I have been away from the game with other things in life to do and now I am back playing again. So this is my first time seeing this update. I find it really neat that they are updating lions arch finally. After all in-game timeline months maybe even a year has passed since it was destroyed. And the same workers have been working in the same exact spot for all that time. They and I assume the vast majority of players want a “living world”, yet the game remains very static. Note this is not meant as a complaint. Remaining static for a time is good as it allows more people to experience the changes as they take place without having to be on every day or every week for that matter.
However with certain things like this it doesn’t make sense and also completely destroys the immersion when poof there is this massive change in one place that took months ever a year to get to that point. So why when they had the opportunity to make this much more than it is did we simply get a poof here it is change? With a year of real time having passed we could have been given small side content to the main story telling the story of the rebuilding. This could have been done with cinematics with a narrator telling us a story along with gradual changes in the zone itself.
Or it could have been a 3rd section in the story journal called the rebuilding of lions arch and had chapters like the rest. Then that would have given them the opportunity for players to interact in the story telling from the perspective of one of the characters involved in the rebuilding. This character could be someone of importance to the rebuilding. This character probably should have been new to the players. That way we get to experience story from an aspect different than normal game play with our own characters.
These story instances with this story character could have involved all sorts of non combat activities to tell the story. And at the same time not be just simple fetch and run errands. The story would be told, in combination with cinematics, through talking with npcs in much the way they tell the main story to us. There could have been event like things within the instances. The players actions could be solving puzzle style content. But I’m sure if a relatively uncreative person like me when compared to the creative people working on the game can think of these things they could have; it makes me wonder why they didn’t and we get just a poof here it is magically massive man power change instantly here.
With that said I don’t think it is too much to ask and expect future changes like this to get some sort of story telling along the lines of the suggestions in this post. I would have been happy with narrated cinematics once a month or so with incremental improvements to tell this particular aspect of the story. Thank you for reading and hopefully affirmatively incorporating ideas like this to tell this story and future changes.
