Guild Wars 2

Will we ever see longer lasting differences between servers depending on how each server community handles each Living Story (this or later stories)?

One of the core ideas behind GW2 is that the world responds to player actions. The most obvious examples of this are major event chains where areas of the world become hostile or friendly depending on the success or failure of events along the chain. However, this is a short term effect.

The ‘world changing’ (e.g. Living Story) arcs have the potential to make each server’s community’s actions in the world of Tyria have lasting effects for their server. That doesn’t seem to be how it plays out at present (e.g. the Lost Shores event had only one outcome: The Ancient Karka is defeated).

Is this something that we may see in the future?
This would certainly make GW2 an even more interesting environment than it is already.

(Beyond the direct effects on the worlds themselves, this may stimulate movement between severs as people try out the different paths (during the events) and resulting environments (after the events). If less active servers go down the less favourable event paths, this may have a balancing effect as they may become more interesting places to explore as a result.)

I’m not sure if I like this idea or not.

On one hand, shaping the world (server) in non-linear ways sounds really cool. It certainly takes the impact the players have to a whole higher level. It makes it an actual choice on the part of the players rather than just having the players take part in a predetermined set of events with a predetermined outcome. And thats pretty neat.

On the other hand, I don’t really like the idea of servers being different on a fundamental level like this. Having servers with different content would only serve to seperate servers more severely, making some preferred over others. One could argue that there’s already an aspect of that with WvW and general population, but thats all centered around the people in the server, not the server itself. With a system like this, it wouldn’t just be people but the server itself that becomes better or worse.

There’s also the fact that as far as developing content like this goes, it would be extremely time-consuming (they’d basically have to be making multiple event chains as opposed to just one). And if, hypothetically, every server picked one route over another it’d be a waste of development time for them to have created a whole branch that no one ever sees.

Electro.4173:

Having servers with different content would only serve to seperate servers more severely, making some preferred over others.

/enter guesting.

There were comments in a recent video to the effect that they are already thinking about allowing stories to diverge per-server in the future, http://www.eurogamer.pt/videos/entrevista-game-designer-guild-wars-2 . You can skip to about 1m30s into it for Colin’s comment.

Not to mention bugs.

Alyssa.3419:

There were comments in a recent video to the effect that they are already thinking about allowing stories to diverge per-server in the future, http://www.eurogamer.pt/videos/entrevista-game-designer-guild-wars-2 . You can skip to about 1m30s into it for Colin’s comment.

It’s a nice idea. I wouldn’t really mind it and Colin would definitely know more about ANet’s financials than I do but I don’t think they can afford to do it properly. By properly I mean allowing all servers to fully diverge. There are currently 51 worlds, I don’t think there is any developer with the financial or human resources to be making content for 51 games at once.

At best they could pull a Claw Island every couple of steps and in that case I would rather they didn’t try.

Khisanth.2948:

There are currently 51 worlds, I don’t think there is any developer with the financial or human resources to be making content for 51 games at once.

Not necessarily, it’s as long as a Living Story arch has a finite number of options it’s possible, the problem only comes when you try to build on previous content, if say the first arch had 3 endings, then for the next one you completely separate it from the previous content and say give it 2 ending, or you build on the previous content potentially having to create multiple endings for each of the previous endings. And so on and so on.

Some of us (me included) was talking about this topic. As Electro pointed on this thread, i doubt you will never see anything like this on gw2. Would be a real living world, shaping the world around you. Don’t buy PR announcements, they are just a bunch of preprogrammed repeatable DEs At best (assuming was planned) we would see a worldwide update at the end of this new content cycle, as a justification of why it was online. Regardless if you logged or not , nor did the DE or chatting on LA.

A part of me likes the idea and another part doesn’t.
It sounds nice, but…

• … you might end up having people switch to servers that has a better (or more interesting) story playing out. And those who don’t switch might use ‘guesting’ to get tp those servers. This would leaving some worlds pretty unpopulated (as far as the ‘living world’ part goes), causing ‘boring’ uninteresting story’s on some server, and that might be causing massive overpopulated servers on one hand and empty servers on the other hand.
• … They aren’t exactly having much success at balancing all the classes (for example: traits from the necro are still a mostly non working illogical ordered mess). I do not want to know what other bugs they’ll be introduce when each server might be getting different story lines.
• … The current story is boring. I mean it took 3 months of people losing stuff because they get killed, before 1 char and 1 norn suddenly realize that maybe something should done about it… :p How much “interesting” would the stories get if they had to improvise several story each month?

Overall I much rather have them bugfixing and giving us some more actual content (read more bugfixing, better balancing then the previous patch, and especially a better “living” story :/ )

I think the day we get anything like this would be the day where they have super mega servers capable of hosting the whole playerbase because honestly it isn’t financially feasible any other way