Guild Wars 2

Dear ANet,

I just finished the Retribution part of my story line (taking back Claw Island) and l am so amazed and very happy with Order of Whispers.

I am usually critical of the different game elements in Guild Wars 2 (this game still needs a lot of work, seriously) but one thing that exceeded my expectations was the Order of Whispers.

There are so many things I like about them. The top 5 are:

1. The members of the Order of Whispers are so brilliantly characterized. The characterization of each member was so spot on – from Riel, to Doern, to Demi, to Lady Wi. You made each character so distinct and interesting with just a few lines of dialogue. The voice acting was very very good as well across the board for all members. My favorite characters in the Order has to be Riel and Doern.

Also, Doern is SOOOOOO hot. >_<

2. Tybalt was so adorable too, and his character was so earnest – such a contrast to the other members of the Order, but it worked really really well. I enjoyed having him in my story, especially his quips and his unusual obsession with apples. I miss him. T_T

3. The armor style is so sexy but classy. I love it!

4. The initial Whispers quests were very well thought out and just fit and enhanced what my idea of Order of Whispers are. I love the drinking game in Gendarran Foothills, I love how they work behind shadows manipulating events, I love the role they played in Retribution. I love how they have the least amount of the stupid “you against waves of mobs” type of encounters. I love how you really felt that you had to be all stealthy and manipulative and such during their quests. JUST SO MUCH LOVE for this faction.

5. The Lore. From hints of the story of the previous Master who got corrupted to the idea that they are the oldest of orders, I really felt so engaged and compelled by the Order of Whispers story line. My other character is in the Durmand Priory and the questline for Durmand is a yawnfest compared to Order of Whispers. I love the Order of Whispers because they’re like the MI:6 of Tyria and I always feel like James Bond when I’m doing an Orders-specific quest.

So ANet, thank you, thank you, thank you!

The fly in the ointment:

Okay, so before I end this post I just have to say this, coming down from the epic awesomeness of the Blightghast fight:

Trahearne…? SERIOUSLY?? WHY?!?!

You ruined a perfectly good story with this bland, one-dimensional, humorless, useless plot device. I can’t even consider him a character because he has none. I play sylvari and I hated him from when I met him when I was level 16, ankittenpt wishing he’d just be like some fungal infection that would go away after a time.

I don’t understand why he has to be the one given Caladbolg. Notwithstanding the fact that he gets all the glory and “leads” the three orders, he dies in every frikkin encounter and he’s utterly useless.

Add to the fact that he’s such a poorly written plot device, the voice acting for him is SO BAD. I don’t know if it’s that monotonous drone, or the fact that he has no depth whatsoever and he delivers each line as if he was in a boring math lecture. There are so many many things that’s going on with Trahearne that’s just so wrong.

I play a male sylvari and the voice acting is excellent – so being “Sylvari” is no excuse for that awful voice acting job.

Random NPCs in the city have more personality than Borehearne. The fact that he takes over my story is bad enough, to have zero personality is adding insult to injury. I wouldn’t have minded if Doarne or Tybalt took over my story. They were absolutely interesting, engaging characters.

Trahearne just isn’t. I really can’t wait for him to die. Seriously. I hope he does some “I’m gonna be a martyr and shed my sap to cleanse Orr” angle so we can get rid of this annoying plot device once and for all.

I agree, I l LOVED the Order of the Whispers story, but felt like it went downhill afterwards.

Tybalt was such a great sidekick for your character. He was funny, earnest, and you really felt for him. I would have loved to have him with me all throughout the story. Whoever wrote Tybalt needs to be in charge of the entire writing team lol.

But yeah, Trahearne…he’s just dull. Whereas with Tybalt, I could totally identify with this goofy guy that was almost considered a joke, yet always felt a burning desire to prove himself. He was such a human character…despite not being human lol.

Trahearne though…he seems like he only exists for the plot. Everything he does is plot driven. I have to get this sword. I have to form the pact, I have to save Orr. I really don’t know what his character is…it’s pretty one-dimensional. The only character development he has is a bit of self-doubt before accepting his destiny, but that was short-lived, and honestly felt a bit cliche (every hero has their moment of self doubt).

Sad thing, that only happens with OoW, on each other order Trahearne could even be counted as a improvement from a pure, this is war vs a massive enemy force and same on how developed the character is.

