Guild Wars 2

I enjoy playing the game’s content, but not at the game’s default difficulty level, and I really dislike playing in a zerg. It’s for these reasons that I usually go out of my way to play under-equipped chars and explore underpopulated zones where there usually won’t be more than one or two people hitting an event at any given time.

Most people don’t play this way, and that’s cool. But the new system won’t work well for me at all when it’s fully implemented across the game, and will kind of ruin my entire experience (I don’t like the logistics, repetition or time commitments associated with fracs and dungeons).

I love the system in theory, but the algorithm will ruin the whole fun and challenge of GW2 for me, unless I get to manually set the criteria for the worlds I’m paired with, or better yet, were just allowed to choose the district myself, based on the population and several other factors. I’m also slightly concerned that jumping around the world is going to become extremely painful, since I’ll be forced to travel to each area before I can access all of its contestable waypoints. With 20-45 second load times on most zones, it makes traveling about my favorite zones/areas (which tend to be in the far corners of the game) both time consuming and uneconomical.

Kudos on the general concept, though. This could be used as a brilliant workaround to the fact that some zones are temporally locked due to the existence of the PS.

Obsidian.1328:

Wait, so your saying that you think the force behind the Fortuneteller was always going to be Abaddon? And that perhaps the long tale of Abaddon was in fact the result of this as-yet-unnamed force in Factions?

Why couldn’t it simply have been someone or something else behind the Teller, and still keep the current Abaddon story in Nightfall?

This is actually something I loved about Guild Wars lore. The developers obviously and deliberately left quite a few holes in both their minor, and major plots which allowed them to grow the world naturally while simultaneously giving everything an air of mystery.

Regardless of whoever wrote the hole into the dialogue/plot, just about anyone could come in and fill it so long as it wasn’t reserved. So the team could collectively look at what they were planning and look for holes that made sense to fill. Abaddon didn’t necessarily have to be behind Shiro’s betrayal, but when the writers were creating Nightfall’s plot, they saw that incomplete thread and filled it because it made sense to them and not necessarily because one writer had gotten excited about an idea and laid everything out in advanced. This also meant that community feedback could really shape the plot, and writers weren’t forced to chalk everything up to experience and wait for the current plot to end before they could react in a significant manner.

The production values on a lot of these new LS releases is looking great, but the plot feels rigid and less organic than it used to be. Scarlet had a lot of potential, but the developer-community feedback loop has far too much latency to really help her meet her potential as something greater than an infuriatingly shallow annoyance.

Always room in the GW1 PvP scene (please join us, we’re so small).

BobbyStein.2315:

Shiren.9532:

-snip-

It’s actually not as simple as that. The process for outlining a year’s worth of content involves working with a number of different teams to realize the story vision while also addressing the needs of the game. Story and gameplay need to work together, and sometimes that means doing what is best for the game as a whole and adjusting the story to make it work.

I’d love for you to tell us exactly how maneuverable/agile your content pipeline is right now. Because it’s clear that while you’re definitely listening, and in some places agreeing with our critiques on the game; you’re too hampered by the momentum built up around your past decisions/plans to quickly shift the direction of the game, so you have to wait until ‘next season’ as it were, to implement anything but minor changes.

What exactly does your content development cycle look like? I think that giving us some perspective in this area might do wonders to the quality of our feedback, and give us a good idea of what might be possible and what would be out of the question.

Knowing all the pillars of your current design philosophy and how set in stone they are might help, too.

draxynnic.3719:

As a lore aside, Abaddon wasn’t punished for granting magic to mortals. He was punished because he threw a massive temper tantrum and declared war on the other gods for placing limits on that gift without consulting him.

Nice catch, I’ll rectify the content in my post accordingly.

pt.2

World Building

This is a big one, for me- and one of the easiest to summarize. Releases are so focused, that the rest of the world barely changes outside of them. The world feels static, and dead. I want to see events change to it over time. I want that one guy to stop being captured by spiders all the time, and learn from his mistakes- possibly replacing his kidnapping with a pre-emptive strike on the spider’s den every time they get uppity.

