Guild Wars 2

I’m just going to break down the personal storyline by chapter. I suspect that many also have a personal point where it all went terribly wrong. As stated, spoilers are going to be entirely unmarked, so you should probably stop reading if you hate those sorts of things.

1-20: Intriguing, personal, often amusing storyline. Great introduction to your chosen race and the world of Tyria. Many of the characters just drop off the map between chapters, but this doesn’t do much to dampen my enjoyment of the story.

20-30: Your character is moving up in life. Not only are most of the Order quests fun, but the decision of which Order is one that genuinely requires a great deal of thought, often accompanied by an hour’s worth of second-guessing, before actually making a decision.

30-50: Working for your Order. Your mentor is a charming deconstruction of the archetypes you expected to run into when joining the Order in question. I found them to be one of the most enjoyable characters in the game. The missions are all fairly entertaining and varied, full of visiting exotic new locales and getting into trouble with your superiors. You rise in rank and fame despite some of your misadventures. This was, to me, the high point of the story.

If I knew what was next, I’d have asked for the rest of the storyline to stick to the status quo it had during the Order section, because it goes so downhill from here it’s depressing.

50: You go through a mission that can be paraphrased as “Someone you like gets killed off so Trahearne gets more screentime while you fight alone through waves of 9,000 kittens Risen because your allied NPCs are useless hunks of flesh with little HP, damage or threat generation.”

You can apply this loose paraphrasing to almost every mission from here on out – you can dub it the “Golden Rule of GW2 Story” if you want – but we’ll continue anyways for the sake of elaboration.

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50-60: Your mentor is killed off and Trahearne fills their role, only somehow managing to be even more useless. You spend much of your time trying to figure out how fix the screwup you made at the Battle of FPS-Death Island. Trahearne is given a magical sword, Saladbolg, and is revealed to be the Chosen One destined to cure Orr of its corruption. Don’t be alarmed, he’s still useless – his autoattack just has electrical noises, now, and he has a spin attack he’ll only use at max range away from the enemies.

The Pale Tree’s avatar asks you a question that causes just as much trepidation as the Order one, but this time because it feels like you’re handing the writers a loaded gun to kill off another character you like. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to happen, if only because the chapters from here on out are stonking broken.

60-70: Your “I have no AoE and must kill Risen” story is briefly interrupted, having you kill Flame Legion instead. This whole chapter is spent frittering about doing productive activities befitting the commander of a multiracial dragon-fighting militia, like tripping balls and nuking your own troops into the ground.

This culminates in the Battle of Fort Trinity, which makes no sense at all, because while you did recover an important magical artifact at level 69, it definitely wasn’t this one. After dying to gargoyles and suffering even more FPS death you realize you can glitch out the whole mission in order to actually get past it. For your ingenuity, you’re rewarded with a beautiful, mosaic-like cinematic regarding the Pact’s entrance to Orr. However, it doesn’t actually have any audio or dialogue – the game only shows the word “Trahearne” in the subtitles for the full minute and a half. You will eventually look back and realize that, no, you aren’t going insane, it’s just the game revealing the plot of the rest of the story to you, boiled down into one word.

Also, at this point, you’ve pretty much given up hope of ever seeing anyone from your Order again, or being recognized as a member of such in any meaningful capacity.

70-80: You spend half this chapter mourning some chick you’ve never met before because everything after the Battle for Fort Trinity is broken. You eventually get over your awkwardly-timed angst to go do some missions in Orr. Chances are if you like a character in any of these missions, they get killed off. To their credit, this is sometimes pulled off very well. Many characters show up from the 1-20 storylines, but they don’t remember you. You can, at least, learn some interesting lore regarding Orr.

80 (middle): Fight a bunch of mega-Risen, culminating in Trahearne completing his life’s work in a flashy-but-poorly-made cutscene while unfitting music plays. Congratulations, you’ve finished Trahearne’s personal story! At least Kormir had the decency to sound slightly inspirational when she took all your glory. Now all that’s left is to kill Zhaitan.

80 (end): PROTIP – Press “2” repeatedly to kill the Elder Dragon.

Chances are you didn’t keep up on the local gossip and opened all your loot bags from finishing the personal story. If you’re ever feeling masochistic, you can now deck yourself in a fresh, new set of level 30 blues. In other news, Zojja spontaneously develops a harelip, the music hasn’t worked for the past five missions, and the epilogue reveals that Trahearne and the Pact stand ready to leap at the opportunity to ruin any upcoming expansions.

Looks like our personal stories were a little different, but I agree that it went downhill from 50.

