COLIN JOHANSSON HAS STATED THAT FUTURE CONTENT WILL CONTINUE BOTH THE LS AND THE PERSONAL STORY.
I think you may be relying on outdated information here. While ANet hasn’t ruled out other forms of story continuation in the future, at the moment their main focus is on living story.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/GW2-Expansion-targeted-for-2013/first#post1391159
While I haven’t read anything that rules out additions to the personal story someday, my point is that if they’re going to be focusing primarily on the living story for the foreseeable future, the living story needs to somehow integrate with the overarching plot. I think there are signs that is in the works, which I hope is indeed the case.
i think ANet’s logic goes like this:
personal story (aka main story) deals with dragons. living story deals with everything else that’s happening in the world meanwhile. the world didn’t just freeze in time because of dragons, other things still happen.
Since the main method of future content delivery appears to be living story, though, even if ANet thought that at one point, the evolution of their vision would have led to the main plotline getting stalled if they continued that line of thinking.
If so, they need to do some rethinking in my opinion. Freezing the main plot in time isn’t really preferable either.
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And Evon Gnashblade has it?
O_O
Stunned.
No, he just hasn’t given me any active reason to distrust him yet, and she has.
If we could do write-in ballots, I wouldn’t pick either of them.
So in other words, you feel like helping Kiel to prevent Lion’s Arch from getting destructed after the consortium stirred up the karka, sink the settler contracts on Southsun and capture Mai Trin and strike against the aetherblades was more out of neccesity than your charatcers deep personal conviction? The Canach situation may have been a different thing, but we’ve helped Kiel numerous times now and more often than not it felt like we did it because it was the right thing to do and not because it was the less bad alternative.
Um… no, when I said Southsun I meant Southsun, not everything ever.
It was just an example of why a character might do something not totally representative of his/her own opinions and desires.
My character doesn’t necessary disagree with Kiel about every issue, either. Again, that more-than-one-dimension thing.
Because of the Southsun incident, though, Kiel has very much lost my character’s trust. She may win it back at some point, but that hasn’t happened yet.
I would be very surprised if Evon didn’t already own multiple ships. He’s the head of a trading company in a setting where a great deal of commerce appears to be conducted by ship. I would imagine he already has a fleet of his own, because from an in-character standpoint that would be required for the running of his business regardless of his political ambitions.
But that creates a problem for the story. If you’re trying to tell a story, you have to make sure that the characters (and in the living story the PC is a character) have a consistent mindset, so that their actions have meaning. If you’re going to say that the player can inscribe each and every possible mindest to a character, that means their motivations for their actions and as a consequence their actions will become random and therefore meaningless for the story, unless of course it’s your own story that you are trying to tell (in which case of course the protagonist will have a fixed mindset again, namely the one that you have inscribed to him).
That’s not necessarily true, I don’t think.
In the real world, I often have to make decisions that I wouldn’t make in an ideal world. My actions don’t always exactly match up to my internal monologue because I’m influenced by external as well as internal factors. That’s part of being a three-dimensional human being.
Likewise, my character may feel it is necessarily to go along with events she is not in full agreement with (like helping Kiel at Southsun) because circumstances dictate it and the alternative would be worse. I really don’t see any inconsistency there, personally. Not every possible mindset would fit every scenario, but there’s a fair bit of leeway.
To use the Southsun example again: My character helped Kiel, in my view, not because she likes Kiel or thinks Kiel made good decisions in that situation, but because letting the refugees suffer just to spite Kiel for being a hypocrite would be kind of awful too.
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What you are saying about kiel there may be true, but the other side of that coin is that every single time she did something that made her feel self-righteous, (for lack of a better term) the PC was there assisting her as her henchman.
Whether you like Kiel or not is part of your personal assesment, it does, however, not seem to reflect the cognition of the character we’re playing. At least I couldn’t see an indication of it so far.
The entire narrative of the game so far has moved in a very tolkien-esque fantasy-world of light and shadow. There’s either bad or good, no real grey areas (which is why Canach, for example, ended up in prison, instead of becoming Tyrias version of Edward Snowden.) And that’s where I have to situate the character that I’m playing. He or she doesn’t go so far as to evaluate who would be the better suited candidate for the ship’s council from a political or economical standpoint. Or at least he didn’t in the past. If he’d take those aspects into consideration all of a sudden, I would expect to be given a really, really strong motivation for him to do it. Otherwise it’s just inconsistent narration that violates my perception of the character according to the possible world theory.
That’s totally valid take on the story… but also a totally different explanation than what you originally said. What you originally said was pretty accusatory.
Other players have very different views on the situation based on how we view the story from our own lens – neither is better or worse, and the fact that other people view the story and characters differently than you do doesn’t mean we’re less influenced by the story and characters or are more focused on pure game mechanics.
I tend to view events through who I know my character is, rather than having events dictate my character’s personality and opinions. That’s just preference, though, not some sort of universal mandate.
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Yeah, they fought with Glint in the “fought alongside” sense, not in the “fought against” sense.
I hope you’re able to get a copy of the book; it’s well worth a read if you’re interested in the lore of Tyria.
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I do hope there are a decent number of “easy” to obtain rewards. But I do want some gated content, it gives something for people to work for (at whatever pace they want to).
I’m expecting there to be both, actually. They won’t want to make it too easy, because they do want you to keep playing. I’m sure some things will be gated at pretty high levels.
I just don’t think everything is going to be. I think that anyone who has some points on their account is going to get some sort of reward, even if it’s small. I just can’t see them gating it so that the majority of their playerbase gets nothing at all, is all I’m saying.
