A suggestion for after End of Dragons... to end the Living World

[Brimwood.7963]

Background

Let me begin by stating that the post below is not going to be an objective one. It will include personal biases of what I consider to be good and bad story-writing.

On the plus side, I have been playing MMOs for two decades and actually wrote a thesis comparing narrative structures in MMOs at some point so I do have some background knowledge to work with. I have also played GW1 from the moment it came out up until GW2 was released. GW2 I played for a little over a year, before taking a multi-year break from it. I've checked back in on the game from time to time but only seriously returned to it recently, mostly because I was excited to see Cantha come back at last.

That excitement was dimmed somewhat, however, when I found out that the existing Living World story would be continuing in Cantha. I had been hoping that due to Cantha's isolation, there would be a clean break with the past and the whole idea of 'Living World' would finally be shelved in favor of much needed new design and story content. Seeing as how that is obviously not going to be the case, I am now going to strongly argue for such a break to be made after End of Dragons.

Why the Living World cannot continue as is

So why do I think Arenanet should abandon Living World? Some of these points will take some explaining so get ready: 

1. What Arenanet calls the 'Living World' has never, at any point in the game's history, been 'alive' at all.

When this term was initially coined, I rather naively believed that Arenanet had found a way to solve a conundrum that has been present in MMOs pretty much since the genre exists. I thought, based on how the living world and dynamic events were presented before release, that they had figured out a way for the world and the story of the MMO to permanently adapt to the way players played the game. 

Suffice to say, that soon proved a major disappointment. Dynamic events didn't change the world at all but rather kept it rotating in a never-ending time loop, never advancing any part of the story one way or the other. Similarly, nothing a player did in their 'personal story' had any impact at all on the world at large. Having done a great deal of research on how difficult it actually is to make an MMO world change based on player actions, I can forgive the developers for the false marketing. What I don't understand however, is why, instead of trying to keep experimenting and expanding the system to at least create an illusion of player agency, they have actually given players FEWER choices as the story continued, ultimately replacing the 'personal story' with a completely set (and very generic) narrative.

To illustrate, up until level 60 your character actually has some choices to make within their own story based on their background, how they approach certain missions, whether they want to join the Vigil, Priory, or Order of Whispers, and how to proceed with these missions from there on. It doesn't solve the problem of player-world interaction but at least it gives players the illusion of having some agency over their characters development

Now, they could have expanded this system quite easily, creating a branching story with many different paths, dialogue options etc. Instead they went the opposite route and simply removed ALL player choice. The thing that is officially still called 'the Living World' has for years now, been as dead as it can possibly be. Which leads to the next point.

2. Turning the player character into a 'hero' central to the story is a BAD choice for an MMO narrative.

For starters, it makes no logical sense. I am apparently a hero responsible for saving the world and yet around me, I see hundreds of other player characters who are all heroes too. Are we living in a collective delusion of sorts? Has Lyssa turned Tyria into her own personal madhouse? Honestly, that would probably lead to a more interesting tale than the one we are presented with now.

Turning the player character into a central component of the game story leads to all manner of weird contradictions. Worse, it SHARPLY limits the design space developers have to work with in expanding the game's narrative.

Would you like some moral complexity in quests? Nope, can't do it. You may have customized your character to look like a world-devouring demon but inside he/she has a heart more soft and virtuous than Kormir herself. They saved the world after all...they lead all five races...what kind of an example would we be setting doing anything other than behaving like an angel surrounded by puppies?

Would you like to have your raids, dungeons, guilds or any multi-man activity tie in with the Living World to an extent? Haha, you jest. There is only ONE hero, ONE commander. How could we ever justify a story where suddenly you have a whole group of them?

Would you like to be able to just GET RID OF an NPC you don't like? I mean, we can't kill them obviously, we're the Commander. But as a Commander, we can command things, right? Like, dismiss a certain Norn from our service? Send a certain overly talkative Asura back to present her inventions in Rata Sum instead? Maybe, you know...NOT bring yet another Elder Dragon into the world?

Oh we have to do all these things? We have no choice in it whatsoever? That's right! Because while at first glance it would seem like a hero character would have a multitude of options for interacting with and saving the world, this is actually the worst storytelling model for creating player agency in existance. In reality, there would be almost too many options to choose from when going about a scenario like the one presented by the threat of the Elder Dragons. But there is no way you can program all that or fit each person's individual choices into the game.

Developers have to limit player choice to some extent. That process is much more obvious and frustrating to the player when there would, in a realistic scenario, be more options than when we expect there would be less.

