Guild Wars 2

Oh, I think we’ll get to see Icebrood Queens further up north. Remember, no women ever return once taken by Jormag and his Icebrood. I doubt he would capture them just to kill them.

Oglaf.1074:

Pretty safe to say it is Zhaitan, I reckon. He matches the concept art.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/b/bf/Zhaitan_the_Undead_Dragon_concept_art.jpg

“Did you find the body?”
“No sir, but it fell…”
“No body, no dead dragon. Keep looking.”

:p

Seriously, the elder dragons are so cool, Zhaitan’s defeat was so… meh. It could have been made so much more epic.

Zhaitan comes, they fire the megalaser and wound it, and the dragon screams in pain. A dozen smaller dragons swoop in on the skyship, tearing at it with tooth and claw, the defense cannons controlled by players firing desperately to keep them at bay, but in the end the engines are crippled and the stricken airship CRASHES into Zhaitan who is blinded by pain.

Both plummet from the sky to the ruined city below. Our band of adventurers survives the fall, of course, but so does Zhaitan! His wings broken and useless, the enraged elder dragon slowly starts to gather himself but is buried under the ruins of a nearby tower which shattered in the preceding crash.
The time is NOW, players have to rush to get to the fallen dragon and finish him before he can get away, but there are dragon minions coming out of the woodwork!
They cut a bloody trail in their haste to reach Zhaitan before it is too late, but at the last moment a giant, never before seen monstrosity CRASHES through a rotting wall! It is the Hand of Zhaitan, a twisted nightmare of rotting flesh and rusted steel, towering over the players.
They try to fight it, but it is too strong. When each player falls, they are held fast by undead hands springing forth from the very ground. Zhaitan slowly rises in the background, and all hope seems lost.

Enter Trahearne! Leaping over the shaterred walls he bears down on the monster, Caladbolg gleaming in his hands, but even its might is barely enough to contain the dreadful power of the Hand of Zhaitan. With one sweep of the magical blade, the players are free and Trahearne SHOUTS to the players to go and reach Zhaitan before it recovers!
He keeps the Hand at bay, but is absorbed by the fight as Zhaitan’s champion, fueled by the elder dragon’s desperation and hate, attacks relentlessly.

The players resume their charge towards the dragon. Hordes of undead spring forth from the ground and shadowed holes around them. But a new cry is heard! The Pact is finally here! Warriors from all over Tyria join the fray and the battle is now in full swing!

Buried beneath tons of rubble, the dragon is still pinned to the ground, unable to move. Through this all the players press on, ever closer to the dragon, who now in desperation starts spewing giant serpents from his mouth, but the monsters are cut down one by one.

Finally, the players reach Zhaitan. He roars defiantly, the deafening shout only briefly overcoming the din of battle, the explosions of guns and ring of swords and spears. Zhaitan rears his giant head, the remaining serpents snapping from his mouth at players who have to quickly evade their attacks or die! They dodge and weave their way beneath the dragon’s head, where a weak spot may be found!

At last the final fight is at hand. With spell and sword the heroic party unleashes all their might into this one attack to bring about the fall of the elder dragon. Zhaitan screams and the mountain of rubble shakes as he desperately tries to escape, but it is to no avail. He is trapped and with no way to reach the heroes striking at him, he is finally overcome.

Thus was ended Zhaitan, the elder dragon of undeath.

Or we can fire fireworks at him until he dies from it. :p

Think of it like this:

1. You can’t kill them
2. They are tired but can never rest – you are helping them get some R&R before Foefire pulls them back up again.

So you are doing them a service. Smack away!

Dante.1508:

This is just a mild guess but Anet said they are going to revamp Orr maybe this revamp is going to show how us killing Zaitan has changed orr for the better.

As i said its just a guess but it would be great if Anet cleaned orr some to reflect our actions against Zaitan..

What would that mean for players like me, who haven’t killed Zhaitan yet – we get no improvements?
They’ll never do that for one simple reason – it would totally fracture the game. It can be hard finding people to do the Arah story now, imagine if half of the people didn’t even play in the same instance as you.

On the note of killing Zhaitan – did you notice how he doesn’t look like anything depicted in the official trailer for the game, or any of the other dragons? Maybe what we think was Zhaitan was just another monstrous abomination of his?

Difficulty-wise, I am not sure what game people are playing. My main is an elementalist, and the only exotic I have is the scepter I use.

Risen are a frikkin’ cakewalk. I frequently just chain drop them, two or three adds are not a problem at all, and I walk (I’m weird that way) most of the time, so you’d think the insane respawn rate would get me for sure – it never did and, while they respawn a little bit faster than in other areas, it is nowhere near as unmanageable as some people make it sound.

The only problem on my server is that some temples are indeed, hard to free up. Personally I like it, gives the whole thing some sense of accomplishment when a group of players does manage to free a temple, but I can understand the frustration.

The only annoying god statue mechanic is the one that spawns thorns at your feet, not sure how it is with tougher classes, but squishy elementalists can’t get near those without getting torn to shreds.

It’s the real Trahearne.

Two thumbs up, but only because I have only two hands! This is what Orr should be like!

