Guild Wars 2

First off, I am very sure that there is a topic highly similar to this hidden deep in these archives so apologies if I am restating things.

When the first appearances of the Living Story came out, I was thrilled. New content, new things to explore and new items at times. I was happy to have new content coming out biweekly as it kept me entertained and excited for the next patch once everything was done for the latest patch. Back then, I was not nearly as busy as I have been in the recent months.

This past summer, I was fortunate enough to spend a few months in Europe with family that I rarely get to see. It was a blast to say the least. While I was there, an active internet connection was hard to come by since half of my family there does not have a subscription to it. I was never able to experience this Dragon Bash, nor these Sky Pirates, and definitely not Queen Jennah’s Jubilee as well as other events that happened in those months. Now they are history to us players and ever since then, I have been completely lost in the storyline. I have no idea how most of today’s content came to be and this is why I now believe a biweekly (temporary) update should be rethought.

Many people that play this game have full-time jobs, go to school, have games and practices for sports, have children to look after, the list can go on. There is so little time between new Living Story content that people will often get left behind and miss a patch or two. This issue also applies to new players coming into the game. New players won’t have a clue as to what is going on and they, along with the players with jobs, school etc, won’t be able to go back and do it. They won’t be able to pick up the back piece skin that was awarded to them for “X” patch. They won’t be in the loop as to where the Living Story is taking them. I for one am one of these people. I was frustrated after coming home from a (wonderful) trip in Europe and not knowing what the heck is going on. Now I know I might get answers like “just read about it online” but I don’t feel that is a proper solution. I wanted to be able to experience everything that I missed. I have two solutions to the issues that many people and myself might be experiencing.

1. Instead of biweekly patches, come out with one mega content patch (expansion?) so that we can enjoy it at our own pace. I realize that some of the content that we’ve received require tons of people to complete such as the Marionette Watchknight fight and the most recent Battle for Lion’s Arch. Content such as those may make it seem impossible to do. I am no content developer but some of these could be change by adding numerous NPC’s that you and your party members could command. Some of you might recall the Dzagonur Bastion mission in Guild Wars 1 where you could command a group of NPC’s where to defend. I see this battle being very similar to these recent GW2 Living Story content patches and adding NPC’s to an instanced version of the map could be a solid solution.

2. Keep the biweekly patches but allow access to previous Living Story events through a similar process of Guild Wars 1 Bonus Mission Pack. For those of you who do not know what this is, I’ll elaborate further. In a nutshell, in GW1, you could talk to these storyteller NPC’s that would take you back into time to relive past events that happened to some of the major characters within GW’s lore. You could replay these missions at any point in time. In GW2, we would have something very similar like this and your character would then be traveling back in time to relive the events that you have missed. Whether the maps be instanced or not, this is completely up to the developers. I feel like this could be another strong viable solution.

I hope this isn’t too confusing of a read. I just hope that this post will come to the attention of ArenaNet with intentions of letting us completely relive and replay the previous content.

Thanks for reading.

I was thinking something similar. I know several friends that left the game and are hesitant to come back because they cannot experience the earlier chapters of the living story and don’t want to join the content midstream. What I think they should do is implement something like Norn spirit traveling to different parts of the past living story. They could even make it so that you could only access the parts that were available at this time in previous years, so that at minimum it would take a year to fully catch up – giving people time to experience the stuff currently out now as well as catch up. NPC allies are a good idea though, for the zerg content. I think people would still do that stuff, even if it didn’t garner any bonus chests or had fewer achievement points associated with it than doing it when it released.

I agree with the storyteller Theory – Though what we have done as players has actually affected the world hence has become part of the lore of the game so it would be impossible to revisit some of the stories for example the cut throat politics patch as this event required players to vote on who they wanted to elect it also had story attached to it which may still confuse people

but other temporary content should be able to be revisited like the tower of kessex hills (even though im pretty sure you can already do this) but all other content as far as i can tell was really zergy so unless many many people wish to do the content again it will be impossible unless they Drastically reduce the HP and difficult of the encounters which would mean , Marionette, Tequatl, Queen Karka, invasion of the Aetherblade, scarlets minions attacking various regions of the map will all be pretty much nerfed to make them able to be done by less than 10 people, not impossible but i dont think that Anet will do such a thing, they provide videos and the new atlas thing to help people catch up.

Expansions are going to happen but they say it wont be in a traditional sense – probable that it will be a living world story that leads to one really really big permanent content patch as the latest living world reveals (im not going to add any spoilers) but i think this chapter of lw will lead up to this content imo

I hope however they add some kind of lore master in game to help players get on track with the story

hope this makes sense

Yep, most of the above makes sense. There are ways that they could still have the Marionette and such as a viable fight. As I mentioned, the Dzagonur Bastion mission allowed the player (yourself) to command a few NPCs and position them where you wanted. (IE: an option would appear when you talk to them such as defend the east side, west side, south side, etc.). Something similar to this could be done. You could even have it as a world boss. Some adjustments would be made to create a “Lornar’s Pass (Historical)” so it would not interfere with the current Lornar’s Pass map.

I get that there are ways to catch up in the story by reading about it in these forums, the Wikipedia, or visiting that Atlas. I for one (and I am sure many others would agree), I’d much rather experience the actual content. I want to play the content that in my opinion should be permanent. The analogy I had used before to describe the current mechanics of the LS is that it is very much like reading a book halfway, putting the book aside due to a busy schedule, then picking the book up later 75% finished. You’ve missed 25% of the story; 25% of the story that likely featured some very important details.

Some people might want to argue that “you shouldn’t be rewarded the same items for someone that was there on day one of the patch”… yeah, there will definitely be those types of people. Personally, I don’t even care about the meta-rewards or even the achievement points. I’m just in it for the story. Take away the rewards from me. Take away the achievement points. But do NOT take away the ability to relive and replay the story from me.