Guild Wars 2

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What did I like in LS1? That we had the most amazing, cruel and just perfect bad character in the history of the whole Guild Wars- Scarlet. And this voice acting!! The best voice acting so far!

Tara Strong is really amazing voice actor and I just wanna say: wow.

LS1 had great story, but without Scarlet it would be boring. She had milion reasons to hate everyone, and it is only one character in GW2 who said exactly why she was doing this, she even asked us to find out what she wants to do. This is the perfect bad character, Mordremoth, “Lazarus” are nothing when we compare them with Scarlet. I admire ANet that they created this character, this was risky as hell and it paid off.

I am really sad that we killed her, because sometimes I wish GW2 would be like fighting with the same enemy, who sends his puppets to kill us and never dies as we don’t, because we are PCs.

Honestly if you were around during LS1 you’d understand that the story was not as great as it might seem in a movie. The first release(s?) was just people fixing sign posts for achievements. People got burned out from constant short-period achievement grinds (content was only around for such a period). Often with ridiculous achievements, people wanted to get them to avoid missing out on AP which lead to AP chests (which were quite rewarding because of PvP skins back then and a couple of other stuff in them). But that’s just one aspect, many players did not like missing out on a chapter because of real life. Add to that the fact that the story was not cohesive as it might seem to be in a movie that was made after the fact. Most players hardly knew what was even going on, it was quite a common complaint by players. Why were things happening? No explanation came for many things untill we got into season 2 with Mordremoth and such.

Some episodes were pretty cool however and I do think it would have been nice if it wasn’t all temporary, I just don’t expect them to ever drop it back in. If they do, I doubt it would be all in 1 go, but perhaps one chapter at a time or so.

LW1 should be as it is now! It was created for the veterans for us who were here from the beginning and we experienced it and it’s over and that’s how it SHOULD stay! As story telling not the best for sure. The evens were huge and we worked as a community which made them epic but it is ok as it is atm … a good and fond memory for us … THE VETERANS!

Ashantara.8731:

I just finished watching the 3-hour movie

That explains this thread. Every summary out there is a far superior delivery of the story than Season 1 was.

It was hogwash among hogwashes, only coming together in the final four releases. Those were the best of it and it tied the rest in. The entire year (14 months to be precise, from The Lost Shores to The Nightmare is Over content) was a mishappen mess of poor delivery, bug-ridden gameplay, and mystery stacked atop of mystery without answer. The answers all came at once (what answers that did come at least) and at the end.

I do agree that Season 1 needs to be made part of the story journal – the main reason they haven’t is because the format they used then is simply incompatible with the format now and to make it part of the story journal like all other storylines they’d have to rebuild it from scratch. Which is apparently more work than worth in their opinion as they would rather tell the “cool” stories that are things like Lazarus being Balthazar (which, imo, is almost as kittencarlet Sue’s origin was).

But to say it was the best? Far from it. It was the worst; from a narrative and story delivery viewpoint, it has been the lowest part of all ArenaNet releases. In terms of gameplay, it ranged from bad to awesome (with, it must be said, skewed towards the awesome side). Its writing and voice acting was worse than Season 2 – when that came out I remember being “omg this is so much better!” but going back now I cringe at every third line delivered. Season 3 is definitely the highlight in terms of delivery, even if… things… would be better off not having been done and certain characters being done wholly differently (not just Laz/Balth but Kas/Jory and, especially, Braham).

Furthermore, the fast pace combined with temporary nature made it a stressful “must complete it all!” game rather than the relaxed form that Guild Wars had been from Prophecies, making it hard to be able to accurately critique the chapters because you were too busy trying to do the content then poof it was gone.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Ashantara.8731:

I just finished watching the 3-hour movie

That explains this thread. Every summary out there is a far superior delivery of the story than Season 1 was.

It was hogwash among hogwashes, only coming together in the final four releases. Those were the best of it and it tied the rest in. The entire year (14 months to be precise, from The Lost Shores to The Nightmare is Over content) was a mishappen mess of poor delivery, bug-ridden gameplay, and mystery stacked atop of mystery without answer. The answers all came at once (what answers that did come at least) and at the end.

