Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I hope Season 2 will bring us more opportunities where player-actions may have an impact on the world.

The only time this was truely the case in Season 1 was the Kiel/Gnashblade election. In all other cases the players participated in the story, but could not really change the outcome. We could never have prevented Scarlet’s Invasion or the destruction of Lions Arch. And even if noone injected poison into the Tower of Nightmare it would be destroyed after the set period of 28 days was over.

So I hope Arenanet will be true to their MMO Manifesto and include elements of choice into the Season 2 story.

At small scale it could be sandbox elements where players can build stuff, which stays in the world.

At large scale, the timing of the Living World story could be changed by players. E.g. if players don’t inject enough poison into the Tower of Nightmare, it will still stand there in Kessex Hills and mobs will attack players (and have other negative consequences for the whole world) until the player-base decides at some point to put an end to it…

Allthough I really enjoy the Living World (please no LW vs Expansion discussion), I nevertheless like to post this reminder of Arenanet’s MMO Manifesto.

Nyti

It would be nice, but it’s been discussed a lot previously and the problem is it’s very hard to implement things like this in an MMO.

Firstly unless everything is instanced you’re limited to choices the entire playerbase makes together (like the election) so right away you’re reducing the impact any one persons actions can have. You won’t see the impact of your personal choice, only aggregate of a majority choice.

At that point it’s already more practical to do something like the timer/antidote tracker for the Tower of Nightmares which creates the illusion of everyone contributing a little bit towards the outcome without the hassle of actually tracking what players do. (And at the time it did work, it was only at the end, when the bar filled right on time for the regular update schedule, that players realised it was definitely just a timer. Until then there was a lot of debate about what would happen if it never got filled.)

But you’ve also got to consider the development time. Development on updates starts months before they come out, and some things (like overall story arcs) are probably planned long before then.

So either you wait months to see the result of your actions (like waiting for the new Fractal after the election, which had some people claiming Anet had forgotten or were lying all along and would never release it) or they have to start working on all the possible outcomes months in advance so they can have every possible version ready to go on schedule. And then scrap one or more completely finished updates because another outcome was chosen.

Even if you only get to choose between 2 possible outcomes that means 50% of everything they make will never get used, and so half their developers were effectively wasting their time (and being paid for it).

Letting players only choose the time when something happens (like when the Tower is destroyed) would have a lower impact but it would still throw everything off. Developers would have to get their update ready for the earliest possible release window (say 2 weeks) but then it might not come out for a month and a half. And then everything else is delayed by a month and a half too. What do they do if a big backlog builds up? Just keep making things far in advance, and then having to change them at the last minute to reflect the intervening changes? Let all the developers go on leave for a few months (paid? unpaid?) and hope they don’t find other jobs and are ready to come back when needed?

It works in single player games because they can make the entire thing, including all the choices, in advance and then it’s fixed. And because you’re not sharing the world with anyone else your choices can change it. But it’s just not practical on a larger scale.

Ah, it was quite some time since we had one of these “buhuhu manifesto!!”-threads.

They talked about dynamic event chains and such in the manifesto. And that is very much true.
If you complete a dynamic event it does (until you fail the follow-up event) change stuff.

The thing is that having actual choices in a game as large as this is more or less impossible.

1: They would either need to create two (or more) completely different versions of content.
or
2: Don’t start making it until the decision is made, which means it will take quite some time before the effects are actually seen. Which people seemed to dislike quite a bit with the Cutthroat Politics release.

They can’t both have 2-week updates and at the same time have choices that effects the next release.

hi,

yes, I know, your reminders of the difficulties are true

But still some of it may be possible. For example as a compromise with the Tower of Nightmare they could have continued with the story (Scarlet learns about the super-poison…) and still leave the Tower in Kessex Hills until the players destroy it sooner or later or even the players decide to keep it.

Anet is imho quite innovative so I hope they find solutions to some of the problems you both described

Nyti

During the living story they can set a failure/succes ratio. If the instance is succesfully cleared a number of times it progresses in favor of us. If not, the next chapter will cause ruin

Ayakaru.6583:

During the living story they can set a failure/succes ratio. If the instance is succesfully cleared a number of times it progresses in favor of us. If not, the next chapter will cause ruin

But that would basically require them to create two completely different versions of the next chapter one which will never be used and thus be seen as a complete waste of time and resources.