Or, maybe just add one or two short events to a few areas every release. It would go a long way towards making the world feel alive. I know that you’re loath to progress the world too much, because you don’t wish to damage the personal story, but that’s a sacred cow which you might just have to sacrifice- you may just have to go in and modify it to be a little more time-agnostic, or spatially independent from the rest of the world. You’re missing so many wonderful opportunities to tell the story of Tyria- how it reacts to the fallout of the PS, how it’s effected by the LS. You could even expand the LS by showing the slow growth of political movements in the background of the current LS in this way- have a main thread going on now, while adding something else in the background.

Imagine, for instance- how it would have been if GW2 was set in GW1 Cantha, and as you progressed through the story of Factions (which could be expressed like the LS), you saw in the background the slow growth of the Ministry of Purity, and its xenophobic policies. It would be exciting, you could feel the world moving around you, like F&F, but even more engaging!

/endrant.

Here’s an example of a release I’d like to see:

Monthly Theme: Better Cities

• The asura have completed renovations on the Polymock Arena! All players can now play polymock in Rata Sum.
• The carnival’s up and running in Divinity’s Reach! All players can now participate in shooting galleries, and other assorted games.
• The Bane in the Black Citadel is now open to all races, and holds tournaments regularly.
• The Grove’s been made navigable! All players can now easily explore the grove without getting too confused.
• Hoelbreak’s bar fights are getting rowdier. All players can now fend off waves of belligerent drunks armed with naught but a three legged bar-stool, a bottle of whiskey, and their wits. The more drunk you are, the more powerful your attacks, but the slower your movement.
• Denizens throughout all the major cities will provide you with short fetch-quests and stories, to keep the lore minded amongst you entertained, and lend the cities feeling of life.
• Various dynamic events have been added, or upgraded throughout the world, go out and explore! Kryta’s experiencing a drought, and Krytans are becoming sick of the Ministry. Ascalon’s finding new life, as the ghosts are being pushed back ever further and settlers are finally beginning to take root in the reclaimed lands.
• In addition, a plot-point is brewing in the living story- better keep an eye on that one, maybe experience the new mission. But don’t sweat it, if you miss this release, the story mission will remain available to all players through a world journal. If you missed a major world event, a brief cinematic will show you what happened, so that you can get on with whatever missions you’ve missed.

pt.1

I’ve not read this entire thread, I’ve only looked at the Anet responses and the posts that they were responding too, but they seem to sum up the majority of my gripes, so I’ll not waste any time by repeating them. That said, here are some of my insights/opinions on a few key issues I perceive to be in the living world as it is right now that I doubt have been brought up too much…

Scale, Morality and World Building

It seems as if every living world release has to be as big and as bombastic as the last, if not more so. Every release places the fate of the world in the balance, and if we don’t do something now everything’s going to explode, or some huge cruel multinational conglomerate’s going to stomp the common man beneath its iron-toed heel.
While this is great and all, it quickly becomes tiresome. It’s everything constantly cranked up to ten, it’s everything (at face value) black and white, and it’s just kind of boring.

Scale

This is a rather simple one. Every update’s big. Not only that, but it largely focuses on one thing, and on thing only- so that thing has to be pretty darn important if it’s to be worth the time of us (the players). This big thing also has to present itself as something of interest to all characters of all races. But does it?

This issue isn’t something that’s easy to solve, but I think one of the first steps towards solving it is moving away from this mentality of “one issue at a time”.

I can understand that you seem want to build an epic experience, but that’s doable without making every release an explosion. You released a strong base product in Guild Wars 2, but there’s so much that needs to be done still. Instead of focusing on things so singularly, why don’t you theme releases around features, rather than plot-points, and release the overarching story to the side. You could theme a release around making racial cities better- so that they can become the hubs they have the potential to be, for example.

Morality

This doesn’t apply to every release- the Southsun releases were somewhat good at providing some sense of moral ambiguity to the situation, though in the end I felt like I was explicitly told who was right in this situation, and it was the Lionguard. But ever since Scarlet, there’s been little depth in this respect.

