Guild Wars 2

I think we need a new strategy to look into the world. We all know, that Zheitan is dead, but cause not everyone finished it, the World cannot change. At the same time, the living world goes on, leaving behind the ones new or without time.

The actual World
The World changes. It does fit to the living story. There must be a way to explain it logical to new players, also you should add some additions, that may annoy the most players. These additions are a explaining storyline (more story) for new players (no good rewards, no challange to Level 80 players). To not confuse players, reduce the former storys (including zheithan) to mere hints.

The old World
NPCs will explain what happened so far. They explain it not as new content, but as if you were part of it (otherwise parts where you plain the main-role would make no sense and so also a second time playing through it won’t need different text). Through this, you can (re-)play older storys they tell you part and than you go to the next step.

Playing alone
There are parts of the story, that cannot be played alone. There the asura Time manipulation comes in handy. If a part cannot be played alone, NPC will explain it to you, best was a sequence-scene. But the asura, intelligent as they are, have build a time manipulatotm that changes a map for a certain time to another state of the game. This will not be a autochange, you have to enter the map through talking to the NPC at the time manipulator. An alternate would be, that after there are older maps, that you as new player cannot enter the actual maps while you are not far enough in the story.

Better Chronic
Create a new NPC in your Hometown, that retells your Chronic in more details and includes cutsequences. For example you finished all dungeons and your storyline withot any order and furthermore you know noone wants to wait in a random dungeon group for the guy who watsches the cutscenes… now you are interested in the story in order, the NPC gives you a short summary and you are able to watch alle cutscenes again.

I don’t really understand the need for any of this – honestly what you’re saying sounds far more complicated to me.

GW2 has one timeline, as long as players know where they ‘are’ on the timeline it’s not really an issue. The living story clearly occurs after the personal story on the timeline. Yes the altering of old zones provides some discontinuity – but if they were looking for a good way of solving that then they would have two copies of each zone/instance, one for the personal story timeline and one for anything that occurs afterwards. They don’t seem willing to do that, so yeah :S

Yeah, that sounds unnecessarily convoluted.

Unfortunately, an open world (as opposed to instanced like GW1) does not meld well with the concept of the living world, and ArenaNet doesn’t seem to comprehend this. It is obvious now that War in Kryta in GW1 was a prototype of the Living World – to see if it was well received and so forth. The issue is that GW1 had instanced zones, and you had to complete the previous campaign (Prophecies and Eye of the North) to access War in Kryta content. And it was also so well received due to the lack of a decent amount of content for over a year – people were deprived of new things to do, thus clamored for and praised the new content.

The Living World with GW2 cannot really work without creating multiple instances of a map and gating where people fall based on their progress in the storyline, without this there will always be confusion with the timeline, and what’s going on, and there will be a discontinuity with how some zones have progressed and others have not. ArenaNet just doesn’t have the manpower to do the Living World properly – not with the amount of maps they put in for the initial release, for sure. They tried to cover too much, imo, right off the bat, which led to forgettable villains (Gaheron, Adelbern, Kudu), solved-yet-unsolved issues (Gaheron’s dead, Flame Legion in civil war, yet it’s still a huge threat because they’re around everywhere in Ascalon), and a calamity of other issues.

The only real way to solve this without excessive manpower to create a new version of each map per season and expand the story of each map per season, is to not touch the old maps in ways that’d cause discontinuity (aka no destroying old forts or having an old zone assaulted by a new force) and accept that they are forever stuck in time. Like what was done with GW1 (until Beyond content, exception of a small handful of cross-campaign quests); Prophecies always took place before the other campaigns, thus you were experiencing past events when you went into Prophecies after doing any other campaign.

What about making a fractal to bring those newer players into the current living story?

So the current LS takes place after the PS, and after season 1. So if they were to include an additional story step as a “previously on….” it would make up for the “gap” in the story and provide continuity.

the fractal doesn’t need to be on a level with current fractals, but more along the lines of the Vision of Orr by the pale tree where we are given a synopsis of what happened in season 1, highlighting key points like the flame and frost, toxic alliance, the destruction of lions arch, etc. There could be maybe a solo boss fight, maybe some mobs or something.

So while the players are leveling, and going through the story, they see the changes that happened, see the wreckage of the nightmare towers, Lions Arch destroyed, but don’t really know what happened. And then starting season 2, they are more confused as the first part deals with Scarlett and tracing her origins. So if you were unfortunate to miss season one, you are kinda thrown into the middle with no idea whats going on, and need to search the internet, the forums, and blog posts to get caught up.

I’m not seeing how that’s any more helpful than the current system with the personal story. Anet intends to make Season 1 repeatable content structured akin to Season 2 and the Personal Story, though when such will happen is unknown. Once they bring back Season 1 as permanent part of the story journal, the only issue there’ll be is seeing the new content in the open world before you’re level 80.

But again, this can only be solved by phasing maps, so that we don’t have a destroyed LA, Concordia, Kessex, Iron Marches when going through the personal story (though Kessex and Iron Marches’ affected areas in S1/2 is not affecting instances of the Personal Story as far as I know).

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I’m not seeing how that’s any more helpful than the current system with the personal story. Anet intends to make Season 1 repeatable content structured akin to Season 2 and the Personal Story, though when such will happen is unknown. Once they bring back Season 1 as permanent part of the story journal, the only issue there’ll be is seeing the new content in the open world before you’re level 80.

But again, this can only be solved by phasing maps, so that we don’t have a destroyed LA, Concordia, Kessex, Iron Marches when going through the personal story (though Kessex and Iron Marches’ affected areas in S1/2 is not affecting instances of the Personal Story as far as I know).

Yea they said they would try, but that still may not necessarily happen.
fingers crossed it does.

i missed the tower of nightmares stuff

This is thorny topic for MMOs. Essentially you want two things to happen :
- friends can play the same content together whatever their timeline
- each player sees the world as it stands in their personal timeline

Generally you can’t do both at the same time unless the world is static and never changes (or loops, as in the GW2 event chains). Players accept this can’t be done and enjoy the game anyway. It doesn’t need any story explanation as it is easier to forget than to explain. If two players are grouped together and do two instances in Concordia, one for personal story and one for living story, then the open world Concordia is always going to be a mismatch for one of the instances. It can’t really be helped.

The next generation of MMOs will probably try to be smarter but GW2 just needs to make sure the instances look right and the game is generally consistent.