Living Story Lore vehicle needed.

#6 - Sept. 3, 2013, 8:17 p.m.

We’re currently working on a system that will better direct players through Living World content. Eventually, it will also provide story context for LW and other content types. The first phase of the system should be ready before the end of the year.

#17 - Sept. 4, 2013, 10:50 p.m.

It seems like there’s some misunderstanding regarding the purpose of the short stories that we publish on the Web site. They are not meant to “write outside the game” such that the game is unplayable without them, nor are they meant to provide vital information to the in-game story for a particular Living World release. They are purely optional stories meant to provide additional context and lore for those who care. If we felt that the inclusion of this information was critical to understanding the plot or playing the content then we would put it inside the game, plain and simple.

On a related note, some of the lore stories use imagery or situations that would be more difficult, time consuming, or expensive to replicate in the game. Some wouldn’t add anything meaningful to gameplay. So if you’re finding it stressful that these optional pieces exist external to a Living World release, I suggest not reading them.

You also have to keep in mind that we’re pacing the Living World stories such that you may not understand the full picture inside a given release. For example, Scarlet made her first appearance in August but she was hinted at in prior months. Her story has not resolved at this time, therefore we haven’t divulged some significant details about her origins or motivations. It’s understandable why some people would be upset or impatient by not getting these details all at once, but rest assured that we’re not conveniently forgetting about these tidbits—we’re just saving them for later.

Regarding SAB World 2, there is a story that is presented in-game. To experience it, first you must beat World 2 and then preview World 3. I won’t spoil it, so I encourage you to figure out the rest.

Thanks, as always, for the feedback. We read as much as we can.

#19 - Sept. 4, 2013, 11:37 p.m.

Elbegast.6970:

@BobbyStein
Don’t be condescending.

I don’t believe I am. Please explain.

Elbegast.6970:

You accuse us of misunderstanding the purpose of the website stories while the in-game storytelling is so poor as to be nonexistent.

Who did I accuse? Some people have expressed confusion or anger over some supplemental short stories on the official Web site. I was merely responding to that. Also, while I appreciate your honest opinion, I should remind you that not everyone shares it. I know that may be hard to believe but it’s true.

Elbegast.6970:

Then you tell us that it would be better if we don’t read the web stories?!? If that’s going to be your attitude, why bother to even write them?

Because some people appreciate them. If you don’t, that’s fine. If that stresses you out, don’t read them. It’s OK. Seriously. This stuff is meant to be enjoyed, not to annoy anyone.

Elbegast.6970:

The in-game plot, what little there seems to be, is stretched so thin that we, the players, are forgetting the ‘tidbits’. Your ‘pacing’ is far too slow. You may eventually give us some answers but only after we have forgotten the questions. Where does a player have to go to understand what is happening in this game? Because the game itself isn’t providing any answers whatsoever.

Actually, there are a lot more details in the game than you realize. Either you’re not catching them because they are subtle, or you may have missed the content entirely. I’m not sure in your case because I have no idea what you’ve played, what you’ve seen, or what you remember.

Some people understand what’s going on, others don’t, and some of that is due to a distinct lack of direction in regards to experiencing the Living World story. We’ve been aware of that limitation since day one, and we’re currently working on a system to address that before the end of the year. I sympathize with that. Trust me.

Can we improve on our storytelling or means of delivering plot? Sure. Who couldn’t! That’s why we appreciate honest, critical, and constructive feedback a lot more than rants or straight-up complaints.

Again, thanks for playing the game and taking the time to post. It means a lot to us.

#21 - Sept. 4, 2013, 11:51 p.m.

Good suggestions, JayMack. Thanks for taking the time to share that here.

The scenes in outside of Ketto’s lab go into some of these details, but I agree that having additional, optional items that add more depth to the story is always a good thing. We sometimes include this type of content in our LW releases (Southsun had journals) and other times we rely on dialog. The more we can include, the more people can better understand the story.

I also agree that having lore-dump NPCs is rarely effective, and often annoying.

We’ll keep trying to improve with each release.

