Guild Wars 2

Conncept.7638:

Sorry for the superfluous post. The thread bugged out when I posted, I’ve seen it happen before, it’s some bug with previously deleted posts when a new page is created, and the only way to fix it is by adding posts.

So anyway, sorry again. Here’s my post that bugged out the thread, carry on.

Not bad, still don’t understand why the pact has to go. Can’t the majority of the pact leader vs non-pact leader be solved in two different sets of dialogue?

Even without the personal story your character wanders the world slaying monsters and spirits and beasts, delving ancient dungeons, and single-handedly fighting entire wars. Why is such a strong explanation needed for why the character wishes to fight the dragons in light of all that?

I kind of agree with this, they could transition into your ideas simply by having a set of dialogue with the pact being dissolved since they only formed to kill Zhaitan. or you could continue to use the pact as a means towards the other dragons. I don’t think that ANET really needs to change their current personal story other than to instance the whole thing as a sort of “this is my story” out of phase history of you.

You could do your entire personal story in your “home” instance traveling around the Tyria of yesteryear (a piece of dialogue to establish that you are not in the here and now)….ANET wouldn’t have to change anything with the personal story…and they could add to it by adding additional “Home” instances every year re-playing (provided they are scalable) the events that take down the additional dragons so that even a new player on year 5 could re-play the events that lead to the destruction of all 5 dragons…leading into the “current” time-scene of the living story. These “home” instances could be run with a party which would make them almost essentially a giant “history” or “Chronocle” dungeon that you could enjoy with your friends whenever you want. Loved the battle of Jormag? RE-play it in your “home” instance.

This makes it re-playable as well as doesn’t leave new players feeling lost and feeling like they missed out.

Arenanet, take notice. These are good ideas.

Moshari.8570:

… I don’t think that ANET really needs to change their current personal story other than to instance the whole thing as a sort of “this is my story” out of phase history of you.

You could do your entire personal story in your “home” instance traveling around the Tyria of yesteryear (a piece of dialogue to establish that you are not in the here and now)….ANET wouldn’t have to change anything with the personal story…and they could add to it by adding additional “Home” instances every year re-playing (provided they are scalable) the events that take down the additional dragons so that even a new player on year 5 could re-play the events that lead to the destruction of all 5 dragons…leading into the “current” time-scene of the living story. These “home” instances could be run with a party which would make them almost essentially a giant “history” or “Chronocle” dungeon that you could enjoy with your friends whenever you want. Loved the battle of Jormag? RE-play it in your “home” instance.

The only problem with a phased, or instanced, game is that it seems to go directly against what the developers want the game to be. They want everyone to experience the world together, such that everyone experiences the changes at the same time. Colin himself stated that in the Colab. Development thread as one of ANet’s core pillars: that “When something in the open world happens, it needs to happen for everyone.” So, that said, there’s no re-living it.

Other people have brought up the fact that by instancing, or phasing, the game it fragments the playerbase. If you are off re-running the death of Jormag, even though you want to because you found it fun, you’re not present in the same world, doing the same content, as everyone else. ANet doesn’t want that. They seem determined to force everyone to take on the same threats. That’s why none of the new Living World content has talked about Zhaitan’s defeat. If it did it’d force them to acknowledge that the LW takes place, chronologically, after that and would inevitably confuse new players in the future about exactly which content is ‘present’ and which is ‘past’.

Believe me, I agree with you. Instancing the content in the form of a Chronicle, a history book, or something would be wonderful. But things like that cant happen until they work out the foundation of the problem: they need to decide first if they ever want to have the content be repeatable, and then if they do, how to do it.

But before even that they need to decide on a chronology. Right now they’re getting away with no timeline because there is only been one dragon: Zhaitan. If a new player comes along and starts playing tomorrow, then to him the Pact hadn’t been formed for last year’s Halloween, or Wintersday, where for you and I it was. But, once they introduce dragon #2, they’ll have no choice but to lay down a timeline and say when Zhaitan was killed, when the Pact (or whoever) moved against the new dragon, and what all happened in the interim. You just can not have a living, evolving world without a timeline.

After reading what Colin had to say in the thread linked above I’ve mostly given up on the idea of replay-able story lines. Honestly, from the way he worded it, I don’t see how they can be true to that principle and continue with the Personal Story at all given that its nothing more than a series of instanced events wholly isolated from the open world. If they don’t want players removed from the living world to do instanced content, then the PS has to go, which is what the OP has done. A personal story can only progress at the rate which the person plays it. They want the world to progress without regard for you, or me, or anyone. By that logic the PS should not have been put into the game in the first place.

