Guild Wars 2

Bringing back Cantha, Elona and other new continents might actually not be such a bad idea after all.

See, Living Story could act as a means of expanding main continents and expansion continents, while Expansions could literally act as “Expanded” continental areas, new regions of the WORLD of GW2 not just the region we are in.

This allows the Devs to have a healthy compromise of new vs old, and equally space vs compatibility.

Expansions into regions such as Cantha and Elona would work favorably not just for re-using old content and giving fans a new taste of what they look like post alterations, but also giving room to add parts of Tyria’s full world that we have never explored before.

How would this benefit personal story?

By adding new continents, the players main character can journey to new lands seeking allies to bring back to Tyria to fight the dragons, and possibly recruit a few new races along the way!

Living Story only linked to recycling old stuff, that’s boring

No, the point I’m making is, it allows them to, expand the Tyria world map, WITHOUT making all of the game content about that one particular region of the world.

This gives them fresh, new, opportunity, to add dragons previously unseen into places we may not have even been to yet.

Wouldn’t that be a lot, of effort?

Actually no, you see this is why:
- Adding a new continent doesn’t necessarily mean adding EVERY ZONE to it.
- This allows Living Story to interject between continents, which allows new zones to be added further on, and new stories to the universe.
- Allowing re-usability for expansion continents, that would naturally be smaller, than larger continents such as fully blown Tyria by comparison.

Still unsure what that means, an example:

Cantha is divided into several regions, but during the launch of a Cantha themed expansion we would only be able to access Kaineng City, Shing Ji Isles and Echovald Forest, while later being able to access the Jade Sea, and further mainland to places we haven’t been before.

My point is, this gives the devs much needed space to work with stuff for the living story, while giving us, what we direly desperately ravishingly want, new areas, new, something.

More importantly, that big E word we are craving so hungrily.

Thoughts?

I’ve been under the assumption that the Living World content has always been designed for implementations such as what you’ve mentioned. It’s a unique vessel to deliver content updates both temporary and permanent. If you consider Southsun Cove being essentially the first Living World update, and being a permanent fixture, it would seem likely that this would be the format they would deliver new content.
However, after seeing how Southsun Cove actually turned out (a great zone but unpopulated), I’m assuming they’re regrouping and approaching any permanent content in a different light.

From what I recall, it was always the intent of the devs to introduce new areas and zones into the game periodically leading up to (as of launch) new races and professions. (Presumably years down the road). This is still feasible. There’s a Tengu city that’s yet to be implemented. There’s lore that suggests Mursaat aren’t extinct and previous considered and potentially reside in The Isle of Janthir. There’s several races already present that would make viable playable races, some of which already use playable races’ models (Kodan with Norn and Tengu with Charr). There’s speculative reasoning to believe the Crystal Desert is being developed. Let us not forget there’s 13 other regions of Tyria that could easily be developed. I wouldn’t hold your breath for a Canthan or Elonian expansion any time soon… but you can certainly look forward to implementation of content that was essentially tabled when launch became the focus.

That being said… I agree that it’s time to start implementing SOME of that content. Not saying they need to release an entire region with complete zones all at once… but the Living World content should certainly be working up to that goal. Besieging Lion’s Arch is great and all, but when it comes down to it… all it did was distort the entire PvE player base’s routines in regard to a primary port city and enforce the rampant zerg based gameplay already present in the game. That’s not exactly my idea of “content.”

Dungeons, Fractals, World Events, and Champ Farming will only hold the player base’s attention for so long. Implementing new zones to find out why the Maguuma Jungle is now the Maguuma Wastes or what happened with the Far Shiverpeaks is much more interesting than fighting a single antagonist for a 3-4 month arc. I certainly understand the level of complexity inherent in designing new zones, including terrain, npc interaction, event coding, lore association, balance concerns, etc… But I’ve seen screenshots of a dev playing in the Ring of Fire Islands from more than a year before launch.

I’d iimmagine the reverse would work better, use living story to expand to other continents, and expansions to continue the storyline. why? because the main story won’t make sense if temporary, but new continents added with temporary introductions, can be recycled in the advance of the permanant main plot via expansions.