Guild Wars 2

When I logged in last night after a long hiatus, I was overwhelmed with all the changes.
I’ll figure them out eventually, but I noticed that only the most recent chapter of the Living Story is available to me. The others are all locked, and seem to require a lot of gems to open them up.

Is there any other way to activate them?

If you log in within 2 weeks of patch day you get them for free, otherwise you have to buy them for gems.

You can convert gold to gems if you have lots of gold to spare, otherwise you will need to purchase them with real money.

So to answer your question, no there is no other way to activate them, you need to pay.

Unfortunately, no. Since you didn’t log in during the two weeks each chapter was available, you’ll have to pay the 200gems for each episode.

Though, you can still go do the open world stuff, like dry top and silverwastes without having the chapters unlocked.

ok, good to know, ty

The only thing you need to pay for is being able to do the achieves. If you have a friend who has the instances they can take you through them.

The areas, events and gear are all available to everyone.

Why would you want to play them? The living story thing has killed this game. Instead of expansions we get some happy tree friends tedious adventure rubbish every month. Oh and some new hats and bags…..

Darramouss.7824:

Why would you want to play them? The living story thing has killed this game. Instead of expansions we get some happy tree friends tedious adventure rubbish every month. Oh and some new hats and bags…..

Seeing that the game is alive and doing well means this statement is false. So really he is saying you should play them.

Yes I agree as well, they were fun episodes, can’t wait to see what is next.

The Living Story releases can be roughly divided into 3 parts, Part 1 is completely free and permanently available for everyone, Part 2 is easier to access if you pay and Part 3 you have to pay for:

1) Open World Content
This includes the new maps, the achievements which can be completed on the open world (non-instanced) versions of those maps and the items which can be obtained there.

2) Story Instances
You can complete all of these for free if you find another player who has them unlocked and join their party. You’ll still see your character in the cut scenes and get to participate exactly as if you had it unlocked, you just can’t start the instances on your own.

3) Story achievements and unique items
These you have to pay for. Completing the story without it unlocked (as described above) won’t unlock the achievements and you won’t get the items at the end of it.

So what you could do is find someone else to play through the story with, and then having seen it for yourself check out the achievements and rewards on the wiki and decide if some combination of replayability, achievements items makes it worth the cost to you or not.

Also remember you can buy gems with gold, and playing on the new maps (particularly Silverwastes) can get you a lot of gold.