Guild Wars 2

I’m feeling really alienated from the current Setting because I couldn’t play Scarlet’s War. A recap of events in the form of a 1-minute clip show isn’t good enough to help me feel a rapport with these characters (Rox, Taimi, etc.), especially since the events of Scarlet’s War really need to be experienced to feel an organic connection with them.

I just feel more like an imposter than a “boss” because of this. Can we get the GW2-team to make it a DLC? I don’t care if you have to handwave an excuse, like, maybe an Asura made a time-machine or postcognition-doohickey—just please, don’t do this to me. Don’t make me play a game where I have to watch someone else’s let’s play on Youtube just to know what was going on, and what these characters went through. It’s not fair.

Whilst I 100% agree with you, in case you aren’t aware why it isn’t in game anymore, I’ll leave this summing up by another poster for you.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lwd/Any-update-on-living-story-season-1/first#post6387327

tldr: It’s a huge amount of work for them to re-make. Yes, it needs to be in game and the recap does not cover it anywhere near enough, but it looks unlikely to ever happen now.

The main problem is that Scarlett’s war does a poor job as a recap and dlc. We would still be missing an important mission that was scarlet’s very first appearance (opening and closing ceremony). We are also missing the consortium (this is were canach was introduced) story. Ellen kiel, Magnus, Evon, and job-o-tron played a role throughout the season and a crucial role in the last episode, they are never mentioned

Sorry for being a negative Nancy, that recap grinds my gears, it’s incomplete and anet said they won’t fix it

Feels like I’m stuck with an incomplete product then…

What if we started a petition? You know, if only to keep reminding them to make it happen. I’m not saying it has to be immediate, just that we use it to poke ‘em, so they don’t forget. I worry that new players will be just as disheartened by not getting to play out Scarlet’s War, making the setting less marketable. I love Guild War’s setting, and don’t want to lose the chance at experiencing the full story, you know?

Just something to hold out hope for…

It would make no difference. It is a question of resources not a question of willing. We want it, many devs want to do it. To make it requires time away from future content. It comes down the what is more important. Rereleased old content and a drought on new content or regular new content.

MrParaduo.4869:

What if we started a petition? You know, if only to keep reminding them to make it happen. I’m not saying it has to be immediate, just that we use it to poke ‘em, so they don’t forget. I worry that new players will be just as disheartened by not getting to play out Scarlet’s War, making the setting less marketable. I love Guild War’s setting, and don’t want to lose the chance at experiencing the full story, you know?

Just something to hold out hope for…

Starting a petition won’t change the business reality: it’s expensive to try to retrofit the so-called first season into the current game, it wouldn’t play out the same, and it’s not as in high-demand as is completely new content (e.g. new zones, new stories).

What they could do is take all the instances, for example where you first meet Braham and Rox and their respective small instanced quests (Hatchery and Cragstead) and make them work like an extra personal story. Talking about the instances added with Flame and Frost: The Razing. That would be a good way to introduce Rox and Braham to new players and shouldn’t be that hard to implement, they are already instances after all.

Then they can move on to next instances and do the same thing. The big events/fights do not have to be re-implemented, for example the Molten facility or the Aetherblade Retreat are already Fractals and there is no need to bring them back. The story could go like: “after this you can experience what happened in the Molten Fractal” or something like that

The number of people who played Scarlet’s War, and the number that didn’t increases daily as new players join the community. The issue isn’t going away.

MrParaduo.4869:

The number of people who played Scarlet’s War, and the number that didn’t increases daily as new players join the community. The issue isn’t going away.

This. They need to do it if they want the game to seem at all polished and welcoming to new players, and it becomes more and more important as time goes on, rather than less so. End of story. It blows my mind that O’Brien doesn’t consider it more of a priority than he does.

They could do it as part of a renovation to the overall narrative. The PS could use a number of refinements as well.

Maybe they could do a kickstarter. Crowd-fund it!

MrParaduo.4869:

The number of people who played Scarlet’s War, and the number that didn’t increases daily as new players join the community. The issue isn’t going away.

The number of people who want to play Scarlet’s War is probably never going to exceed the number who want to play new content.

Not with THAT attitude!

Edit: Besides, that’s statistically inaccurate, considering the number of potential players the game could eventually have in the future.