A hero or any character that is expected to lead, has more possibilities open to him than a simple adventurer. That makes a story much more frustrating when all those options are then taken away due to practical considerations. The most memorable scripted MMO narratives (take GW1, the initial WoW or The Secret World as an example) are not actually about the player character but about the world and a small selection of well-rounded NPCs. Cue next point.

3. There are way too many different NPCs in the Living World and hardly any of them can be considered 'well-rounded'.

It is cruel irony that one of GW2's best designed NPCs, a little known Charr named Tybalt Leftpaw, only appears in a third of all player characters' stories and even then only for four episodes.

For those who haven't played the original Zhaitan story in a while, Tybalt Leftpaw is your faction mentor if you choose to join the Order of Whispers. He's quite a jovial fellow, he likes apples as well as pretending to sell them and he appears very knowledgeable about the world around him. A little later however, you discover that your first mission with the Order is actually his first field mission! He's been working office duty up until then and is, in truth, a bit insecure at first about what you think of him and how the mission will pan out. He is also quite obviously elated to be working with you in the first place, even though you are at this point, still effectively a nobody. He also loves roleplaying, especially as a pirate, but is completely devoted to the Order of Whispers who he sees as family, as also seen by the almost fatherly way in which he protects Demi Beetletun when she runs away to join the Order.

If I give it some thought, I could write more about Tybalt. He is easily my favourite NPC in GW2. The Norn mentor of the Vigil was also interesting as is Almorra's character. What's sad is that I probably couldn't write half as much about any of the later Living World characters if I tried. Taimi is a genius. She invents stuff. Great. Kasmeer and Marjory are lesbians. Wonderful, I'm all for diversity. At least provided the character also has actual defining character attributes that makes them worthwhile to spend time with. Sexuality alone is just not the most relevant information when it comes to saving the world from five rampaging elder dragons, you know?  And yet they keep harping on about it. Brahme is...did I even spell his name right? Eir's son. I honestly have no idea what his function is. He's entirely forgettable which is ludicrous considering he's in almost every episode. Logan and Queen Jennah are ok. Jennah has some sass about her at least and even though it's thin, Logan at least has some moral conflict when it comes to choosing between Queen and country.

I wish Rytlock was even more of a kitten than he is already but unfortunately the NPC Charr have also been reigned in by the need for them to be 'good boys' in the story. If would be MUCH more interesting if their pragmatism and ruthless nature was presented in a more extreme manner so that there was some actual conflict between the pact races, and subsequent moral dilemma's for the player character to mull over.

Any character not mentioned above is probably not mentioned for a reason. I literally forgot about them. Except for villains like Palawa Joko but then, he was written during GW1 when storytelling quality was on a different level entirely. Oh yes, there's Aurene. The living proof of how hell-bent Arenanet's present writers are on ploughing on with this endless tale. Yet it also shows how desperately short they are on inspiration to do so. It is time for it to end.

The future

Parts of this last bit may be written in jest. I'll leave it up to you to decide how much. It contains suggestions for what I believe Arenanet should do after End of Dragons. The first step, which I sincerely hope End of Dragons does, will be to conclude the current story. I do not care how they do it. I doubt there are many players who do. The next thing I would propose is a full, Matrix-like reset of the storyworld. For any story presented hereafter, the idea of 'The Commander' can no longer exist, nor can the Living World as an intrusive, overarching storyline. The world itself has to tell the story as it was in GW1.  This means two things:

1: The identity of the player character has to shift radically. It cannot be a hero anymore but must go back to more humble persona. This is a hard requirement to free up design space for moral choices and will actually allow the player character to develop MORE.

2: The maps should be explorable at any time and present only self-contained narrative elements.

By this I mean that I want to be able to explore the maps at any time I choose and not run into random story-related events that either have not yet taken place in my personal story, or that already happened ages ago and are now just on an endless repeat cycle.

Example: While exploring Mount Maelstrom, my character runs into a 'Pact operation trying to reach Orr while fighting off Zhaitan's minions'. This event makes no sense at all if I encounter it before or after the exact moment in the personal story where this takes place. So don't add more of such events into the game. Instead, make the dynamic events tell their own small narratives within the world and reward exploration of them at any time. Do not tie them in with the main story. Ideally the dynamic events would also not repeat or cycle as obviously as they do now but that might be too much to ask for.

The above  storytelling techniques are relatively simple to execute. Most MMOs with a scripted narrative use them in some shape or form already.

A more complex question is how to deal with all the narrative crap that has already been presented to us up until now.

Because what we cannot get around, no matter how much we might want to, is that any new narrative will in SOME WAY, have to tie in with the Living World as it is now. Again when I mentioned a Matrix reload earlier, I was only half joking. Something like that is probably what it will take.

Fifteen years have passed since the death of the last Elder Dragon.

