Guild Wars 2

Today I spoke with my roommate (Mesmer, Order of Whispers, 10 levels ahead of me) about the personal story. He told me that he was saddened by the death of his favorite character and companion in one of his story quests. Immediately I thought about MY favorite character, Forgal Kennson, from my Vigil story. As I heard what happend to his companion, I feared that would happen to mine too, so I felt a bit spoilered. At the same time I had very high hopes for ANet, that they wouldnt just repeat this motive in every personal story.

Well Forgal just died, so kitten (I took the liberty of already substituting it) that.

What are your feelings about that? Does it have to be this way to be fair to everybody or get them to the same goal at the end or could a little bit more variance make a big difference?

It kinda seems like lazy writing to me.

“Well, in this story path, we had the mentor die. What should we do for the next one?”
“Why don’t we just do the same thing for all of them?”
“BRILLIANT!”

Putting aside the repetition between the storylines, it doesn’t help that there’s not really any choices you get to make for your character that actually make any difference. You get to choose path A or path B, but both paths lead to the same goal, and don’t make any changes to how the story plays out. There’s no opportunity to fail a mission and have to approach the story from a different angle as a result. You don’t even get to choose how your character replies to most NPCs (despite the fury/dignity/charm system providing a perfect template to do so).

I don’t know if this is due to budgetary concerns, or if the writers just cut corners, but it smacks of laziness all around.

The Personal Story branches only in the first 20 or so levels, well a bit more as even the ones involving your first contact with the orders are unique to each race, well I guess until you meet that vegetable. But after that it’s all mainstream, your character loses his identity, as if it gets possessed.

I first joined the Vigil and when that moment came, when Forgal sacrifices himself to hold off the undead to make possible your escape, it sounded plausible, being a fierce Norn warrior. But then I see that every order has its martyr. It was OK for the Vigil(brute force), but not for the other two orders.

Admittedly I am only up to level 60, but it does feel like the “personal” story ends at level 20. I am utterly disappointed by this, after experiencing a few stories in the beta and having such high hopes for what may come in the 21-80 story for my characters. We were teased with that ever-present notification that “personal story will continue at release.”

Well, it didn’t, it just spun into, in my opinion, a boring story about dealing with the dragon and mindless undead. And I call them mindless undead because they were much less interesting for me to fight than some of the characters built up in the 1-20 story, such as Julius Zamon, the bandits, the complex sylvari guardian of the nightmare court who remains a very honorable character despite his evil allegiance, and the list goes on. I thought all that was great, but am quite bored by the “main” story (though there are some great characters like Tybalt).