Guild Wars 2

For me I want to see..

1. A substantial plot line with quests and conflicts that help evolve the story instead of just a large set of achievements to grind on repetitive game play like kill so many champions.
2. With nearly every Living Story a significant change to the culture and quests of the area as well as landscape. With the Nightmare Tree the dev teams missed a chance to make some centaurs become friendly with the adventuring races and even allow for some fragile peace between these factions during and even after the Nightmare Tree.
3. More new permanent terrain including new cultures with interesting associated story lines opening up over time with original and permanent quests, dynamic events and dungeons at various levels so that leveling an alt can have some discovery again and so there is more stuff to do with guilds at our own pace since we can always go back to lower level areas and scale down.
4. Instead of large Living Story lines that continue fortnightly directly from the last with a big boss constantly reappearing, have quite a few story lines spaced out through the year that have episodes that pop up through out the year occasionally rather than frequently.

I would like to see small stand alone stories. They don’t have to all tie in to one big overall story.
Give us stories that bring us back to lesser explored areas.

Permanent content.

Call me old fashioned.

I just want Living Story content I can do at my own pace. Until this happens, I’m not even going to bother logging in, much less purchase gems.

I’m interested in seeing a dev reply to my original post as when I read it back at first it seems what I’m asking for is what they are giving already but in fact I think its what Anet have intended to give us but have mostly failed. To expand on what I want to see and make it clear where Anet have failed to achieve that in my opinion I have made this post.

One big failure was crossing over too many Living Stories at once when at one point there were three to four running simultaneously and it was all a a race really to accumulate achievements so any story was lost in all of this. Now over Christmas and New year there is nothing new for 4 weeks. Madness of one extreme to another.

Another failure is difficulty of areas alongside a vary lackluster environment. I’m thinking Southsun which is mostly a load of Karkas if you know what I mean. It needs to be either more interesting with another element of culture on top of the Karka stuff or it needs to be easier. Hard and boring translates to leave it alone.

The Scarlet story as a story was a nice attempt with the various chapters but it was too much of one big boss with an annoying manner and plot development that didn’t quite gel with the culture of the world with various alliances that didn’t seem believable enough. Did Scarlet have some sort of overbearing magical influence to make various rogue elements like the Molten Alliance and Flame Legion work together as well as the other alliances formed under her or how did she actually persuade such disparate groups to work together for her greater evil purpose. Its still a mystery to me and until I can understand it or find it believable it seems just like a badly thought out plot point.

Apart from this the way that the Living Story is just mostly loosely held together with a few quests or encounters that the are expanded into an achievement grind over and over means that its all very unsubstantial content.

joneb.5679:

For me I want to see..

1. A substantial plot line with quests and conflicts that help evolve the story instead of just a large set of achievements to grind on repetitive game play like kill so many champions.
2. With nearly every Living Story a significant change to the culture and quests of the area as well as landscape. With the Nightmare Tree the dev teams missed a chance to make some centaurs become friendly with the adventuring races and even allow for some fragile peace between these factions during and even after the Nightmare Tree.
3. More new permanent terrain including new cultures with interesting associated story lines opening up over time with original and permanent quests, dynamic events and dungeons at various levels so that leveling an alt can have some discovery again and so there is more stuff to do with guilds at our own pace since we can always go back to lower level areas and scale down.
4. Instead of large Living Story lines that continue fortnightly directly from the last with a big boss constantly reappearing, have quite a few story lines spaced out through the year that have episodes that pop up through out the year occasionally rather than frequently.

this summs it up nicely

Hats.

I have enough backpacks.

I want more hats.

Shoes are also acceptable.

Provided they can be worn as hats.

What do we want from the Living Story?

To see it die in a fire and never return.

What we really want is new, permanent, expansion-style content instead. Aka new skills, new traits, new weapon options, new maps to explore, new activities to do that do not involve grinding achievement points for 2 weeks at a time, new coherent and thought out storylines that do not crap all over the already established lore, etc, etc.

Zeph.5927:

What do we want from the Living Story?

To see it die in a fire and never return.

I know I’m not really someone who stands out in a crowd, but it would be nice if you could include me in that ’we’, of course since I don’t hate Living Story (I see it as holding a lot of promise), that ’we’ will probably have to change into a ’I’.

joneb.5679:

For me I want to see..
#1 A substantial plot line with quests and conflicts that help evolve the story instead of just a large set of achievements to grind on repetitive game play like kill so many champions.
#2 With nearly every Living Story a significant change to the culture and quests of the area as well as landscape. With the Nightmare Tree the dev teams missed a chance to make some centaurs become friendly with the adventuring races and even allow for some fragile peace between these factions during and even after the Nightmare Tree.
#3 More new permanent terrain including new cultures with interesting associated story lines opening up over time with original and permanent quests, dynamic events and dungeons at various levels so that leveling an alt can have some discovery again and so there is more stuff to do with guilds at our own pace since we can always go back to lower level areas and scale down.
#4 Instead of large Living Story lines that continue fortnightly directly from the last with a big boss constantly reappearing, have quite a few story lines spaced out through the year that have episodes that pop up through out the year occasionally rather than frequently.

