Guild Wars 2

Personally, I think the best part of your whole personal story is from levels 1 – 20.

I chose Asura because I like Asura. I chose Charr because Charr are awesome. Their 1 – 20 experiences are great, filled with all the racial flavour you expect from a member of that race.

However, once you join an Order, you leave everything you’ve done behind and become human. By that I mean that all personality has been stripped from your character. Does my Asura speak like an Asura? No, not at all, because the dialogue is shared between all races.

I guess that ultimately I identify much more with my race than the Order I chose, and would like the personal story to reflect that. I’d rather stick with my Iron Legion Warband than join an Order.

I know that it’s too late to change, but I put this here in the hopes that for future personal story content that Arenanet may decide to step back from the rather bland Orders to refocus on the races themselves.

I did like that first chapter a lot, as soon as you got told to join an order that pretty much turned me off on the story. I hope in the future we have the option to no have to join one and instead have a storyline that allows player characters to be unaffiliated.

I sort of agree. I’m a serial alt lover… and have now leveled three characters to 80 in order to explore the different order stories. Having said that, though… my intent was to level 2 more characters for one of each race for completion’s sake. Having witnessed all the order specific points along the way without any balancing race specifics… I’m not sure that I will level the other two races due to the perceived slogging repetition.

Also, would some class-specific story really be so bad?

Full and utter agreement. I am someone who loves nothing more than to immerse myself in my character’s culture and background, so I really enjoy those early story arcs. They allow me to actually feel like a sylvari/norn/charr, to play the character I created and wanted to play. I love talking to the Pale Tree as one of her “children” bearing a heavy burden and being helped by her to prepare for it. I love my warband buddy and the giving and taking of orders. I love the heady boastful confidence and living life to the fullest in the icy mountains.

Where is any of that once you join an Order? I don’t want to be a Generic Bland Human who is forgotten by everyone after each story arc and who displays no identifying characteristics whatsoever. Immersion and replay value suffer hugely as a result.

Please, for any future planned content, let us go back to our roots. Let culture and past choices branch out the main story so we can actually continue to play our characters instead of the Generic Bland Human that’s forced on us now. As it is, there’s just no appeal for me to spend any more money on this game.

My main character is already Human, and even he feels heavily stripped of characteristics in all his Priory missions. The ratio for the Racial and Order storylines should have been reversed in my opinion, transitioning to Order stuff some time in the mid 50s instead of mid 20s.

Just wanted to add my feedback and agree that the early personal story content focusing on your race and character creation choices was by far the strongest part of the entire personal story.

As someone else mentioned, part of the problem with the later personal story content feeling much less personal is that all player characters need to be homogenized into the same character, regardless of race, in order to fit the Order story and beyond. So an Asura, for example, really loses a lot of the personality quirks that make the Asura unique.

Additionally, they did a much better job of making you feel like the main character of the story. As a human street rat, for example, if you choose the option where Quinn gets killed, your character is the driving force behind the story. You tell Logan what you’re going to do about it, and he supports you. From the Order and beyond, you just follow what everyone else is telling you to do.

I enjoed the early parts of the various human/sylvari stories much more than everything else, I agree.

Seeing the choices you made in character creation play out in the earlier portions of the story definitely makes them very enjoyable. I certainly understand how it’s quite difficult to account for every race and the various "paths" within each race when fleshing out the Order portions, though.

For us alt-a-holics, at least our characters aren’t all humans from Ascalon venturing out into the world every time. ;)

Yes. The story loses quality at each sorting point. My guess is that they started out working on the start of the game and the racial stories and then after X amount of time realized, “kitten this is taking too long.” So they had to cut back on all the options and rush to finish the game. I miss you Zojja! Why don’t we hang out anymore?!

Racial Story (Great) > Order (Not Bad) > Pact (Bleh)

I don’t really care for the superfluous implementation of the orders in this game..i think it just serves as a way to consolidate, in a very unimaginative way, the lore and goings-on of Tyria. It also seems to be little more than a poorly implemented plot device. In all honesty, the story and flow of GW1 story was more engrossing and well designed in my opinion…i really fail to see where the creative vision took them with this. It all seems to be homogenized into a generic formula.

I agree as well, it doesn’t feel like I’m a charr after level 20. I got pumped for being in blood legion and doing missions with Rytlock but now….like it doesn’t even matter in

Oh and when you join the vigil? Straight out warning: “it doesn’t matter who you are of what have you accomplished you are nothing here until you prove it” or something liket hat was said…excuse me? I think I chose clearly what I am – a charr serving the blood legion with honorable soldier as my sire. I agree, the story when you join the Order is not uninteresting, it IS fun but I lost all ties to my character.

I can’t agree more.

The thing is it might look like an overwhelmingly huge task to prepare the story lines five times as large. However, I think it is still possible to manipulate a little bit.

For examples:

phase 1 : race oriented:
5 completely different story lines per race

phase 2:
profession oriented: 7 different professions can be categorised into 3 groups, and hence only 3 story lines are needed

phase 3: race oriented:
it can be one story line (or two story lines interwound), in terms of instances, but however different “dialogues” are implemented into the “same” instances.

phase 4: order/pact oriented:

Just a rough idea in hope that there can be a compromise so that we won’t lost the ties to our own race/profession yet the complexity of the multiple story lines can still be handled by anet’s story writers.

