Will this be similar to: hub to hub quests (events)?

nomss

I have kept up with with Guild Wars 2 pretty well. I was just wondering; will this play similar to the likes of WoW, Rift in regards to quest? I know we won't have to go and actually accept the quest, so in this case it'll be similar to the Rift's rifts. In rift I did not fell the adventure. I played for 2 days straight but I was stuck in this forsaken Jungle for too long.

Will the sceneray change at a good place? Will we get to fight lots of different mobs all the time? Say we go to event B from A, the mobs will be different, I am sure, but will event B send be back to A?

In Rift I kept having to go to same place few times and it was painful to kill the mobs that I had already dealt with again and again.

Kingdouglas

I guess this question will be more and more common, if GW2 events work like rifts in Rift. I would say that we don't know enough yet to say how all events are, we only know of the ones in the first demo.

Ablestron

its not good to compare dynamic events to rifts, since rifts generally only spawn in the same locations every time and are repeated over and over, while Dynamic events chain and have cicles and triggers that cause curtain events to happen. One is fairly stagnate while the other has a flow. (Notice that it isnt the rifts that pull you from one hub to another but the same quest system we've alwayse seen) 

I beleive its the personal storyline that takes you from place to place, not the dynamic events. Not to say that you couldnt level up on dynamic events and just head off to the higher level area, but for that flow that pulls you from one end of the map to another, I would have to say that its the personal storyline that does this. 

In the demo when I  played human the first few parts of my personal storyline took place in the city, but soon I was going out side the city to go to places where other parts of the story would unfold; and along the way I would encounter an event that was loosely connected to my personal storyline (Such as more bandits making a ruckus, when my story has bandits in a cave I must defeat to rescue some friends). 

So events can connect to the personal storyline and can take place throughout a map taking you from location to location, buts its the personal storyline that really gives you a specific purpose for being there and going there (well, beyond just being plain heroic that is).

Kleir

Originally posted by Ablestron

its not good to compare dynamic events to rifts, since rifts generally only spawn in the same locations every time and are repeated over and over, while Dynamic events chain and have cicles and triggers that cause curtain events to happen. One is fairly stagnate while the other has a flow. (Notice that it isnt the rifts that pull you from one hub to another but the same quest system we've alwayse seen) 

I beleive its the personal storyline that takes you from place to place, not the dynamic events. Not to say that you couldnt level up on dynamic events and just head off to the higher level area, but for that flow that pulls you from one end of the map to another, I would have to say that its the personal storyline that does this. 

In the demo when I  played human the first few parts of my personal storyline took place in the city, but soon I was going out side the city to go to places where other parts of the story would unfold; and along the way I would encounter an event that was loosely connected to my personal storyline (Such as more bandits making a ruckus, when my story has bandits in a cave I must defeat to rescue some friends). 

So events can connect to the personal storyline and can take place throughout a map taking you from location to location, buts its the personal storyline that really gives you a specific purpose for being there and going there (well, beyond just being plain heroic that is).

well stated!

I also wanted to add on about personal stories... They are your "purpose," they are the storylines, they are the game.  Dynamic events just keep things new, lively, and spontaneous, giving the freedom to sidetrack and still be doing something productive.  When I mean productive I mean you are actually effecting the world, winning rewards, and gaining experience.  This is supposed to replace other methods of leveling to press forward through the storyline such as grinding or completing lists of quests.  Naturally the personal stories change for each player, depending on race, personality, decisions you make, etc. So each time you create a character they may go through different storylines.  And they all tie up at the end where everybody meets up to defeat the elder dragons.  Then you have minigames in towns that you can play if you're bored and want to have some unproductive, mindless fun, along with the social aspect of towns.

Quizzical

There won't be the traditional quest hubs.  There will be quests scattered throughout the game world, like happens in areas with quest hubs, but a given quest usually won't be active.  You can wander around the game world and sometimes run into, there's a quest in progress here, so you might want to join it.

There will be quest hub NPCs who will tell you, these are the nearby areas that could conceivably have a quest in progress, but there usually won't be one at any particular area.  Talking to the NPC is unnecessary.  He'll just help if you can't find the dynamic events or want to know what could be there some other time even if it isn't up right now.

Ablestron

Originally posted by Quizzical

There won't be the traditional quest hubs.  There will be quests scattered throughout the game world, like happens in areas with quest hubs, but a given quest usually won't be active.  You can wander around the game world and sometimes run into, there's a quest in progress here, so you might want to join it.

There will be quest hub NPCs who will tell you, these are the nearby areas that could conceivably have a quest in progress, but there usually won't be one at any particular area.  Talking to the NPC is unnecessary.  He'll just help if you can't find the dynamic events or want to know what could be there some other time even if it isn't up right now.

I think its a bit confusing to use the word quest, since Dynamic events are so different. Better to use the termonology that Anet uses when describing it, or people might get the wrong idea. 

But other then that it's spot on. Sorry for critiquing....

grimm6th

There is a really BIG difference in the questing structure of GW2 and other games like rift (yes, now everything will be a rift clone).  First is that there are no "quests" in GW2.  You generally quested alone or in small groups and they were generally on off things.  I know the reason I did them was because I hated the idea of leaving a quest untouched (in GW1 I have EVERY quest in prophecies momorized).  In GW2, dynamic events are done because you see something happening, or a group of people are there and you decide to join in.  They repeat so that you can decide to do it now, later, or both now and later.  Events aren't the completion oriented thing that quests are, as there isn't a quest list or any explicit reward for doing each and every event (though, you could decide to try anyways).  They are participation oriented.  You play, you have fun, you learn about the story by participating in the story, people in the town recognize that you have helped out (karma, hearts) and you go along and find more fun thigns to do.

 

Also important to defeating the quest hub feel of the game is that there isn't really a way to build events into a hub.  Because events happen in an area, and you really just have to go looking for events and run across them through exploration, and also because there is no person or place to turn the quest in and get a reward (rewards are given when the event ends no matter where you are), there is no reason to have a hub.  Now, that in no way means that a gathering of NPCs won't happen or won't serve any purpose, but rather that the gathering of NPCs (in the form of small towns, outposts, camps, etc.) will be a part of the events in a way that is very unlikely to have occured in other games.  For one thing, there are only 5 towns in the game that can't be attacked (the 5 racial cities), which means that just about any NPC can be killed by enemies, and just about every area can have an event going on there.  You never know what kind of events might be happening at the time you go through the area because the events have an effect on the world around it.  A farm gets burned and the cows get killed, which means merchants won't be carrying certain things and obviously hunger of the town NPCs would be an effect.  This would kick off related events which wouldn't have happened if the event before it hadn't failed.  Basically, there is no real reason why you should feel lost in a world without a story in GW2 (like I sometimes am in quest hub text based questing games) or for things to get very repetative overly quickly (in Rift, rifts where basically all the same, basically always in set places, and basically never felt like they were worth doing.  They don't really have a sense of story or world building either...)

 

As if the above reasons weren't enough to convince you that events won't be anything like the quests of rift or WoW, take into account that some events will be very big group fights (the shatterer, shadow bohemoth, or the smaller drake broodmother), which have a tendancy to gather a bunch of people into one area to play together.  After the fight people might just group up and have fun and do events with each other.  Oh, and they aren't boring waves of mobs and then a boss fight either, like in rift...that is so boring.

Kingdouglas

This video explains some of this stuff:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013691/Designing-Guild-Wars-2-Dynamic