Guild Wars 2

This past year of Living Story has been interesting, and I’ve been following along. It really wasn’t until more recently that it has caught my attention as things are getting a little more bold – like the attack on Lion’s Arch. The rest of the LS content was good and I appreciated the content, but it wasn’t as easy to feel the impact of the story on the living world, until now.

So ANET, my feedback to you is to get even more bold. Don’t stop at Lion’s Arch where most people think this will end. Reading the forums, people seem to think it’ll all be over in two weeks and things will be restored and maybe it’ll look different, etc. By I’m suggesting you don’t do the expected, and instead continue to create major disruptions to the world and changes to the landscape. Keep us, the players, on our heels and surprise us! Attack the Vigil, the Priory and the Whispers. Keep Lion’s Arch in ruins for a while longer. Create even more chaos across Tyria, create even more disruption and change that impacts players, and make us feel like we have to really fight for our world.

Don’t stop now, take this in a bold direction.

im hoping la is an aneemy zone til the next ls season starts with the first part of the ls of us rebuilding la example one part with us clearing out enemies next part us establishing a foothold then us clearing more sections til we get it done then us doing part of rebuilding taking up to 14 weeks or so of living story chapters which moves on to us talking with the tengu about the killing of citizens with could lead to us eventually getting more zones and tengu as a playable race toward the end of year 2 of ls. well get to another dragon at end of year three. just a few thought im hoping they do. also put in a few minor distraction along the way so to break up the things

Yes, turn every mob to 80, add siege weapons and castles all over Tyria, and burn every single village permanently.

Make every noob zone 80 and permakill em at the spawn points!!!!

LIVING WORLD!!!! Make em CARE!!!

Seems people forget new players….but the game is going to need em when the top tier gets sick of farming back items.

I’ve hated the past year of living story. Bazaar of the Four Winds, for me, was the only bright spot and I’m completely boycotting the game until the overblown Scarlet storyline has ended.

To me, the Living Story experiment has done nothing to enhance the game. It has just distracted from everything the game did right at launch and has sucked up resources better spent on evolving the Dynamic World content.

IMO, the clear path forward from launch, given the superb core game design and at launch content, was to refresh at least two zones a month with a mix of new and modified Dynamic Events.

The role of Dynamic Events in an actual “Living World” should have taken a modular approach. As more DEs for each zone were added, the ability to mix and match, either randomly or on a set rotation, would have extended to illusion of a living world. As the toolbox of events for each zone grew, allowing for more configurations, their efforts would have snow balled until they fully realized a Living World paradigm.

Instead we’ve gotten almost entirely temporary content that has undermined and detracted from all the content work done prior to launch, diminished the game and doing nothing for players who missed that temporary content.

The beauty of the game’s original design, it’s business model and it’s logical path for expansion was that players could take weeks or months off and come back to find a lot of new stuff they hadn’t experienced before. That’s all gone now and returning from a break just provides you with a list of stuff you missed and plops you into the middle of a story you have no context for.

They don’t need to go bold. Bold comes across as desperate and an attempt to substitute flash for quality. They need to return to the game’s foundational design concepts and expand world content in a way that builds on existing content, rather than drawing players away from it.

The problem with Living Story isn’t just the failings of the content itself. It’s the way that content has detracted from the rest of the vast game world, taught players to play in a way contrary to the core game design, ( “Adventure by Checklist” is anathema to the original GW2 Manifesto) and also the way it has sucked up all the development resources that should have gone toward ongoing development of permanent/modular/reusable content.

I’m not proposing content that Arenanet hadn’t already itself proposed. In the 4th quarter of 2012, Colin Johanson himself talked about their likely strategy for ongoing content creation being one that would embrace the massive creation of new Dynamic Event content which would allow for events in a zone to evolve and would be rotated in and out to ensure the zones would continually provide a fresh experience.

For what ever reason, they’ve decided to do Living Story instead and, in my eye, that has been a devastating decision that will have a long term detrimental impact on the game and it’s potential success moving forward.

At launch, I said publicly that I thought GW2 had the very real potential to be a $Billion+ product over it’s first five years. IMO, the wrong turn at the fork in the road between LS and broad world DE content development have and will cost the company hundreds of millions in unrealized revenue.

The game is still one of the most successful MMOs since WoW, but it is just a pale shadow of what it could have been, should have been and could still be.

The beauty of the Living Story, however, is that it creates a timeline and a history for the players that experienced it. Unlike having new DE content show up (which I like the idea of BTW) the Living Story gives the entire world an overarching history that players live through. Small dynamic events that happen around various maps would be nice, and might encourage players to be out in the world more often, but it wouldn’t give the game a real sense of progression. The Living Story does, however I feel it only truly does this when players feel the way it impacts their world, which is why I suggested they make future Living Story events bold and in-your-face.

I would completely agree that focusing 100% on Living Story at the expense of development in other areas of game is not ideal. I hope that the statements made from developers about having enough foundational material from this year’s LS to redirect their efforts into other aspects of the game’s development is true and acted upon.

But if we are left with the Living Story then make them stand out. Don’t just make them some off the beaten path thing that you can do “by checklist” and then abandon without seeing or feeling how it affected the world.

Stone.6751:

The beauty of the Living Story, however, is that it creates a timeline and a history for the players that experienced it.

Exactly.

For the players that experienced it.

As far as ANet is concerned, though, everyone else can take a flying leap. I find no beauty in that whatsoever.

minbariguy.7504:

Stone.6751:

The beauty of the Living Story, however, is that it creates a timeline and a history for the players that experienced it.

Exactly.

For the players that experienced it.

As far as ANet is concerned, though, everyone else can take a flying leap. I find no beauty in that whatsoever.

I find that incredibly beautiful because it makes those events truly unique to those that were there to experience them. I understand that some may not like how that feels. People don’t like to feel left out, but that’s life, people miss out on stuff. It may not seem fair to some people (see info on Millennial generation) but that’s the price for this type of a system and the benefits it does bring. And just like any other system it has its pros and its cons.

Regardless, it is what ANET has decided upon and if this is what they are planning then let it be big and bold, instead of some weak, on the side, off the radar, event happening that no one really pays attention to.

I am all for Queen Jennah losing power, and join the players and Logen as a ally NPC.

Yes, be bold plz. ^^