#36 - Sept. 6, 2013, 4:22 p.m.

Elbegast.6970:

R. L. Stein Jr. is no ‘Jovial Bob’…

I don’t believe we know each other outside of the forums, so that statement is a little…strange.

Elbegast.6970:

…but I could really get behind a trail of in-game books. Providing, of course, those books are logged into an interface that would put them in order and allow me to read them at my own leisure.

The original plan was to have in-game books somewhat like the ones made available in the GW1 Bonus Mission Pack content. We wrote nearly 100 of them but were unable to implement them due to the book tech getting cut from development in the months leading up to GW2’s release. We may revisit the idea one day.

Elbegast.6970:

I’m just so sick of website-exclusive stories that are not even hinted at in-game, aside from the launcher window, that is.

Design discussions regarding the updated story interface are ongoing, but the plan is to group narrative information and player progress together like how we handle the Personal Story entries, but for other content types.

#37 - Sept. 6, 2013, 4:39 p.m.

Drakkon.4782:

moronwmachinegun.3815:

The giant tent over the Great Collapse is a great idea, but a real jamboree like that wouldn’t have been so secretive – there should have been NPCs – citizens, children, guards, etc – excited, happy, and concerned about the large event before it happened.

That’s called a “preamble” in narrative terms, and it is quite useful in moving a story along. ANet has been effective at keeping a story going into the next segment for stragglers who were just one achievement behind, but they also should be foreshadowing the next part of the living story, both to give the living story a narrative link through events, but also to reveal details that will become important in the next section and tie up loose ends in the previous one. Any loose ends not tied up could and should be considered a foreshadow in and of itself that it will come back later to be revisited. Annual events don’t need to be tied up in any way other than seeing NPCs cleaning up from the event, whereas build up beforehand would be nice to give a sense of impending excitement.

And don’t be that store that starts playing Xmas music in September (I’M LOOKING AT YOU LOWES!). That’s a bit too far in advance. Just a little foreshadowing and preamble would be nice.

We do this when we have the bandwidth, but it’s sometimes difficult to find the time and resources while juggling so many self-contained releases. I agree, though, that it’s an effective way of connecting things together, and we should strive to implement them more often.

#40 - Sept. 6, 2013, 5:15 p.m.

Elbegast.6970:

We have never met face to face but you have played my games and I have played yours. There’s a good chance you wouldn’t be in your position if not for my career.

Now I’m intrigued. Which of your games have I played?

#42 - Sept. 6, 2013, 5:29 p.m.

Elbegast.6970:

BobbyStein.2315:

Elbegast.6970:

We have never met face to face but you have played my games and I have played yours. There’s a good chance you wouldn’t be in your position if not for my career.

Now I’m intrigued. Which of your games have I played?

You tell me.
http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,23689/

Pleasure to meet you (virtually, at least). I played Brute Force years ago while at Microsoft. It was fun. I watched some friends play Wing Commander when I was in high school. I didn’t have a gaming Windows machine until I entered the work force some years later, so I missed out on some of the classics.

#67 - Sept. 8, 2013, 11:39 a.m.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

A new interactive book object in the Durmand Priory library (or multiple if need-be). Welcome to Paradise? That would have taken a bit more effort, best placed as an intro instance like the one made for the Bazaar of the Four Winds. What Scarlet Saw? A journal item dropped by Scarlet during one of the invasions, just change the writing to first person.

They don’t need to add anything to the gameplay. They add something to the story, and that’s enough to include them in the game.

I suppose I haven’t explained this clearly enough. We don’t have UI or tech to do this. The only thing we can do in the game currently is attach a short description to an object that is triggered by interaction (F to read, for example) or put that information inside a conversation tree. Those are our options. Neither solution is ideal for large chunks of text due to size limitations and usability restrictions. We’ve used both approaches on occasion to present details as you’ve described. But these current solutions are hard limited with how much we can display onscreen. They aren’t really appropriate for the amount of text information we’d put in proper books.