After we have successfully integrated different orders into one pact in the first release of the game, for the future expansions, I hope we can go back to our roots and start our own journey with our own people.

I rally can’t add anything to the above comments other than to say I agree with the OP and many of the supporting comments here in the hopes that AN will take this to heart.

Story from about 1-30 is great, after that it tanks. Hard.

Insert generic drama, kill off new boring npc you just met two minutes ago to create more drama….etc

It’s just…..boring.

The beginning story was full of humor, fun, and made it interesting, but still semi-serious at times.

The later story stuff is just too over-the-top, generic, and no humor at all.

I was going to add a thread similar to this until I found this one. I dislike complaining for the sake of complaining, but I feel this is pretty big issue, particularly for a game that was really trying to put the RPG back into MMORPG. I find it a real shame the further you go into the story the less personal and interesting it seems to become. This problem is further emphasized by complete lack of ability to choose your character’s personality and dialogue choices. This whole dignity/charm/intimate system was too shallow and underutilized.

Anyway, the Order stuff starts out okay enough but all this emphasis on Personal Story makes you think your earlier choices were still going to make some effect. I was somewhat enjoying the Charr storyline and my warband and hoped to seem them involved more at some point. I hoped to see my honorless Gladium father pop out and cause trouble again. I hoped to see that eccentric female Charr engineer I picked to join my warband and never saw or heard from her again??? I was given the impression she’d be a regular teammate. I could not find her anywhere, I even looked in the Hero’s Canton. Speaking of which, never even changes whatsoever anytime you go there.

I seriously hate to say this, but almost all the characters feel like cardboard cutouts, the beginnings of some potentially memorable characters but they never get there. I think only Tybalt so far as had some measure of personality. I have played the Sylvari storyline too and had the same issues. I can’t even remember the names of my Charr warband members anymore. Now I get that time is money, resources are limited and there’s only so much individual branching one can do before the story has to come together since everybody knows Zhaitan is the big baddie here, but I felt this happened way too soon and for a game that really put emphasis on Personal story, it only reached half the mark.

aedra.8361:

(…) but I feel this is pretty big issue, particularly for a game that was really trying to put the RPG back into MMORPG. I find it a real shame the further you go into the story the less personal and interesting it seems to become. This problem is further emphasized by complete lack of ability to choose your character’s personality and dialogue choices. This whole dignity/charm/intimate system was too shallow and underutilized.

Yes, exactly. I had hoped that without the genre’s usual myopic obsession with “endgame” and neverending gear inflation, there’d be more resources to spend on the story. And for sure it’s good that at least some MMOs actually try to add a story now (TOR, GW2). It’s a start, but it really falls flat due to the plot holes, disposable NPCs, horrible lack of continuity and, after the early chapters, a lack of personality as well. There’s so much wasted, underused potential in both the interesting cultural backgrounds and the absence of actual RP elements like conversation choices.

It would have rocked to have 5 more or less independent story arcs for the whole game — one for each culture, varied by both character creation and in-game choices. Just as it would have rocked to build a team of permanent/recurring characters and watch them be involved and grow in strength alongside me. Between each culture’s Destiny’s Edge member, people from the early story arcs, the cultural order representatives, maybe one chosen order mentor too, and yes Trahearne as well (written better and introduced early), it’d be a fun and diverse cast.

Yes, it would have been a lot of work. And no single character would see it all, but that would be a good thing because of the added replay value on top of the immersion factor.

I enjoy the Order stuff but I agree that I would have liked to see more racially based things in addition.

I did enjoy the order things as well as the racial stories.
The thing that bothers me the most is the untied ends that you get in the first 20 levels or so, that you never hear about again…
What happened to Maveryk? The Sylvari from the other strange pale tree? Where is this other pale tree? To just set an example...

I think it’d be great if in future expansions they could bring us back to our roots, make the story at least back to something racial. I’m personally dreading the moment my alt gets into the pact, because the story will generally speaking be the same, even though I have the ability to make different choices…

I really wish they had’ve gone with more racial stories, too. The first 30 levels are fun and full of racial flavour, but after that, it just becomes really repetitive, and as the OP stated, it doesn’t even feel like you’re playing a particular race; you just feel Human.

I think it’d be really interesting if each race had a (for the most part) separate story, and the stories for the various races intertwine and reference each other, before coming together at the end. We already see this a little bit, with various early NPCs making a shallow appearance towards the end of one’s personal story and with some of the racial Order stories (reclaiming Caladbolg, for example), but it’d be nice if it was a constant thing; it’d make it feel as if there are actually other people working to accomplish the same goals as you, instead of it being up to you to do everything (and Trahearne claiming credit).

I have to say I totally agree. For the first 20 levels, I felt like a member of an alien race, and culture. The further I got into the story though, the further I felt like I was moving into “human in a funny outfit” territory. I stopped feeling like a sylvari, and more like “generic hero #2”. Being introduced to Trahearne, long after I met him, having the sylvari I helped rescue from Orr when she had her mishap with the magic mirror not remember me saving her life, and other instances like that really break the immersion.