It would seem that they want this game to be nothing but an ever-evolving, non-replayable world. Maybe I don’t understand MMOs (having never played any other than GW and GW2) but it seems to me that a game with no capacity for replaying old content is doomed to fail. Or perhaps I was spoiled by GW1 and my ability to take a lvl 20, who had defeated the Lich, Shiro, and Abbadon, and go back to Ascalon to run the Great Northern Wall mission again.

Back on topic though (sorry for the tangent) it’s nice to see this thread getting some more traffic. I noticed someone else linked to this thread over in the CD thread and it seems several people came and took a look, but responded over there instead of here. Comments were pretty positive though.

Blimey. That paragraph about the different types of warfare each of the races used was amazing. I had very clear images in my head of Charr tank covoys and a giant spirit bear.
THIS is the game I was expecting when GW2 was announced, not Scarlet wars.
Shriketalon I am very impressed, I really want Anet to look at this post and see how much of a positive attitude these ideas have brought to this thread.
Thank you so much for the read, I hope we see stuff like this in game.

Anet, please read this. Please consider hiring this man as a consultant or writer. This is brilliant.

Shriketalon.1937:

Greetings and salutations.

I come to you today with a comment about the Living Story’s direction, though I know those are in abundance these days. What I’d like to do is hopefully a bit different. I would like to describe what the game would need to do in order to smoothly transition back to the war against the dragons. At present, that is impossible due to an incompatibility between players starting the Personal Story and those who have finished it, and conundrum which can be solved in a single sentence.

To make the Living Story flourish, the Pact must be destroyed.

…Bit of an attention getter, I hope. Allow me to spell on the argument; why the personal story has impersonal problems, what the living story is currently doing wrong, how to fix the two to the benefit of both, and what the results could be for an entire year’s worth of content. I can be a bit overly verbose, so I’ve condensed them into four JPG files for easier reading. Feel free to skip through it if it drags on, but please scroll through the NextYear file to consider what the Living Story could become.

Here we go. The Time Capsule method.

Woah. Awesome.

I’d play living story if it was like this.

Amazing!

The whole 2014 example is so excellent that I just imagine that it is real.

Tobias Valin.5893:

Here’s where I think we disagree, if only in technicality. I think that Guild Wars 2 is, or should be, strictly about the dragons. Once they are defeated it seems more prudent to begin Guild Wars 3 and go into other lore content. If we take 1 year for each dragon that means we’ll finish them in 2018, assuming Mordremoth is a real dragon. That’s 6 years-4 months of life, compared to GW1’s lifespan being 6 years-10 months. That’s pretty consistent.

While I’m hesitant to recommend this from a lore standpoint, you have a rather valid point. Technology is going to progress in the next half-decade quite a bit, so it’s possible that reinvigorating the game would take more effort. Personally, I would prefer for the events to happen in this game, since things like a Mursaat invasion or Palawa’s attack would transpire within our character’s lifetimes. The 250 year jump between GW1 and GW2 allowed a mechanical leap forward to take place at the same time, but it would be rather weird if all our characters retired immediately after the dragons were defeated and new heroes had to rise five years later. Maybe they just got amnesia.

Regardless of personal preferences, I think your observation is quite wise. We’d just have to see what the best course proves to be sometime in the future.

Conncept.7638:

Not bad, still don’t understand why the pact has to go. Can’t the majority of the pact leader vs non-pact leader be solved in two different sets of dialogue?

I’ve touched on this a bit in the first page’s dialogue, but there’s two things to expand upon.

To directly answer your question, no, it can’t be solved just with dialogue. At the end of the Personal Story, your character is the Marshal of the Pact, second in command to Trahearne. T-dog’s entire position of authority is based on his knowledge of Orr, and with Zhaitan dead, that becomes irrelevant. That means that leadership of the Pact is naturally going to fall to the most competent and qualified individual on the planet: you. Unless we get a Trahearne 2.0 figure for every single campaign (unlikely given the reception of the salad bowl in question), the Pact will be lead by the player.

