Guild Wars 2

Introduction

So I thought of this great idea. I realized that a lot of the important story content of the Living World was mostly based in instances or short stories. So I decided to make this suggestion:

The Historian

I was thinking, we have a reference to the Personal Story already in our Hero window. Why not add an npc for Living World in a similar fashion or even a tab for that matter? Here’s what I think should be added to such a window:

Short Stories

We have so many short stories on the website, why not add them to this Living World tab? They could help people understand the story a bit better by utilizing things that have already been made.

Summary of Events

There should be a section for each Living World chapter (e.g. Flame and Frost, Secret of Southsun, The Aetherblades, etc.) that include specific summaries for those events.

Playable Content

Assuming ArenaNet still has the data from previous Living World instances still available, they could add in some buttons in each chapter tab where you can play the Living World story in chronological order. I say this because the majority of story content is in instances, and anything that is not in instances can be explained in a Disclaimer as well.

Solo Instances

Much of the story takes place in story instances, beginning with Rox and Braham trying to get help, to retaking the hatchery and cragstead. Add in the instances for playability by accessing the Living World tab or Historian NPC. Heck, you can even do this for the Personal Story! (How i’d love to replay my old personal story missions…)

Dungeons

There were also many dungeons in Living World as well. You can make this content available by putting in a Historian NPC and allowing a group of 5 players to experience the content through said NPC.

Conclusion

This is about all I have so far, if anybody else has any suggestions, please feel free to make them!

That’s a very good idea, indeed. And, in a magical setting, you don’t even have to worry about why the content is still playable. “Hiya, you traveler! Enter my timeless portal, that will let you enter the flow of time and live a mirage of past times!”.

ANet can choose if the “mirages” let you come back with loot, or only with experience… Nevertheless, is a fine idea.

+100

+936489275886982346397665583423746918 x 999

do I need to say more ?

I just posted something in this in a thread. I will just quote what I posted.

…they could patch in a Tyrian historical society or something, that has a library in every major city in Tyria. When you enter one it would have paintings or artwork highlighting some of the events in previous updates (like a statue of the Karka Queen, or something).
You could talk to a member of the society and tell them:
“Tell me about Act I”
“Tell me about Act II”
“Tell me about Act III,”
etc.
Then they would summarize the events of that “act” in one of those stylized, water-color cutscenes that GW2 does so well.

If they wanted, they could even have exclusive rewards (like titles) based on the number of living world updates you participated in every year. These would reset every year and scale just like achievement chests.

I wasn’t quite as serious about the reward system, but now that I have said it it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.

What I really like is summarizing the story in a water-color cutscenes. I think that art-style makes GW2 unique.

the only thing I and many others want is that they should be replayable in someway ANYWAY.

wookiee.4631:

I suggested something sort of similar…

I never talk to Heralds. Newspaper idea could be cool. Maybe a Newspaper business is set up in LA and newspaper stands are located in the various cities.

Though, I wish more information period was available in the game. I hate those short stories that we get on the Guild Wars 2 site, but never in game. Why would you spend the time characterizing someone who’s in the game outside of the game? I don’t know about other people but I never read those story posts.

Why not have the Newspaper stand be a book store that contains those short stories as well as the newspapers?

…in this thread. There’s some good suggestions in that thread.

Yeah, I believe I saw that post some time back. I figured however that making my own thread would make the idea more noticeable. Still, I suppose I can add it to your thread if you want. Also, ArenaNet has stated that they’re looking into ways to fix the current Living World by adding more permanent content and by allowing people access to knowledge of what happened previously in the Living World. Because of that, I wouldn’t be surprised if a player-suggested feature or a combination of them were implemented by ArenaNet.

/signed (15 symbols)

This is a great idea, It would be perfect if someone could re-play the content of the living world specially new players as it is an import thing in the lore of the game. GW2 pays a lot of attention into dates and things that happened in the past, so it makes sense having this historian. In worst case, at least he should say what has been happening like reading a book.

There really needs to be something like this but the major point of these suggestions and similar ones posted here are that they are all accessible in the game.

The lore should be explaining entirely within the game. Players shouldn’t have to use Google to look up important points about the game’s storyline. The game’s storyline should be in the game. Just like game mechanics, players shouldn’t be looking up wikis to figure out what is going on.

These are excellent ideas also because they make the lore available to EVERYONE. The lore is one of the things that helps unite a community. The common knowledge of the main storylines give something for players to share, it lets hardcores talk to casuals talk to RPers, all sharing something they all should know.

The only point I disagree with is the suggestion of lore being in 5-man dungeons in any form. The main storyline lore should never be gated by group content of any size. Lore should be something a casual solo player can access as easily as the leader of a 300 person guild.

ArenaNet has been taking steps to make the lore more accessible with the latest Tower of Nightmares story arc but then they backslinde and hide important lore elements behind a Scarlet factal dungeon in the assumption that everyone runs fractals. So the only way anyone can learn about this lore is reading about it outside of the game.

I hope that ArenaNet will continue more along the lines of the Tower of Nightmares rather than the fractal when it comes to telling their lore. That’s not to say they shouldn’t continue to have difficult and challenging content for the hardcore fraction of players, but that should be for loot rewards and titles. Lore should be easily accessible to 100% of the players logging in and if it isn’t then the presentation of it needs to be re-designed.

I’d really like to see this type of addition to the game.
But not only for the Living World, I think they could also include the same thing for a characters personal storyline (maybe access through the characters diary).
To me it was really cool in Guild Wars 1 to be able to replay old missions, even if just for nostalgia’s sake.

They need to add historical stuff that’s NOT a fractal. I really loved that they included the old LS dungeons into fractals don’t get me wrong, I just don’t want them using fractals as a cop-out to release historical data because you just can’t get enough quality detail and info out of a fractal like you could a personal story instance or something similar.