Guild Wars 2

I do have to say before we get started. The Living story does sound like a really cool idea. The idea of a world that continues to evolve from month to month sounds great. You never know what to expect. In practice this doesn’t seem to be the case. In some cases it worked rather well. The Molten alliance was a really cool arch. It left players wondering what was going on under the charr and norn areas and was soon revealed to be an unexpected alliance. Even with how frustrating some if it was the story for the Aetherblades was kinda neat. And even scarlet to an extent.

So with all this going for it, how awesome of a concept it was. Why is much of the community drained on it? And I believe there are a few reasons for it. The first reason I believe is because of Scale. They started off rather nicely with a rather secluded event that started small and reached a peak before dropping of. Then the next one tried to raise the stakes much higher then that only to push a little too hard. And then arena net just kept bumping the stakes higher and higher with each living story event and doing this far too quickly. Rather then these stories being stand alone, they each where linked together as a lone person’s fault. Scarlet.

Now I’m not going to say Scarlet is a bad character. She isn’t a good character, but she isn’t bad. The problem with her is presentation. I could get behind her being behind the Molten alliance, the Reactor melt down, the Toxic alliance, being the leader of the Aetherblade, or whatever else arena net wanted to involve her in if the character was presented in a way that doesn’t break the immersion into the game. And this is what she seems to do. Break Immersion.

For example, in Doctor who with the 9th doctor, through out the entire season there was a phrase that popped up throughout the show. “Bad Wolf”. Now the resolution of this was kinda anti-climactic however everything leading up to it filled with intrigue and suspense.

If Scarlet was done a bit differently, even having us see and meet her in person early in the Molten alliance or even on the Karka Island, but her playing a 3rd party character under her real name Ceara, then we would have had exposure to her ahead of time without knowing she was important. You could still have her insane, but keep her true colors to a minimum up until she is needed in the final act. You could have even had characters mention the name “Scarlet” during the fights with other characters. And even have her show up as long as she was hiding her appearance and masking her voice as to keep the intrigue. Who she was as Ceara should have been revealed in pieces through out the story. or perhaps hidden in one of the parts so that only a dedicated Lore fan could find it if they where looking for it. So that who she really is could be revealed at the climax on the hero’s terms to push her into a corner. Even have her working with the hero much like Vizier Khilbron only with less direct influence to the player.

But with the direction that was taken with her she seems to be eating up the spotlight because she has the stage crew hostage and not because she is that interesting. We already have a full map of her personality so there is little mystery to her character. The only thing we don’t know for sure about her is her end game. And that isn’t enough to keep people invested in the character.

Scarlet can’t be fixed because of the direction that was taken with her. But at the same time I don’t think this is all the story telling’s fault on this part. The Mechanics of the living story and how its used in game with the temporary content seems to be causing their own problems when trying to tell a compelling story. There seems to be little involvement with the players and the world itself doesn’t seem to care about if the player partakes in it or not. This could be a mechanical problem and I think the living story should either be put to the side for right now or scaled back to really only effect one to two maps at at time much like with the molten alliance or Karka island.

Another big problem I notice with the living story is Event Overlap. I’ve seen this happen where a living story will be right on top of one or more events going on in the area and NPCs more concerned with bandits then the giant robots killing everything around them. If they are going to do a Living story in a map then the events of the living story should take front stage in that map and other events should be disabled for the duration or replaced so that the NPCs that are normally there don’t disrupt the immersion.

I Honestly think that the living story is a really great idea and I think Arena net can do some really cool things with it. I just feel that they are trying to do too much of it too fast. They can still have updates every 2 weeks but they don’t have to be living story content. What about adding events to old areas like the promised? Or perhaps expanding on the world events that have no consequence of they are completed or failed? I know there are a lot of areas that arena net should focus on besides the living story and I feel that it should be done in moderation until they have a well oiled system.

The story part of the Living Story is not a very high priority to AN.
I reckon it’s partly a business decision. They decided to focus on giving players more gameplay content in order to keep them playing (and spend more money) than on giving the players extensive story, which will not capture as many people and entertain them for less time.
To “fix it” Bobby Stein and his team have to push the story into the foreground. WoodenPotatoes just recently made the argument that “management decisions” are along the lines of “we want the LS to impact the entire world, so let’s start in Queensdale, then on to Frostgorge Sound, etc” and the the dev teams obviously want to bring their design ideas in. And the writing team is basically only responsible to string all those plans together.

NinjaChris.9340:

The story part of the Living Story is not a very high priority to AN.
I reckon it’s partly a business decision. They decided to focus on giving players more gameplay content in order to keep them playing (and spend more money) than on giving the players extensive story, which will not capture as many people and entertain them for less time.
To “fix it” Bobby Stein and his team have to push the story into the foreground. WoodenPotatoes just recently made the argument that “management decisions” are along the lines of “we want the LS to impact the entire world, so let’s start in Queensdale, then on to Frostgorge Sound, etc” and the the dev teams obviously want to bring their design ideas in. And the writing team is basically only responsible to string all those plans together.

I think they need to minimalism the work as of right now. If writes want to create stories for later installments, thats great. However, they should keep them out of the publikittenil the mechanics of their system is worked our. The Living story itself hasn’t gotten all the kinks out of the system and I would love to see it bring some lore to life, but I feel its a bit rushed.

Mechanics should be hardened out first before we can determine what story elements will and wont work in the living story. I think that each story does have a place and a time to be told through the game, I just don’t think that the living story is ready for most of it or that its the best method to use for most of it.

And I have watched WP’s video. It was nice, however I think he is missing some of the larger picture. I’m not saying he is wrong, for the most part he is right or its his opinion which is right as well. The part I believe he is mistaken on is the order. The Mechanics should be worked out first, then the story should be flexible to be able to be applied to the mechanics.

I agree with the notion that the core of the game is not where it needs to be. For me the game is not as much fun as it could be because of that.

But the sole fact remains: You can not create an engaging story, if the story team is shackled to the unpredictable whims of higher management and content designers.

And it’s not like the LS is sub-par but in turn the core has had massive improvements. For the most part, the devs have simply added content that didn’t even compliment the core, but was only created to keep the players online for a week.

If they seriously want to rework the base game, they will have to stop the LS for a few months and tear a lot of things down. And a serious rework will probably only happen when an expansion is released.