Guild Wars 2

Yes, there are hundreds of story instances, but many take place on the same map, or even the same zone of the same map, so you don’t have to make a coppy of your entire map for each instance; either make 1 coppy of each original map, 25 coppies total (you wouldn’t even need that much, as not every map has an instance, and furthermore, not every instance is effected by living world changes, so there’s no need to make coppies of unaffected maps) or you could simply coppy each affected instance zone (not the entire map, just a cookie cut out of the zone involved in the instance). You can still save the old versions of maps and have them accessable without too much data if you play it smart.

Example: at least 4 instances take place in your home instance, multiply that by five races and you have 20 instances… but you don’t need 20 map coppies for that, as nothing changes terrain-wise between each revisited instance, thus bringing the required maps down to 5, one for each home city. So claiming you would have to make 100s of coppies because you have 100s of instances is rediculous.

Just program the [unknown number] of instances that took place in the old kessex hills, to use the old kessex hills map coppy; and the [unknown number] of instances that use the new kessex hills, to use the new kessex hills map coppy.

Lions arch will be the only problem as certain story instances use it at different phases of: winter undestroyed, holoween undestroyed, lost shores destruction, dragon bash undestroyed, natural undestroyed, destroyed assualt, destroyed post assualt, clean up, and the eventual new lionsarch… but even that would only require 9 map coppies total, no, only 6 of them actually have instances, and only one of them can be revisited at this time (natural undestroyed for personal story), so that would only require two coppies of the map to exist, the current and the natural undestroyed.

I think the easy part is having a copy of the map to be used by the instance. The hard part, as I understand it, is having the instance use that map instead of how the current system is designed. So while it is probably possible to make the changes needed, it is a concideration of the resources needed to make the changes. And they also have to be able to continue making new content while also addressing the old content.

With that said it probably would take them months of a significant sized dedicated team for them to make this happen. I’m not making excuses for them but rather trying to put my 2 cents in on what I gather is needed to make this happen. I really think it is worth their time and resources to see this through. As this is only going to be an ongoing and ever increasing problem as they move forward in the game if they want more than one piece of the story to take place on a map. As has already been occuring.

As has been mention it could be possible to simply only alter the parts of the map needed for the instance. This could be handled in much the same way other instance elements are already overlayed on the existing zone. So rather than storing a complete copy of the zone or even the relevant part of the zone for the instance they could just overlay changes to the part of the zone that the instance takes place in and maybe fog out visual range outside of the instance (if there is no other choice).

The bottom line is at this time the games design does not have all the needed systems in place to do what is needed to be done to correct the issue. And only further reinforces my conclusion from a long time back now that they did not have this living world desire at the foundation of designing the game. This is not a bad thing as it just means they need to put the time and resources to making the systems needed to make it work with the new direction of story telling. I think with the current content pushing us into a new area of Tyria not currently in the game they have a perfect oportunity to put a team on getting these systems etc going to make it happen. And I really do hope that they already are.

I am sure it has been previously mentioned more than once, but if we are going to go by continuity issues, there is one big priority in the book and that is a heavy dose of updating on Orr, and even renown hearts. It was nice to see Kessex Hills hearts update alongside the Tower of Nightmares, and yet all other maps seem to be frozen in fears that by now are long past history.
Let’s not get started over people freaking out about, say, the Nightmare Court. Or the ever present remnants of the Toxi Alliance (just how many are there!)

While the Personal Storyline dealings are certainly far more immersion breaking than anything else, well, it’s only fair to remind ourselves that, as it is, 97% of Guild Wars 2 is a big slap-to-the-face when it comes to continuity or sense-make. Not to say this in a despective manner, but it’s merely reality. A quick glance into how Personal Story already makes you wonder too many things.
If you are a human, who helped all the other Destiny’s Edge people get to the gathering in Lion’s Arch? If you choose an order, then who cleared the issues in the other orders, allowing them to be there for Claw’s Island? Do the other mentors die as well somehow? Who retrieves the Plot Orb if you don’t go with Apatia? What happens to the NPCs in Orr that would die in certain paths, but not if you choose the alternatives?
Swiss chiss setting and instances are part of the charm. … That being said, we already have so many useless, giant instances, I am sure it wouldn’t kill anyone to research on resource management. (Fire & Frost instances come to mind. Still there. Still no use for them.)