Our player character wakes up from a long slumber in the Realm of Torment and discovers that the goddess Lyssa has disappeared, creating chaotic anomalies all across Tyria. Events are repeating endlessly, entire zones are out of time with the rest of the world and living memories of the followers of the Elder Dragons continue to roam the earth long after the demise of their masters. 

The player character meanwhile discovers that they have been trapped in some sort of elaborate delusion and have in fact, played no part in the demise of the Elder Dragons whatsoever. Why or how they found their way into the Realm of Torment is also anyone's guess. Fortunately they are not alone. Many others, humans, Sylvari, Norn, Charr and Asura, find themselves in a similar predicament and together work to understand and hopefully escape this new realm at some point. They soon discover portals, waypoints that can lead them back to the time-trapped regions of Tyria but little progress is to be made here.  Experiencing possibility as a glorious Commander of the past is fun for a while, but ultimately, a delusion is a delusion. The only way forward is together.

As hundreds, if not thousands of mortals collectively struggle to explore the Realm they soon encounter something most curious and worrisome. Demons populate the Realm of Torment, as diverse in disposition and purpose as are our unfortunate adventurers.

Some follow a great Lord who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Abaddon. Others seek only to escape and reach the time-blasted lands below, perhaps in collaboration with the unexpected new influx of mortals into their realm. A third faction seeks to seduce and convert the mortals to become demons, thus bolstering their own numbers whereas the fourth group is mindless and intends only to devour everything, including the new arrivals. 

Will the mortals be tempted to side with any of the factions? Will they favor one over the others, shifting the balance of power within the realm? Or will they simply explore the realm, find clues as to what happened to the world, the old gods and attempt to escape? If they even want to escape... there is much possibility here to attain power, perhaps form a faction, a guild of their own? 

 

I will freely admit the above paragraph is hardly the most sophisticated piece of writing. What it can hopefully do, however, is make clear how it is possible to reset the story we have so far. It is even possible to do so in a manner that causes all the weird disconnects between the personal story and the world maps now, to make narrative sense. Without having to redo and reprogram all of them. 

So please Arenanet, for the love of Tyria, make the End of Dragons also be the end of the Living World as we know it. This game is far from dead. The art has stood the tests of time, the maps are well designed and the player base is rising. Narratively, however, it is dead. It has been for a long time. End the story. And begin anew.

Edited September 13, 2021 by Brimwood.7963

[Ashantara.8731]

TL;DR

I am also against the Living World format. The only season so far that managed to produce captivating writing alongside a welcome variety of locations and new story characters was Season 4.

In general, I am not a fan of spoon-fed little content pieces. I prefer full-fledged products, namely expansions, that I can play at my own pace and not lose interest after months of breaks in between episodes. Also, expansions are more polished because they are not a sum of independently produced bits and pieces that vary noticeably in quality.

So yes, expansions and side stories over LW seasons.

[Loules.8601]

I'm strongly disagree with you. I love LW for multiple characters (love most of them) and story, which I like more than many single RPGs and much more than other MMOs.

[Ashantara.8731]

19 minutes ago, Loules.8601 said:

which I like more than many single RPGs and much more than other MMOs.

I don't compare to other games, especially not MMOs since I play none besides GW2.

As for single-player products: you've obviously never played great RPGs like Dragon Age: Origins or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1, or even older classics like Baldur's Gate 2. Had you played those, you would know what good writing and compelling character development (NPCs in particular) in a game look like. Dragon Age: Origins is my favorite computer game to date.

Edited September 13, 2021 by Ashantara.8731

[Brimwood.7963]

6 hours ago, Loules.8601 said:

I'm strongly disagree with you. I love LW for multiple characters (love most of them) and story, which I like more than many single RPGs and much more than other MMOs.

 

That is interesting. Then again, I'm not surprised there are some people who like the current LW. If there weren't, it would have been hard to justify continuing with it for this many years.

Personal likes and dislikes aside however, the current LW limits narrative design space a considerable amount.

So if you already like the current iteration, think of how much you would like a new one where those issues do not exist.

[Linken.6345]

24 minutes ago, Brimwood.7963 said:

 

That is interesting. Then again, I'm not surprised there are some people who like the current LW. If there weren't, it would have been hard to justify continuing with it for this many years.

Personal likes and dislikes aside however, the current LW limits narrative design space a considerable amount.

So if you already like the current iteration, think of how much you would like a new one where those issues do not exist.

The new one will probabely have something else wrong that might even be worse so no thank you.

[Teratus.2859]

I agree that paid expansions are the better option over the living world but I think it's important to stress that the living world we have now is not the same concept as the living world was planned to be way back in the day.

