Guild Wars 2

Rather than looking at this from an Expansion POV maybe it should be looked at more in the context of the Living Story itself and how can Season 2 and Season 3 improve where its already gone.

What has S2 done right

- The story is a lot more fluid (with the exception of DR part 1) and smooth, making the story more consistent and better paced.
- The Main Characters do eventually get some important character development.
- The Pact is back (finally).
- We got a new zone (minor yay) but heck it has a kick kitten soundtrack and visual detailing.
- We got a new backpack that has an interesting scavenger hunt mechanic to forge.

Now for the Bad:
- S2 so far has suffered from a lack of content, namely that it took 4 updates to give us a full Dry Top, of which the town of prospect had to change which may affect people doing episode 1 of this story for the first time.
- DR part 1 was a disaster, trying to tie world events into story progression was just ‘bad’ without an excuse to justify it.
- It feels almost too easy to do even if I myself am a casual gamer, and it lacks any real long term challenge, achievements aren’t motivating.
- Dry top is only ONE zone with no new sign of a dungeon any time soon, that took 2 months to “fully” make over the course of 4 updates.

What S3 and future updates should try doing:
- Focus less on weekly update, and more on what might be SIMILAR to an expansion, this means, longer development time, but bigger content chunks E.g:
- 3 month development time for the first part of season 3, it comes with the first 4 episodes of 12, 2 new zones and potentially 1 new world boss.
- It may sound like a lot of work for devs to make that much in only 3 months but since zones would be no bigger than dry top in expanse I don’t see an excuse why they cant in 3 months of dev time.
- Raid Boss Atunement, E.g. Certain parts of a zone are afflicted with THICK dragon corruption and give you an almost instant kill Debuff without atunement, thus you have to UNLOCK the right to fight the world boss, which has a special weapon set that only drops exclusively from that boss, and will guarantee you a chance to acquire it IF you can kill the boss in an associated time ONCE you are attuned (yes it sounds hard but its really not to develop or to do as a player).
- Less focus on the Biconics, while they are a group of heroes in the world it would be interesting to let them go their own way post S2 and give other things a chance to shine, like the cast of Lions Arch, or maybe minor chars, maybe the pact.
- Sub Antagonists, aka: Humanoid villains and not just the dragons, something like Scarlet, but done more concisely so that its less confusing, e.g. A Cult started in the name of the remaining dragons, or some looter taking advantage of the war, or maybe a few war hungry patriots on the human/charr conflict stirring trouble between the dragon problems, maybe another Anti-Villain like a Mursaat or something.
- Same as above, focus on a villainous character that we can get to know over time and not just some random guy we kill off after we keep hearing they did this or that, but rather someone that actively causes trouble while we are trying to fix it.

There’s a few things that’s for thought about S3 and what I think A-net should do with it.

A few examples of bad guys that you could go with:
- A player companion that causes trouble while seemingly helping you, maybe some kleptomanic that steals important relics that causes ancient traps to get set off all the time.
- An anti-villain that’s goals co-exist with yours but they have a darker way of achieving it, e.g. the death of thousands may save hundreds.
- A power hungry individual, be it a cult, or a power hungry character (Caudecus) that takes advantage of the dragon plight to gain power in their own homeland and influence, seemingly not a major threat at first, but once they amass enough power, they become one.
- A hero that will fall from grace over time, someone we fight side by side with only to eventually be turned by the dragons corruption against us and thus forcing us to kill a friend that was once an ally or even someone that may become a reoccurring enemy over time. Someone maybe naive enough to try controlling dragon magic only to be corrupted by it inevitably.

There’s a lot of doors for bad guys, and I think you A-net devs have been scared because of Scarlet but I say, don’t stop trying, look for more windows, for example, I dare say Anise could be a villain, but so could the Master of Peace (then again I’m the kind that suspects everyone so good luck catching me off guard, and if you do, I am genuinely impressed).

I generally find the best antagonists are chars that start as minor characters and over time become more major, they may have been the subtle hand behind everything all along and you just didn’t pay attention, they start off as little more than a char in a single episode that makes a very minor appearance and seems pretty small but as time goes on you begin hearing stories about someone with a familiar appearance and when you finally meet them again SURPRISE they actually had you fooled all along, maybe even getting you to kill their enemies for them.

THE best villains imho, are the ones hidden RIGHT behind the obvious one, the one that you SHOULD see coming but didn’t.

-“A power hungry individual, be it a cult, or a power hungry character (Caudecus) that takes advantage of the dragon plight to gain power in their own homeland and influence, seemingly not a major threat at first, but once they amass enough power, they become one.”

I think in the last episode during the noble party. Caudecus has repeatedly been linked to a power grab, but due to lack of evidence, never been proven / linked to any of these machinations. But it will be interesting if he does go for a power grab openly, during these turbulent times.

CaptainVanguard.4925:

- Dry top is only ONE zone with no new sign of a dungeon any time soon, that took 2 months to “fully” make over the course of 4 updates.