Well, honestly, if you went in to face Zhaitan with just Trahearne, then Trahearne got mortally wounded and you took up his sword in the last, desperate struggle and finally killed the dragon over Trahearne’s broken body – honestly I would find that ending far, far more epic than the way they did it.

And you could do it solo.

Twill.6217:

btw, i’m female. could it be that all this hate is just male testosterone hitting the brains for they can’t stomach seeing what they perceive to be a “inferior” male in a leading role? is this all just male ego speaking? that’s my theory…

No, not at all. I have no problem with a “reluctant hero” – Aragorn (LOTR) is one, and is one of my favourite characters.

It’s just the way he delivers. His speeches lack proper vigour. He doesn’t sound like he’s about to inspire warriors of all races to do great battle to save the world, he sounds like a schoolteacher explaining the task at hand.

Also, he’s dropped on us too fast. You really don’t have the time to get to know his character at all. So you don’t care what he has to say, you don’t really care about his wyld hunt etc.

His character is a classic one. The hero who has the responsibility thrust upon him by events bigger then himself. But usually there is a transformation from whatever the hero was at first, to something else entirely, the hidden self that springs forth in the face of challenge and inspires everyone around them.
Unfortunately, Trahearne doesn’t really show anything like that. He goes from being a scholar and expert on Orr to being a scholar and expert on Orr with a big magical sword.

Grievous.3568:

Gaudrath,
You are saying that you want more dynamic events, the issue with that is that dynamic events other than The Lost Shores are not one time events, they happen over and over. You want something you have defined as a contradiction, replaced by something else that also fits in your definition of a contradiction. Unless you want every dynamic event to only happen once, which cannot be practcally done (which is probably why it wasnt), by what you are saying you will never be satisfied.

You got it quite wrong – I have no problem with repeatable content and have even thrown around some ideas how to disguise repeatable content as unique, something even GW 2 right now doesn’t bother to do. So no contradiction there.

MMO’s are designed to be played for hundreds and thousands of hours. Of course 99% of the content has to be repeatable.

Rhinzual.7861:

He couldn’t lead his way out of a wet paper bag if his life depended on it.

Why, he would just give one of his rousing speeches to the bag, causing it to spontaneously combust.

I pressed on until I heard Trahearne give that “speech” right before the invasion of Orr begins, then promptly decided salad-heads are not good generals after all and struck out on my own.

Been happily slaughtering risen ever since and I feel much better now. Loot is good, fighting is good, and I bring my own drink, everything a Norn needs.

Really? Maybe because I play Norn, but most of my leveling time was spent fighting Svanir and the Flame Legion (oh, and the Dredge… Dredge everywhere! :p) – I killed my first risen at lvl80.

You need to get out of Orr for some R&R in the north.

It’s a bit late here, but I will say this – you were right about me not finishing the personal storyline, but I just watched the video of the final fight with Zhaitan on Youtube.

Oh my god. What… that’s just so terrible. Awful. I really hope that Zhaitan isn’t really dead, because if they got rid of him in such a lame manner, that’s just… argh. That’s not epic. That’s not even slightly interesting. Definitely not a way for an elder dragon to go.

That works fantastically in WvW, because of its competitive nature. I believe most people would find it to be an inferior PvE experience.

As opposed to always same local events endlessly cycling, always same enemies in same places, in same numbers? With a more dynamic system you could have everything dynamic. If the invasion is going well, there would be more and different enemies and tougher bosses with more loot. You would never revisit an old zone and find it exactly the same, there would always be something different.

I think it would be quite a superior PvE experience. Plus you would royally screw the bots, because there wouldn’t be any farming sweetspots, heh heh.

As for villains… well, there would be, in my opinion, more meaning and more immersion with cleverly told stories involving randomly named villains than static stories with farmable “unique” villains.
Sure, it’s fun and unique the first time, but the thing about MMOs is that first time is almost never the last time. So you have either a choice of disguising the fact that this big bad boss is there to be killed a lot by players and achieve maximum possible immersion, or you can stick to traditional static storytelling and just rely on suspension of disbelief.

Piken Square is the European unofficial RP server, so a good choice if you live in Europe and around. It is also almost never full, so if you can’t get into Tarnished Coast, try that.

Personally, I find both servers to be about the same – very little open world RP, most of it is in taverns.

Heh, you guys enjoying your job, I mean game? :p

Dang it, I want a legendary staff that follows my attunement!

-burst into flames when in fire
-freeze over when in water
-turn into a shaft of lightning when in Air
-and some weird spinning floating stone assembly when in Earth

That too much to ask? :p

Eh, easiest would be to just keep adding new skills – but they said they don’t want to do that because GW1 had a problem with such stuff.

Even though it would add a lot of flavour to gameplay if you could mix and match the 1-5 skills as well as your utilities.

Second best would be to add a possibility to pick a secondary profession, and then have profession combo unique skillsets (for example, elementalist/warrior→ battlemage skillset but warrior/elementalist→ arcane warrior skillset), that would open up gameplay a lot as well.

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

Well, every personal story is not the same, there are numerous variations, but I get your meaning— they’re limited, and you don’t have the freedom to shape your adventure the way you want.
Again, I’ll say that you could only accomplish this in a meaningful way by sacrificing the linear story altogether—- this just isn’t what ANet were trying to accomplish in their PvE, and it’s not the game I want to play.