That cannot be represented properly in game. Military leaders give the orders. It’s sort of in the job description. But the Living Story cannot represent one player being able to command NPCs and tell them what to do, while simultaneously account for a different player giving them a different set of orders. Likewise, it’s going to feel very fake if the NPCs are basically telling the player what to order them to do and giving you the choice of “Yes, do that” or “Certainly, proceed immediately”. If they do manage to achieve any sense of authority, mind you, it’s going to be difficult to mesh that experience with a player who never completed the story. There are circumstances where it is possible, but the overall arc will not feel authentic.

More importantly, the Story must establish the dragons as a credible threat.

Not the dragonspawn, mind you, they’re doing fine. But the dragons themselves aren’t delivering. We’ve only seen one dragon in the entire game, and Zhaitan’s final battle was as exciting as shooting an enormous fish in a pool-sized barrel. The “Elder Dragon” basically flew out of the sky, scratched the paint on our ship, then was megalasered and metamagical harpooned repeatedly until it fell over and died while screaming for its mother to make the bad men go away. We didn’t slay a dragon. We euthanized a sick puppy that just happened to be large and infectious.

That’s not the developers’ fault since the mission had to be rushed for release, but it needs to be addressed. The measure of a hero is defined by their villains, and our main villains simply don’t measure up. The dragons don’t have personality or motivations to fall back on in order to be interesting. They are forces of nature, the apocalypse manifested in wing and talon form. Sheer power is their entire identity; we are fighting living hurricanes, walking volcanoes, scaled tsunamis with appetites to match. If they don’t rock our socks off, they are nothing.

The Personal Story ends with the Pact as the largest, most technologically advanced fighting force in Tyria, fully prepared to go invade another ‘spawn territory and carry out the same Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma’am dragonslaying as before. From a storytelling perspective, we are too strong and our opponents too weak for a good epic. Zhaitan needs to be redone to prove that the Elder Dragons are Ragnarok Incarnate, and that means he needs to pulverize the opponents that come to fight him. For the story to work, for our characters to be heroes and for our villains to be the engines of the End Times they are meant to be….the Pact’s gotta take one for the team and get owned.

Shriketalon.1937:

Tobias Valin.5893:

Here’s where I think we disagree, if only in technicality. I think that Guild Wars 2 is, or should be, strictly about the dragons. Once they are defeated it seems more prudent to begin Guild Wars 3 and go into other lore content. If we take 1 year for each dragon that means we’ll finish them in 2018, assuming Mordremoth is a real dragon. That’s 6 years-4 months of life, compared to GW1’s lifespan being 6 years-10 months. That’s pretty consistent.

While I’m hesitant to recommend this from a lore standpoint, you have a rather valid point. Technology is going to progress in the next half-decade quite a bit, so it’s possible that reinvigorating the game would take more effort. Personally, I would prefer for the events to happen in this game, since things like a Mursaat invasion or Palawa’s attack would transpire within our character’s lifetimes. The 250 year jump between GW1 and GW2 allowed a mechanical leap forward to take place at the same time, but it would be rather weird if all our characters retired immediately after the dragons were defeated and new heroes had to rise five years later. Maybe they just got amnesia.

Regardless of personal preferences, I think your observation is quite wise. We’d just have to see what the best course proves to be sometime in the future.

Indeed we will. And it was wise of you to post in the CD thread, since this one’s not seeing any dev traffic.

Also, when I read through the OP I was still a little confused as to why, exactly, the Pact had to dissolve, but honestly I focused less on that and more on content delivery. Now though, given your elaboration, I whole-heartedly agree that it needs to go. You are right: Trahearne has no reason to run the Pact anymore. Or more accurately, the Orders have no reason to follow him. It’s a good way for the devs to write off a character no one likes. Win-Win. Logically our character, being Trahearne’s right-hand, should become the leader but that re-introduces the original reason he was made Marshall over us: one Order commanding the other 2, given that the PC is a member of an Order. So there’s a choice to be made: make the player quit their order and keep command of the Pact, or the Orders fail to agree on a common leader and thus the Pact dissolves. I find the latter more preferable otherwise we’re just setting up for Trahearne 2.0, which is almost certainly going to draw more ire than goodwill.

You’ve got a really solid handle on your concepts Shriketalon, with well-supported arguments for why they are necessary and how the game will benefit. We can only hope the devs take notice and start communicating on it.

I’m glad I read this. Makes me upset though that we have to deal with Scarlet still…
I didn’t even play original GW, but even I’m getting sick and tired of Scarlet and her being behind every single thing of the story.

