My Necromancer dresses in black, carries a focus called Bloodseeker, and uses a lot of blood-based magic, so I don’t even have to buy a costume! However, we’re pretty much waiting on big stuff for the foreseeable future anyway, which makes the difference matter a lot less to me. I’ve written a couple of times on the direction of the living story, and my overall conclusion is that a lot of the problems people have had with it — mostly temporary activities and a thin amount of actual story content — come back to ArenaNet’s decision to get reoccurring events designed, built and out of the way while restructuring the live teams to deliver updates on a two-week cycle. But making the mental leap from that to imagining the capacity of these updates to open up the path to Elona, or to provide a brand new racial capital and personal story is a little more difficult.

Rachel set up a page in the hopes of making some extra money and couldn’t believe the response she got. Set your jump-point past the break to see. Check out the full list of adapted works in the press release after the break. Don’t forget to check out our great collection of board game costumes and you can become anything from a twister board to a walking talking game of operation. “Thanks to Dracogen Strategic Investments,” said a quiet, falsetto voice that no one could figure out where it was coming from. It’s far more likely that the simplest answer is true: that the developers do have some new landmasses, races, or systems in development, but that those things are so far out from being ready that ArenaNet can take their time in deciding which form they’d like to release them in. That probably contributed quite a bit to the somewhat disjointed feeling of it; the developers needed to create a bunch of festivals, but the story team also needed to introduce the major characters and villains, and that led to a summer in which it started to feel like the people of Tyria were constantly and brazenly throwing parties in an attempt to taunt bad guys into attacking them.

At the start of the living story updates, lore-based speculation was rampant; that’s dropped off quite a bit as the content we’ve gotten has consistently introduced new story elements and shown every sign of concentrating primarily on Scarlet and her crew. Personally, I’d be just as glad to see the announcement of an expansion as I would be to have Scarlet suddenly and improbably gain the attention of the Tethyos Houses, prompting the Largos to join the alliance of playable races. We sat down with DDO’s team to talk about Update 18, the new races coming with Shadowfell Conspiracy, and the pre-purchase program that promises to give you head start. So I’m understandably not champing at the bit to talk more about the game this week, which I had originally planned. If fans have to wait another 5 to 6 months for the living story to bear fruit in the form of major expansion-level features and dragon-based plot progression, it’s going to seem more and more as though living world content and expansions are mutually exclusive. Every MMO I’ve played has gone through slumps where player interest in the current content and story arc has been mostly exhausted, and it’s usually excitement over an upcoming expansion pack that carries people through and keeps them playing (or at least coming back).

Adding a new race in particular seems like the kind of undertaking that would demand its own story arc. I think players are assuming — and not without reason — that we won’t see much of that stuff until Scarlet’s story arc has come to a conclusion, and that probably explains some of the impatience with it. Hundreds of millions players are playing league of legends, which has fully presented this video game’s popularity. There are plenty of places to start in your career as a clothes horse, such as at an outfitter (an NPC who sells basic outfits) or at the auction house. We know that the four living world teams are a small part of ANet’s overall development force, and that there are other teams working on long-term projects behind the scenes. ArenaNet’s goal is to create that kind of excitement every two weeks, but we haven’t gotten the level of buzz yet from the living story that an expansion — or expansion announcement — typically creates. For me, though, the big draw of living story releases instead of expansions would be seeing content released as it’s ready, without the need to wait to get a chunk of huge, game-changing stuff.