Return of Season 1! [EoD spoilers within]

[Zola.6197]

I am really looking forward to having this content back in the game.

 

It will be a great way to shore up the new player experience for the steam release, and as a long time player and story/lore enthusiast, having full access to as much of the story as possible will be wonderful. I only got to play bits and pieces of season 1, and the rest I've had to rely on youtube recaps and wiki articles. Now new players will have a proper introduction to the Dragon's Watch characters without having to wonder who the heck they are once they reach season 2!

 

How do you think they'll format these five episodes? How much will have to be rebuilt/restructured? Will they tune up the enemies, make the instances more exciting? Or will they leave it mostly the same?

 

I expect a pretty straight adaption of the material as it was originally. It'll be well enough for me to have a complete story journal, and play the whole thing from start to finish.

 

It is fun to imagine what they could change, how they could change it, or if they could add new content to season 1 to make things feel fresh though. I don't remember the Commander being voiced, or at least not very much. Perhaps they'll record new voice lines? Maybe more development for characters like Mai or Scarlet especially given some of the revelations about them in EoDs (Scarlet in particular having once sought to prevent Mordremoth's awakening before losing herself). I honestly wouldn't mind if this is something of a remake or re-imagining.

 

They will probably have to restructure certain aspects of season 1 that aren't as easily translated to the episode format, though I am uncertain how much of that there would be to worry about. I wonder what they may have to cut, if anything?

 

Do you think we'll see old Lion's Arch return in some capacity? Perhaps we'll have it as a city instance and then it'll flip over to new LA once the story hits that point? Doubtful, but it's a nice thought. Maybe we'll get old Kessex Hills back, even as an instance?

 

Lots of exciting things to think about, but mostly just excited to see this old content returning! Can't wait for more details.

Edited March 23, 2022 by Zola.6197

[Ashantara.8731]

I am most excited about seeing a full instance of Old Lion's Arch, hopefully.

P.S. There is still the VIP area pass option, ANet. 😁

[NotTooFoolish.7412]

Battle for Lion's Arch did have an event all over the LA map. I think we'll get something similar, maybe in a for of instanced content?

[Danikat.8537]

I assume a lot of the open-world stuff will be moved to instances, especially things like the Battle for Lions Arch. I think they'll also have to change how some of the enemies work because combat mechanics have changed a lot since 2014. I know enemies don't normally use the same skills as players but changes to things like condition caps, defiance bars etc. will still affect them.

And of course they've already said they're changing the timing. For example we're getting all of Flame & Frost as one release and will be able to play through it at our own pace rather than having to wait for the next step to start.

But other than things like that I hope they keep it the same as much as possible. That's why I never liked the idea of bringing sections of it back as Fractals or whatever, it's not the same experience. I'm pretty sure there's a big chunk of the Molten Facility missing between the two Fractals for example. I hope changes are focused on making it work in the current game and the actual content stays the same as it was.

Oh, I'm also not sure how festivals will work. Dragon Bash, the Festival of the Four Winds and the Queens Jubilee all tie into the Season 1 storyline, but now Dragon Bash is in Hoelbrak instead of Lion's Arch and the Festival of the Four Winds and Queens Jubilee have been merged into one festival. I wonder if we'll get story specific versions of the festival (probably not with all the mini games and things) or if they'll update those steps to fit the new festivals.

[Zola.6197]

12 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Oh, I'm also not sure how festivals will work. Dragon Bash, the Festival of the Four Winds and the Queens Jubilee all tie into the Season 1 storyline, but now Dragon Bash is in Hoelbrak instead of Lion's Arch and the Festival of the Four Winds and Queens Jubilee have been merged into one festival. I wonder if we'll get story specific versions of the festival (probably not with all the mini games and things) or if they'll update those steps to fit the new festivals.

Specific festival instances sound like the easiest way to retain the original story beats and aesthetics. I suppose they could make them scaling instances similar to DRMs in that you could solo them or tackle it with a party publicly or privately.

 

On 3/24/2022 at 6:38 AM, NotTooFoolish.7412 said:

Battle for Lion's Arch did have an event all over the LA map. I think we'll get something similar, maybe in a for of instanced content?

It would have to be an instance I think. The blog post confirmed a “Battle for Lion’s Arch” strike, so I imagine the story version will be a solo-able version. Maybe a public instance like Dragonstorm.

 

It’ll likely be awkward however they lead us into that with old LA not existing as a map anymore, but there are a few ways they could make it work as an instance.