In other words, we can’t put these short stories into game UI because none currently exists that would support it. I know that sounds odd since we’re essentially talking about showing text in a window, but it’s a bit more complex than that. There is a lot of design, programming, and art that goes into building a system like this.

Do we turn the book into an item? If so, is it stored in your inventory? Do we build a separate tab for book storage? Is there value attached to it? Can you trade it with other players? How many characters per page are we limited to? How many pages? Does it have image attachment support? How would you navigate the pages? Does it scale from lowest to highest resolution properly with word wrap? Would we simply convert the Bonus Mission Pack book design over, or are there restrictions or dependencies with GW2 code that would make it difficult and time consuming? Can we attach items to the books? Can they be used to replay content or watch cinematics? These are just a fraction of the things that go into building a new feature.

Would I like us to provide in-game books so interested players can immerse themselves in the history of Tyria and the important characters of each release? Hell, yes! I’ve been asking for them for years. We wrote a bunch of them! But right now our UI and programming resources are booked on other projects. Will we eventually create these books? I hope so. But for the immediate needs of the Living World story, a tracking system is more important, followed by some type of journal support. We’ll build those first before committing to anything like books because our lack of a LW tracking system is making it difficult for people to follow the LW story, plain and simple.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Or does ArenaNet no longer care about their lore?

If you only knew how hard we’ve been working these past six years…

#69 - Sept. 8, 2013, 11:47 a.m.

Diovid.9506:

BobbyStein.2315:

If you only knew how hard we’ve been working these past six years…

I want to believe that, I really do but this interview happened:

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/lore/Angel-McCoy-Interview/first

Angel drafted a follow up to this interview that will be posted soon. It’ll put some things into perspective.

#73 - Sept. 8, 2013, 12:04 p.m.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I think the problem with the “tidbits” is the pacing and temporariness. And that they’re a bit too subtle in cases (made worse with the temporariness).

Things need to be in the game longer, especially the more subtle things. And things happen with too much in too little time. You basically give us 10-20 achievements to do, on top of the story itself, which again is on top of the “subtle tidbits” – which in turn is on top of the mini-games you introduce each month (sometimes more than one), and effectively give us only two weeks to do all of that.

The hardcore players will end up skipping over those tidbits. The casual players won’t have the chance to get at them because they’re too busy doing the more obviously-to-do things.

I cannot think of any system that can explain it, other than you telling us everything and not giving us a chance to find it out for ourselves. Like those guides you post for the content, before the content’s even released.

Understood. I am hopeful that some of the new systems that we have in development (the LW tracking system, journal tracking, etc.) will make it easier for folks to make sense of the long-term story.

I think the biggest challenge for the writers right now is getting enough story into each release such that people can understand where we’re going with everything. The fact of the matter is that we have a short amount of time to write, voice, and implement the content for each LW release (3 months on average up to maybe 4 months under ideal conditions). We also have limits in how much written and voiced content we can handle each month (text and VO budgets, essentially) due to limited resources (i.e. people) and a fixed deadline.

The LW story pacing is very slow in that it takes months for all the pieces to come together, whereas in the core game everything is available at once and you simply play through it in the proper order until you reach the conclusion. You consume it at your own pace. In the LW, you consume it at ours and I think that’s hard for many people to get used to, especially since we don’t have the right tracking system in place yet.

You’re right in that the temporary nature of the previous content also made it hard to experience at a comfortable pace. Some people raced through the content in an hour or two and then complained that the update wasn’t big enough. Others didn’t know where to go or what to do first. Some people missed it completely and lost out on a piece of the story that they can’t experience unless we bring it back or give them a mechanism to play it outside of the release window.

I’m happy to say that these comments haven’t fallen on deaf ears. I’ve been in many meetings about these very concerns. We have some solutions planned, but they will take time to build. I can’t be more specific than that.

I don’t expect you or anyone else to change your opinions based on this information. You’ll just have to wait and see what happens. If these new story bits and features improve the game for you, then I’ll be happy that we’re making the game better for everyone. If they don’t, then I’d like to know why so we can figure out ways to improve.