MrParaduo.4869:

Not with THAT attitude!

Edit: Besides, that’s statistically inaccurate, considering the number of potential players the game could eventually have in the future.

Every player wants new content. Only some players want old content, since it’s only ‘new’ to some of them.

There’s no question that most everyone would enjoy the opportunity to replay Scarlet’s War. Just the same, those same people wouldn’t want to give up future stories to do so.

If the second expansion sells better than the first and ANet figures out how to manage a third with less effort, then we might see some people made available to look more closely at what it would actually take to bring back Scarlet in a series of instanced stories. Until then, development is going to go towards ensuring that the game and gem shop are meeting/exceeding stockholder expectations.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

MrParaduo.4869:

Not with THAT attitude!

Edit: Besides, that’s statistically inaccurate, considering the number of potential players the game could eventually have in the future.

Every player wants new content. Only some players want old content, since it’s only ‘new’ to some of them.

There’s no question that most everyone would enjoy the opportunity to replay Scarlet’s War. Just the same, those same people wouldn’t want to give up future stories to do so.

If the second expansion sells better than the first and ANet figures out how to manage a third with less effort, then we might see some people made available to look more closely at what it would actually take to bring back Scarlet in a series of instanced stories. Until then, development is going to go towards ensuring that the game and gem shop are meeting/exceeding stockholder expectations.

Considering most new players are going to need to first level up their characters to 80+ to reach said-new content, and the fact that—to them—old content is technically new, I have to disagree.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

MrParaduo.4869:

The number of people who played Scarlet’s War, and the number that didn’t increases daily as new players join the community. The issue isn’t going away.

The number of people who want to play Scarlet’s War is probably never going to exceed the number who want to play new content.

I don’t think so. The reason being that the LWS1 story hints are preserved in the fractals. There are 5 fractals and an additional dungeon path that are directly related to that story arc and new players will come across them and many if not all will be curious on what they stem from. (plus if you go backwards form Molten Duo you can still see the entire molten dungeon laying bare)
Many of the groundwork and assets from LWS1 is still in the game, even on clientside files. It is not too far of a stretch to think it would be easy to re-enable them.
Also it would be good from an economy standpoint because there are recipes and rewards tied to that content and with its removal those no longer had a source ingame making them insanely expensive over time.
Prime example is the Bowl of Sweet and Spicy Butternut Squash Soup, one of the best buff food in the game

• of which only 27 recipes exist anymore (at least on TP)
• many people who have it unlocked don’t play anymore because it was so long ago
• No one can drop new ones because its source got removed (Molten Dungeon)

The recipes aren’t tied to the content; ANet can release them at any time via other means.

Regardless, I’ve explained why I think it’s incredibly unlikely that we’ll see ANet even contemplate this until an expansion exceeds expectations and the next one is being produced.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Regardless, I’ve explained why I think it’s incredibly unlikely that we’ll see ANet even contemplate this until an expansion exceeds expectations and the next one is being produced.

For a complete re-addition of LS1 yes an expansion and some good sales might be needed. But adding just some of the instances back so new players know who this Braham person is or who this Rox person is, shouldn’t require an insane amount of development resources.

tbh the fact that we cant play the season one isnt that bad now since the story after season 2 rarely every give reference to scarlet and what she did, i understand wanting to experience content but i cant relate with what you mean an outsider you are not been called a boss becauseyou brought scarlet down you are been called a boss because at bringing dragons down there isnt anyoone beter in tyria atm.
I would also like playing the first season just to play it
it doesnt take anything away from the experiebce and the narative not having it same way it does not take in the first episode of season 3 the big part the white mantle play and your stance towards them as the mercenary who stopped their plans in the raids versus not having done the raids and experiencing all that.

Have you forgotten SAB? It was an instance and took years of ‘fixing’ to be able to be offered with the current engine/code.

Don’t be too sure it would be ‘easy’ to bring back the old instances. The game (engine and code) has changed quite a bit since then.

We’re not asking for immediate gratification. We just want assurance that, one day, the stuff’ll be made available to us again.

MrParaduo.4869:

We’re not asking for immediate gratification. We just want assurance that, one day, the stuff’ll be made available to us again.

