Guild Wars 2

Do the collective player actions effect how the storyline goes?

Was it even possible to save lions arch? What about other living story parts?

Do our actions change anything at all?

Short answer, no. The storyline we play through is ultimately linear, with minor choices along the way (Example being the election between Evon and Ellen). No matter who won, Lion’s Arch would have been destroyed, even though Evon likes to let everyone know he knew it was coming.

From a technical standpoint this would possibly more than double the work load of the Anet team, making multiple maps of a fully damaged, partially damaged, and maybe not damaged at all Lion’s Arch, figure out dialogue and locations of NPCs across the world based on outcome, and relocating other services, as well as figuring out where the story could go based on the outcome.

Im thinking of something more like, the actions of this patch can affect the actions of the next patch or the one after it. Not them having to make double content every patch.

Honestly, I think it would be really doable. knowing in just a couple weeks how well the playerbase performed and make the next patch or the one after it accordingly.

Well, they would have to make multiple scenarios for each outcome to bring the outcome to us in a timely fashion. The patches we see are not prepared a couple weeks before they happen, but more around 6 months before we see them, based on how long it took for the fractals update to hit after Ellen joined the Captain’s Council.

No. Save the election the story is fixed. With the LS it plays out as it is writen. ANet would not wast time on content that people would not see. It’s the same resin in other game series that if a person can die in true first game they don’t have big parts in he sequels. Company’s don’t want to wast money on things people may never see.

As for saving it. I really don’t see how we could have. LA was trashed by the initial attack. Maybe if Evon had been elected another city would have been whipped out. But seeing as the place scarlet was looking for was in LA, it was always going to happen.

woofie.5603:

Do the collective player actions effect how the storyline goes?

Was it even possible to save lions arch? What about other living story parts?

Do our actions change anything at all?

Nope. This is one the major problems with a “living” story. It’s not living, its just a story. Specifically a story about NPCs that only die when the authors want them to and always succeed otherwise.

Those ticking bars you sometimes saw at the top during certain archs, those were just timers. Players could have done zero events or a billion, it ticked at the exact same rate.

Nope. We failed horribly and then the devs tried to act as though killing Scarlet was something impressive.

The only alteration there would have been would be if Evon was elected, so I’ve heard. And that change would have been “Lion’s Arch would have been more prepared” – but that doesn’t mean LA would have been saved, just not as damaged with fewer civilian casualties.

Supposedly, there will be more – and better – methods of changing the plot in Season 2. But keep in mind that the effects of the change (most likely) won’t be seen until 4 months after our actions.

Evon couldn’t have done squat to prepare LA more then Kiel did. Political stonewalling is what kept the defenses from being increased, not individual actions.

Also, as I’ve noted many times back during the day… AA guns would’ve just dropped the airships and all their ammo onto the city with how low they were flying. It’d basically have doubled the amount of damage we saw the breachmaker itself make when it exploded :P

Kiel vs Gnashblade election seems to be, so far, the only divergent Living Story entry.