When is LS4 story coming? (No Spoilers)

Any idea when it will be released?

Perhaps, in November; more likely in January or February.

2-3 months after the last release (expansion day) give or take 1 extra month for sanity because working during the holiday season in full shift would be silly.

They were wanting to pick it back up on the 2-3 month schedule. Late November is probably what they're wanting, since that would mean a major release each month (Halloween, S4E1, Wintersday).

Arenanet seemingly is aiming for a 2-3 month gap between major releases, however i fully expect that there will be a bit of a longer gap between the release of PoF and the release of season 4, and I can think of a few reasons why.

Season 4 may possibly add a new mount, if season 3 is anything to go by, or at least in general a mastery that may affect the mounts, thus giving the players the time not only to get used to their mounts, but also to prepare them for any season 4 adventures that involve those mounts in new and interesting ways.

The griffon! While keeping this train of thought on mounts, the griffon is the most difficult mount to obtain, because it's both a gold sink and a feat of exploration too. While it's true any player can look up a guide for the griffon, some may avoid it completely because they want to organically find all the collectibles themselves.

There's 5 whole new maps to explore, as opposed to living world episodes where a single map is released (at least according to the trend of season 3), meaning that, if anything, they'd want players to explore those places for a while, find every nook, cranny and secret imaginable and share the excitement with others on the cool things they've found.

Achievements, which sort of ties into the map exploration part, but there's a boatload of achievements to accomplish that the majority of players will take their time with. While some may rush and strive to complete every achievement as soon as humanly possible, most people won't play that many long and intense hours in such a short timespan, and as such giving some extra space to complete them might be a good idea.

Maintenance of servers, mega-servers and bug fixes. While the living world and expansion teams are separate, there are issues that cross over, and some of that is player perception. With smaller releases like living world episodes, there isn't that much content added, and as such fewer bugs should happen (I say should, in that while the nature of bugs are random, there is some correlation between the amount of new stuff added and the amount of bugs that surface depending on that), players perceiving that the devs are moving on despite the existence of some bugs is seen as natural, while moving from expansion to living world with some fixes not happening could be seen as negligence. Not everyone reads the forums or amas, so that criticism can be negated a bit by having a longer amount of time to fix things. Also a longer amount of time to fix things is just, in general, a good idea.

Prepping the new living world episodes. As a whole, the dev teams working on season 4 have a lot of stuff to figure out. Going by what season 3 did, we have to examine quite a few things like economy, grind, farms, experience, masteries and their effect on the game, story, achievments, the addition of possible sinks etc. The living world teams also have to do something that they didn't have to do before, account for people who have mounts. They also have to account for people who only have mounts and don't have gliding, and how to make it fair for only path of fire players, while making sure they don't allow heart of thorns players to break things (for example, if there's a leyline that heads into a secret cave otherwise inaccessible, it's not fair for players who only have path of fire). There's a lot going on in living world development and i'm sure there will be alterations made upon seeing player feedback after path of fire launched.

Like others are saying and guessing Anet is sticking with their 2 - 3 month release window, I would suspect any time between November 22 and December 22 barring some catastrophe. :P

Any date between Nov 22nd and Dec 22nd. Not before, nor later.

Release before the holidays will be neat but I prefer to be 1-2-3 months later than something similar to PoF.

I'm guessing either November or January.

We've got the Halloween update coming in October and Wintersday in January. They have combined a Living Story update with a holiday update before, but that was when they were doing 1-2 releases a month. Since they've slowed the Living Story down a bit I think it would make sense to space them out.

@bOTEB.1573 said:Release before the holidays will be neat but I prefer to be 1-2-3 months later than something similar to PoF.

S4E1 is likely already or nearly complete, considering the first team was finished with season 3 about 8 months ago. ArenaNet likes to experiment, so you can expect season 4 to try something different.

I can't wait to continue the story, HYPE !

In addition to Halloween and Wintersday, I could see potentially new raid or new fractal before the end of the year as well.

New living world story will probably be early next year.

@Hana.8143 said:I can't wait to continue the story, HYPE !

Same. Im loving where everything is going!

i'd say after the Xmas event.

I hope it's around new year 2018.

Still got lot to do in new PoF content. Also will be lot of other stuff to do in Halloween and Wintersday soon too.They should just take their time and make sure it's out when it's ready and when we are not busy with other new/limited stuff :sweat_smile:

Tomorrow. A dev confirmed it on Tumblr.

@VaLee.5102 said:Tomorrow. A dev confirmed it on Tumblr.

The sad thing is that tomorrow never comes.....

