#10 - July 18, 2014, 8:43 a.m.
Hey guys – I can tell you that we have certainly looked at this issue, even as far back as Lost Shores, and it did come down to technical and logistical problems we are, at this time, unable to solve. Jia Shen is correct that our instances do not use separate maps from the open world, so if those maps change because of a larger world story event, like Lion’s Arch being laid to waste for example, then the story instances that take place in those maps will reflect whatever the current state of the world is.
We do have some limited ability to do phased instancing of certain elements within those maps, but not the kind of sweeping large scale terrain changes that result from the major changes we want to make to the world.
Solving this for our existing instances was not as simple as reserving a custom map for every instance, either, as that would entail a significant number of new maps to be generated, which would all need to be downloaded and stored in the DAT. There are hundreds of instances for the personal story, so even compressed that many custom instance maps would add dozens of GB to your DAT. So at the very least, we determined that we couldn’t accomplish this retroactively, but we are certainly still discussing all the implications of this limitation, and how it impacts your experience with our storytelling.