I liked the OoW story line. Tybalt is by far one of my favorite NPCs. Demmi isn’t bad either. My biggest complain for the story line was the revealing of the Master of Whispers. I just felt it was very poorly executed.

I dunno Sieran was fairly developed in the Priory. She was definitely not Tybalt, but she is better than Snoreherne. OP is right. I enjoy hearing my male Sylvari talk, but Traeherne sounds like that high school math teacher whose class you slept through because he was so boring.

I despise Tybalt. He’s an excellent character, though in no way was he suited for a secretive order that accepts very few failures. The fact he added an element of comic relief to almost every Order of Whispers mission was a little annoying, too – especially since it came at the cost of the giving the more important and intriguing lore figures much less screen-time.

Garenthal.1480:

I despise Tybalt. He’s an excellent character, though in no way was he suited for a secretive order that accepts very few failures. The fact he added an element of comic relief to almost every Order of Whispers mission was a little annoying, too – especially since it came at the cost of the giving the more important and intriguing lore figures much less screen-time.

Gotta agree with you there. Tybalt was definitely a likeable character (although they took the whole “apples” gag way too far), but I really would have liked to have seen him used somewhere outside of the Order of Whispers storyline. I couldn’t take the OoW seriously because of him.

I think that was the point of Tybalt. He’s there as your partner in the Order of Whispers to completely destroy any notion that the Order of Whispers was only full of stock no-nonsense assassin-temperament characters who are only cold and unflinching. Rather than that, they’re made up of people from all walks of life who each have something to contribute information-wise to the order for the goal of taking down the dragons.

So, you know, rather than an order where everyone is one-dimensional, you find out that everyone feels like a real character that aren’t conforming to your standards of what a spy organization should be like. It also makes it scarier since that Apple vendor who cheerfully sold you apples is exactly who he appears to be despite passing off info to the Order. There’s no finding some cold-exterior under a warm facade, no telling right off the bat that someone is acting nice because they aren’t acting. They really are nice and they’re still a part of a continent-wide spy organization.

Actually all the Orders of Tyria have great and well crafted characters, the stories as quite a lot of fun, right up to Claw Island.

Arena Net did a great job with them, not so much in some other aspects of the story. But with these specific parts they did very well.

1. I don’t have a sylvari. What does Trahearne do in the sylvari questline? Does his character get developed at all there? Or is he just another, “Hey I need your help get the Orrian MacGuffin for me plz”

2. And what if Trahearne was actually an interesting character? How interested would you be in the story then? I think the problem extends beyond Trahearne himself.

There aren’t many plotholes in the personal story, but the ones that I have found are pretty critical. For example:

Asura level 30 quest. You get the word out about Professor Gorr’s theory that dragons consume magic, despite the Arcane Eye’s attempts to repress you. What happens next? The council comes out and says that they’ve known this all along, and that they’re just going to go along like nothing happened. Zojja then takes about 5 seconds to say, “You’ll never get away with this!”. This entire plotline is never mentioned again. The very next quest is the meeting in Lion’s arch with your mentor. Umm… what??? The only explanation I can think of is that your character is moving on to bigger and better things, but still, we don’t get even a hint as to what happens next?

On top of that, there’s the whole concept of the “branches” in the personal story. No matter what branches you take, you’ll end up at the same ending. They aren’t really branches at all, are they? Though it’s hard to be mad at Arenanet for this, since coming up with, much less coding 100000000 different endings simply isn’t feasible.

But why not, say, 3 to 5 possible endings? I strongly believe that Orr shouldn’t be the only endpoint of the personal story. Arenanet kind of backed themselves into a corner by making Orr the only real endgame zone. Frostgorge sound is the only other place that comes close.

Hopefully when more content comes out, there will be more lv 80 zones, and more possible branches for story.

I very much enjoyed all of the orders up to Claw island, some very fine writing there and missions that reflected the different “temperaments” of the orders.

Post Claw Island the quality of writing has dropped, while the glitches have increased … and yes, I’ve complained bitterly about Trahearne elsewhere.

Currently only one of my characters has progressed beyond Claw Island, I see no point in participating in something I think is sub-standard. On the bright side, there’s a lot of other cool stuff in the game to engage with.

MasterGeese.4756:

1. I don’t have a sylvari. What does Trahearne do in the sylvari questline? Does his character get developed at all there? Or is he just another, “Hey I need your help get the Orrian MacGuffin for me plz”.