I do agree that Season 1 needs to be made part of the story journal – the main reason they haven’t is because the format they used then is simply incompatible with the format now and to make it part of the story journal like all other storylines they’d have to rebuild it from scratch. Which is apparently more work than worth in their opinion as they would rather tell the “cool” stories that are things like Lazarus being Balthazar (which, imo, is almost as kittencarlet Sue’s origin was).

But to say it was the best? Far from it. It was the worst; from a narrative and story delivery viewpoint, it has been the lowest part of all ArenaNet releases. In terms of gameplay, it ranged from bad to awesome (with, it must be said, skewed towards the awesome side). Its writing and voice acting was worse than Season 2 – when that came out I remember being “omg this is so much better!” but going back now I cringe at every third line delivered. Season 3 is definitely the highlight in terms of delivery, even if… things… would be better off not having been done and certain characters being done wholly differently (not just Laz/Balth but Kas/Jory and, especially, Braham).

Furthermore, the fast pace combined with temporary nature made it a stressful “must complete it all!” game rather than the relaxed form that Guild Wars had been from Prophecies, making it hard to be able to accurately critique the chapters because you were too busy trying to do the content then poof it was gone.

The very thing that you hate is what I loved about LS1: it was dynamic, it was urgent, it mattered whether we (as players) could figure out what was going, it kept changing and moving forward.

You’re absolutely correct that there were tons of bugs and disorganization. ANet couldn’t handle the load on the servers or keep us with the changing content. (And sure, it was horrid for anyone whose real life took precedence for a few weeks.)

But it was so much more fun (for me) than LS2, HoT story, or the Personal Story (after the racial stories). LS3 (again, speaking for myself) has done a better job of adding the sense of emergency, but it cuts itself off at the knees because we only get an update every few months.

I like LS3 and I hope that ANet keeps up the good work with Expac2’s story and LS4; it’s a good compromise that takes the best of ANet’s storytelling and leaves out much of the worst. All the same, I felt the most engaged in the story & the game during LS1 — and importantly, because of the speed, I was able to cut ANet much more slack about bugs and poor writing than I am now.

As veteran player of GW1 and player of GW2 since release, with a huge breaks…

Well I saw LS1. IT WAS BAD. SO BAD, that I skipped most of LS2 and returned only in last 3 episodes of LS2. And even now I do not want to purchase them.

What was LS1? Huge zergs grinding events for no reason. That’s it. That was in a time when there was no really good organised play in WvWvW (amoeba zergs there too). Open world meta events were already old and not refined (no break bars and so on). And story overall was more like side quest, not contributing to a dragon arc.

And only reason that I returned in GW2 was SW map actually. New meta was looking good, LS episodes with this map was good too. How good is LS3? Well I bought two missed episodes.

And about quantity. They released all of GW1 content in much denser window… Eat this.

Yakez.7561:

And about quantity. They released all of GW1 content in much denser window… Eat this.

And burned themselves out doing so. That’s why they started making GW2 in the first place.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Yakez.7561:

And about quantity. They released all of GW1 content in much denser window… Eat this.

And burned themselves out doing so. That’s why they started making GW2 in the first place.

Not sure where you got this from, but I’ve never heard it said. They had an expansion planned for Guild Wars 1, but they wanted to do things the game itself wasn’t capable of implementing, so they decided to scrap that project and do a new game instead. A game that wasn’t locked down to the limitations built into the Guild Wars 1 architecture.

That’s the reason this game came out. according to Anet. I’ve never seen anything else to suggest otherwise.

I preferred the Instance system, tbh. Open World Exploration is nice and all, but that wasn’t what made GW1 great. Alas, all but a memory.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Funny, at the time, the story of Living World Season One was decried as terrible. Even after it finished. It only became ‘good’ years later. Might be a case of ‘grass is always greener’, or something.

I really did not like Season 1 and I definitely did not get the impression it was all that popular back in the day. It only became ‘good’ afterwards because it left a large gap in the story for anyone who didn’t get to play it.

Zok.4956:

Watching a three hour movie maybe has given you a false impression of the storytelling back in the days, because Season 1 took place in two years. Storytelling in Season 1 was (especially in the beginnig) not very good.

Indeed. The actual story of LS1 is quite nice, but the delivery was absolutely terrible and waaaay too spread out. It’s a great story to see in a 3 hour movie. Not so much to play through in tiny pieces spread out over the course of 2 years.