They wont give that since it is strict internal policy not to discuss forthcoming content (unless they are doing WvW polls)

maddoctor.2738:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Regardless, I’ve explained why I think it’s incredibly unlikely that we’ll see ANet even contemplate this until an expansion exceeds expectations and the next one is being produced.

For a complete re-addition of LS1 yes an expansion and some good sales might be needed. But adding just some of the instances back so new players know who this Braham person is or who this Rox person is, shouldn’t require an insane amount of development resources.

“adding some instances back” — again, those instances were designed as temporary content. They can’t be “just added back” without context, which requires attention to other details, too.

The point isn’t whether this is or is not an “insane amount of development resources,” it’s that it isn’t trivial. At that point, what’s the best use of ANet’s resources? Retooling old content? or introducing new content?

The closest compromise we’ve seen is that 4 of the 15 current fractals re-use instances from the Living World (aka LS1 aka Scarlet’s war), without any introduction or orientation to the original stories. The 16th fractal looks to be another LS1 re-use.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

maddoctor.2738:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Regardless, I’ve explained why I think it’s incredibly unlikely that we’ll see ANet even contemplate this until an expansion exceeds expectations and the next one is being produced.

For a complete re-addition of LS1 yes an expansion and some good sales might be needed. But adding just some of the instances back so new players know who this Braham person is or who this Rox person is, shouldn’t require an insane amount of development resources.

“adding some instances back” — again, those instances were designed as temporary content. They can’t be “just added back” without context, which requires attention to other details, too.

The point isn’t whether this is or is not an “insane amount of development resources,” it’s that it isn’t trivial. At that point, what’s the best use of ANet’s resources? Retooling old content? or introducing new content?

The closest compromise we’ve seen is that 4 of the 15 current fractals re-use instances from the Living World (aka LS1 aka Scarlet’s war), without any introduction or orientation to the original stories. The 16th fractal looks to be another LS1 re-use.

Yes, it’s far from trivial, they have to update the instances to work with the current game systems, none of us armchair programmers really understand the amount of effort required in design, development and QA for that.

There were few story instances in LS1, a lost of the story was told in the open world events, without those open world elements they will need to develop and add in a storyline that links the instances together in a coherent manner otherwise new players will find themselves just as confused by a bunch of disjointed instances (and the content will look terrible).

Although I’d quite like to see them restore LS1 in some fashion, I’d prefer they put their resources into creating new content. Reworking LS1 to fit with the current game is a huge task and I just don’t see it being worth their while right now (and neither do they, apparently).

I remain unconvinced.

MrParaduo.4869:

I remain unconvinced.

If your goal is to get ANet to change their plans, I recommend thinking about it from their perspective.

Here’s the issue with what you’re say, Mr Paraduo.

You’re suggesting more people weren’t here and more potential future players exist to tip the scales in the favor of more people wanting it. Here are the issues with your logic.

1. Most games sell 90% of the copies they’ll EVER sell in the first three months of business. As a result, the people who play catch up later are never nearly as much as the people who were there at the beginning.

2. Guild Wars 2 was an enormously popular game with pre-order and early sales. It old over 4 million copies by launch day. That’s a lot of people. As far as we know it hasn’t reach that amount again in the four years since then. So more people bought the game then.

3. Not everyone cares about story. In fact, many people don’t care about story at all. Not only does every player buying the game not PvE (some people only do SPvP or WvW), but some of the new PvE customers themselves might not be interested in story. Some might only be interested in raids.

4. A lot of the content in Season 1 was open world content and couldn’t be easily recreated. The amount of work would be enormous. The question isn’t what you want or anyone wants, so much as what has to be given up to get that. I’m an experienced player. I was there for all of season 1 and I enjoyed it immensely. But I don’t think think it’s so easy to go back again.

5. There are better solutions than remaking season 1. Making a video about each of the people you meet and how you know them would be infinitely better, or at least cheaper, than trying to redo the entire season, which lasted a year and a half and had a boatload of updates.

At the end of the day, because you feel strongly about this, you assume it’s something more people want that probably want it.

I saw a suggestion like this posted on reddit, or example and it received very few upvotes, but posts in the thread that said they don’t want it received more upvotes. This idea is not as popular as you think it is.

