Guild Wars 2 Dynamic Events System Q&As

ArenaNet’s newly unveiled “Dyanamic Events System” for Guild Wars 2 has triggered a lot of questions from the community, so lead designer Eric Flannum and lead content designer Colin Johanson have both taken time to address the questions in Q&A sessions on the game’s official blog. First, a snip from the Q&A with Colin:

Will dynamic events reset? For example, if an NPC dies in a dynamic event, will that NPC die forever for everyone in the world, or will she eventually respawn? What if players kill a boss in a dynamic event, and I logged off for the day and missed it? Are dynamic events really just one-shot, large-scale quests?

Colin: Dynamic event chains can reset. As chains, they move along paths based on player participation and event outcome. If an NPC dies in a dynamic event, their corpse might sit there waiting for players to come resurrect it and kick-start the event chain again, or it may re-spawn some time later.

Our event chains will never be lost to everyone in the world forever, they’ll simply cycle back into different states based on their outcomes, or they might not be actively running based on the current state of the event chain. If you and other players push an assault on the centaur base event chain to the point where you kill their commander, eventually the centaurs will choose a new commander and the event chain can begin again.

Changes from events will not be permanent and last forever, but they will change the world directly and last for a period of time long enough that it feels like what you did matters and has an impact. If we wanted every event we designed to run only once, we’d need to hire approximately 100,000 people to make enough events to fill GW2. Since our budget isn’t quite that big, we’re going for the next best thing and creating awesome cycling event chains that allow you to experience a wide variety of ever-changing content, but allow us to use event chains more than once.

With our dynamic event system, you’re never really missing the fun stuff, just experiencing different fun content than someone else at a specific time. It gives the world a feeling like there is always something exciting and fun going on out there that you may have never seen before. You don’t feel let down because you missed an event; instead, you’re excited to discover the next event!

And then a snip from the Q&A with Eric:

Is the term (quest) reserved for the personal story? Will we have traditional quests in addition to events?

Eric: We’ve actually gone away from using the term (quest) to describe any of our content. The feeling is that the word has a lot of baggage associated with it. It brings certain expectations and preconceptions that we don’t want players to have in mind when they play our game.

That being said, there are no traditional quests in Guild Wars 2. We have three main types of content in the game. First, we have events which we’ve started talking about in some detail. Next we have the personal storyline, which is probably closest to being what players usually think of as a (quest) and yet it’s very different at the same time. We’ll be talking about the personal storyline very soon. Then we have dungeons, which are organized group content, but again with ArenaNet’s own particular twist. We’ll talk about dungeons a little further down the road.