The way you explained how living story should work and sort of combine it with personal story would make perfect sense. I don’t even think it’s that hard to implement that stuff into the game, seems like it doesn’t change THAT much game mechanics.

Hopefully Anet reads this, or better yet, hires Shriketalon as a writer.

Shriketalon.1937:

The Personal Story ends with the Pact as the largest, most technologically advanced fighting force in Tyria, fully prepared to go invade another ‘spawn territory and carry out the same Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma’am dragonslaying as before. From a storytelling perspective, we are too strong and our opponents too weak for a good epic. Zhaitan needs to be redone to prove that the Elder Dragons are Ragnarok Incarnate, and that means he needs to pulverize the opponents that come to fight him. For the story to work, for our characters to be heroes and for our villains to be the engines of the End Times they are meant to be….the Pact’s gotta take one for the team and get owned.

And that’s why making the person story beyond the lvl20 bits was a bad idea, in the light of the Living Story. We are mercenaries. Hired by the highest bidder. We should never have joined the Pact, unless it was as a mercenary. Which means we should have left the pact as soon as the goal of the Pact was completed.

I didn’t mind the story (except that Treehome, he’s only negative and doesn’t do anything but steal our glory), but I do mind that it stands in the way of a really evolving world.

Wow!
I’m deeply impressed Shriketalon! Rarely would you come across a plan that’s as well thought out as yours – you’ve managed to capture everything GW2 should become. If only your ideas would transpire into the actual game, I truly hope Anet pays attention to this thread. If this was implemented, the game would be so much greater!

I love this line of thought and the OP. The lore in this game is so deep and there’s so much one can do in congruence with that lore. The pacing might still be a bit fast, but with progression it’d be great, especially if people have a way to go back and see how we get from Point A (the introduction instance every new character goes through) to “today.” I’ve lost interest in the story and even the game itself, sadly, but something like this would definitely pull me back in drooling for more.

I almost never log into the forum, but this deserves praise. Great job. I hope the right people read and learn from this.

I’m not convinced of the longevity of the specifics of plot, but I agree on two core points of all this:

1. Dragons need to be something that matters all the time The sense of dread, mystery, investigation, and overall central themes Zhaitan inspires during the personal story is a good benchmark. You don’t fight Zhaitan for the entire story, but the story is always ALWAYS about fighting zhaitan, even when it isn’t.

2. We need to lose. Think of it this way, Star Wars was a good movie, but it wouldn’t have been a great trilogy if the empire just packed up an went home at the end of the first one. It only became a great trilogy because of Empire, in which the heroes spend pretty much the whole movie losing, which is then handled in Jedi where they succeed against all odds/clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.

The thing is, in the LS we haven’t ever really BEEN defeated. We just win, and win, and win. The closest the enemy ever gets to winning is running away after we have thwarted their master plot… so we’ve still won, they’re just free to hatch a new plan.

Tobias Valin.5893:

The only problem with a phased, or instanced, game is that it seems to go directly against what the developers want the game to be. They want everyone to experience the world together, such that everyone experiences the changes at the same time. Colin himself stated that in the Colab. Development thread as one of ANet’s core pillars: that “When something in the open world happens, it needs to happen for everyone.” So, that said, there’s no re-living it.

Other people have brought up the fact that by instancing, or phasing, the game it fragments the playerbase. If you are off re-running the death of Jormag, even though you want to because you found it fun, you’re not present in the same world, doing the same content, as everyone else. ANet doesn’t want that. They seem determined to force everyone to take on the same threats. That’s why none of the new Living World content has talked about Zhaitan’s defeat. If it did it’d force them to acknowledge that the LW takes place, chronologically, after that and would inevitably confuse new players in the future about exactly which content is ‘present’ and which is ‘past’.

Lets be honest, the living story is already instanced…the battle of Claw island is not actually happening outside of Lion’s Arch all the time)…so I still don’t see the big deal of simply moving the instances to a different space, or prefacing each instance with “this happened in the past”. Dungeons are already “instanced” with the story mode of the dungeon being instanced story…all of this fragments the player base to the exact same extent that further instancing their personal story would.

If what Colin said is law, there will NEVER be a truly living world, nor will we ever see another dragon…and I personally think they designed the game wrong for their plans.