LWS1 was the purest form of the living world concept, genuine big events in the game leading to permanent changes.. a very ambitious idea but ultimately not a good one in the end.
There's so many people at odds over Lions Arch, many like the original one, many like the current one but only one of them can exist forcing one group to be satisfied and one to be disappointed.
Adding to that, people who were not around for LWS1 and even those who were.. cannot replay this content at the present time either, creating a huge hole in the playable story continuity of GW2 which is immensely immersion breaking for a lot of players who mostly play Gw2 for the story.

I think Anet made the right choice moving away from this format and making living world repeatable, always accessible and limiting it's impact on pre-existing game content.
But that also brought other problems too such as the trend of every map being (stuck in time) so to speak while new content introduces new mechanics, powercreep, masteries etc that can trivialise much of the older game.. mounts, gliding and elite specs being huge contributors of this.
This is largely why some of us want to see Anet devote a lot of effort into remastering the older areas of Gw2 + LWS1 after End of Dragons, specifically the later areas of the vanialla game, Orr etc to bring them more in line with LWS2 and HoT.

[Brimwood.7963]

12 hours ago, Linken.6345 said:

The new one will probabely have something else wrong that might even be worse so no thank you.

That's a very pessimistic view. From that perspective no positive changes can ever be made to the game at all. And trust me, it's a lot easier to make the story better than it is to make it worse at this point. This is the same company that wrote the GW1 story (I suspect not the same team of writers but regardless) and that was magnificent.

 

9 hours ago, Teratus.2859 said:

I agree that paid expansions are the better option over the living world but I think it's important to stress that the living world we have now is not the same concept as the living world was planned to be way back in the day.

LWS1 was the purest form of the living world concept, genuine big events in the game leading to permanent changes.. a very ambitious idea but ultimately not a good one in the end.
There's so many people at odds over Lions Arch, many like the original one, many like the current one but only one of them can exist forcing one group to be satisfied and one to be disappointed.
Adding to that, people who were not around for LWS1 and even those who were.. cannot replay this content at the present time either, creating a huge hole in the playable story continuity of GW2 which is immensely immersion breaking for a lot of players who mostly play Gw2 for the story.

I think Anet made the right choice moving away from this format and making living world repeatable, always accessible and limiting it's impact on pre-existing game content.
But that also brought other problems too such as the trend of every map being (stuck in time) so to speak while new content introduces new mechanics, powercreep, masteries etc that can trivialise much of the older game.. mounts, gliding and elite specs being huge contributors of this.
This is largely why some of us want to see Anet devote a lot of effort into remastering the older areas of Gw2 + LWS1 after End of Dragons, specifically the later areas of the vanialla game, Orr etc to bring them more in line with LWS2 and HoT.

 

I actually liked the original idea you described. I think the main reason they moved away from it was that it was impractical to execute consistently but I definitely appreciated the ambition it showed and it did not fail for reasons of storytelling.

I absolutely do agree about remastering the older areas, though even the HoT and LWS2 maps have some of the same inconsistency problems that the original maps do ( they are much better designed gameplay-wise). 

Edited September 14, 2021 by Brimwood.7963

[Dante.1763]

19 hours ago, Brimwood.7963 said:

That's a very pessimistic view. From that perspective no positive changes can ever be made to the game at all. And trust me, it's a lot easier to make the story better than it is to make it worse at this point. This is the same company that wrote the GW1 story (I suspect not the same team of writers but regardless) and that was magnificent.

 

 

I actually liked the original idea you described. I think the main reason they moved away from it was that it was impractical to execute consistently but I definitely appreciated the ambition it showed and it did not fail for reasons of storytelling.

I absolutely do agree about remastering the older areas, though even the HoT and LWS2 maps have some of the same inconsistency problems that the original maps do ( they are much better designed gameplay-wise). 

They got a ton of angry and negative feedback about missing releases and never being able to go back to them. Thats why they stopped it. Not to mention player burn out, due to the rapid release cycle they wanted to do. Ultimately what had me stop right when the probes went up around Tyria was the burn out. It was so bad i didnt come back till a month before HOT went live.

Im still not happy i cant experience lws1 in its full extent. I hope they keep bringing some of it back like they have(scrying pool, and adding in the events like marionette to a rotation in eotn.).

Im also down to remaster older content/armor/weapins etc. Bringing the entire core game up to the visusl level of the expansions would be nice to see.

 

[mythical.6315]

On 9/13/2021 at 1:56 PM, Brimwood.7963 said:

Suffice to say, that soon proved a major disappointment. Dynamic events didn't change the world at all but rather kept it rotating in a never-ending time loop, never advancing any part of the story one way or the other. Similarly, nothing a player did in their 'personal story' had any impact at all on the world at large. Having done a great deal of research on how difficult it actually is to make an MMO world change based on player actions, I can forgive the developers for the false marketing. What I don't understand however, is why, instead of trying to keep experimenting and expanding the system to at least create an illusion of player agency, they have actually given players FEWER choices as the story continued, ultimately replacing the 'personal story' with a completely set (and very generic) narrative.