That is of course, your preference. But since neither of us has the power to direct ANet on how they will make their game, the fact that our tastes differ means little. We are discussing what would have been the best way to make the game in the context of storytelling. I argue that basically, more logical and consistent your story and player experience, the better.
You seem to disagree.

You seem to be speaking now about a different issue. You brought up before that you weren’t happy that the death of Zhaitan did not have a noticeable affect on the open world. I took this to mean that you wanted either 1) a story that effects the world in a lasting way for everyone, or 2) a story that contains no epic events.

What other option is there? You’ve not actually provided a solution that satisfies your criteria realistically. When we create a threat, do we then have to keep it alive indefinitely…?

I am actually just not happy about the all too quick and easy defeat of an elder dragon and the issues it brings up in the open world. I do not call that an epic event because I had very little to do with it. This is a game, not a book. If there are epic things to be done, they should be done by players, not NPC’s. You basically just tag along.

When you create a major, godlike threat like the elder dragons, you make kitten sure they live up to that reputation. Killing one via a 5-player instance is a bad, bad idea. Makes the kitten thing feel easier than a common giant. I don’t care about set-piece arrangements. Do you feel a sense of accomplishment after one of Call of Duty’s set-piece fights? No. Why? Because it is a movie pretending to be a game and you have very little to do with the outcome.

Instead I proposed that there be MANY epic fights. Long, epic, uphill struggles against these terrible forces that want to devour the world. Armies of dragon minions marching across multiple fronts, with the actual possibility to see stuff such as:

-major cities actually under siege
-dragon minions taking over an entire zone and forcing players to push them back (Orr style)
-dragon armies cascading invasions (for example Orr->Sparkfly Fen->Bloodtide Coast->Siege of Lion’s Arch), with dynamically adjustable content (instead of chasing away drakes and pirates in Bloodtide Coast, now you have to chase away undead beating on the bulwarks hastily set up by the Pact and the Guard), where if one zone is run over, the invasion spills into the next
-NPC generals leading these armies, which can be defeated in epic combat (see the random name generator idea)
-solo players can, WvW style, disrupt enemy supply lines or go deep behind enemy lines to try and assasinate key enemy leaders to slow down or help turn back these invasions

And so on and so forth. A fully dynamic, player driven content, think dynamic events but on a much grander scale. That’s not epic enough?

But this means you cannot go down the route of easy gratification and just let the players practically solo an elder dragon. This kind of system has many epic fights instead of just one and the final reward is the world. Instead of killed, the dragons could be barely contained in their core lands. The system could be made such that it is progressively more difficult to push back their armies the closer you are to the dragon. Players could even face the elder dragons themselves, but not kill them. Wound them, defeat them and besiege them.

But no, you would not be able to actually kill one. Fitting, in my book. GW2 dragons are so over the top, of such epic proportions (I mean, they’re basically flying mountains), that just killing them is actually somewhat anti-climactic. One of them casually scoured away a canyon across half a continent. Another raised a continent from the seabed, how can you just kill such things, megalasers or not!

Anyway, that is how I would have done it. MMO games are about players interacting with and next to each other. I have nothing against personal storylines, in fact I welcome them as a sort of a unique sidequest you can have, but such things need to be kept separate from the open world.

Hm. It could be the case, after all, Norn are not ones to dwell on things that are no more. BUT the problem remains that Svanir have chosen Dragon as their totem, and once you go down that path you do NOT come back (well, there is one Norn who did, but that’s the only one I know of).

When an elder dragon dies, does the corruption they have spread die with them? We don’t have a conclusive answer, and judging how things went with Zhaitan, it was no Lord of the Rings (movie) moment where all risen just dropped dead(er).

Maybe they would just go insane.

RyuDragnier.9476:

This brings to mind questions…what would the other races think of tengu? I’d love to hear the Charr response on how they are. Would they be considered a race worthy of respect, or one the Charr disrespect constantly like humans?

Depends. Could Tengu beat up Charr like Norns can? Then they’d get some respect.

Oglaf, so what you say is that if Bear gets killed by Jormag, Norn would just abandon the teachings of Bear?

I find that highly unlikely. What would all the burly warriors do?

Oglaf.1074:

You don’t known Norn. They worship Jormag as a Spirit of the Wild and when Spirits die, so does their worship. Sons of Svanir are in that sense no different than the countless Bear/Wolf/Snow Leopard Shamans scattered all over Hoelbrak.

They won’t be revering Jormag as “Dragon” once he/she(?) is killed. All the Spirits of the Wild devoured by Jormag have all but vanished from Norn society/culture; only a few die-hard fans maintain the very basic of shrines to them.

And yet I will still have to beat the crap out of them every time I want to hunt around Hoelbrak. :p

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

So you’d like a multiplayer, open-world game in which you can accomplish epic feats that genuinely affect the world around you in a lasting and large-scale way, with such feats being completely unique to your own character?

I assume after someone’s completed such a world-changing feat, other people cannot complete said feat, because that would be contradictory. So an impossibly-large team at ANet must work night and day to keep creating these events, as they can only occur once each.

I’m just trying to get this straight, so I can get to creating this masterpiece.

Precisely! This is what Anet did with the Ancient Karka. Remember how that was?

