Guild Wars 2

The main beef I have with Living Story is how it is all just sprung on us, without any real rhyme or reason. Oh, a giant tower came out of nowhere and we must go inside! The Krait and Nightmare court are best buddies now, why? I know that there are other griping about the same things, along with a host of other problems about how the story isn’t told properly, how characters aren’t well-developed, etc. On the other hand, Anet is trying to find ways to get people to be more engaged in the Living World content, (and in the PVP/WVW content) as this is crucial to their business model.

Well, I propose that, to help achieve these lofty goals, one way is to change the way Living Story content is generated. Right now, ANet is actively trying to write Living Story in the same way a Television story unfolds. This kinda works, and has worked well especially in solo RPG games like the best JRPGs of old. However, GW2 is an MMO, and has a completely different format, but most importantly has tools and advantages that no single player game has, most notably: a huge player base connected constantly while playing the game. Why not milk it for what it’s worth?

I propose: Let the actions of players inside the game directly influence where Living World story is going to go."

What does that mean? Well there is this wildly successful card game known as The Legend of the Five Rings. In this game, players take the role of the head of one of several clans trying to dominate the world. The fun part is, depending on what people have been putting in their decks and how they have been winning (or losing) in sanctioned tournaments, the next card expansion and the story that comes with it changes drastically.

For example, early on during one of the World Tournaments, a Lion Clan player won. In the succeeding lore and history, a warlord from the Lion Clan rose to become emperor and this was a central point of the game’s story for many years. But what about those now playing and winning world tournaments? One of the clans, the Scorpion Clan, lost (and badly) and became a fallen clan, their stronghold demolished and consigned to oblivion, its leaders becoming exiles struggling to survive. One clan, the Crab Clan, had a popular deck build that made use of demons and evil corrupt cards. In the next expansion, they became an evil corrupted clan, lost honor, and had corruption and demons built into their clan — all because so many players in sanctioned tournaments around the world were putting demons in their decks.

Why can’t we apply something like this to Gulid Wars 2? The above game managed to create a true, living breathing world with nothing but cardboard. We now have advanced computers with unlimited connectivity between players and the game creators, surely we can implement a similar system. I know the upcoming End of Scarlet story arc is already well planned out for the next several months, but why not apply some of the principles here to upcoming Living World content?

For example:

• Have several optional achievements. Depending on how many times these achievements are made, they will determine how an element later on occurs. As a quick example, look at the Aetherblades Boss Fractal. If you kill Horrick, an achievement flag is set. Now if say 1,000,000 players make this achievement, in the story lore next update Horrick will canonically be dead. You could even play with this in other ways, like for Scarlet, there may be an achievement to “spare Scarlet” or something. Done enough times by enough players, maybe in the end Scarlet doesn’t die but finds redemption.

• Create a choice during the Living World story that a player must make — similar to the choices we saw in Personal Story. The choice must be between two opposite things or results and must be clear to the player. Depending on how many players made a choice for A or B, this data would influence how you shape the next Living World story. Taking the Scarlet example earlier, if more players choose to kill than to spare or redeem her, that’s what we would see in the next Living World update.

• Tie up Living World and WvW even further. Living World achievements were introduced to WvW last season (and it had a big impact, though not necessarily good in many people’s eyes). Why not take the next step? You could have a certain NPC “Sponsor” a server or team. For instance, Scarlet sponsors the Red Team. At the start of each Reset Night, she lays out several objectives to achieve “Kill 1,000,000 players total from Marjory’s Blue Team!” or “Raze Stonemist to the ground 500 times for me this week!” or “Capture 5,000 supply camps for me to fund my campaign!” And if the players on the server are able to achieve these, this would translate to the next Living World content.

We all know Anet has been trying to get more people into WvW, particularly trying to transition PVE players to WVW (or PVP) content. This would make a much better way to drive it and give it back to PVE Living World story content at the same time. It would be more meaningful, it would engage players more, and it would keep us far more vested in the results than just ticking an Achievement Point flag. As an added benefit, the NPC sponsoring a team would be a “hint” for players to try to figure out where Living World’s story is going next. How many theories would come up from players discussing why NPC A is asking us to take 1,000,000 supply, is she going to start a war somewhere? Why does NPC B want 1,000,000 people dead, is it because she needs the bodies for a risen army here? Why does NPC C want to defend Towers a total of 10,000 times, is there a place in the world being heavily assaulted right now and does it need a hand to repel enemies? There are so many possibilities and these hints would keep players guessing and wondering what is going to happen.