 

Destroyed LA might follow a similar example too, I suppose, unless they really bring back old LA and phase the maps until we get to LA’s current state.

 

 

Also, I wonder if Lost Shores will be included in one of the Season 1 episodes? It happened before Frost and Flame, but it might meld with episode 2 that might have more Southsun content.

[Linken.6345]

18 minutes ago, Zola.6197 said:

Specific festival instances sound like the easiest way to retain the original story beats and aesthetics. I suppose they could make them scaling instances similar to DRMs in that you could solo them or tackle it with a party publicly or privately.

 

It would have to be an instance I think. The blog post confirmed a “Battle for Lion’s Arch” strike, so I imagine the story version will be a solo-able version. Maybe a public instance like Dragonstorm.

 

It’ll likely be awkward however they lead us into that with old LA not existing as a map anymore, but there are a few ways they could make it work as an instance.

 

Destroyed LA might follow a similar example too, I suppose, unless they really bring back old LA and phase the maps until we get to LA’s current state.

 

 

Also, I wonder if Lost Shores will be included in one of the Season 1 episodes? It happened before Frost and Flame, but it might meld with episode 2 that might have more Southsun content.

Pretty sure the strike will be the battle on the breachmaker not the whole lions arch map.

[Zola.6197]

4 minutes ago, Linken.6345 said:

Pretty sure the strike will be the battle on the breachmaker not the whole lions arch map.

Ah, I may be misremembering what the blog post said!

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

On 3/22/2022 at 11:25 PM, Zola.6197 said:

How do you think they'll format these five episodes? How much will have to be rebuilt/restructured? Will they tune up the enemies, make the instances more exciting? Or will they leave it mostly the same?

I imagine for the instances, they'll be mostly the same. There were quite a lot more instances than people seem to credit, especially along the "key story moments". And in terms of difficulty - they won't need to rebalance as Season 1 created a slow ramping up in difficulty from core to Season 2 difficulty.

My worry is that I recall similar terminology when ArenaNet described the addition of Remembering Scarlet's War recap that's in-game now. So I fear that it'll only focus on those same plots - utterly ignoring Southsun Cove, Canach, Kiel, and O-Tron narratives.

Most open world content can honestly return as it was - especially the stuff prior to Tower of Nightmares update. It won't even be *that* disparaging given that we have S2, S3, and even S4 moments in the open world. But as they mention "key story moments" I think it'll just be story journal stuff. Which is very sad given how much character development happened elsewhere.

Quote

Do you think we'll see old Lion's Arch return in some capacity? Perhaps we'll have it as a city instance and then it'll flip over to new LA once the story hits that point? Doubtful, but it's a nice thought. Maybe we'll get old Kessex Hills back, even as an instance?

Old New LA will probably return in the same form as in the personal story. Don't think we'll get old Kessex back, but we might get the during-ToN Kessex to some degree.

Edited March 26, 2022 by Konig Des Todes.2086

[Zola.6197]

On 3/25/2022 at 10:27 PM, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

My worry is that I recall similar terminology when ArenaNet described the addition of Remembering Scarlet's War recap that's in-game now. So I fear that it'll only focus on those same plots - utterly ignoring Southsun Cove, Canach, Kiel, and O-Tron narratives.

That would be really unfortunate! I hope they don’t cut those aspects out, as those characters are pretty important to introduce and build properly.

 

When I initially met Canach and Kiel I had no idea who they were (Taimi as well), as I had missed those bits of season 1.

 

It would be great to actually have a reason to go to Southsun in the story journal.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

5 hours ago, Zola.6197 said:

That would be really unfortunate! I hope they don’t cut those aspects out, as those characters are pretty important to introduce and build properly.

 

When I initially met Canach and Kiel I had no idea who they were (Taimi as well), as I had missed those bits of season 1.

 

It would be great to actually have a reason to go to Southsun in the story journal.

Hopefully my worries will be for naught, though it does seem The Lost Shores is cut out, but we'll find out for sure in May when the second episode of Season 1 Return gets its trailer.

[Zola.6197]

5 minutes ago, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

Hopefully my worries will be for naught, though it does seem The Lost Shores is cut out, but we'll find out for sure in May when the second episode of Season 1 Return gets its trailer.

It would be nice to hear from the devs if they’re cutting out Southsun/other stuff… I suppose we’ll know soon enough, but more details on season 1 would still be appreciated.