I agree that this is a problem, very akin to being a giant elephant in the room to all of us players. We all know its there, but we really don’t wanna acknowledge it.
It is unfortunate that in a tech sense, Anet cant do much else than what is already being done, however; I’m glad to hear that they haven’t given up on it.

I also agree with the earlier post acknowledging that if this problem were to be solved, the amount of freedom further granted to Anet in making the open world evolve with time would increase dramatically. So much more could be done! (without it also being completely immersion breaking for anyone leveling up from 1-80 or not being on that step of the living story yet)

I’m sure most would agree that orr needs some TLC to make parts of it more relevant but we can’t deny that in the wake of the events caused by zhaitan the undead problem would still exist. If we are to go by lore (spoiler tagged in case this is considered one): then zhaitan is not dead but merely caused to go back to sleep. So his latent power in the area would cause the undead to remain but not as a threat to the greater tyria but just to the area of orr. As far as other enemies that existed from day one, there is no reason they would go away. The nightmare court hasn’t had an end to their reason for being and has not had an extinction level event occur to remove their local or possible worldwide threat.

As far as the orders go I think it is rather clear that if we joined one of them then some other joined the others as an implicit story resolve. But we are free to make our own story outside of the game for this if we so choose to do so. But remember we become the partner in leadership of the pact with trahearne leaving our ties with the order a secondary thing. And in the new story other than being the leader of a team there is no defined role for the orders or pact (spoiler tag to be safe as I don’t know if that would be a spoiler).

As far as the alternate PS paths we didn’t choose, I’m almost 100% certain that in the story dialogs it is expressly stated that we choose to go and do one task with someone or a group and other(s) go to do the other thing. So both things are done regardless of which path we take. In fact this goes even deeper and intertwines with each races story and even the recruiting of the nonplayer races. Where each races story contributes something to another races story or the story as a whole.

I see no reason they couldn’t use existing instance such as the fire and frost one you mention for other things. And depending on the game systems in place currently would determine the extent at which they can do things with them. Because obviously if they differ to greatly in certain things we would end up with continuity issues with them. After all the things that took place within instances for the first season of the living story would be the easiest to bring into the new journal system as they would simply just flip a switch so to speak to play out those instances again. Assuming they didn’t do something crazy and delete the code. I would not advocate the complete removal of places in the world. It is already jarring that the zone where the festival of the four winds takes place it mysteriously vanishes when the festival ends. Even though we know the land must still be there. The logistics of this being for the moment that they have not went as far as to code a variation of the events and NPCs for when the festival is not taking place. However we know this to be possible with the existing systems within the game as they have demonstrated this with multiple instances that take place in the same exact place already.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

Hence the limits of Living Story and the real reason behind expansions and additional areas. It is nearly impossible to keep continuity in an MMO designed around altering the world when so much of the personal story takes place throughout key areas of that world. Realistically the only way to completely avoid this is by ensuring the changes made are only to new areas of Tyria that are not a part of the personal story. All LS content needs to take place in newly created areas or limited to instanced or continuity will completely deteriorate.
The other issue is that it makes the characters involved in the PS almost off limits to current LS as far as killing them off or changing their role. Personally I have no idea how the heck this would play out if the current LS leads us to the death of Queen J.

But that somewhat goes against the original intent of the LW which is to revisit existing places and change them, update them.

Xhieron.2168:

I gotta be honest: ESO’s phasing is pretty impressive. I realize GW2’s infrastructure has a little age on ESO’s, but I’d absolutely be willing to give up a few gigs of hard drive for consistency. I’m afraid to say what I’d be willing to give up for the Nightmare Tower. a lot. probably too much. …

Phasing was originally introduced in WoW many moons ago. Not sure about ESO phasing (I didn’t hear too many nice things about the game so did fork over any money to see for myself) but ANet previously stated that they didn’t implement phasing since it inherently separates players on different phases thus prevent players from playing together.