• Take a look at Event data. How many players are killing the Shadow Behemoth every week? Are there any world bosses nobody does at all? Maybe an ignored World Boss is being allowed to gather his strength, so after several updates of being ignored, that World Boss becomes super powerful and launches a Living World army update to take over his map. Or maybe a World Boss got hunted to extinction; take him out in the next update and replace him with something new.

There are just so many ways to apply this principle of having player’s actions influence the story content. We are players, not television viewers. We want to be actively involved in the content we are doing. We want our actions and choices to make a difference. That’s what Role Playing is all about. We have the technology to make it happen. Anet has the meta data to know what is going on in the world. We can make things like this happen, but Anet has to want it and the playerbase has to want to do it as well.

I would love to see Guild Wars 2 evolve into this kind of interactive story, and it would definitely keep more players actively engaged and coming back for more month after month. I know Anet’s developers and writers can think of even more ways to do this than I did in the ten minutes it took me to write this post.

There are some awesome ideas in this thread, and I agree with all of them.

I see where your going with this and i think its a really cool idea. Its always nice to see these unique suggestions come up. However in this case i believe there might exist some complications.

This mainly from the time it takes to develop content. We know that the AN crew have multiple teams working on different LS content at the same time, and that the making of this content takes multiple months. This means that it would be very problematic to launch LS content and register how it plays out, and then in just a couple of weeks create new LS content that reflects the actions players took in the previous content.

However if AN would approach it in a way that gives them the time to properly develop such content it could work out. But the time gap between those launches will then most likely be significantly increased.

Still this is a very good idea, and i think AN would agree. We can already see some of this in previous content aswell, as when we elected Ellen Kiel and that reflected on future LS releases.

I like the idea of giving us game changing choices simular to what you might find Iin Dragon Age and other concil games. the issue with this however is deadlines. they were able to give us a choice with the elections, but that’s because its effect wouldn’t be seen until 5 months or so down the road, giving them more than enough time to actually build it. it was also only one choice resolting in two possible impacts, which is relativly easy to manage. but if our choices were to affect the next chapter, which take months to create, they would not have time to facilatate and implement changes, not to mention a mass overhall of raining colateral that would come from multaple choices. its a good idea, but not right for an mmorpg

I’ve to point that, being in the traditional RPG side of Legend of the Five Rings, their method of world construction with tournaments is really annoying and horrible from the RPG/Story point of view, because we have to deal with many arbitrary storylines that are only justified by “someone won a tournament”.

So, when planning a campaign, you have usually to pick the story so far, and choose which elements to discard and which ones to adjust, just to have a believable world constructed (not a realistic one, but a coherent one).

But I have to admit that the card and the tourneys scene is more much stronger, and every card player loves the idea of being able to affect the setting. It does not create a great, coherent story, but the current Living Story implementation neither does it, and at least it creates an interesting one.

That said, the ability to affect story would be only in the most power-hardcore-players, so probably the most able to grind something would have more chance to affect something, so my very very early prediction is that the story would be affected by some sort of StoryZerg, that would create a train to chain the selected events, grind champions/materials/whatever needed to vote/affect. This would clash with mechanicals nerfs/bluffs (like the current berseker one).

But it would create an interesting world, nonetheless

Mia Lunarfang.5826:

I like the idea of giving us game changing choices simular to what you might find Iin Dragon Age and other concil games. the issue with this however is deadlines. they were able to give us a choice with the elections, but that’s because its effect wouldn’t be seen until 5 months or so down the road, giving them more than enough time to actually build it. it was also only one choice resolting in two possible impacts, which is relativly easy to manage. but if our choices were to affect the next chapter, which take months to create, they would not have time to facilatate and implement changes, not to mention a mass overhall of raining colateral that would come from multaple choices. its a good idea, but not right for an mmorpg

This really depends on what the scope of the change even is. It’s entirely possible that it could be something relatively minor that’s the ‘choice’ for one of the Living Story chapters.

As a very lazy example, the player gets the opportunity to kill one of two Centaur leaders. One is a Harathi, one is a Modniir. Depending on which leader is killed the most, the mob spawns for certain zones change- Say, veterans of the relevant tribe spawn in all centaur events. This is an absolutely miniscule amount of effort and can still quantify a ‘choice’.

When they are Timed and are more than one hour there is so much waiting in this game it is pretty boring.

There should be no multi-hour timed events. The longest should be hourly.