No, thank you. I’ll pass on having more content like that. I don’t want to miss such stuff, but I certainly don’t want to sit an hour or two through massive horrible lag again either!

Technical details. I missed the Karka event on purpose – I was content just to have new stuff made available for exploration and wanted to avoid the massive lag which happens when you do such things in such a manner. There are other ways, you can stretch things out quite a bit, create medium-term goals for the server communities to strive for and finalize the event in a less “everybody come to this here ONE spot where EVERYTHING will happen!” and more massive but spread out manner.

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

So you’d like a multiplayer, open-world game in which you can accomplish epic feats that genuinely affect the world around you in a lasting and large-scale way, with such feats being completely unique to your own character?

I assume after someone’s completed such a world-changing feat, other people cannot complete said feat, because that would be contradictory. So an impossibly-large team at ANet must work night and day to keep creating these events, as they can only occur once each.

I’m just trying to get this straight, so I can get to creating this masterpiece.

Not at all, but I am not surprised you really just skimmed across what I wrote, eager to argue. What I actually said, is that ANet should have made the world story more open-ended and player driven, and personal story more tailored to each character and more personal. The personal story should in no way seriously affect happenings in the open world.
The notion that the player must be “crowned king” or otherwise highly elevated in order to have a sense of accomplishment is an utterly false one. Especially in an MMO, the sense of accomplishment should primarily come from things one has achieved in the social environment, .i.e the open world.

Case in point, I don’t care if you killed Zhaitan – the act is meaningless, because its success is predetermined. Soloing certain lesser champions is more difficult than killing Zhaitan and gives a greater sense of personal accomplishment.
That is because the possibility to fail is an important part of the sense of having accomplished something. This possibility is not presented to the player in any shape or form during the personal storyline. The choices are linear, few and predictable, and they all ultimately converge to the same conclusion – in other words, there are no choices and every “personal” story is the same.

So again. Personal storyline should have been created in such a way that it offers true choice and variation to the player, but not so that it interferes with the open world and the larger events in it.

Open world, on the other hand, should have been created with a much greater degree of player interaction and impact in it (the before mentioned war against dragons throughout the world), with game-changing epic events reserved only for most special occasions, such as Blizzard did with Cataclysm, or ANet did with the Karka event. They changed the world forever, and they did it only once.

Such special events should NOT be available for players to determine, especially when it comes to removing something from the world, such as an elder dragon. Same goes for directly confronting one. You can have godlike beings that can smash continents apart, or you can have loot pinjatas for paltry bands of players to defeat. Not both at the same time.

Given how tough karka are, if they ran into Zhaitan’s forces, wouldn’t at least some of them get corrupted? And if so, it would have made sense for Zhaitan to throw them at the Pact.

Twoflower.7031:

Also, Zhaitan is dead, if Southsun Cove takes place after Arah.

Yes, and Europe takes place after Australia.

What if karkas are actually corrupted by Bubbles? Then obviously they could not be corrupted by any other dragon.Is it stated anywhere speciffically that they are not corrupted?

Plus, with the war going on in Orr, most of the risen armies would be tied up and on the defensive. It would be poor strategy to overextend by trying to occupy more distant land when you have enemies knocking on your front door.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Gaudrath.6725:

Nope. If you think you need a big bad boss at the end to have story progression, or even just to have an epic story, you haven’t read enough good stories.

Again, I invite you to play Planescape:Torment – where the central plot is in fact, all about you. One great example of how to have a very personalized story and very personalized epic ending and still leave everything else open.

[…]

Another way to create a good epic, open story where everyone who wants can participate, is to make it fully player driven, and open-ended. Make the entire world a warzone like Orr. Make it so that, if players don’t put in some effort, most of the world gets taken over and then players have to work together to retake it. Then the world is the prize, and once secured, it has to be defended. The war never ends.

I know you don’t need to defeat a big bad boss at the end of a story, but when one is presented – and several are in GW2 – then the story will be fairly unrewarding to players. You might be into the story of an endless conflict, but the vast majority of players enjoy a real sense of accomplishment – that they ended the conflict. That they were the driving force of such.

I have Planescape: Torment, though I never finished it due to having to change computers and all my progress lost, leaving me unwanting to redo all that progress when I have other games still, however that remains no different than the Elder Scrolls – it’s a single player game and thus is an invalid example of how an MMO should act.

And again, endless warfare is not enjoyable to everyone, because people like an ending to their story. And stories which end without the main conflict ending are generally leaving people yearning. It’s fine to leave some conflicts open – this makes it feel more real, because in reality all the problems of a society are never solved together, but you normally need to close the conflict that is the main focus of the story.

Eventually, yes, perhaps. Certainly not right away, and not in the manner it was done with Zhaitan.
What I am trying to say is that you can easily create a personalized storyline which doesn’t create paradoxes in the open game world. I mentioned Torment because that game has such a storyline, even though it is single-player. The story is deep, and meaningful and in the end you do accomplish many things, but all of those things are directly related to your character and nobody else. You do not go and kill a god, instead an epic journey is concluded in an appropriate fashion and the story is nicely self-contained.