PopeUrban.2578:

That’s not the first, and probably won’t be the last asynchronous NPC side-dialogue. Game is riddled with them. However what I stated is the official explanation for old forum topics like “Why doesn’t Zhaitan fly over Orr” or “Why isn’t Zhaitan a world boss” as well as “Where the heck was the pact during season 1?”

The pact is still quite busy killing risen. In Orr. In The official timeline.

Yip it’s next to impossible for a MMO to escape the time-travelling-issue. The number of flags and checks requires to represent several different states would just be a big mess waiting to happen.

MithranArkanere.8957:

They really need to have a look into keeping small copies of portions of old maps to use for past stories.

They did any the issue was apparently size. However I don’t mind a few extra hundred megs here and there.

Djinn.9245:

They should have considered it BEFORE implementing the ENTIRE Living Story. Its incredibly silly that the Personal Story, the Living Story, and the Open World all use the same resources when each of these might be in a different state at any time.

Living world only came into being after launch, if ANet had considered it while in development they could have built the infrastructure around it. However when ANet went living world instead of expansion the architecture currently in place could fully support it. Such changes would basically requires far reaching alterations of both client and server code.

lakdav.3694:

I dont know all that much about network and internet programming, but whatever technology (probably thats the one called “streaming”) Youtube and similar video sites use, might be the solution. To my knowledge we dont actually download the video files themselves on the Hard Drive, it goes straight to the memory instead.

You’re referring to cloud gaming. Also that would mean that I with my very bad internet connection would be unable to play GW2

OtakuModeEngage.8679:

Example: at least 4 instances take place in your home instance, multiply that by five races and you have 20 instances… but you don’t need 20 map coppies for that, as nothing changes terrain-wise between each revisited instance, thus bringing the required maps down to 5, one for each home city. So claiming you would have to make 100s of coppies because you have 100s of instances is rediculous.

Yes but even if they had to load multiple copies at present the maps being affected are very few, and it isn’t a perfect solution but it’s still a temporary fix which they can apply until someone comes up with an ingenious scalable solution. Sure it’s a band-aid on a gaping wound, but at least it’s something :P

Jia Shen.4217:

Snip.

Oh I certainly don’t mean that in the lapse of two years Orr should suddenly be a brilliant land of greenery and cute fluffy bunnies. However, as you said. At least changing of referrals by NPCs, or everyone not pretending we are still trying to breach into Arah for the first time. Of course this would just ruin the experience for the beginner players, but that was my point initially; There really are no means of doing both things at the same time, and probably never will be if we try to cater to both “players starting” and “evolving, changing world”.
More or less the same thing applies to the Nightmare Court, Centaurs and other minor threats. Sure, there should be no reason to -remove- them, however, the Nightmare Court after Faolain’s kickout is quite clearly in heavy disarray and infighting. This should reflect in heavy decrease of numbers, or at least “tribes” fighting each other in some way. The same could be said about the centaurs, specially since their leader, by the current setting’s time, is gone. (And is gone every day for delicious loot.)
Again, it is not something that can be done. But those happenings by now should be heavily altered for all sense-makingness.

And while I of course assume that everything that happens in your Personal Storyline is taken care of by unnamed people even at the times where the dialogues does not establish that it will be done (After all, many of the paths are labeled a choice on how to do it, not which path you want to LEAD), it would certainly have been less “up in the air” if the existence of a racial NPC for each of the Destiny’s Edge had at least fleeting mentions, so as to not feel our character is both adamantly key in the setting because the writers says so and completely irrelevant since things get done anyways if you aren’t there.

I just hope they find a solution to this problem. At the current rate of the living story, if they keep radding over top of everything but keeping the stuff from the living story, so it can be repeated too, it will end up like a weird hodge-podge of mix-matchy things that dont belong together.
Like a previous poster said “oh, over there is the destroyer stuff, and just across this road is the mordrem viney stuff, and over here you have some old stuff where the NPCs are STILL worrying about zhaitan” etc.