@castlemanic.3198 said:Season 4 may possibly add a new mount, if season 3 is anything to go by, or at least in general a mastery that may affect the mounts, thus giving the players the time not only to get used to their mounts, but also to prepare them for any season 4 adventures that involve those mounts in new and interesting ways.

The griffon! While keeping this train of thought on mounts, the griffon is the most difficult mount to obtain, because it's both a gold sink and a feat of exploration too. While it's true any player can look up a guide for the griffon, some may avoid it completely because they want to organically find all the collectibles themselves.

I had not thought about a new mount. It will be interesting if that one is also a flying mount. Sure there will be complaints (there will be either way) but the people with the griffon would have a prestige item whether they wanted the, oh, Aurene mount or not. I am guessing by the time LS4 launches there will not be many new people getting the griffon anyway.

Do any of you have any reason to be so optimistic that they might release it before end of this year or beginning of the next? Look at how long it took to get LS3 after HoT. While I think they're learned their lesson, I think they need time to prep LS4.

Between Halloween and Wintersday, I don't see it happening this year. February seems like the earliest possibility, but even that feels way too optimistic for me, as we might get a feature/QoL pack to fill the gap instead, which puts it out to April, which is Super Adventure Box. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes until June to get LS4. A year would be stretching it, but not impossible, given the record with LS3, but then there would be a big summer gap they would have to fill with something else.

If I had to bet, I would bet late spring / early summer, so June-ish, give or take 2, maybe 4, months.

It takes a lot of time to intially plot and prep sketches for the whole season, and then they have to produce the first installment. The only way for it to be sooner would be if they already started working on LS4 before the launch of PoF (and it is possible that they plotted out the story and planned the content already).

I'm expecting it to start either end of November (21 or 28, that's two/three weeks after halloween ends and two months after PoF launch) or beginning of January (right after Wintersday ends, would be ~3.5 months after PoF).

Personally, I think I'd prefer January. I want time to work through PoF properly without rushing.

@ekarat.1085 said:Do any of you have any reason to be so optimistic that they might release it before end of this year or beginning of the next? Look at how long it took to get LS3 after HoT. While I think they're learned their lesson, I think they need time to prep LS4.

Between Halloween and Wintersday, I don't see it happening this year. February seems like the earliest possibility, but even that feels way too optimistic for me, as we might get a feature/QoL pack to fill the gap instead, which puts it out to April, which is Super Adventure Box. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes until June to get LS4. A year would be stretching it, but not impossible, given the record with LS3, but then there would be a big summer gap they would have to fill with something else.

If I had to bet, I would bet late spring / early summer, so June-ish, give or take 2, maybe 4, months.

It takes a lot of time to intially plot and prep sketches for the whole season, and then they have to produce the first installment. The only way for it to be sooner would be if they already started working on LS4 before the launch of PoF (and it is possible that they plotted out the story and planned the content already).

The problem with them doing this is the fear of another content drought. I dunno if you were around when it happened between HoT and LWS3 but it was pretty bad, in my opinion. I don't think Anet can afford to do that again.

I mean, I can see it happening like you said but I don't see anything good coming of it. You've already got people complaining about the "lack of content" in PoF. Making them wait longer for LWS4 could really hurt Anet in terms of player retention.

This is just my opinion based on observations and experience though, mind you. I could be wrong.

Do any of you have any reason to be so optimistic that they might release it before end of this year or beginning of the next? Look at how long it took to get LS3 after HoT. While I think they're learned their lesson, I think they need time to prep LS4.

LW4 must be already finished or close to finish at this point. Also, MO said long time ago they aim to release first LW episode at the same time space after PoF they released episodes in LW3.

Would love to see some more creativity, instead of the huge amount of cliches they've been using in the past few.

hopefully before xmas, i want my legendary weapons!!! and also wanna know what happens to aurene

@ekarat.1085 said:Do any of you have any reason to be so optimistic that they might release it before end of this year or beginning of the next? Look at how long it took to get LS3 after HoT. While I think they're learned their lesson, I think they need time to prep LS4.

Season 3 took so long because they didn't plan for it and only started working on it after HoT. With season 3, they created 3 living world teams to work on 6 month schedules, allowing for a release every 2-3 months. If they didn't move those teams to help finish PoF and instead continued into season 4, episode 1 should be nearly complete if isn't already, considering team 1 was finished roughly 8 months ago. If they take too long to release it, they'd be better off abandoning it entirely and switching to yearly expansions, because the only reason for it is to keep players active. They won't be able to catch the launch wave if they wait and MMOs tend to die out after 3 months.