I’d also like to see the world move to being a little more gray, like it was in Guild Wars 1. Character motives and methods were often very ambiguous or questionable during quests in GW1- I love that I slaughtered an entire crew of corsairs in NF for a mother, who believed that her son had been kidnapped by corsairs, only to have him turn around and thank me- because he could now steal their ship and run his own crew. The mother then shrugged off the deaths and gave me the quest reward, simply stating that her son would be home for dinner. It was dark, it was tongue in cheek, and the game never told me who was right, or wrong in the situation. In the end, I concluded that it was I, and the mother who were the real monsters.

Even the big bad Abbadon’s motives could hardly be declared absolutely evil. He was Prometheus. He gifted the mortals with magic, and he waged a war with the rest of the gods in an attempt to keep them from limiting that gift. But in the end, he lost and was sent to experience centuries of torture in the realm of torment along side his faithful followers, until he finally set forth to take revenge upon the the gods, and the humans who had betrayed him. To be honest- I somewhat agreed with Abbadon’s motives, if not his methods.

Something I’d like to know, is, how many individual people voted for each candidate? I’m willing to bet, that Kiel legitimately won the popular vote, and that Evon only got as large a chunk of the vote as he did, because of a highly dedicated minority of players. Everyone I know who voted for Evon was perfectly happy to toss 8g+ (myself included) at the token merchant in hopes of being able to play the Abbadon fractal, but they were in the minority. Most everyone else I know tossed a token at Kiel whenever they found one, or only dedicated a small amount of money towards the election, for the WP discount; I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, of course, the outcome is probably ideal for most of the community.

Of course, I’ve got a relatively small sample-group from-which I draw my conclusions.

It’s nice that the mystery tonics offer an indefinite transformation, but, why don’t Mystic Forge tonics?

It’s very cost-prohibitive to produce mystery tonics in any significant number, and, if I want a special tonic (Skritt, Wolf, Leopard) from the Mystic Forge, it become even more-so (though not by much). I would like to be able wear the forms granted by these special tonics, if not indefinitely, then, at the very least, over a much longer period of time than is currently granted per tonic.

Thanks for the replies, everybody.

It would be nice if someone from Anet could come in and clarify the exact nature of the Mists, in this regard.

Alright, thanks for the answer!

So it could be considered the essence of a multiverse?

I’m not sure if this has ever been cleared up, but, are the mists and equivalent to outer-space, where planets are to be found within, or do the mists function as the space in-between a multiverse, where time doesn’t exist?

This thread, right here, has it right.

I personally like to play on under-equipped/weak characters, as it adds more tension to the game.

The new Anet site looks nifty, I’ll give you that. But you don’t seem to have your blog up right now. Which means I can’t read all those awesome articles you shared with us over the years.

It also means that I can’t fact check the wiki!

Will you be putting it back up?

I completely agree with this video, which is why I’m bumping the thread.

I recently came across the Gladium Canton for the first time in almost a year, and I had a pretty much identical experience. Without any quests, there’s next to no cohesive narrative, and the lore all feels watered down as a result.

GW has some of the strongest base lore of any franchise, but repeating events with binary outcomes just can’t take advantage of that. Neither can the living narrative, it’s good for showing story movement on a grand scale, and I don’t feel that the living narrative is bad (quite the opposite), but it’s completely impersonal, and there aren’t really any memorable characters.

I love Guild Wars 2, and here’s why:

• Anet obviously cares about the game and the series.
• It has the best long-term value proposition of any game on the market.
• I can (almost) single-handedly liberate the researchers of Dredgehaunt Cliffs from the occupying force of communist moles, despite the fact that their claim to the region holds some legitimacy.
• The lore is amazing.

Of course, I still have some complaints which pale in comparison to the whole of the game, but I expect those will be rectified within the next couple of years.

I’d love to see 25 man instancing of these things. It could be troublesome finding a party, but perhaps if you had the option to be either randomly assigned a group, or work with a pre-made team, it would work extremely well.

You’re absolutely right about the achievement armor sets. I was simply using a slayer title track as an example. If they were to introduce armor for the slayer track, I would recommend they introduced it at % of slayer titles maxed.

Truth be told, I wouldn’t really mind if districts were exclusive to world events. I only ever really play at peak hours though, and I find that some maps usually have a higher population density than others.