What ANet should have done, in my opinion, is create such a story for players to enjoy, without tying the open world conflict into it directly. The story should have been, also, far less linear. It is not a personal story if all choice is reduced to a handful of predetermined junctions. If they wanted to have a personal story, they should have made one.
It is not even as though the players get that sense of accomplishment (many are complaining about Trahearne stealing their thunder, among other things).

And where is that sense of ending the conflict, when they step out of Arah after killing Zhaitan, only to hear the same old thunder of battle and see the same risen infesting the countryside?

That is why I think things could have been done much better. The dynamic events should be far more important to the gameplay, the open world should be crafted to be longer lasting lore-wise and the elder dragons to be far, far more powerful. Not something you simply kill off in a dungeon instance. Ending such world-defining enemies could only be done in a Cataclysm-like remake of the game world, and that when the game has run its course and needs to be refreshed.

Oglaf.1074:

Son of Elias.5420:

For the comment about the Sons of Svanir continuing after Jormag’s defeat – that actually would happen, wouldn’t it? The Sons, largely, aren’t constructs or automatons. They’re Norn who went, “Hey, that Dragon looks tough. Let’s follow him!”. Just because Jormag is dead doesn’t mean they’ll stop acting ‘in his memory’ or hoping he’ll come back to life. There are still shamans of Owl, after all, and she’s been dead a while.

If Jormag gets destroyed, they definitely will scatter and disappear. They’ll go

“Hey, that Dragon wasn’t so tough after all. Leg it!”

Actually, they won’t. Whether people prefer to explain it with some ridiculous theory about linear progression or simply the fact that you can’t just remove elements of the game because of new players, doesn’t matter. Risen are here to stay, Sons are here to stay, so kick that suspension of disbelief into high gear, cause you gonna need it.

Narcemus.1348:

Except there is no comparison or exchange of ideas. Just us telling you how the game is, and you giving terrible ideas as to how to change the game to how it “should be”.

/shrug As far as I am concerned, your ideas are terrible. Everybody’s got an opinion.

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

May I ask, in an open-world game, would you insist that every ‘event’ happen only once? Is it too unrealistic that a giant attacks the town of Nageling several times a day, or are we, perhaps, supposed to take this with a pinch of salt? Is it unrealistic to have a named boss die multiple times, and therefore, the game should forsake named enemies altogether?

Dunno. Maybe my english is not so good. Did you even read my last post? Why would such an event only have to happen once? Is the giant named Bob, or just “a Giant”? If it is the latter, then kill away. There are more where that one came from and they’re kitten because you killed their buddy.

If it is a giant named Bob, then yeah, if you kill Bob, kill him only once. Or attach a random giant name generator and presto – named giants for those who like to get to know their enemies. You can put a whole story into place around that, you could have a tribe of giants sending attacks against Nageling for whatever reason, and then have a randomly named chieftain players can defeat. When that chieftain is dead, another one takes his place, maybe put some bonuses like unique traders and such in the tribe when it gets pacified so that players have incentive to bring the fight to the giants when they inevitably get riled up again.

Basically, all I just described is already in game, so don’t pretend it is something far-fetched ANet would never do. They already did and it is called Orr. All I said is, shame the rest of the world isn’t as dynamic as that. Dynamic events and fluent seesaw story arcs are the only thing that sets this game apart. They should have played that card a bit harder.

Narcemus.1348:

As to Gaudrath, I’m done here. Have fun with your endless cycle with Konig, there will never be a winner.

Primary purpose of any discussion is to exchange and compare ideas and views, not to “win”. Cheers.

Eh, if they had a truckload of skills and spells you could load up in your 1-5 slots and mix and match… well, one can dream.

P.S. Although I have no idea what it has to do with the topic at hand. Wizard, you can buy new gear at the Trading Post, just go to any major city and look for scales icon on your map.

The only solution for an MMO to not hold the “bad storytelling” that you claim GW2 has is to have no story progression. At all. And that, my friend, is just as bad as never confronting and beating the big bad.

Nope. If you think you need a big bad boss at the end to have story progression, or even just to have an epic story, you haven’t read enough good stories.

Again, I invite you to play Planescape:Torment – where the central plot is in fact, all about you. One great example of how to have a very personalized story and very personalized epic ending and still leave everything else open.

But of course, we have to kill the big bad dragon. Again. How original.

Another way to create a good epic, open story where everyone who wants can participate, is to make it fully player driven, and open-ended. Make the entire world a warzone like Orr. Make it so that, if players don’t put in some effort, most of the world gets taken over and then players have to work together to retake it. Then the world is the prize, and once secured, it has to be defended. The war never ends.

Introduce innovative mechanics where players can, through teamwork, establish and maintain impromtu bases and save havens, so that people have spots to regroup in. Make it so that they can actually fail. Center everything around players, including the story. Fit the way you tell the story to the capabilities and potential of the medium you are telling the story in.

Of course, then it would be something else than a scripted experience and I understand that stuff doesn’t sell too well, which is why I’m happy we at least have something new like the dynamic events.

By the way, interesting you should mention the Elder Scrolls series, since the MMO variant has something similar – the war never ends, there is no big bad boss at the end to defeat, because, ultimately, it is all about faction warfare and who gets to claim the world (and eventually, lose it again).

Of course, PvP is not everyone’s idea of fun, but same or similar principles could be used for PvE.

