Guild Wars 2

So,

I happened to stumble upon a thread that really surprised me. Personal Story line quests that take place in LA still appear, but in the current state of LA.

What does this mean? It means for a new player who might be doing his/her personal story and witnessing the “cutscene” that has the members of Destiny’s Edge conversing; right in the middle of a warzone but with no inclination of their surroundings do to it being a quest pre-destroyed LA. A user also pointed out you have kids playing in fire, etc.

Do you think this breaks the lore or immersion for a new player and how does this effect the personal story do to it being placed in a destroyed LA?

Personally I wasn’t fond of the latter part of my personal story to begin with, but I really feel bad for anyone who has to play the LA scenes with it being blasted to bits.

I think it’s a bad decision on their part.
It essentially means that all new players/characters are experiencing the past within the present.

The game should be showing them THEIR present – as in the present that is the personal story while they’re doing it. Not to mention it’s going to confuse people and makes next to no sense since you’re doing things in a completely destroyed place.

Yeah I get the feeling that their intention is – maybe not to restore it to exactly what it was – but at least have it somewhat rebuilt and less destroyed looking.

Can that even work? I’m thinking of one of the Order of Whispers quests that involves an escort through LA- it traveled along paths that aren’t necessarily all there any more, to reach a ship at a pier that has now been sunk.

This is exactly the problem Anet devs have been alluding to the entire time when they talked about the LW and PS intersecting.
The game was never designed with the LW in mind, and lacks the support needed to make this work.
This patch has shown us a lot about the inner workings of the game, and how much work there still is to fix that.

Make no mistake. The PS is in the past. It takes place in old LA.
There’s just no way for the game to currently render it like that.

This whole thing seems like a disaster. The Living Story and the personal story should NOT be related, aside from bringing in some minor characters to give a bit of nostalgia to those of us that have finished. I wouldn’t mind that. But this whole parallel thing can’t be happening and shouldn’t be happening. It’s limiting what they can do with the Living Story to make it something really great, and the fact that they didn’t hold onto the old instance for the PS bugs me.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

Can that even work? I’m thinking of one of the Order of Whispers quests that involves an escort through LA- it traveled along paths that aren’t necessarily all there any more, to reach a ship at a pier that has now been sunk.

Apparently it works, but you have to take an alternate route – and the ship is still sunk when you get there so the story makes absolutely zero sense.

Hopelessalchemist.4816:

This whole thing seems like a disaster. The Living Story and the personal story should NOT be related, aside from bringing in some minor characters to give a bit of nostalgia to those of us that have finished. I wouldn’t mind that. But this whole parallel thing can’t be happening and shouldn’t be happening. It’s limiting what they can do with the Living Story to make it something really great, and the fact that they didn’t hold onto the old instance for the PS bugs me.

It was recently outright stated that the personal story is now in the past.

So it’s no longer parallel.

Apparently, Anet realized their mistake of claiming the two were parallel for the past year or so.

MMO timelines… something that’s always been very difficult to do well, since in some games even going from one zone to the other essentially involves time travel. Although yes I have to say ANet could have done this better. Unless of course LA is going to magically go back to normal after a few weeks, in which case putting extra effort into sorting out the timeline would be a waste.

CureForLiving.5360:

Although yes I have to say ANet could have done this better.

I don’t think they could have.. a huge portion of the personal story is about an undead attack on Lion’s Arch. If it was still in “old” LA that would be even more story-breaking because the player has almost definitely seen the destroyed Lion’s Arch and would suddenly be presented with a pre-attack one, which would be in keeping with the original timeline but not work at all in game – “oh, I’ve time travelled”. Unless they rewrote the whole thing to be about an attack on Rata Sum or someplace else, there’s nothing they can do.

The main issue here is that they are using the live version of Lion’s Arch for personal story missions. Which is a mistake, but might simply have to do with space. Having a seperate version of Lion’s Arch for PS would require them to store two Lion’s Arches on the servers after all.

wookiee.4631:

I never thought of them as parallel. Were they really meant to be that way initially? I could have sworn that they said around Lost Shores that it was officially post-Zhaitan, I therefor assumed everything else released would be too.

Matthew Medina stated the Lost Shores was in a forum post, but afterward whenever asked, Angel and Scott (possibly others like Bobby) stated that they both happen whenever the player experiences them.

Meaning that, for some players Zhaitan died in 1325 AE. For others, he was still alive, even in 1327 AE, all the while Scarlet’s plots were ongoing while Zhaitan was alive.

Aye. But canonically though, the Living Story takes place after the Personal Story.

I think this means that lion’s arch in it’s current state won’t be perminent. It may be returned to it’s original state, but with slight differences.

Of course if they change the PS to use pre-destroyed LA, I’m completely wrong.

I did the meet-the-mentor step on my thief yesterday. That was a big immersion-breaking mess! PS happens during the campaign against Zhaitan, before the Karka invasion, before Flame&Frost, before a summer-full of festivals and Scalet’s reveal and subsequent antics. Even the official year of PS (1325 AE) and LS (1326-7) is different. They should have kept the old LA instance like the original starting instance.
Random alliances wandering around the bickering DE members makes no sense whatsoever.

I’m just hoping this is temporary and that they really wanted to have the old Lion’s Arch during PS sequences for this release, but didn’t have time due to their LS scheduling.

“When it’s ready!”

This was pretty much always sitting at the back of my head when they talked about the LS and started making permanent changes. They might have made a mistake making the PS so connected to a certain time frame that no longer exists in game.