I absolutely agree that a lot of the personal story needs to maintain a high level of instancing. That said, I think it would pull people out less if after each mission, you were given a task to carry out in the open-world ala the karka investigation, which would incentivise players to explores the current area they’re in without turning it into a check-list, and add to the narrative (Nightfall, for example, did this relatively well, thought there were a few hiccups). But mainly, my complaint is that the narrative takes a hard stop after every mission while you stop to level up.

I love Guild Wars 2, and I have to say- this is one of my all time favorite games. That said, no game is perfect, and I’d like to offer a few suggestion which I think might increase the quality of the play experience in the future (though I don’t pretend to be a games designer). Hopefully my suggestions will prove useful.

1. Achievement Armor Sets
I’ve considered buying cosmetic items before, but I never have, because I would feel no sense of ownership over the item, and there wouldn’t really be anything special about it. It would be great, in my opinion, if you added a new tier to certain achievements, which, upon completion, would award players with the rights to purchase a unique set of armor designed specifically for that achievement. Players would have the option of paying for the armor using either gems, or gold.
Example:

• My character has just completed the new final tier of the ‘Indiscriminate Slayer’ title track (let’s say it’s ‘Faunacidal maniac’).
• Since I now have the highest tier of the achievement, I can go to the NPC ‘Bob- Title Armorer’, and choose to purchase the armor set ’Faunatic’s Garb (Required level 80)’ for either 8g, or 875 gems.
• I now own an armor set which I’ve most likely paid for, I feel a sense of ownership over, not just any old yahoo is going to be running around with it. It becomes special, and it can provide additional cash flow for the gem store.

This will also provide players who desire a more directed experience, but lack the time or resources to pursue dungeon sets with a long-term goal.

2. Major World/Meta Events/Major Content Updates
As demonstrated by both the Halloween, and Lost Shores events, there are (at least in my eyes) two major problems with major updates like this:

• Lag makes the game borderline unplayable.
• A glut of players concentrated within small areas wreak havoc upon performance, especially on mid-range to lower end machines. I run a higher-end set up, and the game wouldn’t render the karka until the Wizard’s Fife invasion.
  The large amount of players also detracts from the general experience- obscuring objectives, characters, making it hard to focus on the narrative, and making it so events must occur at an immersion breaking rate.

I completely trust you guys at Anet to fix the server-related performance issues. But there’s something I’d like to suggest as a solution to the second bullet point: reintroduce districts.
Being able to choose between a high-population instance and a low population instance is something which appeals heavily to me, largely because of the reasons I’ve stated above. In general, an ultra-high population detracts from the experience more than adds to it, and giving people the option to choose between population densities helps players tailor the experience to their individual play-styles.

I’ve always preferred low-population maps, because I have a chance to read through all the flavor text in an area, individual boss encounters provide more challenge, and when I meet other players, the interactions are more meaningful and memorable, because I get to play with a group of individuals, as opposed to a hoard of voices, blades, and explosions. Of course at other times, joining a larger mob can sound like an appealing concept.

Having multiple instances of an area on one server will also allow you to fine tune the population distribution during big events, so that large events can reach their full potential.

Another thing I might suggest for events like this, is to lean more heavily on instances.

3. Future Expansions

• Campaign
  One of the only gripes I have with the campaign of GW2 is its pacing. The missions are spread far apart across the map with little transition, and stopping to level my character (even two small levels) can make me feel disconnected from the story when I’m not doing anything closely related to the campaigns events. I believe that if, instead of having full missions close together, but forcing a full stop to the campaign narrative after certain missions (especially painful when you start to get invested in the story), why not increase the use of meta-quests like the Halloween scavenger hunt, which take the player through various parts of the region, encouraging explorers to stay in an area a little longer, and allowing for the writers to develop the narrative more without having to worry about breaking the cinematic or voice-acting budget.
  This could also allow for more effort to be put towards producing fewer, but higher-quality missions.

• Player Characters
  If/When new standalone campaigns are released for GW2, I’d like to see different options for character creation based upon the regions from which they hail (i.e. Elonians of whichever race can be identified as Elonians.) GW1 did a good job of this.