Personally I found Trahearne really annoying and one thing that bothered me was that he promoted me to Commander and was giving me all these special tasks to execute and yet most of the missions he was joining me. Why giving me the tasks in the first place when he will come along anyways? Why doesn’t he simply command the mission himself and be done with it?

Oh and why is the supreme commander of an oh-so-important multi-racial dragon-killing world-saving alliance doing all the dangerous missions at all? Shouldn’t he be staying in Fort Trinity, out of harms way, and keeping this whole operation running and, well, staying alive? Why not let his new and fancy Commander do all the dangerous missions alone?

I have to agree. As an asura warrior my initial storyline experience was kinda funny: I bashed stuff to get things done with a hammer, and all the cutscenes were about inventions, about being a genius with no peers. I guess I got what I deserved for breakng the canon. It was however mildly amusing and ok story. Nothing spectacular, but ok.

Things went on, joined the Vigil, and it appeared to fit my warrior class far better with kicking doors down and solving things with brute force. Still OK, nothing super great, but decent. I however really disliked however how fast I climbed the ranks in the order from mere recruit into warmaster in couple of quests.

Then came Claw Island, and things simply got out of hand fast.

My order got attacked, and apparently they were so incompetent in their defense, that they required my personal help to get some catapults firing and saving the day. Surely the Vigil is large and powerful enough to not rely on my character so completely. It’s ok to have such event where the Order is in threat, but the solution was terrible.

Then to get Claw Island back, and instead of helping to build a huge army for it, I’m sent to find single persons to aid the effort. Surely you jest?

The whole combining the orders was totally cheesy “together we can achieve great things”.

Rest I don’t even want to bother remembering. The general tone of it was bad storywriting that could have been far better if it wasn’t aimed for audience that has troubles following bit more complicated storylines.

This topic sums up my feelings on the last part of the story ending pretty well.

I feel extremely disappointed in how the game ends, first the story goes down the drain, then you are forced to do a dungeon that isn’t just horribly designed to begin with but also horribly bugged, and then you get level 20 blues. Yay!

To add insult to injury i didn’t even get credit for killing zhaitan so i have to do the that horrible dungeon AGAIN.

And then there’s the whole Orr farming endgame, with broken events, bugged skill points, and having to kill the same risen mobs over and over and over until the next expansion. Just for fun – try to do the 15 unique mob types daily in Orr – you can’t – there aren’t 15 unique mob types in Orr!

Well, I’m not a real story buff myself and skipped most of the dialog options I could. I began the personal story just because of the experience and potential gear “loot”, but winded up trying to complete it to get the back.

Not caring for the actual story, the missions “quest’s” in the end made me question my own sanity. That’s all I can say.
I have enjoyed myself in most aspects of the game, but now that I have gotten my back I’m all drained…

SWtOR’s personal story line was better done than this, and that’s quite the feat, since absolutely everything about swtor can be questioned.

agreed. i have stopped my personal storyline at the kill 5 million kittens quest because i dont feel like sitting there for what i believe is actually like 30 minutes killing waves of the same thing. its really boring.. sad to hear it just keeps going like that after

I felt it started getting worse from 30 onwards and at 50+ stopped paying much attention at all.

As an Asuran I was hoping to spend the game with my krewe and perhaps do my priory work from our lab but you never go back there or meet those characters ever again, then the priory leader forgets who i am during the meeting at claw island and introduces himself again.

I have the exact same thoughts, but the thing what really bugged me was the ending mission. THE. BIGGEST. LETDOWN. EVER. The whole time they were saying that Zhaitan was freaking dangerous and all and we kill it with some stupid cannons while pressing 2 the whole time. I was very, very disappointed. I hope they will fix this, because I wasnt amused at all. It was a bit of ME3. The starting was cool and the middle was cool to ok and then the ending was just worth vomiting over. What the hell?!

Btw. Trahearne was also a major letdown. His character was just a bad joke that started flat and ended very flat.

The ending was bad and they should feel bad..

The bit that was a big letdown for me was the fact that the big help comes from a Sylvari (guess the other races really are useless) but then we also have to go to the tree.

I mean come on, if I wanted to play a Sylvari, I’d have rolled one. Did you HAVE to force one on us, AND force us to hug the pale tree?

Why not let your starter quests’ companion, or maybe your race’s hero join you instead?

I got to the point where I phased the monotoned Twig out, and hoped my Norn warrior felt the same. Sadly at no point did my burrly avatar lean across the cut scene window and deck the overgrown shrub, and take matters into his own hands…