This week's article of The Scrying Pool looks at how Scarlet fits in the Living World releases.

The immediate response might be simply make more content. If the small bit is outbalancing the larger bit, just make the large bit larger. It isn’t that there isn’t enough content for a typical release, but in how the content and story is being portrayed.

In game design there is this constant balancing act between players watching a story and actually playing it. The comment usually made about this is that if you wanted to watch a story being told, why would you be playing a game when you can get Hollywood quality movies?

ArenaNet seems to be taking this sentiment to heart. While there has been a fair share of cutscenes over the course of the Living World releases, most of the story being told is for players to find on their own within the world. The relationship between Kasmeer and Marjory Delaqua is a good example. You could find out a lot about those characters by sitting in Kessex Hills during the Tower of Nightmares content patch and waiting for the random dialogue to pop up. I personally would have missed almost all of that if not for a fan recorded video showing each exchange between the two NPCs.

Probably the best by way of being whole and direct has been the short stories, released not in-game but on the official Guild Wars 2 website. All of these short stories have been tied to new characters’ backstories. Through these we learned what happened to Rox’s original warband and the beginnings of the villain known as Scarlet.

What I would like to see is stories like these telling the current Living World’s story. What I imagine is a Living World journal with pages that fill in, giving players blocks of text that tell the current story in its entirety, not something that players must piece together through little bits of dialogue.

Something that I mentioned in an earlier Scrying Pool is that I was worried that because the short stories were not in game players were not going to bother reading them or possibly not even know they were there. That’s why this journal would need to be something in game for players to see.

While not quite what I was envisioning, the My Story tab within the Hero’s panel could be copied to create a Living Story tab. The text area would give a nice section to fill in players on the story, and multiple pages could be used if more text was need than fits on a single page. And as for the concept art at the top of each page, almost every release has had its own concept art on the preview page.

Most of these story pages would then show how little Scarlet factors into each patch’s story. The Nightmares Within would be full of story of the Krait and Nightmare Court with only a line or two of how Scarlet escaped the tower but not before reminding us that we don’t know what she is planning.

I wouldn’t release these pages based on achievements or finishing the meta achievement. A page would be time released to appear for everyone. I imagine that this would be two or more pages for each release, one that would be visible on patch day as has happened until now, sort of like the “Last time on…” at the beginning of television episodes. The other could then release a week after a patch (the same day that the next release’s teaser page would go live). This would be the page that tells the story of the patch. With releasing in between the two patches it would allow players to discover the story before the page is revealed but wouldn’t be so late that it is overshadowed by the story in the next release.

What I like about this time-gated release is that players who are new to the game or coming back after missing previous Living World releases would have an easily available source to read and get caught up on the previously told stories. If the pages opened up for doing the content, these players would still not have that valuable resource.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams can't wait to get into the Edge of the Mists.

My small little guild was one of the 1000 guilds that ArenaNet invited to the Edge of the Mists beta last week. Everything I have seen of the map makes it look amazing.

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