Here’s my point:

If you are designing something to be “living” and to change with time for all players, all at the same time, then you design the world to be static (villages go here and here, trees are here, lake is here) and then you ADD the drama with the living story from the beginning (oh no! The centaurs are attacking this village…go help and save them and drive them off….oh, you failed..darn my village is burned, help us re-build it…thank you for rebuilding it…..oh no, here come the centaurs again!)…you can then change the drama elements at will and whenever you want (oh no, now instead of centaurs, its Krait that are attacking our village…save us!)….Voila! living story world that changes for everyone in real time. If you have a personal story at all, it would be within the confines of this…being a “living personal story” that changed as the world around it did.

If you want a “living” world, you DO NOT design it with Drama as a static element. The personal story is static, (It makes no sense that the undead are still in ORE after you have done your personal story), so for that entire part of the player base, the world is frozen in time…and not “living” at all by the simple fact that the personal story is supposed to be happening now. The Centaurs constantly attacking in divinity’s reach…the Jotun, the nightmare court… all of this seems to be part of their world that cannot be touched (static) right now because it is part of the various personal stories. As long as Colin and the others hold to that belief, there will never be a living world or living story.

I hope ANET does read this thread. There is a serious flaw in their thinking if they think they can both have a living world as well as keep things static with the personal story (outside of further instancing the personal story as a personal “history”).

Heck, they could even keep the locations of the personal story the same as well, as long as they prefaced it as your “history” instead of “story”…you could travel to the wayfarer foothills and replay your “Personal history” of how you came to be who you are….going all the way to the (now clean) resort village on the (formerly) cursed shores to see how you helped unify the pact and destroyed the elder dragon Zhaitan. Inside the newly rebuilt temple city of Arah, you could replay the “history” of the dungeon with all the paths to see how you cleaned up the former “lost” city. The dungeons can ALL stay, as a history of the area…defeating the dredge, the inquest, the Jotun, the nightmare….

All while the world around them changes…Its not a major change….add two little letters to your “personal story” to make it a “personal history”.

Simply put, I would buy the game again for something like this in place of the current Living Story.

I could say a lot, but I won’t.

I will just say, I LOVE your suggestion.

I only read the stuff in the OP, not the later schedules, but I loved every bit of it.
Even though it’s obviously just an example of what could be done, I hope Anet reads it and gains some inspiration or stuff to think about.

Btw, I don’t necessarily dislike Scarlet, but the lack of any plot makes every new update a shallow achievement grind. I know that Anet can do way better in terms of stories, which is why I am so frustrated with the current LS.

Can you add 2017 with the last elder dragon
Reading this like a book lol

Shriketalon.1937:

Alrighty, ready to go.

The idea here is that one year leads to another in a general sense, but it uses self contained stories to form the foundation. That way, they can form the framework for something bigger, while still standing strong on their own. In theory, of course. For a touch of variety, creature features (one month monster focused stories), holidays, and the oddball joke episode are thrown in the mix.

The one big potential problem is the predictability of the campaigns. If it becomes rather dull to gather together and slay the beast in about the same time frame each year, it could turn monotonous by the time we take on Bubbles. At the moment, the hypotheticals attempt to solve that with some hooks to throw in the middle of the stories, but one could also delay the battle with the Deep Sea Dragon and interject something else if it grows too predictable. That’s a conundrum for another day.

After the dragons are dead, the next few months are spent on a Reclamation, transforming the areas currently occupied by dragonspawn to mark the dawn of a new day. Meanwhile, it introduces several story threads to act as major plot points for the future. All things sailing smoothly, this should mean that the fifth anniversary of the game is poised to reinvigorate itself and introduce several new campaign themes across every corner of Tyria.

Here’s the big old block. I hope you enjoy it, and thanks for reading through the long haul.

MOREEEEEE, PLEASE.

Honestly this is bloody amazing and I can only wish that Anet was capable of pulling something like this off.
I keep thinking that maybe they have a good 3/4ths of the company working on some amazing huge brilliant secret expansion or something while the skeleton crew pushes on with the dying story but this is a better dream than that.

great presentation, and a strong direction and purpose to living story. Im sure there are details to be ironed out, but this is the type of thinking that needs to go into overall planning of Events.

Letting personal story be, essentially the past adventures, while living is the current world is probably one of the better ways to meld the two. It can also account for personal story as small group missions as well.

At first I was like .. “Meh, probaly just a silly suggestion again.”. But wow was I wrong. This is amazing. I would like to hear from a dev though if this would work in theory (Enough resources, etc.). But yes this Forum post definetly needs more love than it’s actually getting.