[BobbyT.7192]

I hope they keep the south sun stuff, a plot point from the consortium and canach neared the end stemmed from the molten alliance. So it would make sense to include it.

I wonder how they will deal with the story event involving the festivals. Aether blades attacking during dragon bash, and the festival of the 4 winds which wouldn help explain some events in season 2.  

[Danikat.8537]

On 3/27/2022 at 10:40 PM, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

Hopefully my worries will be for naught, though it does seem The Lost Shores is cut out, but we'll find out for sure in May when the second episode of Season 1 Return gets its trailer.

I'd like to see Lost Shores return as well but I suspect it's harder than bringing back Season 1 because it was designed as a genuine one-off (and didn't work that well to begin with). If I remember correctly a lot of the steps were being manually triggered by Anet staff, which helped them delay or repeat things when they were bugged but wouldn't be practical for a permanent update.

I hope they do bring it back at some point though, and all the other South Sun storylines.

Edited March 31, 2022 by Danikat.8537

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

53 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I'd like to see Lost Shores return as well but I suspect it's harder than bringing back Season 1 because it was designed as a genuine one-off (and didn't work that well to begin with). If I remember correctly a lot of the steps were being manually triggered by Anet staff, which helped them delay or repeat things when they were bugged but wouldn't be practical for a permanent update.

I hope they do bring it back at some point though, and all the other South Sun storylines.

I believe it was all automated but without updates, similar to Halloween's acts in 2012 where the stuff would trigger at specific times.

Lag was horrendous, and the NPCs would be bugged frequently because they weren't designed for such high interaction rates (this got fixed later down the line in S1 I believe - at the very least it didn't happen nearly as often) which meant devs had to go in and fix things / trigger manually.

But all the things that made The Lost Shores "fail" are either fixed or were only an issue because it was promoted as a one time event prompting too many people to overstress the code/servers. Moving the Invasion of Lion's Arch and The Lost Shores metas into story instances (which would be necessary due to open world changes) and being available more than once would nullify both these issues. Meanwhile, having the story steps in Caledon, Kessex, and Metrica be permanent additions to those zones should be sufficient (they only bugged out due to amount of people trying to interact with the NPCs).

The 'problem' is primarily the work required to move those into instances and alter the triggers from "activate at this specific date/time" to "activate when entering instance". At least on the surface level - who knows what bugs the content would have accumulated similar to how SAB, a seemingly isolated part of the game, got bugged out to unfeasible playability by the end of S1 preventing its return for Festival of the Four Winds in 2014 and years down the line until it got finally fixed and brought back with Super Adventure Festival.

[Teratus.2859]

One benefit I think of this reintroduction is that the content already exists so they don't really have to make anything from scratch, just reorganise it into replayable content and maybe adapt it to new systems and of course rebalance a few things to bring it up to more modern game balance etc.

They certainly have the technology now to ensure those open world elements can remain in the game on the client side so only players doing the story can see/hear NPC's talking and stuff.
So I really hope a lot of the open world stuff is redone in this way and not completely cut out as it is important.

I'm actually curious how big these releases will be because they don't have to create new content from scratch.
Living world 1 did span something like 2 years I think so there was a lot a content spread out there.
It could end up meaning these 5 episodes are actually pretty big and full of content to play and that would be amazing tbh.
I won't get my hopes up too high on that one though, but if it turns out to be the case then i'll be very happy with these episodes.

[Zola.6197]

Recent blog post has more tidbits of information regarding season 1 narrative restructuring, and even some minor additions/adjustments: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/living-world-season-1-flame-and-frost-returns-on-april-19/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=news&utm_campaign=rss

 

“As originally released, Living World Season 1 wasn’t designed to fit within the Story Journal, so we’ve restructured the content to feel more natural alongside our modern content. These old instances didn’t need to be played in a specific order, so we wanted to make sure that Season 1 felt playable in a more linear fashion. We’ve also made small, impactful adjustments to make the story feel complete and fleshed out given these changes. Our standard of storytelling has evolved over the last ten years, so we’ve taken this opportunity to edit some of the older text and add some additional lore books in Episode 1 to meet our current standards and characterization.“

 

Mobile won’t seem to let me format this to look a little nicer lol.

[ugrakarma.9416]

Its seems they finally find way to master the famous "spaghetti code"? it wouldn't surprise me if its related to the announcement of re-hire of previous devs.