As a person who has played 3 Sylvari characters on different personal story arcs, I am going to say that it does not help to be Sylvari. He arrives out of nowhere after the first arc of the Sylvari story, then he does exactly what you just mentioned up till you start working with the Orders. Actually it’s more of like:

Pale Tree: oh by the way, Trahearne has arrived. he’s like, a scholar in Orr, ya know?

And Caithe is like:

Caithe: ZOMG I can’t wait to see him again.

And then you go meet Trahearne and he’s like:

Trahearne: Hello chump. I’ve spent years studying Orr. You do not know it yet but I will take over your story despite the fact that I will be utterly useless in ALL of your quests and I will keep dying despite carrying the legendary greatsword Caladbolg which you rightly deserved not withstanding the fact that I’m a necromancer and necromancers can’t equip greatswords in this game, but apparently ANet run out of budget and hired mediocre substandard scriptwriters so you’re stuck with me. In the meantime, I need these chores done. Now go.

So in short, Syvlari actually get the short end of the deal because we have to endure him from level 10 or so onwards.

Andele.1306:

Sad thing, that only happens with OoW, on each other order Trahearne could even be counted as a improvement from a pure, this is war vs a massive enemy force and same on how developed the character is.

I will have no ill spoken of Gixx and Sieran! Durmond Priory all the way!

Atmaweapon.7345:

I think that was the point of Tybalt. He’s there as your partner in the Order of Whispers to completely destroy any notion that the Order of Whispers was only full of stock no-nonsense assassin-temperament characters who are only cold and unflinching. Rather than that, they’re made up of people from all walks of life who each have something to contribute information-wise to the order for the goal of taking down the dragons.

So, you know, rather than an order where everyone is one-dimensional, you find out that everyone feels like a real character that aren’t conforming to your standards of what a spy organization should be like. It also makes it scarier since that Apple vendor who cheerfully sold you apples is exactly who he appears to be despite passing off info to the Order. There’s no finding some cold-exterior under a warm facade, no telling right off the bat that someone is acting nice because they aren’t acting. They really are nice and they’re still a part of a continent-wide spy organization.

I agree with this totally! If you choose the Grawl as your tribe, you get to go to Dredgehaunt Cliffs and the Order of Whispers agent there is a sylvari who runs a homestead full of Orphan Norn kids (and one Charr orphan). I had met her before on my main who is part of the Durmand Priory. Never once would have guessed she was Order of Whispers. Just seemed like a nice lady who wanted kids but couldn’t have kids on account of being a Sylvari and thus taking care of kids who needed a mother. But no, no, she’s a Whispers agent keeping an eye on things for the Order. Was totally shocked! But that’s how it should be, if you can tell person X is a spy, then person X is not a very good spy.

Tinni.4351:

I agree with this totally! If you choose the Grawl as your tribe, you get to go to Dredgehaunt Cliffs and the Order of Whispers agent there is a sylvari who runs a homestead full of Orphan Norn kids (and one Charr orphan). I had met her before on my main who is part of the Durmand Priory. Never once would have guessed she was Order of Whispers. Just seemed like a nice lady who wanted kids but couldn’t have kids on account of being a Sylvari and thus taking care of kids who needed a mother. But no, no, she’s a Whispers agent keeping an eye on things for the Order. Was totally shocked! But that’s how it should be, if you can tell person X is a spy, then person X is not a very good spy.

Oh my goodness. Thanks for sharing this tidbit. Order of Whispers continue to tickle my imagination everywhere in the game.

Case in point, my necro right now is in Vigil just because I want to have all 3 account medals for successful initiation into an order (can you sense the masked disappointment? i’m such an OoW fanboi). In fields of ruin map where majority of the vigil quests happen initially, there’s a door beside a farm. You won’t even notice that you can interact with it unless you happen to hover your mouse over it or press Ctrl.

The door leads down to a path and behold, there’s a very small room at the end containing OoW agents keeping tabs on the developments between Renegades, Separatists and Ebonholde.

Best faction ever! Haha!

But you’re right Tinni. I will give Priory another chance. I completed enough quests to get the initiation medal but I have not progressed further than that on my engineer.

TY!

I agree, Doern is smoking hot, isn’t he?

