Having now gotten a few story modes under my belt, and completing my personal story on two separate characters, something’s been bugging me. There is a major disconnect between the personal story and the story mode dungeons. But this shouldn’t be the case.
There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, the primary character we are introduced to first in all our stories is our racial member of Destiny’s Edge. For the first 30 levels of the personal story, we adventure beside this individual as they help and guide us through the various challenges we face. At level 30, Destiny’s Edge has their first fateful meeting in Lion’s Arch. This remains one of my favorite parts of the personal story, mainly because of the excellent way that the events that lead to their breakup are explained by the children. In any case, the meeting goes badly, but Eir thinks she can reconcile the group by going to the Ascalonian catacombs.
Now, at this point, it would seem perfectly natural for the next story mission to feature your character going to said dungeon to accompany Rytlock to find Eir. It seems to be the natural progression of your early levels. Instead, you’re disconnected from this completely, and taken off on the Order missions. All this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem of course, except for the very final mission, which involves you doing Arah story mode. Your character meets up with the re-united Destiny’s Edge, and Caithe praises you for getting the team back together again.
But wait. There’s no actual check to see if you’ve done that or not. These characters are acting as if you’re some kind of hero who knows them all intimately, when in fact the last time you even saw one of them was fifty levels ago.
You could say that forcing people to do dungeons to progress their personal story isn’t a desirable thing. I would raise two counter points to this. Firstly, the existing personal story already forces you to do this with Arah. Secondly, story mode dungeons are currently extremely unpopular since there’s no reason to do them as the rewards are poor. Properly integrating them into the story would go a long way to fix this.
A frequent critisism of the personal story is the lack of persistent characters. Characters come and go, or are killed off, leaving the player feeling like as soon as they’ve gotten to know someone, they’re gone. But wait a moment. There are persistent characters. Destiny’s Edge. What better choice could there be than the mentor who leads you from the beginning? Why cut them out of the story? This is doubly damning when we consider that it isn’t Trahearne standing by your side when you kill Zhaitan. It’s Destiny’s Edge.
For that matter, why do story modes require 5 people? A far better solution would have been to make all the trash mobs into regular mobs, champions into veterans, and bosses into the slightly nerfed champions we encounter in our personal story. Beef up the Destiny’s Edge members so they feel like assets. It’s you and the heroes of old against the horrors of the dungeons. Would be an excellent way to introduce people to dungeons as well.
But I digress. My main point remains that the personal story feels like it swerves off track at level 30, only to act as if it didn’t at the final stage. Integrating the existing story modes into the personal story would, I believe, have resulted in a far better story experience for the player, especially as some of the story mode dungeons are really quite excellent in terms of narrative.