The fractals. They can use the fractals to re-live the past events. The Molten Alliance instances are already available, and next week the Tower of Nightmares will be available too. Things such as Battle for Lion’s Arch and the Twisted Marionette and heck, even the Southsun thing with Canach are all possible candidates for future fractals

MrParaduo.4869:

Feels like I’m stuck with an incomplete product then…

The principle is easy, it was made as a once only item. Anet were trying out a new way of designing content where you only got to play stuff if you were there at that specific time. A lot of the content required large numbers of players mindlessly bashing on Scarlett’s hordes. Several more weeks were spent fighting in the ruins of LA before final victory.

Anet thought the idea was good at the time, the problem being it left a massive hole behind for new players who would never experience it – then that did seem to be the idea. The newer stuff you can do because it was written to be always available.

Now comes the question, do you want them to update the old stuff, or do you want them to continue creating new content? They are supposedly ‘working on it’ but how long it might take and if anything will actually appear is anyone’s guess at the moment.

I personally would really like the Bazaar of the Four Winds to return but there is no indication if it ever will.

Serious.7083:

MrParaduo.4869:

Feels like I’m stuck with an incomplete product then…

The principle is easy, it was made as a once only item. Anet were trying out a new way of designing content where you only got to play stuff if you were there at that specific time. A lot of the content required large numbers of players mindlessly bashing on Scarlett’s hordes. Several more weeks were spent fighting in the ruins of LA before final victory.

Anet thought the idea was good at the time, the problem being it left a massive hole behind for new players who would never experience it – then that did seem to be the idea. The newer stuff you can do because it was written to be always available.

Now comes the question, do you want them to update the old stuff, or do you want them to continue creating new content? They are supposedly ‘working on it’ but how long it might take and if anything will actually appear is anyone’s guess at the moment.

I personally would really like the Bazaar of the Four Winds to return but there is no indication if it ever will.

AFAIK they never said they were working on it. What they did say was that it’s something they would like to do at some point, but there’s no evidence I’ve seen that they’ve started anything.

Vayne.8563:

Here’s the issue with what you’re say, Mr Paraduo.

You’re suggesting more people weren’t here and more potential future players exist to tip the scales in the favor of more people wanting it. Here are the issues with your logic.

1. Most games sell 90% of the copies they’ll EVER sell in the first three months of business. As a result, the people who play catch up later are never nearly as much as the people who were there at the beginning.

2. Guild Wars 2 was an enormously popular game with pre-order and early sales. It old over 4 million copies by launch day. That’s a lot of people. As far as we know it hasn’t reach that amount again in the four years since then. So more people bought the game then.

3. Not everyone cares about story. In fact, many people don’t care about story at all. Not only does every player buying the game not PvE (some people only do SPvP or WvW), but some of the new PvE customers themselves might not be interested in story. Some might only be interested in raids.

4. A lot of the content in Season 1 was open world content and couldn’t be easily recreated. The amount of work would be enormous. The question isn’t what you want or anyone wants, so much as what has to be given up to get that. I’m an experienced player. I was there for all of season 1 and I enjoyed it immensely. But I don’t think think it’s so easy to go back again.

5. There are better solutions than remaking season 1. Making a video about each of the people you meet and how you know them would be infinitely better, or at least cheaper, than trying to redo the entire season, which lasted a year and a half and had a boatload of updates.

At the end of the day, because you feel strongly about this, you assume it’s something more people want that probably want it.

I saw a suggestion like this posted on reddit, or example and it received very few upvotes, but posts in the thread that said they don’t want it received more upvotes. This idea is not as popular as you think it is.

So you’re saying that because I feel strongly about the topic, my argument is invalid?

MrParaduo.4869:

So you’re saying that because I feel strongly about the topic, my argument is invalid?

That is not what Vayne said.

Just because you are convinced (strongly or otherwise) doesn’t mean that everyone is. Just because you think it’s a good idea doesn’t mean it’s a good business decision for the company or even good for the overall health of the game, given that there are lots of other things the devs could do with the same resources.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

MrParaduo.4869:

So you’re saying that because I feel strongly about the topic, my argument is invalid?

That is not what Vayne said.