There was an impact during season 1 but many players took issue with the all of the things that they would miss out so a switch to permanent story releases was made. 
 

As for dynamic events, I suggest reading their previous articles on the subject as well as thinking about it. In order for all players to experience those changes, the impacts have to be temporary. 
 

“On the release of Guild Wars 2, we managed to accomplish this feeling across shorter time elements through our dynamic event system. You could visit a town, and later come back to find it under attack, or under control of an enemy (enter centaurs stage left) and in need of liberation. The centaurs who hold your friendly village will stay there until players drive them out, the enemy camp you control will stay that way until enemies win it back from you.”

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/living-world-in-guild-wars-2/

 

[Faridah.8431]

tl;dr

They did experiment with Living World, and for a time, it was living. Season 1, for which I played most of (on another account), was essentially "living" in the sense that it would add content specific to that time period it was released for, and could change things in the world. For example, the Tower of Nightmares, or The Battle for Lion's Arch, the aftermath of which saw the tower's ruins in Kessex, and an LA in ruins, the city moved to the Vigil Keep in Gendarran, until it was rebuilt, respectively.

This was actually a lot of fun...if you were fortunate enough to play at the time. Admittedly though, the narrative at the time and Scarlet as an antagonist was not particularly compelling. But it did set the stage ultimately for the next dragon to wake up.

Season 2 continued the idea of frequent releases (every 2 weeks), but removed the idea of temporary content that would forever disappear from the game, and instead introduced the idea of new maps that would slowly unlock as the episodes progressed. Narratively, they shred away from large scale meta events driving the story, and more towards instanced content. Not really living world anymore, but the frequency of release was nice. 

The seasons following largely continued the narrative style, but changed up certain things like frequency of release being much, much less, and new maps every release instead of slowly unlocking maps (IBS kinda went back to that).

All in all, as a concept, it would have been interesting for them to continue some interesting season 1 grand event style content as "living world", with narrative continuation in the style of Season 2 onwards.

All that said, what I really would have liked to have seen is more expansions on a more frequent cadence. 

Edited September 15, 2021 by Faridah.8431

[Brimwood.7963]

2 hours ago, mythical.6315 said:

There was an impact during season 1 but many players took issue with the all of the things that they would miss out so a switch to permanent story releases was made. 
 

As for dynamic events, I suggest reading their previous articles on the subject as well as thinking about it. In order for all players to experience those changes, the impacts have to be temporary. 

 

Oh believe me, I know. Maybe I should clarify that. I understand perfectly well why they made dynamic events the way they are and why the one time events are no longer a thing. No MMO to date has managed to successfully create maps with NPC driven story elements that permanently change based on player activity. The latest to announce they would try it is Ashes of Creation and that's not going particularly well from what I've seen. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do.

What I do NOT understand if why they the PERSONAL story devolved in the way it did. When you replay the story now, you can still see very clearly that the player has some branching paths to choose from in the first 60 levels or so. Of course they all return to the same central narrative in the end but at least there is some variation and choice there. When GW2 was released I remember they also had this dialogue system and slider that would shift based on whether you chose a Ferocious, Dignified or Charming option. Now I can't even find the slider anymore.

Those systems were fairly rudimentory but I was feeling pretty optimistic at the time that the devs would refine and expand them over time, giving players more branching paths in their personal story. They have however done THE EXACT OPPOSITE with Living World. The story right now has no choice or player agency in it. Literally none. You are following a completely pre-set story with a very one dimensional character and it's not even a good story. Most of Living world is incredibly generic and lacks any depth compared to other MMOs and especially compared to GW1. You can literally predict from the very first moment of any chapter pretty much exactly what will happen in that chapter. So why persist with it? There's very little to lose here, mind. I'm fairly certain the majority of players play Living World only to unlock new maps and other content. Why not try something new?

Edited September 15, 2021 by Brimwood.7963

[ASP.8093]

On 9/13/2021 at 4:56 PM, Brimwood.7963 said:

If I give it some thought, I could write more about Tybalt. He is easily my favourite NPC in GW2. The Norn mentor of the Vigil was also interesting as is Almorra's character. What's sad is that I probably couldn't write half as much about any of the later Living World characters if I tried. Taimi is a genius. She invents stuff. Great. Kasmeer and Marjory are lesbians. Wonderful, I'm all for diversity. At least provided the character also has actual defining character attributes that makes them worthwhile to spend time with. Sexuality alone is just not the most relevant information when it comes to saving the world from five rampaging elder dragons, you know?  And yet they keep harping on about it. Brahme is...did I even spell his name right? Eir's son. I honestly have no idea what his function is. He's entirely forgettable which is ludicrous considering he's in almost every episode.

