Guild Wars 2

According to the post-PAX party, the story of Heart of Thorns is going to take place immediately after the latest Living Story. Literally within 24 hours of the destruction of the Pact fleet.

…but the expansion doesn’t come out for at least another month or two, if not more. So far the world seems to be working in real time. How are we handling the discrepancy between launch date and in-game time? Is the fighting in the Silverwastes going to be canonically extended until HoT launches? Is the HoT story going to be “in the past”?

For example, say the pact fleet crashed on 13 Zephyr (January 13th), and the expansion launches on 91 Phoenix (April 1st), does that mean HoT story will have taken place some time between 13 Zephyr and 91 Phoenix, that it was going on in real time we just couldn’t play it until after the fact?

Maybe the events where the pact fleet are destroyed (as seen in the trailer) do not happen right after the events of chapter 8. In other words, maybe there is some time between chapter 8 and the events of the two trailers we’ve seen at the end of it. Though it seems unlikely that it would take the fleet two months or more to get to the jungle. I honestly have no idea how they are going to handle this.

The calendar sync issues has been a hot topic for quite some time now. Certainly, to begin with, it sounded like ANet wanted to sync each day to completely fit our 365 days.

However, if you look at how the living world has been set up, I’m not sure if that’s 100% true anymore. Several of the Season 1 and 2 episodes are connected to each other in a similiar way: ending with a cliffhanger and with the next episode picking up the story seemingly shortly after (at least not waiting for 4-6 weeks, as we’ve done during season breaks).

Also, during all releases, events are clearly being spread out to last longer for the sake of game mechanics – while in lore they’re taking place over just a few days (e.g. did the attack/evacuation of LA take 1 hour or 2 weeks?).

Furthermore, the exact dates have never been added to the story journal. If they intended days to be 100% in sync, why didn’t they do this?

Years in sync = a wonderful and necessary idea imo.
Days in sync = not so much.

Tbh, I’m hoping they retcon the whole calendar (again) and instead of having 360 or 365 days per year reduce it to e.g. 150. That would make much more sense in respect of the amount of content they’te able to release per year.

They’re just going back to how they originally did things. Which is how a lot of GW2’s open world functions.

“It’s stuck in time until we say otherwise.”

I think the time syncing just ended up being a failed experiment. It’s basically expecting them to make content as fast as we consume it, but still refusing to let them timegate us like other MMOs would.

Well, if you’ll go hang around Fort Marriner, you’ll see Magnus, Kiel, and Hero-Tron are just now discussing how to get LA back on its feet. So I guess we just have to suspend our disbelief and remember time doesn’t pass in Tyria as it does here.

The point, however, is that for the past year Angel McCoy – and lightly Bobby Stein – had explicitly stated that the Living World happens at the same pace as time passes for us.

Which has never made much sense and they claimed it was done for the date put in the story journal… which only ever documented the year.

So still, nearly a year had passed since LA got destroyed…

When did they say that though? I hear people refer to those statements all the time, but I have yet to actually see the actual statements.

lordkrall.7241:

When did they say that though? I hear people refer to those statements all the time, but I have yet to actually see the actual statements.

They didn’t exactly state it, but it is inferred from the Angel McCoy interview:

“The connection between the Mouvelian calendar and our real-world calendar is a practical one.” ¹

Why would this be a practical decision? The only reason I can think of is that they want to align the events/seasons in Tyria with our own, such that Wintersday occurs when our winter holiday seasons do, despite that not being what Wintersday is about. Angel mentions in that same interview that the question that spurred this answer caused the lore team to discuss this… I imagine that it was a very short discussion given how absurd the consequences of it are.