Just because you are convinced (strongly or otherwise) doesn’t mean that everyone is. Just because you think it’s a good idea doesn’t mean it’s a good business decision for the company or even good for the overall health of the game, given that there are lots of other things the devs could do with the same resources.

I am still not convinced that it would be so much work that it shouldn’t be done, and done soon.

The reason why is that it would be horribly unwise and wasteful, if not outright impossible, to try to put everything that happened during season 1 back into the game in a replayable format. That isn’t the way anyone should be thinking about it. Instead, it can be significantly consolidated and cleaned up, with large sections of it either left out entirely or simply placed inside of a story instance with re-balancing to any combat that occurs.

First, substantial parts of the story happened within instances just like they do now. This includes most of the introductions of major characters and pretty much everything that involved much actual dialogue (most of the Flame and Frost arc, for example). It also included a lot of the combat scenarios. There’s no reason to change much of this, and no reason it should be that difficult to put them back into the game using the new narrative format.

Second, LW1 contained a LOT of fluff that wasn’t directly connected to the Scarlet story, and can mostly just be left out because they now exist as their own recurring events. This includes the intertwining with all the festivals, Southsun Cove, Super Adventure Box, etc. Much of this can be left out entirely or slightly re-tooled to be more event-agnostic.

Third, all of the insignificant open world stuff (such as the refugees) can just be left out. Nobody really cares or needs to see that in the world. They don’t need to try to simulate the vote between Kiel and Gnashblade. There are other things I’m sure I’m forgetting.

As I see it, the hardest part is figuring out how to do the zone changes. But even then I don’t think it’s that crazy. I don’t really see the big deal with having split maps. Players pre-LW should simply go to the original version of Kessex Hills and LA, and players post should go to the new ones. This is basically how pre-searing/Ascalon worked in GW1, but it’s worth noting that, since the LW is replayable, you would be able to effectively choose which versions of the map you zoned into after completing the stories the first time. Best of all, creating this type of structure would open up a lot of flexibility for future story-telling.

Einlanzer.1627:

I am still not convinced that it would be so much work that it shouldn’t be done, and done soon.

The reason why is that it would be horribly unwise and wasteful, if not outright impossible, to try to put everything that happened during season 1 back into the game in a replayable format.

If it were that alone, then I’d agree with you; it would be silly to try to recapture everything. I suspect that if you re-read the long list of things that they have to do regardless of how much of the story they incorporate, you might change your mind.

Here are a couple of recent developer quotes that cover the same idea:

Developer Quotes
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5dk50e/the_return_of_living_world_season_1_is_important/da5sxjx/

Without saying anything definitively about a re-packaging of Living World Season 1 (because that’s the domain of studio heads to make such decisions) I just thought I would chime in as a story team lead to say that the work to do this would be a significant undertaking, and may in fact be harder to do than creating a new Living World season, given how much has changed in our pipelines since then.

A simple, but specific example is how we do all our VO, which is now in a totally different format that is a lot more flexible for us (it’s how we got player VO back, as well as the ability to have characters walk and talk). Going back to those old content objects and converting them over to the new format would be weeks of work by themselves, not to mention we’d probably want to add player VO to get around the awkward way we had to tell story in that season.

I’ve also taken a look at what it would take to update all the story beats and convert them from using the special event UI to living in the journal and since none of those objects exist (Season 1 didn’t use QuestDef’s which are the objects that show up in the journal) there’s weeks of work there too, as the quests would all need to be created now, and everything would need to be unhooked from the event system and plumbed into the story journal, which on some levels is starting over from scratch given how the underlying story structure is scripted. Some of the gameplay can just get ported over without too much trouble, other things rely on actions/skills/etc. that we’ve since deprecated for perf reasons or to address bugs, so even the idea of copying and pasting encounters isn’t “free”.

