ArenaNet’s Narrative Lead Bobby Stein has hit the Guild Wars 2 forums to address some of the concerns raised this week when a forum mod suggested raids might be a component of the upcoming season of living story, which actually seems to be true, just not entirely in the way players had feared.
First, Stein has confirmed that neither the current raid nor future raids will be a required component of the living world or any other expansion stories. “Raids do not gate main story progress,” he declares. “Raids are not part of our Living World episodes; they are separate game elements.”
Further, he says that “if any lore information from the raids is relevant to storylines in other content, [ANet will]Â make sure that information is also available in that other content.” Irrelevant lore information — which one might argue is most of it — and raid-related story content inside raids is not directly addressed.
As to the idea that the team is shuffling around to make all this happen, he writes,
“Output from the raids team isn’t coming at the expense of other projects in development. Raids are made independently of Living World. We do communicate regularly with that team (and we share some resources and assets in both directions) but neither team prevents the other from doing its job.”
So that should allay at least some of the worries provoked by the dungeon-and-raid forum specialist yesterday. Who’d have thought raiding in a game like Guild Wars 2 would be such a contentious subject, right?