Couldn’t agree more about this part. There’s hardly anything I like about the story itself because I couldn’t care less about the iffy narrative and they make it screamingly clear every time I try playing it but they really should not throw gameplay under the bus. WvW, PvP and PvE all need updates and PvE at least should be very easy to implement into the living story. Add a dungeon to the new area you reveal, have the story mode be somewhat related to what’s going on in the living story if necessary and make the explorable modes pose a challenge for those that care about the actual gameplay. Bosses that have actual mechanics like pavilion bosses, new armor set for tokens and new weapon set for tokens

And whabam, we get permanent content, long-term goals, worthwhile additions to the world and at the same time the story can go onwards. I wouldn’t mind waiting for 4-6 months for an area like this assuming it’s well thought out and can entertain players for a while

CaptainVanguard.4925:

Dry top is only ONE zone with no new sign of a dungeon any time soon, that took 2 months to “fully” make over the course of 4 updates.

And Season 1 was any better? Yeah, we got Molten Facility at the end of the fourth month – aka fifth non-holiday update, and we got Southsun at the very first update. But take into consideration how much content there was with Southsun after The Lost Shores and before Secrets of Southsun (read: very, very little; there’s still very little – far far less than Dry Top). And while we got Molten Facility, the full four updates of Flame and Frost in full barely meet the amount of content we got in the first episode of Season 2.

So while it took 8 weeks – 4 updates – to give us all of Dry Top (though if you discount Episode 3, it’d be 6 weeks/3 updates given that they overlooked expanding it for one update), it combined with the other four updates is still more than even the final four updates of Season 1.

CaptainVanguard.4925:

Focus less on weekly update, and more on what might be SIMILAR to an expansion, this means, longer development time, but bigger content chunks E.g:
- 3 month development time for the first part of season 3, it comes with the first 4 episodes of 12, 2 new zones and potentially 1 new world boss.
- It may sound like a lot of work for devs to make that much in only 3 months but since zones would be no bigger than dry top in expanse I don’t see an excuse why they cant in 3 months of dev time.

Supposedly, there is still a four month production period for the four episodes we saw of S2 thus far. So 3 months is unnecessarily reducing the time spent. :P

But more seriously, they kind of gave exactly that (just one zone short of your desires) in the four updates and releasing all at once or over time wouldn’t have changed much.

This said, I do like the idea of larger updates with more spacing inbetween. Do what was done with Winds of Change – that was recieved exceptionally well compared to even War in Kryta, which is obviously in hindsight a prototype of the Living World but it has two things going for it that the Living World of GW2 never will: instanced zones for individual players, and a long period of no-content prior to it (I bet you that WiK wouldn’t have gotten as much hype as it did if it began 3 months after Eye of the North, rather than 2+ years).

CaptainVanguard.4925:

Raid Boss Atunement, E.g. Certain parts of a zone are afflicted with THICK dragon corruption and give you an almost instant kill Debuff without atunement, thus you have to UNLOCK the right to fight the world boss, which has a special weapon set that only drops exclusively from that boss, and will guarantee you a chance to acquire it IF you can kill the boss in an associated time ONCE you are attuned (yes it sounds hard but its really not to develop or to do as a player).

So basically you want Agony and Agony Resistance in the open world with equivalent of Fractal weapons tied to said open world content? No, thank you. That is just a cheap way of gating rewards with fake difficulty rises. The problem with Agony is the main disgruntlement of Hard Mode in GW1 – all it is, is “higher harmful (to players) numbers!” I despise the Agony system already, no need to expand it. Despite similar effect to GW1’s Spectral Agony and Infusion system, it functions terribly differently and in all the wrong ways.

All this kind of mechanic does is unnecessarily gate content in a game that proclaims easy access to all content.

CaptainVanguard.4925:

Less focus on the Biconics, while they are a group of heroes in the world it would be interesting to let them go their own way post S2 and give other things a chance to shine, like the cast of Lions Arch, or maybe minor chars, maybe the pact.

Not to mention that some of their involvement is becoming hypocritical.

Take Braham. He has been despising his mother since we met him, and had since then said he would never follow in her footsteps and fight the Elder Dragons. What is he doing now? Oh yes, fighting an Elder Dragon.

CaptainVanguard.4925:

Sub Antagonists, aka: Humanoid villains and not just the dragons, something like Scarlet, but done more concisely so that its less confusing

I agree. For good GW1 examples, I would suggest looking at Varesh Ossa, Xan Hei, Reisen the Phoenix, Apep, Unending Night, Verata the Necromancer, and perhaps best yet: Palawa Joko. With GW2 villians, the closest we get is Caudecus and Kudu – and Kudu best if you played an asura with the weather changer storyline. These figures don’t have to be fought the whole time either! They just have to be present and offer an open opinion that we can judge before killing them. If we kill them.

For example, with Reisen the Phoenix, the entire time I was hoping we’d get a chance to reason with him, rather than having our hand forced to kill him thanks to the prosecutions of a third party.