I don’t say all this as discouragement for those who would love to see a Season 1 Redux – but I just wanted to clear up any misconceptions that the community might have about the challenges that such an effort would entail. To my knowledge this is still something that we’ve kept on our backlog as there are plenty of devs who also want to see us make such an investment someday. As some have pointed out, we haven’t said no to this, but it hasn’t yet risen to the top of our priority list given our other releases and plans for Guild Wars 2.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5dk50e/the_return_of_living_world_season_1_is_important/da5trw2/

IF we were to undertake such a project I would like to revise, add to, or rewrite sections of that story to make it stronger (similar to how we improved the Personal Story last year). These things take time. Just including voice-over on a project instantly adds two-to-three months for recording and localization and doesn’t include things like prototyping, iteration, script revisions, etc. We couldn’t (and wouldn’t even if we could) simply “port” Season 1 into the new framework. There would be a substantial amount of revision involved. Anyone who thinks it would be “easy” to redo Season 1 doesn’t fully understand the process or the time investment. I wouldn’t expect them to. (emphasis added)

MrParaduo.4869:

Vayne.8563:

Here’s the issue with what you’re say, Mr Paraduo.

You’re suggesting more people weren’t here and more potential future players exist to tip the scales in the favor of more people wanting it. Here are the issues with your logic.

1. Most games sell 90% of the copies they’ll EVER sell in the first three months of business. As a result, the people who play catch up later are never nearly as much as the people who were there at the beginning.

2. Guild Wars 2 was an enormously popular game with pre-order and early sales. It old over 4 million copies by launch day. That’s a lot of people. As far as we know it hasn’t reach that amount again in the four years since then. So more people bought the game then.

3. Not everyone cares about story. In fact, many people don’t care about story at all. Not only does every player buying the game not PvE (some people only do SPvP or WvW), but some of the new PvE customers themselves might not be interested in story. Some might only be interested in raids.

4. A lot of the content in Season 1 was open world content and couldn’t be easily recreated. The amount of work would be enormous. The question isn’t what you want or anyone wants, so much as what has to be given up to get that. I’m an experienced player. I was there for all of season 1 and I enjoyed it immensely. But I don’t think think it’s so easy to go back again.

5. There are better solutions than remaking season 1. Making a video about each of the people you meet and how you know them would be infinitely better, or at least cheaper, than trying to redo the entire season, which lasted a year and a half and had a boatload of updates.

At the end of the day, because you feel strongly about this, you assume it’s something more people want that probably want it.

I saw a suggestion like this posted on reddit, or example and it received very few upvotes, but posts in the thread that said they don’t want it received more upvotes. This idea is not as popular as you think it is.

So you’re saying that because I feel strongly about the topic, my argument is invalid?

No. I’m saying because you feel strongly about it, your judgement is likely affected. You don’t know how much work it would take. I played through the Living Story Season 1. It lasted a year and a half. It was a year and a half of updates. It would take at least that long again to bring it out, even if they started this second. But they couldn’t bring it out live the way it is, because, there were at least two major events in Lion’s Arch that were completely different. All of Lion’s Arch, which is completely different now anyway. It’s an impossible task. They’d have to change it completely, which would add to the time taken.

You’re not wrong because want it badly but your willingness to pay whatever the price in development time is based solely on your strong feelings. Other people have different feelings and some people have no feelings at all.

Over all, Anet is in a much better place to judge whether it’s worth it or not than anyone on these forums.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Einlanzer.1627:

I am still not convinced that it would be so much work that it shouldn’t be done, and done soon.

The reason why is that it would be horribly unwise and wasteful, if not outright impossible, to try to put everything that happened during season 1 back into the game in a replayable format.

If it were that alone, then I’d agree with you; it would be silly to try to recapture everything. I suspect that if you re-read the long list of things that they have to do regardless of how much of the story they incorporate, you might change your mind.

Here are a couple of recent developer quotes that cover the same idea:

Developer Quotes
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5dk50e/the_return_of_living_world_season_1_is_important/da5sxjx/

Without saying anything definitively about a re-packaging of Living World Season 1 (because that’s the domain of studio heads to make such decisions) I just thought I would chime in as a story team lead to say that the work to do this would be a significant undertaking, and may in fact be harder to do than creating a new Living World season, given how much has changed in our pipelines since then.

A simple, but specific example is how we do all our VO, which is now in a totally different format that is a lot more flexible for us (it’s how we got player VO back, as well as the ability to have characters walk and talk). Going back to those old content objects and converting them over to the new format would be weeks of work by themselves, not to mention we’d probably want to add player VO to get around the awkward way we had to tell story in that season.