Bottom line is, if you make your readers/viewers/gamers go and say “but wait, how is that possible”, you didn’t do a good job telling your story. Ironically enough, I remember watching one of the videos before GW2 launch where someone said pretty much the exact same thing – (paraphrasing) “we don’t ever want you to go in and kill some important boss, then see them respawn a few minutes later”.

Sure, they did that, but in the process they caused half the world to not make sense, regardless of how much people want to explain it with “it’s just a game mechanic”. We’re not discussing MMO mechanics, we’re discussing why stuff doesn’t make sense if you kill off Zhaitan.

Ninth Requiem.3250:

Actually, there is a risen Largos.
It’s encountered in an event in Bloodtide Coast, called an “Orrian Terror”. I think it’s part of an event chain in Castavall – you can fight it there, or (I believe if that event is failed) on Mistarion beach.

Not sure, is that the “Orrian Terror” that spawns inside that underwater cave?

If it is, then it just an ordinary “I-got-corals-growing-on-my-back” Risen. It was dark down there, but I got a good look on it as it chewed my face off. :p

AlexMc.2083:

If your lvl 2 character goes to the Straits of Devastation, the Pact is formed and Fort Trinity has been built. There are also many event bosses, such as Taidha Covington, that have died thousands of times. Whether you like it or not, this ‘time travel’ does exist.

And it indicates bad storytelling. Which is my entire point. Say I make a Lord of the Rings MMO. You go through all that epic journey, throw the ring into Mount Doom, then, you being one of those pesky roleplayers who actually care about character development and continuity, you decide to go back, a hero returning to his home.

Only you can’t. Because it is “in the past”. Because everybody is stuck in time, there are other heroes just setting out to deliver their own personalized One Ring to the melting pot, and other confused veterans wondering what the hell is going on and why are those orcs still there.

I just made a mess of a story. I did not respect the medium I was delivering the story in. I wanted to write a book instead of a MMO. So I got a weird, disjointed hybrid.

And you can claim otherwise all you want, but that, my friends, IS a fact.

Shame, really. They got Orr down just right. The uphill struggle, the hopeless odds. Holding onto captured areas tooth and nail (and often having to fall back). Sets a really nice mood. It’s war.
And it should last for years.

But I understand that is not everyone’s cup of tea. I like to have a solid background where I can make my own story, not have one forced down on me. And it would be ok (and in fact really is, I am not that bothered by all this) if the personal story was not made to do just that. Force itself on everyone, whether they like it or not.

They went from one extreme, which is no personal story at all, to another, which is an utterly definitive personal story. If you really follow through with it, there is literally no character development there. Hence, for those of us who care about such stuff, the personal story is there to be enjoyed, then discarded and henceforth ignored.

Risingashes.8694:

Gaudrath.6725:

Competition is there to be destroyed. It’s just a game, we can afford to be evil, unscrupulous banksters, no bad karma is involved and nobody will lose a job and have to sleep under a bridge.

There’s a difference between competition where buyers benefit and competition where a seller gains an advantage over another without giving anything up.

I’m not saying 1c undercutters are evil, I’m a 1c undercutter. I’m simply saying that the longevity of the system needs this to be addressed.

In EVE you could at least relist your orders for free. The problem is the fixed listing fee combined with the ability to gain primacy with 0.00000001% of a transaction price.

If you’re attitude is that nothing matters because it’s a game- why are you even here? This is a game forum not the United Nations, this is where we talk about ultimately meaningless things.

Well, first, I am here because I like playing this game. I won’t get too upset if I can’t make a killing on the TP every time I post something up, because it’s a game. Doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it.

Second, you have to pay tax in EvE as well. Sure, it is not as brutal as here, and you can get it to something really low, like ~3%, but when you have billions up on the market, it adds up.
With no tax on sell orders, everyone would just relist them endlessly and profit margins would snap shut really quickly. Something like that you can see in EvE, actually. If you have, say, a 15% profit margin, and the tax is 3%, you are going to see aggressive pricing wars where people keep just removing and reposting their orders as long as they can afford it – and then someone fresh comes in and undercuts them and reduces that profit margin to maybe 4-5%.

And yet the market is still there and people are still getting crazy rich off of it. It just needs more work. As I said, count yourself lucky that it is really annoying to keep track of how your sell and buy orders are doing in GW2 – in EvE you can have everything laid out of you nicely, in spreadsheet format and dynamically updated, and the result is that if you want to make a profit on the market, you have to babysit your orders. Some people do nothing but sit in Jita and shuffle numbers for 90% of their game time.

Is your gear up to date? You shouldn’t be dying to a dragonfly, unless you messed up your stats because your gear is nowhere near where it should be for your level. Or if you are trying to play several levels above your own, low-level elementalists are not really good at that sort of thing.

So get to TP and deck yourself out. Low level gear is dirt cheap anyway. And don’t forget the bling (jewellery).

Take a look at for example, concept art from the “Temple of the Forgotten God” chapter of the personal storyline or maybe the Black Citadel loading screen – that’s sci-fi. Don’t get me wrong, I love sci-fi, but you just don’t see anything like that in the actual game.

Maybe GW2 was supposed to be set a lot further into the future, but they changed their mind and kept the art (which is, by the way, really nice)?