I still remember the profound feeling of disappointment I had with a lot of the chapters when I realised there wasn’t more story in them. Especially in the beginning many chapters had me go like “..That was it?”

Though I admit I am kinda biased against LS1 because it didn’t release the type of content that I wanted personally. I wanted more instanced story missions (like personal story) and I wanted new zones, not just keep hanging around in the areas that I already know. So when LS2/LS3 started delivering just that, I was over the moon. And just looked back at LS1 as “That really bad one”. Only in the last few releases it started to become good, but that was too late imo.

LS 1 was not really good and the concept was a huge failure as this stuff is not possible to implement. Also, I heard they lost a lot of data (i. e. they lost the Queen’s Jubilee content, with Liadri, Queen’s Gauntlet etc.).

Also it was heavily criticised by the community and most people disliked Scarlet.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Also, I heard they lost a lot of data (i. e. they lost the Queen’s Jubilee content, with Liadri, Queen’s Gauntlet etc.)

lol you heard? I’d love to see some proof of this.

Living Story Season 1 had many, many flaws, but I daresay it was the only season that could truly be called “Living”. Now we just get instances, and you lose the epic world-scale feeling because the moment you leave the instance, everything is exactly the same as when you went in.
By far, the best living story episode(s) of all seasons was the Battle for Lion’s Arch. It changed the face of the world, and it was hard to ignore what was happening even if you were standing at the other end of the world. Similar deal, but not as cool, with Scarlet’s invasions, but Battle for Lion’s Arch was some of the most fun I’ve had in the game since launch.
Maybe that’s just the RPer in me talking, and given how hard that community got stomped into the dirt, ANet might not care, but still. Seeing a major city fall, and people of all races, origins, and power levels rushing to evacuate and defend civilians? It was gold.

Sometimes I wonder if I am the only person for whom the non-instanced (ie, cooperative and open world) parts of the story are the best part. Unfortunately those parts are also hard to bring back when the open world or various mechanics change.

By joining in 2014 I also missed season 1 and would love to see it. Unfortunately I have resigned myself that watching vids and getting summaries is the closest I will get.

Lethalvriend.1723:

Honestly if you were around during LS1 you’d understand that the story was not as great as it might seem in a movie. The first release(s?) was just people fixing sign posts for achievements. People got burned out from constant short-period achievement grinds […]

Nothing of what you criticize about S1 when it was released has anything to do with the story.

Given the story per se (of what was presented in the movie), I’d say the devs could turn this into a very popular purchaseable LW season without any of the downsides you mentioned during its release. It just needs to be done, but it doesn’t look like ArenaNet intends to put any resources into that project.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Ashantara.8731:

I just finished watching the 3-hour movie

That explains this thread. Every summary out there is a far superior delivery of the story than Season 1 was.

It was hogwash among hogwashes, only coming together in the final four releases. […]

Looking at the current LW season, it seems like they haven’t learnt that much from their past mistakes.

Unfortunately, your opinion would have been part of a tiny minority, at the time. You might look at the forums back then. The story, and particularly Scarlet Briar was very unpopular. More unpopular, dare I say, than the delivery method.

The Devs have explained, on more than 1 occasion, how difficult it would be to bring back Season 1, and if it is brought back, it would be in the form of Fractals, and such (for technical reasons). Thus, it will never be 1 long continuous 3-hour movie-like presentation, anyway.

Good luck.

Inculpatus cedo, those are just excuses. It could be developed into a LW season when done from scratch — they just don’t want to invest resources into its development.

Also, its popularity back then doesn’t say anything about how it would be perceived now, as a new product. Besides, the story has been made part of later seasons and HoT as well, what with Mordremoth’s influence being partially responsible for Scarlet’s transformation into a murdering lunatic. You can’t include the repercussions of LWS1 into later content without having LWS1 still present (for newer customers) as a playable part of GW2. It just doesn’t suffice.

I guess it will have to, as the Devs have no plans at this time (and haven’t for years) to spend the resources to re-engineer the game to make it possible (other than in Fractals, etc.)

Good luck.

MO talking about LW1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6pj6wm/one_path_ends_devs_here_ask_us_anything/dkprv68/

It is a mistake not to work on adapting the living world 1. At that time I worked at night on weekends and I could not play it.
That format sucked. They should give us a chance to play it again.