I don’t know why they use places that are in the PS. It not like there are not other pact forts they could have used that are not a part of the PS. It’s really going to be story braking once I get my next alt to Concordia and they are a ting like nothing’s wrong. And I’m going to be looking at a splintered fort full of vines and everyone’s talking about Zhitan while I’m thinking the vine that is hanging the Vigil soldier behind you says you have a bigger problem here than Zhitan. Or better still just make a new instance map for that one part. That way it’s not braking the story. Then, next time stay away from places that involve the PS. It’s no hard. The world is big enough. But then ANet could have done the sensible thing and kept the story to the new zones. But the. They have forever changed already in a completely story braking way already. So I guess if you are not here from day you everything is just going to be a mess for ever.

They really should do some kind of versioning with optional space usage then if file size is that big of an issue. For example make the default game download the original maps and the current LS versions. From there have a version that is current LS version and the first season of LS and so on. Also have a version for “kittening everything” for those of us with several terabytes of HDD space who thusly “do not care how big this gets”. So essentially you would have various versions with 2 map variations and a single one with everything. Sucks for people that don’t have tons of HDD space but kitten man, I had a 250GB HDD stock in my laptop 6 years ago. I’d also leave all the story chapters playable regardless of map version set up you have but make an option to set the launcher to patch to the appropriate “LS setting +current LS” combination for that story chapter.

Anmida.4058:

Snip.

So, basically you’re asking for a massive rewrite of all the maps; to completely alter the location, allegiances, and amount of enemy fortifications, the events, npc dialogue, and the hearts, to erase the past in favor for the present… do you know how much material they would be throwing out? How many man hours and spent budget would be wasted? Virtually all the art work, the terrain, would have to be trashed so that new content could be added in its place. The core of GW2 is its open world content, about 75% of the game is invested in that, and you want them to redo it all? That’s ridiculous. With budget and time restrictions its impossible, but more than that, it would be throwing out perfectly good content, enjoyable experience we could never revisit, and new players would be forced to miss out on all together.

Are you seriously telling me, that if in this update Rytlock releases all the ghost, you never want to be able to fight a ghost again? Or that if they redo Orr, to reflect the death of Zhiatan, you wont miss being able to capture temples?

Personally, when i’m playing the char personal story, I want to travel through an old Ascalon plagued by ghost and tainted by the searing; to play events and fight enemies that should be there, because my last and next story chapter tell me so, because the story flows better when meshed with the surrounding map… it doesn’t make sense otherwise. You talk about continuity, but how the hell is the story line to make sense in the beginning chapters when the beginning maps are dated in the long distant future?

GW2 has always been designed so that as you travel and adventure, as you move through each map towards the end of the story line, you are moving in time. From Divinity’s Reach east to Lion’s Arch, you grapple with your nations internal problems before moving on to join an order; and south from Lions Arch to Orr, you forge the pact, and thrust it into the heart of the dragon. The game has always been set so that each map was set in time, reflecting the personal story chapters that are their parallel; and you’re asking to redo all of that. Where would the continuity be then? Think of the replay-ability the game would lose, or how new players would be discouraged, unable to experience each chapter in its full glory and intensity, the worth of the content devalued. No, its far better that they add new maps, and let the time line continue there.

You seem to have missed the whole point, where I stated nothing of what you are currently being baffled about would be possible given it would severely alter the gameplay for new players, and that it is standard for Guild Wars 2 to be a bigg snowball of continuity mishappens, as per the ongoing conversation.

Anmida.4058:

You seem to have missed the whole point, where I stated nothing of what you are currently being baffled about would be possible given it would severely alter the gameplay for new players, and that it is standard for Guild Wars 2 to be a bigg snowball of continuity mishappens, as per the ongoing conversation.

Oh? I seem to recall someone stating that there should be visible fractions among the Nightmare Court, that the Centaurs should be severely weakened; that the present maps should match the current story. Well if there are fractions among-st the Nightmare Court, they certainly aren’t all going to be partying in the same outpost.

Likely, during a rather bitter argument in the mess hall, gloves would be tossed and what would begin as a small scuffle would break out into an all out war, in effect destroying their current abode, and forcing the two sides to erect apposing structures on opposite ridges, with an event where they fight in the middle. Such an event would match the current Living Story, but would greatly alter the map in which it took place (with the unfortunate negative side effect of ruining the beginning personal story in that region)… which in essence, is what you’re asking for, is it not?