Really amazingly done

For the sake of how awesome it is, here is a MP3 of the elder dragons roaring at her: http://picosong.com/qp79/

PopeUrban.2578:

I’m not convinced of the longevity of the specifics of plot, but I agree on two core points of all this:

1. Dragons need to be something that matters all the time The sense of dread, mystery, investigation, and overall central themes Zhaitan inspires during the personal story is a good benchmark. You don’t fight Zhaitan for the entire story, but the story is always ALWAYS about fighting zhaitan, even when it isn’t.

2. We need to lose. Think of it this way, Star Wars was a good movie, but it wouldn’t have been a great trilogy if the empire just packed up an went home at the end of the first one. It only became a great trilogy because of Empire, in which the heroes spend pretty much the whole movie losing, which is then handled in Jedi where they succeed against all odds/clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.

The thing is, in the LS we haven’t ever really BEEN defeated. We just win, and win, and win. The closest the enemy ever gets to winning is running away after we have thwarted their master plot… so we’ve still won, they’re just free to hatch a new plan.

Well, they can just make the dragons like dhuum, a immortal core of existence, just as you cannot kill death it can be that for example you cannot kill perfection (kralky), you cannot kill power (jormag), etc.

I don’t think there’s much of a conflict, to be honest. The only thing that changes with Personal Story is that Zhaitan is “dead”. Everything else in the world remains unchanged, except that the leadership is in different hands. Destiny’s Edge and The Pact are similarly compartmentalized in PS cut-scenes and instances. It’s not perfect, but it works just fine.

So as long as Living World doesn’t touch Zhaitan, there really is no conflict at all. No matter where you are in PS, the Scarlet content fits right in as something that happens before, during, or after the Zhaitan PS content. Which, I believe, was the intention.

Personal Story and Living World should remain separate. No need to merge them in any way. The point of Living World is that it is persistent and dynamic. It happens with or without you, because it is alive. It doesn’t wait for the player to do something in order to be able to respond. The Time Capsule idea is incompatible with a Living World.

I think you are placing too much importance on Personal Story, when the real focus of the game is on the Living World. What you are suggesting is like trying to stuff a kraken in a juice box. It’s not gonna fit, bro.

I like that you took the time to put together such a well thought out suggestion, but I think you went a bit outside the realm of possible solutions.

While I agree that Living World needs more Dragon content in the future, I like that it is not all about dragons. The “dragon of the year” thing would get really boring really fast. I’m glad we have more diverse threats to confront, and I’m okay with the current LS not being about dragons.

Most constructive post I have ever seen. In any MMO.
In the last 10 years.
I’m awestruck.

Best thing i have seen for the Health of GW2. Anet! TAKE NOTICE OF THIS POST!!!! This would make this game Amazing. Game play in GW2 is great. One of the best! Story…Not so much…Take this and make it happen.

Shriketalon.1937:

Greetings and salutations.

I come to you today with a comment about the Living Story’s direction ……

If this was the game. I would not hesitate to play it or spend money on it.

Fantastic piece of work, thanks Shriketalon

Just to add a Suggestion as well. For the PS that you suggest it would be great to have some Order assignments as well. I liked the NPCs from the early PS so to revive them in between PS (Not the LS) chapters would be great.

This is the game that I want to play. I’ve grown tired of Scarlet Wars 2.

Bravo to you for coming up with this. However, at the same time I am now depressed because I realize GW2 will never be as good as this…

Very nicely done.
I completely agree that the Living World updates should focus more on the remaining Elder Dragons and the Tyrian history and lore.
Let’s face it.. Tyria’s history and lore is absolutely brilliant..
Why should we waste time on totally non-important bad guys/girls like Scarlet..
And even though I think the Living World stories are somewhat entertaining, I really don’t care at all if I don’t finish all the achievements which are linked to it..
And that is really bad in my humble opinion.
These Living World updates need to lure me in, they need to make me wanna start up the game..
Give me raw epic awesomeness, which leads to the remaining elder dragons and Tyrian history/lore and I will marry this freaking game and make babies with it!
Throw some Dragon champions at us to show us that Primordus and his homies are not simply chilling somewhere on a Hawaii beach..
Continue our personal stories and give us new reasons to fight, make those personal stories better and blend them together with living world updates much like the creator of this thread has suggested. (Let’s be honest, it’s a fantastic idea)
Right now I am only leveling alts and doing WvW..
Sometimes I even find myself being a part of this horrible Queensdale ‘champ train’.
See what I mean? We need a new fight!
This game is incredibly awesome and it has so much potential to be so much more..
Don’t waste more time on creating Scarlets and unimportant alliances.
We need stories that will lead us to the remaining Dragons.
We’ll battle through dragonspawn, dragon champions and eventually even the elder dragons themselves.
Let us learn more about Tyria and its history in the process..
Please just make it more interesting..