More on-topic though, while I love all three Orders, Whispers is probably my favourite, Tybalt being my favourite of the mentors (Even though I love both Sieren and Forgal too), he has the best voice actor in the game in my opinion, and is just so…adorable! Demmi is also a really well-written character too in my opinion. I agree that they could have revealed the Master a bit better, but it wasn’t that bad.

Trehearne however is an abysmal character, as has been said loads in other threads. Worst, most boring VA in the game, which is odd considering everyone finds him really inspiring and charismatic, he’s just mono-tonal and dull. He also just kinda barges into the story as a minor character, rapidly becoming the leader of the only army with a chance against Zhaitan, despite having -no- previous military experience; the player character would have made much more sense, and Trehearne would suit being an adviser a lot better.

In my opinion my favourite part of the Personal Story is the 1-20 bit, the race-based stories which are determined when you make your character. After that it’s the 30-40 part where you help your Order, and Orr is easily near the bottom, some really good quests, but too many god-awful ones (Underwater Cathedral anyone?)

@Ridley:

I was not exactly disappointed w/ the reveal but I would have preferred that they did not do the reveal at all since it gives that much more mystery to the order (although okay… to be honest, I was surprised who it turned out to be and I was literally – “omg omg omg” – while I was watching the reveal exchange).

I hope they flesh out the story in future patches. I would LOVE to know how the prior OoW master got corrupted, how it happened, and what they did to kill him. There is just so much potential in terms of story telling for this order (and Durmond Priory, since they’re always out and about digging up strange things).

The relationship between the player character and Tybalt is very well “balanced”: he has knowledge of how your new order works internally and is very inventive. In return we give him the support and trust he needs to achieve his goal of becoming a field agent. He goes from being your mentor to being your friend and partner. Tybalt comes across as someone that genuinely wants to help other people which really helps to give the whole Order of Whispers a better, more positive character (so we see that the OoW is NOT just an assassins’ club). One might argue that Tybalt is mostly a comic relief character, but I’d disagree. Though his “pirate talk” during the rescue mission can be quite silly at points, this is actually played staight – the guards calls his bluff “you gotta be kidding me”. And in while he does have quite a large number of snarky comments and one-liners, I actually think he is quite a serious and earnest character. Lighthearted, yes, but not silly or “funny”. When he tells us that our support means a lot to him, we believe him, because he is earnest. When he helps Demi confront her father’s henchmen outside the Chantry, he shows both his compassion and his determination again.
With the “visit” to Claw Island, the story really hit a nasty bump for me. Tybalt’s character had a LOT of potential, not only as your sidekick/partner during missions, but also for other personal matters. Especially with Demi joining the Order. Similar to Tybalt Demi is eager to prove herself and overcome past events. This in turn could have been the point where Tybalt becomes a mentor to Demi, seeing much of himself in her…
I would have loved to save Tyria with Tybalt and Demi by my side. Seeing so much potential go to waste hurts twice as much if the character replacing your friends is Trahearne. (And I won’t go into Trahearne here, I’ve already written a much too long analysis why following Master Togo in GW:Factions felt good, while playing sidekick in The Trahearne Show feels baaaad).
So, yes, I agree: The Order of Whispers has some very interesting, engaging and endeadring characters. I really enjoy interacting and fighting with them.
(Sooo much potential… why… Trahearne… why…)

I mostly agree with the others here. Loved Tybalt, but also didn’t think the Master of Whispers reveal was done very well.

I wonder if theres a bug in my achievemnt on log in screen btw, because i had two chars one master wisps ands one knowledge dude.,. But hence since relase of patch i had to delete them cause of overload on my PC. When i installed client again the aciecvment is credited but characters dead. And i cant se my achievemnt in HoM either. Is htat a bug between log in screen and transportal stone?

Anyone else with same problems? Or if i still get credit for it on log-in im happy either way.

Nomadic Reverie.2863:

I wonder if theres a bug in my achievemnt on log in screen btw, because i had two chars one master wisps ands one knowledge dude.,. But hence since relase of patch i had to delete them cause of overload on my PC. When i installed client again the aciecvment is credited but characters dead. And i cant se my achievemnt in HoM either. Is htat a bug between log in screen and transportal stone?

Anyone else with same problems? Or if i still get credit for it on log-in im happy either way.

Hi Nomadic Reverie, that sounds like an account or technical issue. You can raise a ticket to support.guildwars2.com about that but that has never happened to me even across playing different computers.