I noticed A-net made a comment a while ago about struggling to decide how best to integrate expansions to the game since you guys clearly want to, but haven’t quite figured out how.
A few ideas I think our community can share, might help to format that and offer advise from experience as players seeking good quality content.
Living Story Seasons
The last few patches have been perfectly well formatted, I admit, I am content with where they concluded, but I am still hungry for more Guild Wars content, and having put so much expectation for content faster I believe the solution to this is, major arcs:
You guys are the ones that write the lore, and decide the formatting, but maybe this will help to organize and plan the future direction living story could generally follow.
The Idea:
Season 2 and onwards could follow a format, where by each season has 3 major arcs, of which are done over the course of four months, thus, we shorten the length of each Season, while increasing the content within them.
There could also be interval’s, which act as minor content updates to bridge the gap between living world, and game expansions, these would work as a minor 2 week long micro event that serves as a prologue to each expansion.
Now the Seasons themselves:
- Major Arc 1
- Major Arc 2
- Major Arc 3
Each of these would act as events, weather related to expansions or not, that carry over the course of the months, weather all happening one after the other, or between each other like chapters in a book over lapping.
These Arcs eventually tie together to conclude yet another chapter in Guild Wars expanding universe, these events will have no consistent tie to the personal story, or the expansions to follow, but act as gap fillers and lore extra’s to buffet the curious and the needy for those that want more character development and back story for individual characters and regions of Tyria.
Expansions
Now Expansions will be done shortly after each of these great arcs are filled, given a teaser announcement, a short prologue chapter between the time gap, which allows for feature patches in the meantime to help balance and game play gripes.
These Expansions are the chunky content, while Living World fills a short amount of time, the Expansions are designed to fill in the long term, giving lots of new content, adding new races, new abilities, new classes, new skills, new regions and most importantly advancement to the personal story itself.
So while the Expansions focus on the individuals personal story and advancement, and add new permanent dungeons to the world, as well as new races and classes and the rest, they also allow the game to separate the two, giving Living Story a focus more on its Story aspect, while Expansions can more heavily focus on the “features” and “Personal” Story.
Confused? Don’t be.
Simply put, I’m basically saying, Living Story works well to the credit of an F2P game and certainly offers some interesting changes to the world, but the format has to be more clear from the start in future, otherwise randomizing everything risks confusing people and upsetting them greatly, to the point people just stop playing.
And while I appreciate you guys are under no obligation to worry about that given Gw2 is F2P… it doesn’t hurt to help your money pocket a little by giving incentive to people to come back with more enjoyable content that’s easier to follow.
People find Personal Story linear enough to follow while Living Story is reliant on people being there for that particular piece of content, that’s fine, as long as you do it right.
This is probably, by my thoughts, the most effective way to organize that so that its easier to manage.
Even so, if anyone else has ideas on how best to make living story and expansions co-coincide together, then feel free to throw down your own suggestion, maybe the devs will take an interest.