Guild Wars 2

I have to say that i am very disappointed by the personal storyline. It seems like original intention was good, but execution seems rather poor, and is probably the weakest aspect of the game. It is not in line with rest of the game quality.

To me, personal story certainly does not feel like adventure. Everytime i have to go with the storyline, i feel like “Hmmm, i gotta finish few of those boring instanced missions before i can move onto the next area :/”

What really feels like adventure in GW2 is the exploration of large persistent world… finding new places, fighting your way into the deeply defended areas, and exploring interesting landscape. Linear storyline in instances absolutely breaks the joy of persistence and non linear gameplay for me. It is an unnecessary distraction from the persistence of the world.

The execution of personal story goes against everything i heard in the GW2 trailes prior to release. I heard that player will experience rich, living and persistent world, and will work with other players to achieve goals. That feeling is indeed there but it always dies as soon as i encounter solitary instanced mission.

To me, storyline is simply a buzzkill, and a big demotivation to proceed with the game. What i hate most is the feeling that my progress in the game world and the progress in the personal storyline are very separated. It feels like two different games, where i play the fun one, but every once in a while, i have to jump over to the boring game to unlock new level in the fun game.

Now, for the suggestion.

My suggestion would be to completely ditch any instanced storyline, and made personal story non-linear and part open word exploration. Where any random direction player takes brings him an unique storyline… where pieces of storyline are scattered all around the extensive and beautiful game world, and where player feels a freedom of exploration, instead of being served a plate of flat linear story under their nose.

Very nice example of the main storyline implemented within game world in a non-linear way is The Elder Scrolls series.

I hope at least someone will read this wall of text.

Thank you in advance.

Agreed, and you’re not the only one. For me, this is the single biggest disappointment and reason why I stopped playing. The story is SO badly done, so utterly disjointed both externally (with the world) and internally (the individual arcs), so completely devoid of identity and individuality for our character as well as impact on the world, that I just couldn’t stomach it anymore after Claw Island. Well, the beginning is actually enjoyable because of the immersion in the cultural lore and because the flaws are less glaring. But it falls apart quickly after that.

It’s doubly and triply a shame because many aspects of the lore are very interesting to me, and I really wanted to get into and love this game.

IMO, a story based on promising lore and a promising beginning that is butchered horribly later on is worse and more demotivating that a story that is altogether bad or non-existent.

I personally liked personal story. Yes it feels like all that happens in different world but that is my personal story. If I feel alon I can ask my friend to join me.

Rawalanche.3897:

“Hmmm, i gotta finish few of those boring instanced missions before i can move onto the next area :/”

You mean you can move to next story? If you dont like the story then why do it? It does not stop you from doing 100% world exploration (believe me I did that before compleating my personal story). It is just there to define who your character is and where he/she came from, what he/she did etc.

I’d still prefer that my personal choices would not affect the hole game and how it is shown to other people. Other than I was in that battle for this city and it is still under our control (which is what dynamic events are for). Dont know if any of this made any sense but that is my opinion.

Have fun playing you all!

I enjoy the personal story, especially when you have alts of different races and you see how the storylines mesh. Like my ranger talking to the ghost of someone who is an ancestor of my necro.

I also agree with the poster above, you can get 100% world exploration without completing the personal story. I completed the story first, but only because the WvW maps were hard to get completion on. THAT is something I have more of a beef with than the storyline, the need to go into the WvW maps to get 100% world exploration. The storyline IS pretty linear, granted, but for me at least, they were fun.

I know i can proceed without completing personal storyline, but i always try to finish them on a level they are meant to be finished on… So the rewards for the missions are useful for me…. if i was higher level, those rewards become junk, and missions seem a bit too easy…

My point was that i would love to see personal story integrated within open world exploration to remove feeling of the huge seam between the two…

For example… Story quests would not be separated instances, but special kind of events… those events would be marked green, instead of regular orange events, and they would take place where original instanced quests occurred. At the end of every storyline event, an animation would appear informing players what just happened and how they contributed to their personal progress. Once finished, next time player would encounter the same storyline event, it would act as a normal (orange marked) event.

The biggest challenge is that for many of the missions, state of the game world has to be altered, be it daytime, or asset arrangement, so that is the reason quests are instanced…. to arrange more thrilling environment… but i doubt it was worth the huge separation of open world and personal storyline.

I believe skilled gameplay designer could make personal storyline work even in openworld mode, but while arenanet seems to have a lot of skilled artists, whoever was behind gameplay design seems of mediocre skill.

I’m agree it seems too linear and lonely to do… I would better see it as group event and with more cinematic (like GW missions which looked better to me).

Beside I have crucial question here: to get whole story line achievement, we need to complete ALL races stories, but I hate some races look. So my plan was to get ugly char to lvl 30, made racial story complete and delete it. Now I’ve noticed: if we delete char, all merit relative to it will be gone.
So if I’m not mistaken, I need to keep all 5 slots with different races to be good?
That means, I’ll not be able to enjoy alts as I’ll give up char I dislike at lvl 30 and I find useless to pay for more slots.
If anyone can confirm, please do, as I feel disappointed that I have like no choice but need to get all 5 races to be present on my account.
Thanks in advance for reply.