The "Return To" stuff actually offers us a great opportunity to go and make sense of these characters.

Taimi is a "genius," yes, but when you first meet her she's like halfway between a little kid and a teenager — she's young, emotionally immature, and socially disempowered, but incredibly driven to do something with her life right now because she knows her disability will kill her long before she reaches old age. That's why she's so fascinated with Scarlet Briar (down to hero worship, almost) and why she struggles with the seniority-based academic power games of asura society. She quickly grows into someone who's devoted to helping people on a large, world-transforming scale, and the workaholic aspects of her personality make her into a kind of "team mom" figure who's constantly trying to manage the well-being of people around her — Blish, Aurene, Braham, &c.; and what works about this transformation is that she's very perceptive and involved, but she's not necessarily good at actually fixing other people's problems, which is how you get all those exasperated dialogues like, "Commander! I'm stuck! Fix this other person's problem for me!"

Kasmeer is quite the institutionalist, as humans go. She's connected to the nobility, she supports the monarchy, she's an ardent believer in the human gods (which is why she goes through a personal crisis during Balthazar's rampage of destruction). Marjory is far more pragmatic and working-class; her job before dragon-slaying is basically "detective," and you see her put those skills to use a lot from time to time. Most of their lovey-dovey dialogue isn't really "we're lesbians," it's two people trying to carry each other emotionally when they have pretty different weaknesses and limits. I think they're kinda basic as characters but I find Marjory pretty well-rounded, and she's well-positioned to be a character who carries a good bit of the plot forward without taking up too much focus herself.

Braham I think suffers from some rubber-banding in his characterization (unlearning old character development too easily due to the episodic nature of the stories), but the thrust of his storyline is that he's a Norn who very much wants to follow in his parent's footsteps but got abandoned by that parent. So he struggles to self-regulate a bit, he gets really attached to found family and then pushes them away, he tries foolhardy stuff in the name of externalizing his emotions or "building his legend" but also fundamentally does sometimes save the day by risking himself boldly when everything is on the line. A lot of players get wrapped up in some tantrum-y dialogue and kinda ignore the ways in which he's a linebacker for your quarterback, taking some pretty serious hits in order to protect you at the right time.

Whereas the first set of iconic characters was supposed to be very cut-and-dry representatives of their cultures, and old and jaded (and their plot arc in the Dungeon storylines was largely defined by trying to recover from the acrimonious stink of failure; honestly, they bicker and fail just as hard as the the new characters, and often in less sympathetic ways), this set tends to be young people who don't quite fit in with their cultures. I think it's easy to focus on that "young people" part, the occasional notes of immaturity or foolishness in how they're depicted, and miss out on the way they very much demonstrate how the species societies in the games aren't monolithic and trying to fit in the mold your culture made for you isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

…

On 9/13/2021 at 6:00 PM, Ashantara.8731 said:

As for single-player products: you've obviously never played great RPGs like Dragon Age: Origins or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1, or even older classics like Baldur's Gate 2. Had you played those, you would know what good writing and compelling character development (NPCs in particular) in a game look like. Dragon Age: Origins is my favorite computer game to date.

It's funny that you bring up these specific games, because I think a core part of both the GW2 story's best and worst elements is that the Living Story characters largely are "Bioware NPCs," just in an environment where you interact with them differently.

(Bioware very much has a signature style of character presentation and development, especially compared to other non-Bioware talky RPGs like Fallout: New Vegas or Disco Elysium, a set of character/storytelling conventions that's just referred to as "Bioware" for short.)

I think they strike some of the same emotional notes and develop along similar lines to GW2. The main difference is that these big talky single-player games make you spend a lot of time "peeling the onion" to learn about them through dialogue (sometimes with the promise of a character power-up or a sex scene if you get to the end), and present you with a lot of (sometimes contrived) moral choices that the NPCs react to (though sometimes kinda half-heartedly — time to stare disapprovingly at you while you kick puppies for Evil Points and before you go back to the main quest of saving the world).

Note also that those games do also make it easier to "filter" your team, and a lot of players simply sideline any characters they don't like as much. People who hate some GW2 character might probably find a lot of the same stuff to hate in Carth, or Alastair, or Aerie, or Anomen, or Mazzy, or Jan Jansen as well.