I’ve also taken a look at what it would take to update all the story beats and convert them from using the special event UI to living in the journal and since none of those objects exist (Season 1 didn’t use QuestDef’s which are the objects that show up in the journal) there’s weeks of work there too, as the quests would all need to be created now, and everything would need to be unhooked from the event system and plumbed into the story journal, which on some levels is starting over from scratch given how the underlying story structure is scripted. Some of the gameplay can just get ported over without too much trouble, other things rely on actions/skills/etc. that we’ve since deprecated for perf reasons or to address bugs, so even the idea of copying and pasting encounters isn’t “free”.

I don’t say all this as discouragement for those who would love to see a Season 1 Redux – but I just wanted to clear up any misconceptions that the community might have about the challenges that such an effort would entail. To my knowledge this is still something that we’ve kept on our backlog as there are plenty of devs who also want to see us make such an investment someday. As some have pointed out, we haven’t said no to this, but it hasn’t yet risen to the top of our priority list given our other releases and plans for Guild Wars 2.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5dk50e/the_return_of_living_world_season_1_is_important/da5trw2/

IF we were to undertake such a project I would like to revise, add to, or rewrite sections of that story to make it stronger (similar to how we improved the Personal Story last year). These things take time. Just including voice-over on a project instantly adds two-to-three months for recording and localization and doesn’t include things like prototyping, iteration, script revisions, etc. We couldn’t (and wouldn’t even if we could) simply “port” Season 1 into the new framework. There would be a substantial amount of revision involved. Anyone who thinks it would be “easy” to redo Season 1 doesn’t fully understand the process or the time investment. I wouldn’t expect them to. (emphasis added)

That was an interesting layout of some of the technical challenges, but there’s nothing in it that changes my opinion. “Might be harder than creating a new LW season” is not a good reason not to do it.

Vayne.8563:

MrParaduo.4869:

Vayne.8563:

Here’s the issue with what you’re say, Mr Paraduo.

You’re suggesting more people weren’t here and more potential future players exist to tip the scales in the favor of more people wanting it. Here are the issues with your logic.

1. Most games sell 90% of the copies they’ll EVER sell in the first three months of business. As a result, the people who play catch up later are never nearly as much as the people who were there at the beginning.

2. Guild Wars 2 was an enormously popular game with pre-order and early sales. It old over 4 million copies by launch day. That’s a lot of people. As far as we know it hasn’t reach that amount again in the four years since then. So more people bought the game then.

3. Not everyone cares about story. In fact, many people don’t care about story at all. Not only does every player buying the game not PvE (some people only do SPvP or WvW), but some of the new PvE customers themselves might not be interested in story. Some might only be interested in raids.

4. A lot of the content in Season 1 was open world content and couldn’t be easily recreated. The amount of work would be enormous. The question isn’t what you want or anyone wants, so much as what has to be given up to get that. I’m an experienced player. I was there for all of season 1 and I enjoyed it immensely. But I don’t think think it’s so easy to go back again.

5. There are better solutions than remaking season 1. Making a video about each of the people you meet and how you know them would be infinitely better, or at least cheaper, than trying to redo the entire season, which lasted a year and a half and had a boatload of updates.

At the end of the day, because you feel strongly about this, you assume it’s something more people want that probably want it.

I saw a suggestion like this posted on reddit, or example and it received very few upvotes, but posts in the thread that said they don’t want it received more upvotes. This idea is not as popular as you think it is.

So you’re saying that because I feel strongly about the topic, my argument is invalid?

No. I’m saying because you feel strongly about it, your judgement is likely affected. You don’t know how much work it would take. I played through the Living Story Season 1. It lasted a year and a half. It was a year and a half of updates. It would take at least that long again to bring it out, even if they started this second. But they couldn’t bring it out live the way it is, because, there were at least two major events in Lion’s Arch that were completely different. All of Lion’s Arch, which is completely different now anyway. It’s an impossible task. They’d have to change it completely, which would add to the time taken.

You’re not wrong because want it badly but your willingness to pay whatever the price in development time is based solely on your strong feelings. Other people have different feelings and some people have no feelings at all.

Over all, Anet is in a much better place to judge whether it’s worth it or not than anyone on these forums.

