Guild Wars 2

[CONTAINS SPOILERS for the new Living Story, insofar as the trailer for the July 29th release goes.]

Bringing this up as a discussion point arose after seeing the new Entanglement LS trailer with Rytlock seeming to release Ascalon from its curse, and how that brought up the possibility of having no more ghosts. (Nooooo!) Of course, as we know, the starter zones for Charr characters prominently feature ghosts (including the very first playable sequence), and in fact, most of Charrdom is heavily focussed against the ghost threat. Many NPCs in Charr territories list the ghosts and separatists as the major threats against the Charr. In fact, I’m fairly certain that somewhere a Charr character states that a major motivator for the fight against Zhaitan is to then free up resources to deal with the ghost problem. So getting rid of ghosts would entail major rewrites of at least one playable race’s entire personal story progression.

More generally, the problem stems from the fact that most of Tyria in GW2 – in explorable zones, granted, but that’s still most of the game – reflects pre-Zhaitan’s defeat, where there are tons of risen all over the place, etc. However, we are now increasingly seeing the effect of Mordremoth on the explorable maps, and ArenaNet themselves stated the desire to keep the world “alive”, having it change over time, etc.

I think this will increasingly be a problem since the main world is being rewritten. ArenaNet could get away with it with Lion’s Arch since… actually, did they get away with it? I’m playing a new toon now so will see what happens in the personal story once I get to Lion’s Arch.

Anyway, we can’t keep forever having risen crawling all over the place since Zhaitan is increasingly long gone, and Mordremoth is increasingly affecting the rest of the world. Taken to the extreme, we will have the ludicrous situation where two dragons will be active “simultaneously”.

This necessity to keep most areas in “pre season 1 and pre Zhaitan” versus having some areas be “up to date” is going to present an increasing synchronization problem IMO. One solution, which would be really neat, is if after this living story episode is complete (i.e., the struggle against Mordremoth), the main game ends up reflecting the new reality, so that instead of fighting Zhaitan, you start off level 1 characters in the fight against Mordremoth. The struggle against Zhaitan, the formation of the Pact, the rise of Trahearne, etc., will then be considered “past history” that some Priory scholar NPCs will be able to tell you about. :P The more I think of this the more it seems highly unlikely, but I don’t see how else they can reconcile the aftermath of a Zhaitan defeat with a Tyria-wide mobilization against a new Elder Dragon threat.

Thoughts?

When playing GW1, I could take someone who started life in Cantha and bring them back to Ascalon to do events that were technically in the past.

As long as the new content takes into account the changed status quo I think it will be fine in so far as a starting character is still starting when the game “started” and will work their way story wise to the modern day when Rylock does the deed. I also don’t think all the ghosts are going to suddenly be like “Oh man, you Charr are a solid bunch. Up high!” Some might be thankful and others might be just as vengeful.

I answer this in another thread. My hopes are that seeing the Dust map shows actual map change based upon ‘something X’. That the Ascalon area will see the map changed based upon ‘its now night’. This had pretty much always been how the ghost situation was supposed to be, I think that if you read the book, the ghost encounter also takes place ‘at night’… (or in dungeons where daylight doesn’t reach)

It may be that a day Ascalon has been laying on the shelves for quite some time now, but seeing that the system to govern the change in maps and events wasn’t up to standards (or finished), now that it has, and been tested with dust storms, they might well be confidant enough to release new content on several maps all at once.

This would mean that the efforts of Rytlock succeed only partially, mainly, ’we will give you the day to fight off these dragons, but the land is still ours, and be gone when the sun sets, because we will take over, and anyone will be our enemy, plant, charr, or any other of these scrubs present here. Ascalon is ours and it will stay that way, until the rightful heir to the throne will claim his place, and Ascalon will be a human kingdom once more…

Now nothing really changed, and for a new player (or a new character) nothing has truly changed, the ghost are still there during the night, and the separatist (and others) have taken over during the day. For older characters though, it would also make sense. And for the story in the repeated version (the bought one), well it may display the exact same thing, and there are merely some questions as to why people didn’t see any daytime ghosts as they levelled up (if they even noticed). Or it is replaced by a failed attempt (just some lines and frames cut out of the scene). And all is well and understandable. ‘Only ’we’ currently present will ever know that at one time the systems to govern total map changed based upon timers just wasn’t ready to deal with the day/night time events in the Ascalon area.

In this sense though I am a bit more concerned with LS1 left overs, as these do not make sense for a player if they haven’t done LS1. Phazing might ultimately be the best way to deal with this, but it also creates the problem of splitting up the community, something that they just seemed to have tried to fix with the mega server package. So i am not entirely sure how to deal with this yet…