Edited September 15, 2021 by ASP.8093

[voltaicbore.8012]

@Brimwood.7963, upon reading the entirety of your initial post, I don't think any of the issues you describe are actually specific to the Living World format itself. As others have told you, they actually did make LW permanently change the game world. That's why the Tower of Nightmares has always been a fallen ruin for me in Kessex Hills, since I started playing the game well after LWS1 asked players to find and topple that tower. Also, as far as I am aware, no other game has had the nerve to torch a well-loved player hub city, then replace it with a really watered down version, then populate it with NPCs that talk about how the new version is less cool than the old one. No other LW season has even attempted to rehash the permanent-game-world-changes thing, although I would argue that the existence of the scrying pool and fractals now justifies being able to permanently remove things from the wider game world, while letting people revisit them in via the pool or fractals for achievements.

 

What you really have an issue with has nothing to do with LW, and everything to do with poor narrative choices. I, too, do not particularly like being the Commander. I, too, do not care for most of the characters we've met in LW. You make a big deal about new narrative content needing to tie back into LW, but that's a problem because the old narrative is just poorly designed, not because it's LW. It would still suck to need to tie back into poorly designed old narrative that is not LW. The dissonance you mention between (1) a character that hasn't hit the Pact part of the story and (2) running into Pact events all over the open world also has nothing to do with LW. Our characters being progressively stripped of meaningful choice is also something I don't like, but frankly in almost any game scenario that choice must end up being illusory anyways when players inhabit a shared game world. Your mentor is always going to have their Claw Island moment, etc, regardless of what you choose. The shared world (which again has nothing to do with LW and everything to do with MMOs general) forces any developer to radically narrow the range of story endings (i.e. usually just one ending) because a game that sharded players into different worlds based on their story choices would quickly find itself in a new corner (the result of doing this could take several walls of text on its own, so I'll just leave it at that for now).

 

So it's not that I disagree with the gripes you brought up; in fact I agree with much of what you point out as weaknesses in the narrative. I disagree that the LW itself is to blame, and I can't really see how your (admittedly) weird suggestion would do anything other than reset the narrative so that... they can continue having the same problems with weak narrative.

[ASP.8093]

On 9/13/2021 at 4:56 PM, Brimwood.7963 said:

By this I mean that I want to be able to explore the maps at any time I choose and not run into random story-related events that either have not yet taken place in my personal story, or that already happened ages ago and are now just on an endless repeat cycle.

Example: While exploring Mount Maelstrom, my character runs into a 'Pact operation trying to reach Orr while fighting off Zhaitan's minions'. This event makes no sense at all if I encounter it before or after the exact moment in the personal story where this takes place. So don't add more of such events into the game. Instead, make the dynamic events tell their own small narratives within the world and reward exploration of them at any time. Do not tie them in with the main story. Ideally the dynamic events would also not repeat or cycle as obviously as they do now but that might be too much to ask for.

This kind of "each map section depicts a specific moment in the larger storyline" structure was an established thing in the GW1 as well. (It's also basically how the Diablo "Act" structure works once you're playing online.) And it's a great tool for varying the themes of your maps and quickly communicating the stakes of each one.

It works precisely because MMOGs don't really present a consistent, coherent single 'world,' they mainly present a pile of engaging activities that you can easily share with other players.

The game tries pretty hard to explain its story to you. The core campaign's level-based structure keeps most players lined up pretty well on story vs. map. The expansions and living story carefully gate map access so you're always getting the story aspect of a map explained to you before you jump into it (and a lot of the personal story chains have little "explore the map" sidelines).

People simply don't need the illusion that your gameplay is 1:1 with the linear narrative of the game, especially not at the expense of the environmental narrative. "Welcome to Mt. Maelstrom, where we do things that you haven't heard of before and have no consequences for anything" is straight-up worse than "Welcome to Mt. Maelstrom, where you experience this specific era of the story." Either way, a bunch of your activities are senseless diagetically because you're doing stuff like spending 6 hours repeating a map meta cyclically to get enough special rocks to make a special shiny backpack.

Like, look at the proposed solution here…

On 9/13/2021 at 4:56 PM, Brimwood.7963 said:

The player character meanwhile discovers that they have been trapped in some sort of elaborate delusion and have in fact, played no part in the demise of the Elder Dragons whatsoever.

Why would anyone want to play this? If you hate the GW2 story, why would you want to play the "you're playing a deluded rube who spent years imagining the GW2 story!" story instead of just an entirely different story?

It's like fanfic people who blow up a setting they hate and then try to shoehorn their own thing into its smoking crater instead of just recognizing that they want a separate, different thing from the get-go.

Edited September 16, 2021 by ASP.8093

[Dean Calaway.9718]

[This message is unwelcomed and was removed.]