Fantastic post from Skyy-High Reddit regarding OP’s post which I agree with completely:

• The basic idea of merging the PS and the LS is nice.
• I don’t agree that we need seasons (Dragon Bash was a good example of how they can put story beats into otherwise “normal” festivals).
• The “Scarlet is boring” routine is, itself, boring. We’ve gotten plenty of context at this point (both in and out of game) to speculate on her motives, ANet has already admitted that they’ve gone too slowly with her, and above all else, we’re going to finish this arc. There is no possible way they are going to just forget about Scarlet at this point. The image asks the question: Why do the people of Tyria care about her so much? Because she is demonstrably dangerous, that’s why! The Molten Alliance and the Aetherblades committed real crimes that had an impact on the world, whether it was displacing refugees or killing a member of the LA council. She’s reshaped an entire zone, for Dwayna’s sakes! She is clearly immediately dangerous, there is no question about that.
• The “PS is all about the NPCs” is also boring, and false. It’s a meme that started because we weren’t technically leaders of the Pact, but it’s been exaggerated to the point of absurdity. No, the PS is not just about NPCs congratulating each other. No, your character doesn’t lose the ability to choose his path. Yes, your character actually does have a huge impact on the fight against Zhaitan. No, the fight against Zhaitan does not just consist of a 10 minute bombardment of an already heavily weakened dragon, it’s the entire campaign through Orr. I’m truly tired of people with such negative and objectively false views of the PS getting backslaps all around while these misconceptions continue to propagate.
  The Pact doesn’t need to die in order for the PS and LS to grow closer. They’re not going to retcon the Pact being a big part of the current LS, anyway.

This is simply divine. I hope you gave ANet your resume -because they need to hire yo’ kitten

But seriously, this is the Guild Wars 2 that I want to play. Simply fantastic and inspiring work, Afoot, nearly brings a tear to my eye…

I just read through all you wrote and I cannot agree more. The way you depicted the ’’year’’ in which we deal with Kralkattorik. Man, if Anet would put it in the game just like that I would be thrilled to play it! It sounds like a blast and would make the living storyline super exciting to play. Very well done.

I cannot like this enough – Well thought through from my uneducated perspective, and unlike the way the current PS ending, and LS feel, it’d actually feel… Epic. Like a proper achievement, an accomplishment where you mattered. Currently, the PS ends with you as a part of a chain – A strong part (or rather, the others are weak), but not any more apparently important than any other nameless Pact NPC. Then comes the Living Story, where the first real indicator of -you- having gotten anything done, is where Scarlet sends you a message that she hates you.

And while the Living Story is most definitely getting better in how it’s delivered, what’s being done, etc, the main point of critique to it, is that it seems pointless. Away from the aim of the game. And are we seriously supposed to believe that, while Scarlet is ravaging the lands (And posing a more difficult challenge than Death Incarnate Zhaitan?!), the other Elder Dragons are just going to continue chilling in their domains?

Kinda makes it seem as though the Elder Dragons aren’t really a threat at all, instead just… Well, forces of nature – Tornadoes or hurricanes. Local troubles, periodic troubles, but nothing we can’t recover from. Occasional catastrophes, but it seems most of the Elder Dragon threat comes from their waking up. Zhaitan’s ships were something of an issue, but not quite as much as the tidal wave that came when he woke up and brought Orr to the surface.

Kralkatorrik’s Ogre Revolt was damaging, but only a little – His constant minion attacks are easily contained by the High Legions, and the only real damage Kralkie’s done is the Dragonbrand… By flying over, before… What, sitting? Sleeping again in the Crystal Desert?

None of the elder dragons are an active threat, or even a passive one. At best, they’re a distant hassle, easily contained with the military might of Tyria – Even before the Pact.

Rant aside – The concept proposed here would not only make the Dragons relevant again, it’d also make the Players relevant. It’d create a very real threat, on a very dynamic world, with real problems and real people. Maybe it could even incorporate things like co-op instances where you unlock new paths in the same continuity depending on the PS choices of the party members, such as their Orders.