¹ – http://esprits-dorr.fr/node/261

Actually it was said, various times. The most prominent would be by Angel McCoy during the whole “lore is malleable” catastrophe:

In the case of the “days per year,” that was a response to our new Living World cadence and the upcoming journal (which I couldn’t mention at the time). We felt it was important to align the real year with the in-game year. If we adamantly stuck to the old in-game calendar, then we’d be cumulatively off by 5 days every year. Before long, we’d be doing Wintersday in January. Which makes no sense whatsoever (and would completely kitten our development schedule! Hehe.). Plus, we wanted the new year to turn over on the same day as the real new year. I gave a loreful explanation for the change at the time.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lore/Interesting-things-in-Scarlet-s-Room-Spoilers/page/5#post4193104

Except that her “loreful explanation” was basically “humans are wrong, asura discovered the truth” without taking into consideration the fact that no one would be stupid enough to not realize that there were a whole 5 day difference between actuality and what they thought after even two years. And the “reason” for it never required the change in the first place given that they have YET to provide exact dates and even the finale of Season 1 didn’t adhere to this change-in-progress (Angel explicitly stated during the Season 1 recap video they made that the Twisted Marionette was a one-time event, only repeating in-game due to not forcing players to be there or miss a one time event; and Escape for LA/Battle for LA’s descriptions and lore points it to being less than a week given that Escape was also a “one time lore event experienced many times by players” (as evident by how we’re saving the same people the same way) as was the finale for Battle for LA, and the transition was argued to be a change of winds – which is a daily occurrence in the manner spoken of indicating a grand total of 2 days for that fight, minimum and potentially maximum).

… I’m done ranting, for now.

SirMoogie.9263:

Angel mentions in that same interview that the question that spurred this answer caused the lore team to discuss this… I imagine that it was a very short discussion given how absurd the consequences of it are.

I am now imagining Angel walking into the Writers’ Circle (or w/e) at Anet and saying “hey guys, I’m being asked about how the Tyrian calendar works compared to ours. Do we have anything on this?”

Bobby, face deep in reading something, replies: “Dunno, just go with whatever. We’ll make it work.”

Angel: “Okay, how about we sync up the calendars up, keep it simple for us?”

Bobby: “Sounds cool.”

Meanwhile Jeff and Ree are tied and bound in a corner, wriggling in protest and screaming internally at the horror about to be unleashed, but ultimately ignored.

On an unrelated note, I half-expect this post to get deleted.

But does that actually say that everything in the game happens in real time?

I read it more along the lines of: When the real life year is over, so is the in-game year. Not that “every single day in the game correspond to the exact same day in real life”.

Hahaha Konig :‘D. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud throughout that last post of yours.
It is quite descending if one choose to read it that way. But personally I choose to think that the writers are quite thickly skinned at this point – and might manage to laugh a little bit at it themselves

lordkrall.7241:

But does that actually say that everything in the game happens in real time?

If it wasn’t then why would we be cumulatively off by 5 days every year, as Angel claimed?

Such can and would only happen if you sync the very days, thus having things in the game happen in real time. That was the entire purpose of the ridiculous calendar change – to allow things happening in real time while also having a calendar conversion easy to keep track of.

But, thankfully, it seems they cut off the silly real time and have stuck to merely yearly syncing.

The initial thought must have been to have days synced. But as living world progressed, it just didn’t make sense anymore. So that’s why they’ve refrained from giving exact dates to the Story Journal, and also why HoT now will pick up the story just hours after Point of no return.

…I presume (but obviously; I’m right)

Except that they state they still did such… after Episode 2 of Season 2. When the post was made.

Ouch, didn’t see that. That one is a tad bit harder to excuse, yep indeed.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

But, thankfully, it seems they cut off the silly real time and have stuck to merely yearly syncing.

Which still has its problems for the numerous unattended story lines they have going. I really want the Charr-Human peace delegations to show some progress at some point.

Although it somewhat clashes with what they originally said, the way I see it is that from the time Season 2 ended up until the expansion comes out is the total amount of time it takes to defeat(?) Mordremoth. If they completely followed the idea that in-game time equaled real time then Mordremoth could hypothetically be defeated in a single day.

Regardless, trying to sync it up to real time is messy anyway and story continuity works much better when their is only a broad sync (such as Wintersday matching Christmas).