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GuildWarsInsider has a post up here about the workings of the Dynamic Event System.
For those that prefer to stay on-page:
For those that prefer to stay on-page:
Thanks so much HAPPYcat for the great read!!GW2 CBT3 Dynamic Event System Primer
By: HAPPYcat | Mar 26, 2012 | Featured,GW2 News,PvE,Video
Quest givers be dammed! Throughout your future adventures in Tyria, you won’t find a single one anywhere.
In Tyria’s future, there won’t be a single person offering quests, which is a radical departure from what we’ve come to understand as the traditional MMO. For once, we aren’t chasing little exclamation points intrusively floating above the heads of people the game tells us to talk to. In place of that stands the dynamic event – a new way of offering players an objective to complete without requiring them to accept it or even find other players to do it with. Both are handled by the game on its own.
The player versus environment aspect of Guild Wars II – and even World versus World PvP to a certain extent – employs dynamic events to get the world moving. A dynamic event is a sequences of occurrences taking place in the game that act like a news announcement about what’s going on in a specific area. In just about every corner of Tyria, the game gives you things to do, people to save, outposts to defend, or enemies to defeat. As a result, you will never again be asked to roam the land to collect random animal parts that, for some reason, can only be found on half of the things you kill.
In many cases, what happens in one dynamic event affects what happens next. Generally, should one event end in success or failure, something else will happen soon after as a consequence or benefit of the prior event. In other cases, events will start randomly, introducing a new set of foes or a new thing to do that you more than likely didn’t experience before.
Throughout my time in the beta this weekend, which was only about eight or so hours, I returned to several areas I had previously visited to find that they weren’t necessarily in the condition they were in when I left them. A great example of this is an early event chain available outside of Divinity Reach, the human capital in northern Kryta. It’s a farm with a number of items and objectives at the ready. Water buckets exist to put out fires and water crops, bags of grain lay around to feed the cows. Wurm burrows introduce hazards to the farm.
My first visit to this area found me killing wurms and feeding cows to help Farmer Diah – the owner of this fine establishment. Completing these objectives helped me complete an event asking me to help Diah, which rewarded me with experience, karma and a thank you note in my mailbox with some money attached to it.
Later on, I was moving through the area while exploring and I found that bandits were attacking the farm, setting fire to the hay bales in the area and more. Suddenly, the world had changed. The buckets of water that were once used to water crops were now serving another purpose – to put out hay bail fires.
A day and a half later, the farm was under siege from a Plains Wurm Queen who was seemingly upset by the fact that everal people had been slaughtering wurms on the farm for some time.
After my first tour through the farm, the game alerted me to another nearby event. Tragically, a nearby water supply was being poisoned by bandits. Me and several others made our way to the water supply area and spent about four minutes fighting the bandits, only to find that we hadn’t brought enough manpower to stop the poisoning of the water. As soon as the game notified me that the event had failed, the bandits retreated and the water supply started overflowing with some sort of green, toxic somethingorother. It was now our job to clean up the water supply, which was only achievable through killing ooze that had moved into the area and, on death, provided blobs of ooze that could be used to clean the water.
In another part of the human starting area stands a guard post that is a frequent target for centaur assaults. Early in my time in the beta, we were tasked with defending the guard post from seven waves of attacking centaurs, which we did. The next day, I came across the post under assault again, and this time the centaurs succeeded in destroying it. Moments later, a band of repairmen came from a nearby trading outpost to rebuild Altar Brook Guard Post, and it became our mission to defend the repairmen while the work was completed.
In my time in the beta, I was able to get to around level 10, so when I returned to many of the areas, my level was scaled down to match what I was fighting. When I returned to Diah’s farm for example, I was brought down to level four.
I had the skills of my current real level, but my health, stats and more matched what they would be had I been level four. Tragically, this left me overconfident and running into the farm like a hero, not realizing how susceptible I was to damage, and I suffered one of my only deaths in the beta to an attacking wave of bandits.
What the scaling down of level does for the game is it makes it so no matter where you go, no matter what events you are completing, they’re always going to be at your level. In Guild Wars II, it isn’t possible to say to yourself, you know, I’ll just go do that while I’m at a higher level because it will be easier. While you will have access to more trait points and a better variety of skills or weapons, you’ll still be only as strong as the level four and five players you’re grouping up with.
It’s because of this that Guild Wars II will be a challenge everywhere you go, no matter how far you’ve advanced through the game.
