Guild Wars 2

Player Driven Problem Solving Initiative
How to put MMO back into LS?

With the change in scope of the LS one very obvious problem has arisen. While the new approach (in my view) is a good change, as it somewhat extends the personal story, makes it possible to live through the events on Alt’s, and it also makes it possible for new players to live through the history of Tyria and through that come to understand what happened and why X or Y is in the world.

BUT!

With that change comes the problem of how to put Large Scale Massive Multiplayer Events into the story, in a way that they can be relived/replayed by individuals or small groups later on… So the problem goes both ways, how to put MMO back into LS, so that we can have big multi player story steps, but at the same time, how to translate those big multiplayer events into the current LS format?

While I am sure that ANet is thinking hard to come up with solutions, I thought it could be nice to try and collaborate as players to come up with ways to achieve this. Obviously ANet dev’s are more then welcome to chip in, but this isn’t a CDI thread (which seem to be broad and feedback driven). This is a thread with a single problem that we all have to deal with, and hopefully we can come up with ways to solve this problem, so that the LS can be all that we hope it can be…

Boss Fight
One of the more obvious ways, that I think we can all somewhat see coming, is the addition of a big Boss fight, aka fighting the Champ of Mordremoth. While this is a great way of doing this, as it also adds more permanent content to the actual world. There a few ‘problems’ that I see with this (otherwise fine) solution:

1. It can only be used 1x in a whole story arc, because else each map will have Several Super Bosses, and not before long the whole world is just ‘Super Boss’ content.

2. If this Super Boss is part of a story step, where completion is needed to continue the rest of the story, then how are your Alt’s or New players going to complete it? I mean, it is going to be on a couple of hours of rotation, and come with Guild Activation. But if you are just some player, are you really going to have a good time having to wait until that boss spawns, ’AND" defeated, in order to continue your story?

So while this works, it is much more suited as an ‘story end boss’ scenario, if the story ends at this point, then it doesn’t become a huge hurdle in an otherwise manageable story. But… Surely we would like some more big multi player fights during a LS chapter…

3. While we have seen that it could be possible to transplant the boss into a single/small group instanced story step (aka. the attack on the summit) for the replay. I think we can agree that it doesn’t give nearly the same experience; some strange stories will come from that: “What you mean that fight against the Shadow was this epic MM-battle that took several days to figure out and complete, where you just ‘had to be there’, I just solo’ed that thing on my thief”.

4. Any more problems that anyone can identify?

ending So yeah, while this is a more obvious solution, it only works in a 1-time end boss scenario. Surely there are more ways… ?

The Marionette
Taking some of the more iconic steps from LS1 (I think) can be a great way to find both inspiration as well as possible solutions. The Marionette content (in my views) has some things in it that would make some of the mechanics of that fight suitable for this Problem. Why?

-!- The Marionette divided us all up into smaller groups.

This means that for a replay version you can replace a lot of the ‘other players’ by NPC’s, and use DE2.0 NPCs to assist the player to tackle a more manageable problem. This goes for both the passage ways, as well as the direct confrontation. Especially in the direct confrontation I think the experience of looking around and seeing NPC’s on the other Pads, instead of Players, would not diminish the actual epic feel of having defeated this big boss in a collaborate effort.

Problem?
There is the problem though as to how (or if) to let the player choose his/her own lane. With this I mean that you could, but if you do you can not let the player ‘get out’ of that lane to check upon others, as they would be empty :P (in the replay of course). At the same time, a lot of the fun was to try and achieve all the lanes… perhaps this could be solved by splitting up said fight, and have the player ‘choose’ a lane, to then put them in that lane. The story itself could continue after completing one successful lane, the ‘achievement’ could be to replay that boss and do all lanes.

conclusion
I think the Marionette style content would be very appropriate to do as a Massive Multiplayer event during a story, as it can be divided up for the replay, your NPC hero band can be your assistance, and other NPCs can give you that group effort feel.

The Karka Queen, as a cinematic?
This was a single time large scale open world event (that I missed due to having a family weekend ), while it was sad for those that missed it, I am sure that for those who were around it was an epic and fun experience…

This I think is one of the strong points to this kind of content, it’s a one time epic deal that truly gives that ‘you should have been there’ feeling to those ‘that were there’. For those that were not there, well not so much … in fact, I never even got to see it :/ … I have no clue what it was about, other than a big Karka.

Now I can personally step over my disappointment of not having been there, but I find it somewhat ‘sad’ that even though I can not relive it, I can also not ‘review’ it … this gave me the idea that perhaps:
One time deal events could be used to explain the story in a cinematic, for the replay session.

But! This would (I think) only work if the event took place at the very start of the LS, see, it doesn’t make much sense if midway there is a large-scale open-world event taking place in which you the player can not partake, and now you have to watch the tldr instead -!?!-

Yet! For an opening cinematic I CAN work. See, if we were to assume the whole of the Karka Island experience was delivered in the replayable LS format. And you were to start that storyline, a cinematic of the actual Karka Queen event would have made perfect sense, and after it had been killed, it would make sense that ‘you’ could not kill it again. Sure, people would be as disappointed by that, as they would be for missing the actual deal, but at least that part of Tyrian history isn’t lost on them. It sets the tone for the content, and it would actually bring up the stories:
new player: ‘man I wish we could kill that boss in that cinematic’
veteran: ‘we did, it was a one time deal though, but man you should have been there… etc… etc…’
new player: ‘wow, how cool, wish I could have been there ’
veteran: ’well get your character to LvL80, new LS:chapters come out on a fairly regular basis, and surely there will be one time fights like that again…’

Conclusion one time large scale open world events could be used in the LS as an opening event, the actual play troughs could be used to serve as cinematic material for the replay of the LS that is to follow after that one time event.

Shared Goal
This is a way go create large-scale open-world content during the LS, that can be consolidated into a single player replay-LS as well. This idea comes from the LS2:Win over the Norn story step, which I think had great potential to be turned into an open world shared effort, while the actual steps as they were in the LS now would need very little adjustments to relive that segment on a replay.

So how could it have worked? Well, we are asked to deal a blow to the svanir, and this could have easily been turned into an open-world full scale war declaration on them. A simple ‘bar’ with say 4-5 segments could keep count of the amount of Svanir slain during a certain (2 weeks obviously) period. All contributions in all instances (seeing with the mega-server, I can no longer say ’on all servers), would count towards the common goal, and based upon the amount of svanir killed in that timeframe (based upon the segments completed) we could have had a increased reward.

The story step we had ‘now’ instead, could have been a follow-up on that shared effort and conclude the ‘win over the Norn’ after the timed open-world large-scale common goal event…

replay
The replay could have captured that same effort by having people complete a certain number of Svanir Events (of which there are plenty), to then finalize on the same end step (though arguably that one might be better suited to do in an instance, as there is no guarantee that a single player can complete that in-game event on their own.

Conclusion
Common goals set for everybody in the LS first run, may well be translated into individual goals for the replay of the LS. While the scale in the experience may differ, it would not diminish how much sense the content makes in relation to the story.