Lostwingman.5034:

This was pretty much always sitting at the back of my head when they talked about the LS and started making permanent changes. They might have made a mistake making the PS so connected to a certain time frame that no longer exists in game.

Mistake? No, but they definitely didn’t put the technology in game to handle it. In GW if your character was doing a mission they couldn’t have possibly done (such as a Canthan escorting the Ascalonian refugees to Kryta), they put a message on screen indicating such. GW 2 has it harder as apparently they use the current map as is for the personal story and don’t keep multiple copies of the map around to go back to. If they did all they’d need to do is somehow indicate temporally when the event takes place, which can be done with blatant messaging, contextual cues, or other in game tools (e.g., a timeline that gets filled in as you encounter story events).

It would be extremely negligent if they didn’t save the original Lion’s Arch, Kessex, etc.

Lostwingman.5034:

It would be extremely negligent if they didn’t save the original Lion’s Arch, Kessex, etc.

Oh I think they have it, but the way their infrastructure works is that they can only serve up one type of Lion’s Arch at a time. Whether it be the Normal, Halloween, Wintersday, or destroyed Lion’s Arch. They’d need to build new tech to allow for multiple types of Lion’s Arch.

SirMoogie.9263:

Lostwingman.5034:

It would be extremely negligent if they didn’t save the original Lion’s Arch, Kessex, etc.

Oh I think they have it, but the way their infrastructure works is that they can only serve up one type of Lion’s Arch at a time. Whether it be the Normal, Halloween, Wintersday, or destroyed Lion’s Arch. They’d need to build new tech to allow for multiple types of Lion’s Arch.

Possibly related to the issue of phasing. ANet didn’t particularly like the idea of phasing (it created barrier that prevented people from playing together if they were on different phases). So yeah very likely they didn’t think to include the functionality in part because they never thought they’d use it.

I try so very hard not to think about this because I’ve already done the personal story a few times on several characters… the way it is now, the entire plot of the main story is completely broken. Lion’s Arch was a central point in a very key part of the plot, and now it’s gone, taking the game’s plot with it.

So yeah, it appears that ArenaNet has no intention of letting us fight the elder dragons because they are no longer a threat. They probably don’t even exist anymore. Shoot, they probably went back to sleep for a few million years. The game’s entire plot has been shifted to this poor excuse of an antagonist named Scarlet. Lion’s Arch deserved a better foe, and so did the player base.

As I’ve said before, I hope that this Scarlet fiasco was all just one bad dream of our characters and we ‘wake up’ a few days after having destroyed Zhaitan, and remembering that “Oh right, I was on my way to fight Primordus/Kralkatorrik/Mordremoth/Jormag/Bubbles. I really gotta lay off those spiked ales. That Scarlet thing sure made for a weird dream.”

Why not wait, like little less than a week, and see what Season 1 actually leads to?

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I think it’s a bad decision on their part.
It essentially means that all new players/characters are experiencing the past within the present.

The game should be showing them THEIR present – as in the present that is the personal story while they’re doing it. Not to mention it’s going to confuse people and makes next to no sense since you’re doing things in a completely destroyed place.

I don’t think it’s a decision, I think it’s a temporary technical limitation. I suspect they don’t have the easy technology to show Lion’s Arch as it once was and have it change for Open World content, so they have to make the undesirable compromise.

Obviously Personal Story doesn’t make sense in war torn Lion’s Arch but for all we know it’s only going to be like that for a few more weeks (if not faster than that). I suspect Lion’s Arch will begin to rebuild shortly after we retake it.

What I do find interesting about this, is the basic infrastructure of Lion’s Arch is still there. Even if buildings are rebuilt or redesigned, Lion’s Arch is likely to look familair to how it once was. There might be some big changes, but you can’t change too much geography without having to redesign the pathing of some of the Personal Story missions (the OoW one is the first that comes to mind for me).

Unless they find a way to historically recreate Lion’s Arch for Personal Story instances or they redesign the missions inside the city, I suspect LA will have a very similair layout to what it once had when it’s rebuilt.

The easiest way to do it was have it like it used to be and let players know it’s in the past.

Dean Calaway.9718:

The easiest way to do it was have it like it used to be and let players know it’s in the past.

That might however not be as easy as you think.
It would require them to store multiple versions of Lion’s Arch for one.

Technically, only one additional version – the release version (before even The Lost Shores), and then the current version – as well as any decorated version of LA (Dragonbash, Halloween, and Wintersday).

lordkrall.7241:

That might however not be as easy as you think.
It would require them to store multiple versions of Lion’s Arch for one.

Depending on circumstances this would be true. They already store all of these versions somewhere, but only one of them is live on their servers at a time. The proposal would likely only have two live at anyone point. The current Living Story version of Lion’s Arch (e.g., Wintersday, Destruction of Lion’s Arch, Super Quaggan Festival Day, etc) and the Personal story version. Theoretically this could multiply to more than two live versions if they introduced new personal story steps that were in a post-destruction Lion’s Arch, rebuilding of Lion’s Arch, Neo-Lion’s Arch, etc.. The solution to that is only introduce personal story steps that require different temporally placed Lion’s Arch-es when they have the infrastructure to handle that many.

I don’t have access to their infrastructure, but I don’t see how they could be far off from a solution to this if they really wanted to do it. Going to a different, temporally placed Lion’s Arch can’t be all too different from going to a new zone or even the same zone in overflow. I suppose it could use a lot of resources unnecessarily by storing a whole zone just to use a small chunk of it to tell personal story steps.