Guild Wars 2

How much of it is already set in stone? Is the whole storyline decided on before you even start working on a LW season (I imagine that a general idea of course, but other than that I am curious), or is it flexible enough to change the story partway through if you think you need to?

What brought this to mind for me was the recent threads about Caithe hate. I’m not asking you to remove that from the story (even though I don’t like being forced to hate her), but considering that you are getting feedback on this, would you be able to change the story of the next few episodes to tune it down, or hell even change them dramatically and make the commander do an aboutface after some event if you felt like it was the direction the story needed to go?

What about stuff like the Elder Dragons? Right now we are set up with both Jormag and Primordus, and I’m sure that if we are going to face at least one of them in this LW season you already have an idea of which one that will be. Is this also set in stone already, or do you guys generally wait a while and see where the players are taking the story and then surprise us (eg if players are super excited to fight Primordus, yet have been expressing interest in him being the last elder dragon due to being the first one awake, do you have the ability so shift the story such that we actually end up fighting Jormag instead)?

I think the story in the short-term (as in the current chapter being developed and probably the next chapter being developed) is set in stone. What is also set in stone is a longere term lore thread (i.e. they know what the next expansion is about, especially since it is already being developed at this time, and even they probably have rough ideas about the expansion after that). Aside from that it is a lot more fluid I’d imagine.

As for your specific questions: How Caithe is handled is probably set in stone for the next chapter and (roughly) for the one after that, but less so for further down the line since it is less directly tied to the overall arc.

About the Elder Dragons: The next ED and the one after that is set in stone, I have no doubt about that. Especially since, as I said above, they are already working on the next expansion (in fact, they have been working on it since at least march).

The storyline for major games like these is usually set up a year or two in advance.

As Diovid said, the next expansion’s storyline, and probably the following LS as well, is set in stone already. They may be able to change minor things, but there isn’t going to be any major overhauls because it would effect and push back develop. For the expansion after that, there is probably a rough plot and overlying story arc mostly done by this point. The only thing left is fleshing it out, filling in the subplots, and editing it all down to a manageable length.

There have been occasional panels with the narrative devs talking about this. They’ve said that there are “beats” that are set in stone, but there is wiggle room in how they reach each beat so there is iteration for quite a while. Weeks out, yeah, that’s not changing, they have the voice acting in the can etc, but months or a year out I imagine they can rearrange things at least somewhat.

One example is that per datamining, Marjory was going to be killed in the final fight against Scarlet instead of just knocked out. They were able to scrap that major story element even after developing it for a while, though I assume the decision wasn’t made within a month of release.

Does anyone have an idea why we are doing 2 dragons? Was there a reason for this like a battle between Fire and Ice (perhaps a dragon battle would be cool in the extreme). In the past we have only one dragon at a time?

macon.4065:

Does anyone have an idea why we are doing 2 dragons? Was there a reason for this like a battle between Fire and Ice (perhaps a dragon battle would be cool in the extreme). In the past we have only one dragon at a time?

Probably to speed it up. If we kept going at the same rate (1 dragon every 1.5-2 years) then it would have taken another 6-8 years before we were even fighting the last one.

@OT That is interesting about marjory almost being killed! Certainly answers my question as that’s a pretty large change in the story.

Also, we don’t know for certain that we are doing two dragons at once yet. We’re only 2 episodes in, and the bulk of the focus has been on Primordus. There’s been some mention of Jormag’s forces moving, but that’s a far cry from “We’re attacking two dragons at once! Everyone panic!” Let’s just wait and see how things progress before we make too many assumptions about the next dragon.