Amazing post and amazing ideas. The only thing I can add is possibly making the living story and personal story a part of the personal story hero panel which is currently only used to retell the story so far. Instead of it just being a story of your past deeds, it could be utilized to select what year’s campaign you want to progress for your personal story. That way the problem with people getting left behind would be solved.

OP, I thought your idea was silly at first. Then I read it and man, you know your Guild Wars lore front and back. This is definetly something I would like to see in the future but I doubt Anet would ever try doing something in the caliber you suggested.

One suggestion, you would really put the other three years you suggested in your OP. Those are extremely wonderful and it shouldn’t be buried in the forum.

https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/116923/ThreeYears.jpg

oh my god. this is amazing.

of course nothing is perfect though. the only problems i can foresee are:

1) people only want to log in during the dragon months and not the rest of the year
2) no one will want to help new players defeat the dragons again
3) no cantha/elona :’(

but other than that. A+!

EDIT: also, how do we get this post in the collaborative development thread or whatever it is called?

Phenomenal, it makes me want to come in and leave a post every time this thread falls of the front page, just to make sure the devs pay it heed.
It solves every problem I have, from the incompatibilities between living world and personal progress and the ability to keep temporary content, to the weaknesses of the story telling itself.
The only thing I would add is a feature to replay Personal Story missions.

This is my two cents, I agree with everything he said, I think it would be hard for them to push a dragon and new region like the crystal desert out so quick, but who knows. And to those who say that the regions will change example lets say Orr becomes pure again from the death of Zhaitan, I think the way I put up the replaying of the story campaign should settle it a little, once you’re in the mission, for example during the invasion of Orr, IN THE MISSION it will look as bad as it does right now, that is if they change the landscape of Orr in the future. Please tell me what you guys think (the fading away mention like if it’s a memory doesn’t NEED to fade away, it can cut straight to the mission but I thought the fade would add a touch and truely make you feel like it is a memory of the past.

This is a great idea!
At the very least it will get the GW story creator thinking.
Scarlet is way to weak of a villain, seriously I just cant get over the fact that it feels like a good anime series gone bad with so many pointless fillers. lol

Hire this man.

/15char

KeybladeMaster.3148:

oh my god. this is amazing.

of course nothing is perfect though. the only problems i can foresee are:

1) people only want to log in during the dragon months and not the rest of the year
2) no one will want to help new players defeat the dragons again
3) no cantha/elona :’(

but other than that. A+!

EDIT: also, how do we get this post in the collaborative development thread or whatever it is called?

Shriketalon already commented on it there and included individual year images. Some other players have also commented on it and praised its epicness in that thread.

• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Collaborative-Development-Topic-Living-World/3176135
  :)

Words cannot express how incredible this idea is.

If Anet, for example, added unlockable event Hearts in Orr (and Southsun Cove) after Completing the Personal Story, that would be alright by me. They would be totally invisible until then. And then, you would complete those hearts by killing Undead “To make way for a settlement” or something. Or you could talk to an event NPC that only unlocks after you beat the game that triggers a set of events that relate to things that happened after the fall of Zhaitan. (These events already exist in parts of the game, like the Krait witch in Caledon forest, you have to specifically speak to someone to start the event chain. New event chains can be made to unlock after killing the dragon).

After completing the event chain, it would fill up the event heart, and after doing several of these chains, the heart is filled up and its done. Or, you could just kill X enemy to make it done too, like every other heart in the game. You would recieve some ingame mail thanking you, you would get some money, or a special “Pact Token” that you would need to collect all (lets say 30, 10 in each map) of in order to buy a new weapon/armor skin. You can also buy them off of the trading post, and they are tradeable since there will only ever be 30 per character, so there would be a martket for these things, so new players just beating the game for the first time, and completing these events, would have a source of income beyond random dyes and rares they pick up from dead enemies.

None of these events would be instanced, even people that didn’t finish the game can still do them, but they wont get credit for the event heart until they beat the game, and it wouldn’t even show up on the top right of the screen, or on the map.

Southsun Cove could add in some event hearts for the same thing. You could even add some in other parts of the game that you can do after you defeat a Dragon Champion. And make these new event hearts seperate from world completion, make them optional, for achievement points, and weapon/armor skins. They don’t have to be mandatory!

Something like this, The Little Things, would do more to help quiet down the community and the perception that Anet ‘Forgot the Dragons’, than just about anything else (and more than anything, other than, maybe the original idea in this thread)