They have to find a balance between providing a challenge but making sure people who play more casually don’t just give up on it entirely.
it seems to me people just don’t want to play anymore and yet stick around because they have nothing better to do. If you don’t like the stories and being there watching the world be built. Go play another game. I can name 50 other games that have a simple quest chain and you can just simply dungeon crawl and enjoy your own time. The fact is people love this game and GW2 gets new players every week and then they love the game. If it’s not the game for you, then it’s not the game for you, it’s as simple as that. You don’t have to like, you don’t have to do anything. It’s your life, but please don’t try to spoil it for the rest of us that do like it.
I love this game. But at the same time, if ANet only got positive feedback, how would they ever know what was working well for the playerbase and what wasn’t?
Developers need honest feedback to be able to make their game the best it can be; providing that feedback isn’t malice or disloyalty, it’s the player’s part of the player/developer equation.
It’s more then just a game, it’s a world.
That’s the whole point, though. It’s a world that is threatened by dragons! And I’d like to be able to do something about that, please.
Given the urgent scenario presented to us by the personal story and all the losses suffered in “these dragon-haunted times” per the game and the books, the side-stories feel to me rather like fiddling while Tyria burns.
As I said, I don’t want it to be all about the dragons. I like having other challenges and experiencing other stories. A balance can be struck between all and nothing, though, and for me as a player who takes seriously how the story affects my character, the nothing-for-months-and-months thing isn’t really making the world very believable to me.
That said, I’m excited to see what comes of this. Hopefully the reward tiers aren’t ridiculously high. As in only the people that are like top of leaderboard can attain at release (10k points). Hopefully they are a lot more reasonable. Looking forward to it at least.
My guess is that anybody who has put basic effort into the game will get something - much like with the HoM. Of course, having more points will give you shinier items and bonuses, but it wouldn’t make sense to gate this too harshly when the point is to give us as a general playerbase a reward for our efforts in-game.
I would assume it’s going to be that if you’ve played a little, you’d get a little, if you’ve played some more you get more, etc., based on how it’s been described in the info they’ve released so far.
This is the first Dragon Bash. GW2 is not quite a year old yet.
So in a sense, we’re all “new” to it this year.
Typically festival events in the GW series are annual, though, so I would expect Dragon Bash to return next year. If you have limited time and have to choose, you’re better off focusing on completing Sky Pirates, as it’s definitely a one-off.
While I agree it would be nice to fight more elder dragons, other things happen in the world. The elder dragons are still local in a sense. If you read Destiny’s Edge you’d get this.
Zhaitan was the dragon bothering the Tarnished Coast and Kryta. Other dragons invaded different areas. The Krytans aren’t straight up affected by Jormag at all. He’s up in the Northern Shiverpeakes.
They’ve just had a major war against the dragons, one would think there would be time to celebrate and or deal with other matters. It’s not like other things aren’t problems too.
Take the alliance between the Flame Legion and the Dredge. That’s a problem. And a more immediate problem than the elder dragons, who are dangerous, but not quite as active.
That’s the in game explanation. But the dragon scenarios will take time to create and other projects are being worked on.
I know everyone wants everything NOW, but that’s not the reality of programming or game creation.
Guild Wars 2, like just about every MMO in recent memory, released far too early (the exception was Rift which was relatively small at launch). The game needs to be worked on BEFORE another dragon is worked on.
The Living Story is filler content to keep people playing. Nothing more. There’s no monthly fee. If you don’t like what you see, take a break until the next dragon comes out.
But don’t blame the living story because programming stuff takes time, or because the game needs to be strengthened before it moves on.
Even from a story telling point of view it’s important for everything not to be epic.
Couple of things:
1.) The people who are asking “What about the Elder Dragons?” are not, for the most part, suggesting that we need to have epic battles with them on a regular basis. What we’re saying is that the story does not appear to have any forward motion in that direction at all.
I don’t expect us to go off and attack Jormag right now.
It would be nice to do a Pact mission now and then, though – and that doesn’t need to be any more difficult to program and implement than any random side story.
People seem to forget that the Zhaitan story wasn’t just the Arah dungeon. There were lots of other small steps leading up to the confrontation. What we’re currently lacking, in my opinion, is not the epic battle but instead those small steps.
2.) What you’re saying about the dragons being less of a direct threat than the other issues we’ve been dealing with only really makes sense from a human perspective. This isn’t a human-centric world anymore. What is most threatening to Kryta doesn’t make sense as the primary focus of everyone all over the world.
I mean, think for a moment about the difference in scale between the incursions of the Sons of Svanir and the Icebrood as compared to the Molten Alliance. Jormag made refugees of the entire Norn nation, not just the inhabitants of a few farmsteads, and Jormag’s minions are (in lore) a major threat all over the Shiverpeaks. You say you’ve read Edge of Destiny. Remember how it starts?
Also, bear in mind the effect the dragons are having on the world’s magic. If we wait to address that till it reaches a crisis, addressing it will no longer be possible, so moving preemptively is really the only option.
As I said, I’m not suggesting we need to go kill a dragon in the next two-week patch. What I’m saying is that there needs to be some sense that 1.) the Pact is still active and scheming against the dragons, and 2.) the existence of the dragons still affects people.
If the Elder Dragons are a threat we can safely ignore for a year or so, what was the point of all the effort and sacrifice that went into taking down Zhaitan even after pushing him back from Claw Island?
The writers can’t really have it both ways on this, is the thing.
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