Guild Wars 2

I love the new Lion’s Arch design. It’s gorgeous, and it looks more like a city than it did. Nevertheless, it’s obviously not perfect. One area in which it feels deficient – which ArenaNet may address later – is that the city feels somewhat devoid of life. When I say that it feels devoid of life, I am not referring to player activity but of NPC activity.

Both the Trader’s Forum and Grand Piazza are incredibly open, but they also lack the flair of city life. Where are the market stands and peddling merchants that we see in Divinity’s Reach and Old GW2 Lion’s Arch?

The residential areas look nice, but it feels like there should be more of them due to all the empty space. Sure it’s a recovering city, but it is still a metropolis that attracts refugees, vagabonds, traders, and peoples from all tracts of life.

Excellent work so far on Lion’s Arch, but are there any plans by ArenaNet to add more liveliness of city life to Lion’s Arch?

Thanks.

I agree with this. There is no reason why there cant be merchant stands that dont sell stuff to players and is only for looks. Also would be funny if u have a couple npcs walk around and try to pickpocket players out of a few copper at most.

I completely agree. The old version of LA didn’t exactly have a lot of NPC movement, but the areas were more focused so it wasn’t as noticeable. The new LA is quite open and expansive and it ends up feeling quite barren in a lot of areas.

I love the new city as well! It’s like a sea world themed park with all the structures based on creatures from the deep blue. Although I agree it’s lacking liveliness, energy, or active populus to show that the city is a center point for all to meet. Placing shopettes/vendors in crowded street seems like it’d be more realistic, but also would make it just that much longer for my computer to buffer this scale of a scene. Still the detail put into a lot of the artwork here is fantastic I just love it all I can’t express just how cool this place is now!