Is it just me, or does some concept art as shown on the loading screens (for example, Hoelbrak, Straits of Devastation) look strangely futuristic. Some of those buildings and landscapes remind me more of a post-nuclear apocalypse or crashed spaceships than anything to do with a fantasy setting.

Ok, to quote myself:

The big difference guys, is that a book is a static narrative. It has a clearly defined plot development and of course that means there is no inconsistency if you just go back and read a previous chapter again. You, as the reader, are not participating or influencing the plot of a book or a movie in any shape or form by watching it.
But games are a completely different storytelling medium. The player has a direct say in how the story goes (unless we’re talking about those old-school movie/game hybrids which were extremely linear and rigid). The less linear the game, more influence the player has.
So if you have a very linear, single-player game, reloading an older save doesn’t influence the consistency of the player’s experience. That is literally “going back in time”.
But say you have an MMO, and even the most “linear” MMO is much more open and free than many single player games. You have this huge open world, where players are let loose to play the game and interact with the story. You HAVE to take that into account when creating the storyline, because the player is directly interacting with it.
This is important because player experience, unlike reader or movie watcher experience, is not passive, but active. Player actions have consequences in an interactive story. Ignoring those actions shatters the consistency of the player’s experience, something you don’t want to do (for example, what Bioware did in Mass Effect 3 ending).
MMOs add to this by their very nature of being non-linear as far as character storyline and progression in the context of gameplay are concerned. In MMOs, the narrative is always unbroken (reloading a save essentially breaks the narrative and resets it to an earlier point in a story). In an MMO, you cannot save your game. Your character cannot hop between various chapters of their experience like they can in a single player game. Your gameplay narrative remains unbroken – any gameplay mechanics that break that narrative is a sign the developer hasn’t grasped the concept of open-world MMO gameplay.
Second, continuity of the open world is paramount to maintaining this unbroken gameplay narrative, which is again very important in the social aspect of the game. In an MMO, it is not all about you, but you in a “living” world, a world which goes on even after you log off. That’s a major draw of MMOs. And that alone demands consistency of game narrative.

Please go back and reread my earlier post where I explained exactly why a book and a game are not the same where narrative is concerned. I also covered pretty much all of the points you just made. You cannot have a linear narrative sharing and changing major elements within a non-linear medium. Even the game makers acknowledge that, hence instancing as a mechanism to put a non linear world in line with a linear narrative and avoid emerging paradoxes in a multiplayer environment (not very successfully, mind you).

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

What is suggested about the Claw of Jormag/ Shatterer is never suggested about Tequatl. He’s a named lieutenant, like all of Zhaitan’s lieutenants, and he is only ever killed once.

In story, he is killed once. In mechanics, you can kill him more than once, because the game mechanics allow you to revisit old areas. My book analogy holds. You’re revisiting an old chapter if you kill Tequatl after Zhaitan.

Ok, so then they messed it up even more. Your book analogy only illustrates that you still do not understand the concept of adapting the mode of storytelling to the medium in which the story is being told. You cannot apply conventions of a non-interactive narrative, to an interactive one. You can try, but then you mess it up.

It’s easy to have more than one type of narrative in a game. Take Arkham City; it has the primary story, linear for the most part, and it has the Challenge Maps, in which you battle The Riddler in various other challenging ways.

Now, the Riddler is defeated in the main story. Playing the challenge maps after the main story wouldn’t make sense! But it’s fine— that is purely a mechanic. Anyone playing the game is going to know that lore-wise, those challenge maps happen while the Riddler is still at large. IE, before the end of the main story.

The game lets you play the challenge maps afterwards, or whenever you kitten want, because it’s not arbitrarily restrictive. People can separate story and mechanics.

Another example, a little more classic: Super Mario 64. You play through the castle, you grab Stars from the levels, you go and fight Bowser. At the end, you can revisit the old levels and go for whatever Star you want, even ones from bosses you’ve already beaten.

Does this mean the boss has been resurrected?! Why is he still guarding the Star if Bowser is already beaten?! No, none of that is implied at all. You’re merely playing through content again. It’s a mechanic to allow you greater freedom. It implies nothing about story.

You just named more examples of poor storytelling in games. What, you thought GW2 is the only case? In this game they at least try to work around some of the problems, I have seen much worse.

I have also seen much better.

Oglaf.1074:

Well, it is still possible that Orr sunk by some other force and then Zhaitan swooped in and raised the dead.

Not only that, but Zhaitan didn’t even raise the initial undead – he just corrupted them to his cause. Later risen he did raise, but Orr was both sunk by the Vizier Khilbron reading from a Lost Scroll in a desperate attempt to prevent Charr crushing his nation, which subsequently resulted in the sinking of Orr and the creation of the orrian undead (something similar to Foefire event).

So Zhaitan literally just took over what was already there and built upon that.

Oglaf.1074:

Gaudrath.6725:

Either way, you end up with a paradox. Because you cannot mix the two types of narrative in a single game, have major overlapping elements and still expect the result to be seamless and logical. However, I have written a number of extensive posts on the subject already and am in danger of spinning in circles, so I will leave it at that.

