pull off than what you make it sound like. Even LA was never just an overlay during the finale – it was like a dungeon, just open world.

And ArenaNet has said before they don’t want to isolate playerbases via phasing maps, which is what you’re asking them to do. ArenaNet has also said that keeping copies of map – just the environment parts – is a lot of size for the dat and client, and doing such too much would be putting too much stress than they want. Which is why they only first started doing the map changing thing with LA when they rebuilt it (they had no sewers and no trenches so most of the PS maps literally stopped working) – even though there are other maps affected by the LW seasons (namely Kessex Hills).