Showing Posts For William Altman.8601:
Continuation of Part 1
Timing
I liked how there was a release at the start of the month and then an update two weeks later, but you could still go back and do the elements of the first two weeks. However, even though you effectively had a month to do one part of the living story you only had two weeks to do the second part. Overlapping story elements is a good thing as it gives users more flexibility in attending to stuff. However, it can make it harder to do a continuous story.
It may work well to take a page from Babylon 5. Have one continuous story going on. This updates/moves to the next segment every four to eight weeks, and it lasts a year. Then have a parallel series of episodes that is composed of unrelated content. They can be standalone, two parters, etc. Each episode is the same length, but its rollover is staggered two to four weeks from the continuous story arc. The episodic stories can also be used to introduce elements that are later used in the continuous story. Time blocks can be extended or shrunk as needed/desired.
Competing Time
This dovetails with Timing and Fun, above. I decided to finally try starting up a new character, but then playing that new character conflicted with completing Living Story content. When I have only limited amount of time, I’m going to jump on the Living story stuff since it’s a limited time only deal, and it might have something really cool like the noir scene during dragon bash. However, so much of the Living Story is just a grind and I try to close 50 doors or kill 100+ Aetherblades. This means that I then don’t have time to play the new character that I wanted to start up. That the Living Story material is all or mostly level 80 based dashes any thoughts I have of using the new character for it. I find this situation disappointing.
Currencies
A different currency each time lets people customize their rewards. This is awesome, but the multiple currencies is also burdensome. I have appreciated that there is a way to dump off old currencies (e.g. fortune cookie wrappers, jade tickets etc.), and this helped address this issue; though, there is not yet one for the lion’s arch commendations from when folks donated supplied to help repair Lion’s Arch.
Follow “Wouldn’t if be cool if?” with “Does this make sense?”
It seems that a great deal of GW2 is driven by the question “wouldn’t it be cool if?” As a result we have umpteen sentient species, pirates, steampunk, skull shaped helicopters without stabilizers, mad scientists, more pirates, underwater ninjas, etc. GW1 was more limited, but it still had a dazzling variety and crazy imaginative landscapes, plots and foes. Unlike GW2, GW1 nearly always managed to reasonably explain how everything fit together as a whole. As a result, it felt like a more real, a more living world, unlike GW2.
The living story elements of GW2 have, unfortunately, continued this trend. Taking the Aetherblades as an example, they came out of left field with bleeding edge technology, vast armies and elaborate bases hidden in already established and well traveled areas. Even within GW2’s hectic pel mel they didn’t make any sense. Where’s their supply lines? How did they get technology no one else has? How did they build everything in secret? Where did they get the recruits? These are a few of the questions that should have been answered, but were instead handwaved or at best given very shallow answers. Frankly, it was insulting.
Honorable mention goes to the Queen’s Jubilee. The extravagance of the arena by the Queen tells us that Kryta has slipped further into decadence and that she is seeking to distract her people with entertainment rather than actually fix the problems of bandits and centaurs, which I love, or I would if I could trust that this is what was actually going on rather than it being another “wouldn’t it be cool if?”.
Opposite all of those, Southsun Cove and the Molten Alliance were given back stories that worked reasonably well within the setting, and they felt solid.
In reading some of the posts, I get the feeling that maybe some of this was addressed in web posts of some form. If so, that is lazy; though, it may be that developers have felt that approach forced upon them due to a short development cycle, in which case, please see Timing above.
Leverage Existing Assets
Even though I thought the Molten Alliance was silly, I liked how it leveraged two existing factions, rather than creating something new. This immediately grounded the story in the paradigm of the GW2 Setting. There are plenty of existing assets within the setting that can be leveraged similar to what was done with the Molten Alliance. For example, there’s an antagonist summit in Brisbain Wildlands. Let’s see something come of that!
This is already crazy long, so I’m going to wrap up here.
Beware, much verbosity below. So much that I had to split it into multiple posts.
My Story
When I start a new character, s/he narrates “this is my story”, but it isn’t. My role in GW2, be it personal (past level 30ish), dungeon or living story is more akin to that of Uatu the Watcher or Robin than any sort of protagonist. Instead of a lurid tale that I become invested in, I am eating popcorn watching NPC theater. This is one of the most biting contrasts between GW2 and its predecessor, which threw you into the fire and grabbed your heartstrings from the very beginning and never let go.
In the context of the living story, this situation is painfully apparent. At least there are token attempts to feature your character in personal or dungeon story. In the living story my character has no place. To make things worse, sometimes the NPCs don’t have a place either.
Fun
There has been a trend in the living story material away from fun to time consuming. Part of this is the achievement grind. At first this was lessened by the inclusion of optional daily achievements, but now those dailies have become required, which can make completion of living story impossible for a casual player that only logs in on the weekend.