But that’s exactly what they did, like it or not. Moan about time travel if you want, but the zones do follow a chronological order. Which is why I raised the question of how Arah exploration makes any sense in the first place.

And my answer is that it doesn’t, they messed it up, and for my part I will choose the lesser evil, which is keeping the integrity of the game world intact (which means that zones all exist at the same time and do not follow a chronological order), over keeping the integrity of the personal storyline intact. It’s those undead fumes, they… confuse people.

Lore wise, you could argue that the undead of Orr are not, in fact, product of Zhaitan, but of the earlier curse, the same one that caused it to sink beneath the oceans in the first place. Zhaitan took over, but he is not the ultimate source of the undead:

“There are few who survived that day, now known as the Cataclysm. While the Charr were never allowed to step foot in Arah, few count what the king’s advisor did on that day as a victory. The resulting explosion felled the invading army where it stood, but so too did it sink the entire peninsula, leaving only a scattering of small islands in its place. The beautiful city of Arah was consumed. What’s left above water now lies in a pile of ruins, blackened by the Cataclysm and years of neglect. All that remains in the wreckage of Orr are the wandering dead—those souls unable to rest in the shadow of this great disaster.”

So killing Zhaitan still allows for Orr to be stock full of wandering undead. We just kill an usurper.

Doesn’t explain Tequatl, but what the hell, Zhaitan was so easily defeated he might as well be a liutenant himself.

Anyway, your personal preferences may be different.

Competition is there to be destroyed. It’s just a game, we can afford to be evil, unscrupulous banksters, no bad karma is involved and nobody will lose a job and have to sleep under a bridge.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

You’re not listening.

Personal storyline and zone events happen simultaneously. Whether or not you participate in them (be it alternative storylines or missed events), they all happen at the same time based on level.

And you’re still thinking that my analogy of time travel was literal? It was a metaphor – and analogy. Tequatl’s death predates Zhaitan’s death, regardless of when you do either.

And if you want to get technical, Zhaitan’s death is part of the dungeon storyline, not personal storyline. There’s three storylines in GW1 – personal, world, and dungeon – but all three happen simultaneously.

I am listening, but your arguments just do not make sense. Tequatl can be killed repeatedly. Ingame this is explained by the fact that he is, like the Claw of Jormag and the Shatterer, not a unique enemy, but in fact a type of enemy, a liutenant. We can kill them, but a new one will arise to take their place, as long as the Elder Dragon behind them is alive.
Now, explain to me, if I kill Tequatl, then kill Zhaitan, then keep on killing Tequatl about 20 more times, which one of those times predates and which one succeeds the death of Zhaitan? If you say that all of them predate the death of Zhaitan, then your analogy of time travel just got literal. If you say that some of them succeed the death of Zhaitan, the original question of “but we just killed the reason these things exist” pops up.

Either way, you end up with a paradox. Because you cannot mix the two types of narrative in a single game, have major overlapping elements and still expect the result to be seamless and logical. However, I have written a number of extensive posts on the subject already and am in danger of spinning in circles, so I will leave it at that.

Plus, it seems people like Narcemus are getting upset, what with being unable to grasp the concept of someone both enjoying the game and being able to be critical of certain aspects of it.

Yeah, I just realized that the entire TP is based on web server technology… which makes it really easy to both scoop up data and send it via third party programs. Not sure why they decided to do it like that. Market data and especially market input should be protected.

As a market trader, I actually find sites such as GWSpidy really annoying, not helpful. Because I know my way around the market I can find lucrative deals by myself… and then those same deals show up on sites like that and a gazillion wannabe tradelings immediately pricewar the margin into oblivion, like piranhas.

Life would actually be easier (and more fun) without crutches like that.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I think the issue is that you’re starting to confuse means of story_telling_ with means of story experiencing. And you also seem to be thinking of GW2 as any other MMO. Most MMOs typically have a very sandbox layout, with only a beginning and an end – everything else is just “the middle” (and even then, sometimes they don’t have that end or a beginning) – that is to say, both the storytelling and the story experiencing is non-linear, a sandbox. GW2 is different – it’s a mix of linear storytelling and both linear and sandbox story experience.

The experience, outside the personal story, is very much sandbox in GW2 – with the personal story being linear. But the story itself – the lore itself, the order of events – is very much linear.

And in this sense, while you may experience killing Zhaitan before Tequatl, Tequatl dies before Zhaitan.

Only problem is that Tequatl isn’t part of the personal storyline. Blightghast is. That’s what I’m talking about. You fight Blightghast only once, and once he is dead, he stays dead.
Tequatl on the other hand, isn’t, you can even defeat Zhaitan without ever fighting against Tequatl. And then questions arise, the same ones that the OP is asking, and the only really viable answer is: “they messed it up.”

Or you can say that time travel is common in Tyria (no lore supports that) and that after killing Zhaitan I can travel back in time to fight his champion, only if you go down that route I can trow a whole heap of paradoxes your way and you realize that the time travel theory creates more problems than it solves.

Yes, but as another poster pointed out in this thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Why-would-a-gold-seller-even-farm-mobs

that data could be used to feed bot programs that actually do post buy and sell orders, and that IS a problem.

Unfortunately, I don’t see what can be done, since TP is based on web server technology, and thus there is no foolproof way to prevent crawling.