Guild Wars 2

Just some thoughts, having seen what a total shambles LS3 turned out to be in the plot department. The sad thing is, the maps are decent enough, the worldbuilding and environmental story is decent to good. The actual serial story… the less said about it, the better.

1. Make it a complete story arc, not a preview of the next expansion. Of course the plot should flow logically from season to expac to season, but people who buy the expansion should get an entire self-contained story arc, from beginning to climax to denouement, they shouldn’t feel like they came in after intermission.

2. If we’re lucky, the end of PoF will deplete most of the story’s momentum a little, giving people a chance to take a breather. So, start over small. We’ve got a team. Let’s use it to proactively, not reactively, make the world a better place, while we don’t have an apocalypse to worry about. Between E, Aurene, Taimi, Marjory, and our contacts in the Pact and elsewhere, there are any number of ways to learn about a guild job that needs doing.

Create some maps that are tied tightly with self-contained problem-of-the-week quarter story episodes. Use a steady dribble of current events to tease the season arc and advance/close side stories (e.g. Eir’s funeral, Aurene training). Now, LS3 was rightly accused of jumping around from plot thread to plot thread at random; the difference between this and PotW is that each thread gets resolution. It has a start, rising action, and a denouement. If there’s a plot twist, it’s of the “oh, our first plan failed because we made a kittenumption. Now, we have to scramble for a plan B” variety. Scheme of the week is thwarted, monster of the week is put down. It doesn’t just raise the specter of apocalypse, and then say “later, cub” to any attempt at followup. For all that LS1 had its own problems, chiefly of the villain sue variety, it did episodic content well. Now, you can still slowly advance some side plots, but it should be through bite-sized, lower-stakes current events quests like Caladbolg, so it isn’t so unsatisfying.

3. Pace yourself. We don’t need a giant, earth-shattering twist each episode — save the big stake-raising and plot twists for the penultimate episode, and then resolve it with the last one. And actually give us a season finale, not a pointless coda with “buy the movie” tacked on. In terms of pacing, Ep4 and Ep6 should have been swapped — Ep6 is a monster of the week episode that introduces a possible recurring character. Ep4 is the conclusion of a buildup that occurred throughout the season, the raid stories, and in the vanilla story arcs, and places leaders and capital cities in jeopardy.

4. Plan it out. It just feels like each episode kinda hopped around from point to point with no real plan. Arc story team should be a separate group that works on a separate timeline. Arc story is the skeleton that everything else is built on, so it has to be right and reasonably fixed beforehand. PotW stuff, obviously, can be adapted over time.

5. Keep the season arc threads tightly related. The PotW can be anything, though, provided it makes sense for our guild to deal with it.