Another part is the difficulty. I finally took a shot at the new Twilight Arbor path. I was the only one that hadn’t done it before, but even with 4 experienced people it took us over four hours and we only completed it because I could tank the Clockheart almost indefinitely / while others rallied (only time I’ve seen revive orbs put to good use). There’s difficult and then there is “there is no way that this is possibly a way I want to invest my time” or, more succinctly, “this is dumb”. I could have done multiple runs in other dungeons during that time and had more fun. I stuck with it because I figured there would be some sort of story pay off to wrap things up with Scarlet or half way decent reward at the end, but there wasn’t any. I expect there to be some challenge; it gets boring without one. It needs to be balanced though, which the current story dungeons seem to have down pretty well.
Tequatl is a similar example, only it is timed so it doesn’t feel like a slog fest. I love that it is harder and more involved than “stand here and let auto-attack fly”, but it would be nice if it didn’t take the level of numbers and coordination that it currently does as it creates a huge barrier of entry for meaningful participation in the event.
Consequences
To me “living story” is something that is alive. You can trace its life path and see how it logically evolved and what its done. As a story moves through life you can see the footprint it has had upon the world and those within it. Generally speaking this doesn’t happen. Folks have already put forward a number of good suggestions. I figure I’ll toss in one more: Make the Living Story the WvW of PvE. That tag line doesn’t quite describe it right, so here goes.
We saw the start of this approach with the Zephyr Sanctum arc where Kiel and Gnashblade faced off, but the contest was left to the players to determine who won. Expand on that. Leave instances with choices players have to make that gets tallied for some impact down the road.
Alternatively (and this is where the WvW-esque part comes in), cull the metrics for who completes the Living Story steps. Take those total achievement points and map them out by Species, Profession and Personality. Then have these impact the game world. In essence the influence of the players will spread or morph based upon who completed living story steps. Lion’s Arch is an easy place to center this around
Example: More Asura are completing Living Story than any other species, so suddenly the Asura start slowly taking over Lion’s Arch. You see more asura walking around and people talk more favorably about asura. Maybe Asura PCs get a 1% discount in Lion’s Arch. In the extreme, after several months of the Asura on top, Lion’s Arch decides that its in its best interest to sign a permanent treaty with Rata Sum.
Example: More Necromancers completed last month’s Living Story arc, now this month all necro powers get a 5% cooldown bonus, including the NPCs, plus there’s now a few more necro NPCs amongst the mobs. May it actually unlocks or change some dynamic event changes.
Example: More folks with a high ferocity completed living story last month so now the more warlike NPCs get bonuses. So the Centaurs and Sons of Svanir get +5% Health, but if this goes on too long then its +10% Health for the second month in a row, 15% for the third and so on. In addition to getting a bonus those same baddies initiate events more often. Note that the PCs don’t get anything, but the NPCs are inspired by their ferocious behavior.
In essence people are fighting over the world and Lion’s Arch in particular. You can also set this up so that each server evolves on its own.
End Part 1
The Duelist Trait “Deceptive Evasion” often fails to work. In particular, it fails when transformed (e.g. AC path 3 when you take on a ghost form), and when there is a lot going on on screen. The latter is not simply an issue of the clone not rendering, the pink circle counting illusions does not fill in to signify that you have generated a clone. This issue came up throughout the karka event and continues to plague me when running in large events such as Grenth. I realize that the clones do not generate when not in “combat mode”; that is not the cause here.
Like many posters I’m not a fan of the WP rez change. I understand what its getting at thought so I’m not fully turned off by it in theory, even though its current implementation sours me. The issue it tries to address is not just isolated to dungeons, you see it in big events like Balthazar and Grenth as well: rather than rezzing defeated toons people will tell them to WP and run back. It really does remove a team/help aspect from the game by telling players “you’re defeated? well you’re on your own”.
Like others have said, this actively discourages people from wanting to dungeoneer. Even with an experienced team, once one person goes down, the team’s performance drops by 1/5. However, if you send even one person to resurrect that comrade, then team performance drops by another 1/5. Given the length of time it takes to resurrect someone in combat, you will now be at 3/5 capacity for an extended period. In the best case scenario, one member can kite or otherwise occupy all the antagonists while you have 3 people resurrect the defeated comrade. However this still takes a long time and you simply need one more mistake to have two people dropped, at which point you’re pretty well buggered. There are events that reflect this difficulty, such as retaking/repairing the camp at the Colonnade Waypoint in Malchor’s Leap where you must keep engineers alive / resurrect them while undead overrun everything. Where there are tricks to aid in resurrection (e.g. stealth, aegis, etc), they do not address the fundamental problem.
The primary reason things are now difficult and that people refuse to resurrect during big events is that it takes a very long time to resurrect people. Its takes you out of the fight, both diminishing your team’s ability (as above) and taking you out of the fun. It strikes me that the easiest solution would be to reduce the resurrection time in PvE. I note that such a change would be PvE only as very rapid resurrections in WvW could very easily make for infinite armies on both sides of a battle.
I would actually like to see something like this in game. All it would need is server, possibly language/country, and a guild name search option. Clicking on a guild’s name would bring up a brief profile page with basic information (e.g. server, emblem, etc.), including in game contact info for the guild’s leader and/or officers (toggle option?). There have been times when I would like to speak with a guild’s leader or an officer, but cannot otherwise obtain contact information. All the information is right there in the game already; it should be easy enough to manage something like this.