Agreed fully with #1 and #3.
#2 I agree with as long as significant means ’adding’ and ’updating’ and not ’replacing’, I want areas to have more content, more to do and see.
As for #4, not sure, I do think it’s something worth experimenting with.

More good looking non recycled weapon and armor skins

Content with commitment, enough with the temporary festivities. New areas, new mechanics, new races, new skills, new weapons.

Also…more content similar to the Zephyr Sanctum content. It had a serious LoZ vibe going on that I really enjoyed. (the Molten dungeon was a good addition to!)

We need a Sorrow’s Furnace and campaign style content for GW2, GW1 did it right!

I personally believe that “Living Story” is the wrong term for the kin of thing that ANET is shooting for. What I believe they are attempting to cultivate is a “Growing World”. Something that is not necessarily crammed chock full of events and dungeons and Gods know what else. A place where the people visiting it can put a bit of themselves into it is all we need.

I never needed anything more from GW1. An occasional skill balance, a new update here or there were nice, but it wasn’t what kept me there. It was the permanence of it. The dungeons, the quests, the missions. Everything was repeatable ad nauseum and I never even finished it all on all my characters over 7 years.

What we need from the Living story is growth. The things that I hear GW2ians commenting on most are the events that have a lasting effect on the world. The opening of Southsun, Twilight Arbor, Kessex Hills. Even the Zephyr Sanctum was an enormous hit because of its hinted return.

Random and passing do not satisfy the need to put yourself into a game, to form memories of the places you visit. I will sound incredibly infantile and lame but I will admit that when GW2 hit beta, I spent a large portion of time with a proverbial tear in my eye, rediscovering places that had changed so much in what for me was a little time (was playing GW1 until final release) but for the world that I had put so much time an thought into, it was 250 years in the future.

I can find no fault in the OP’s list, I can only stress that if GW2 is going to become a sequel worthy of its precursor (and I am positive it will), the team is going to have to step out of the “safe content” bubble, make things matter, change the world. Break it to pieces and make the players put it back together, make them grow more attached to it. The updates don’t need to be frequent to keep people coming back, they need to have heart.

I decided to not care about Living Story events or any other kind of periodical events that requires forced repetition for 2 weeks in order to achieve something. Achievements like “complete puzzle x 100 times” or “try to kill scarlet but not really kill her like 10 times today” are not, IMHO, the way to follow any kind of a story.

I didn’t knew the winter stuff would last for 1 entire month, knowing that in advance I could have tried the nightmare tower or whatever is currently going on. But making dungeons that last for some very limited time doesn’t sound any interesting for me, because when I can complete it or reach the skill to do it, it’s already gone forever.

IF Living Story events are more similar to Southsun Cove, in the way that after ending there is something permanent left there (an area, a dungeon…), then I would not mind to try something, or to follow the story arc if there is any.

Also, it would be nice to have some easy way to check the story so far, missed videos or cutscenes, etc.. probably there is already one (as far as we’re reached, the story in the events is not interesting for me, so I didn’t checked).

Also, I think that humoristic events should be more limited. Yesterday I was doing events in Shiverpeak Mountains and had to retake a fortress, with enemies all around, epic music and a big pink present package in the middle. Either take out the joke or change the epic tone for some festive music and put Santa hats on all the grudge.

Trying to develop an intense story about an archvilian epic salad mastermind while there are a lot of halloween stuff, wintersaday stuff, joke stuff, presents with letal funny toys and so… well, it doesn’t seem to make the world serious enough to care about those characters.

How would I like all this to implement?

1. Add more than replace. Let new players replay the “Scarlet Epic Whatever” when they reach certain level, for example after finishing Personal Story, or in parallel. Make the non-festivities content as instances, missions, quests, dungeons or whatever fits. But something I can play and care at my own pace.

2. Separate the grinding part of the events and Living Story more than now. I have not use for all the ugly hats and ugly whatever I accidentally collect from those festivity boxes. I checked that I needed hundreds of thousands of them to build even the less useful bit of content. Basically, crap taking space.

3. Add permanent content. Or permanent changes. If there needs to be permanent changes affected by the events, let us know in advance how can we affect, and which decisions can we make (other than ¡vote for her! ¡vote for him!). For example:

Orr rebuild:
During 2 months, the 3 Orders will conduct events in different parts of Orr in what they call the “clean phases”, every Order has his own plan and they started to do stuff in a different area, for example 3 areas in the first Orr map. Those Order events can chain other bigger events and are all done at the same time, you can be supporting one at time. There is a global count of success events and chained events done for every Order.

During the first month, all Order members can vote for the next action, this vote will define how that area will change if they are successful. After the first month, the events change to reflect the result. If the Order events are successful enough, that area changes in the voted way. It may be more competitive (only one Order can be successful) or cooperative, and there can be a result in which the Evil wins, making the zone more difficult for example.

This would allow to develop NPC’s, make a significant change over a zone and allow the creative teams to receive input from the game itself.

Just to expand on my 4th point I would still like to see one piece of content each fortnight but not always the same story updating every fortnight. When I say occasional I mean in regards to having maybe 5 stories running through the year but with episodes popping up at various times of the year instead of running one story like the Scarlett one for months until it ends then a new story only after this.