Edited September 30, 2021 by Dean Calaway.9718

[Dean Calaway.9718]

[This message is unwelcomed and was removed.]

Edited September 30, 2021 by Dean Calaway.9718

[Dean Calaway.9718]

[This message is unwelcomed and was removed.]

Edited September 30, 2021 by Dean Calaway.9718

[ugrakarma.9416]

On 9/13/2021 at 5:56 PM, Brimwood.7963 said:

 

Why the Living World cannot continue as is

So why do I think Arenanet should abandon Living World? Some of these points will take some explaining so get ready: 

1. What Arenanet calls the 'Living World' has never, at any point in the game's history, been 'alive' at all.

When this term was initially coined, I rather naively believed that Arenanet had found a way to solve a conundrum that has been present in MMOs pretty much since the genre exists. I thought, based on how the living world and dynamic events were presented before release, that they had figured out a way for the world and the story of the MMO to permanently adapt to the way players played the game. 

Suffice to say, that soon proved a major disappointment. Dynamic events didn't change the world at all but rather kept it rotating in a never-ending time loop, never advancing any part of the story one way or the other. Similarly, nothing a player did in their 'personal story' had any impact at all on the world at large.

LOL. i wonder where that this illusion started in GW2 (I suppose LS1 advertisement, but I wasn't here), the kind of "world change" is heavy coded  even in single player game like Dragon Age Inquisition, imagine it, on MMPORG. You have all u want in personal history, be happy, its unreplayable because of "choices" code. All noteworthy mention the cry rivers for old LA.

My bet is that is another niche idea, that Anet make mistake to take it seriously again. Only die hards RPers bother with realism at point that time never go back.(i imagine if they play good old SNES they throw the game out of window because play history again is "unrealistic")

Edited September 19, 2021 by ugrakarma.9416

[The Greyhawk.9107]

 

[Randulf.7614]

I don’t agree with a lot of what you wrote, but the bit that flared out the most was the quick dismissal of living world chars likeTaimi as having no char development versus earlier chars like Tybalt.

There is no comparison - whether you like Taimi or not, her char development has been vastly superior to earlier characters. LS2 alone shows that and what she goes through in LS4 with Blish. To dismiss her as just a genius and nothing else given the sheer amount of time and detail vs other chars means you either just don’t like the char and have chosen to overlook her character, or haven’t paid attention to the narrative. From her apprenticeship with Zojja, to her disability, to her mistakes causing profound problems through the season and going from a scared child, to a self sufficient person who clearly grows in both character and size through the game.

Lets look at the others;

KasmeeR -“Just a lesbian”. 

A noble woman who was stripped of her nobility due to her family’s actions. A devoted worshipper of the Gods brought into conflict with the aims of the rest of the group and was well touched upon throughout all of Path of Fire. Whilst one of the less rounded chars, she does get more background than suggested

Canach

Prob the most popular NPC in the group, he goes from eco warrior, to terrorist, to prisoner to snarky companion. A reliable member of the group who has been through more than most in the living story

Braham

The most controversial, but largely because of his char development. Going from teenage hothead, to grieving son, to a lost and spiteful drama queen to seeking forgiveness and fulfilling his destiny. Perhaps not always well done, but the writers put a lot of thought and time into his arc. Sure he’s not as beloved as Tybalt, but in stories you aren’t always meant to like everyone. Braham was the redemption character.

Rox perhaps is the one with the least character of all, but they still gave her more than is credited for as she finally found her place in the World with the Ohmakhan

 

Ive been as critical of the Living World as anyone (mostly because they allowed the cadence and structure to dictate the story and rarely the story itself), but in the end I think they got the supporting cast largely right and certainly put more into them than during the early campaign. It’s fine to prefer older characters, but it is outright incorrect to dismiss the newer ones as having no/poor design or character at all.

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

Sorry but it doesn't feel like we're playing the same game if you're literally blind to the amount of character progression that has happened to each character involved with the events of GW2 throughout the years.  

In fact based on all the stuff I've read, you've essentially ignored every character's development because you decided to focus on a singular trait they have to the point that you even label them with just those traits and nothing more, completely dismissing all of the relevant characteristics they gained and lost, along with the connections they've made. 

I've got my own personal gripes with how they've done the narrative with this game myself, but I'm not going to ignore the fact that each character has developed, whether it's good progression or not is subjective, but the fact remains that they did actually have strong character developments and that's not something you can just erase because of a single trait you label them with. 

[LucianDK.8615]

The OP must be crazy if he doesnt want regular free content in between expansions. No, Living world is here to stay.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

Anet need to stop living world after EoD and fix everything that they have neglected for the last 9 years.

[Raknar.4735]

Sounds like a bad suggestion to me.