It lasted a year and a half because it was intertwined with all of the first year’s festivals. Re-releasing it would require condensing and polishing it up. Yeah, it would be a fair amount of work, but it needs to happen, and systems they develop as part of the process of doing it could benefit future LW seasons, such as implementation of phasing.

Einlanzer.1627:

That was an interesting layout of some of the technical challenges, but there’s nothing in it that changes my opinion. “Might be harder than creating a new LW season” is not a good reason not to do it.

I’m not sure why you say it’s not a sufficient reason:

• Some people want LS1
• Everyone wants new Living World stories.

With limited resources, which should they focus on? Do you think they can actually pull off producing two stories of the size and scope of Living World?

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Einlanzer.1627:

That was an interesting layout of some of the technical challenges, but there’s nothing in it that changes my opinion. “Might be harder than creating a new LW season” is not a good reason not to do it.

I’m not sure why you say it’s not a sufficient reason:

• Some people want LS1
• Everyone wants new Living World stories.

With limited resources, which should they focus on? Do you think they can actually pull off producing two stories of the size and scope of Living World?

Just because “Everyone wants new Living World stories”, doesn’t mean players wouldn’t appreciate being able to experience episodes they never got a chance to experience.

Also, the script and plot of Scarlet’s War is already done. How hard would it be to make a series of short, but critical scenes where “other players” in mass instances were replaced with nameless NPCs of equal level to your character? It’s practically cheap compared to something like Heart of Thorns.

Besides, they’re already coming out with “A Crack in the Ice”. Once it’s out, they’ll have plenty of time to breathe till the next major installment, time in which they can start working again on SW.

If it takes the Devs 2 or 3 months to release a Living World Episode, why would they have ‘time to breath and work on re-releasing Season One’ once Episode 3 is out?

Or were you considering waiting through another content drought while the Devs worked on it?

Einlanzer.1627:

That was an interesting layout of some of the technical challenges, but there’s nothing in it that changes my opinion. “Might be harder than creating a new LW season” is not a good reason not to do it.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’m not sure why you say it’s not a sufficient reason:

• Some people want LS1
• Everyone wants new Living World stories.

With limited resources, which should they focus on? Do you think they can actually pull off producing two stories of the size and scope of Living World?

MrParaduo.4869:

Just because “Everyone wants new Living World stories”, doesn’t mean players wouldn’t appreciate being able to experience episodes they never got a chance to experience.

I’ll rephrase:

• Everyone wants new stories.
• Some people want to play LS1 for the first time, some people would appreciate replaying it (and some people would not).

You are still missing the point that there are always going to be more people who want new stuff. You also seem to underestimate the resources it would take to make it happen.

MrParaduo.4869:

Also, the script and plot of Scarlet’s War is already done.

Read the developer quotes above: the plot is mostly done, but would have to be modified; the script would have to be rewritten. (That’s before worrying about hiring voice actors — not everything is available in a format that could be re-used.)

MrParaduo.4869:

How hard would it be to make a series of short, but critical scenes where “other players” in mass instances were replaced with nameless NPCs of equal level to your character? It’s practically cheap compared to something like Heart of Thorns.

It’s a lot of work to replace “other players” in massive instances with anonymous NPCs. For starters, you have to change the mechanics.

It would not be ‘cheap’, practically or otherwise, compared to the Heart of Thorns story.

MrParaduo.4869:

Besides, they’re already coming out with “A Crack in the Ice”. Once it’s out, they’ll have plenty of time to breathe till the next major installment, time in which they can start working again on SW.

I think you might want to re-read about how long it takes to put together a Living Story episode and about what’s involved. Even as they release Episode 3, they are working on Episode 4. There are only two times when the developers have breathing room: when they are on vacation and when they leave ANet (and haven’t yet started work at their next firm).

I was there for release/first season as well and the thing I remember most is it seemed to stay busy in game. Every 2 weeks something new was released and it stayed really busy for a year and half (content never got a chance to get old lol). Sorry all latecomers don’t get that great experience and rewards but I really don’t see them bringing it back as content no matter how many of these threads still pop up over time. A+ for trying yet again though. GAME ON

Then I guess I wasted money on Heart of Thorns. An epic book that’s deliberately missing one-to-three chapters worth of content.

I’m depressed now. Sorry for wasting everyone’s time.