Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure if I’m beating a dead horse here, but upon soldiering through the entirety of my human character’s personal story over the course of a few nights, I really began to look back at the somewhat cheesy GW1 stories and realize how much better they were.

I think the main problem in the story lies with the characters. Both your own character and the supporting cast.

Your character:
The problem here is that your player character is completely devoid of emotions. The voice acting isn’t particularly bad, but there are very little times we see any sort of emotive behavior from PC. If we see the PC as the protagonist to the journey we embark on, then we have only a minimal palette of emotions to relate to. I get that our character is supposed to be a resolute hero, but that aspect runs dry very quickly.

For instance, at the beginning, when you aid your companion in the level 1-10 levels, its OK to establish your character as a stoic, resolute character, with the leadership qualities that are deemed useful for the latter half of the story. This however, is exactly what happens, from level 1-80. Our PC ends up having no actual character arc, he/she starts and ends exactly the same way.

A successful protagonist is one in which we can relate to. However, this doesn’t always need to be the case. The protagonist can also serve as a proxy to the viewer/player. This option would appear to be the correct choice here given the nature of the game. GW1 does this very well.

Lets take Nightfall as an example. Put aside the rather wooden vocal performances (though still leaps and bounds better than Trahearne) our PC set off on a journey as our proxy. We discovered the world through the heroes we met, and in turn see them develop an arc in their characterization.

Dunkoro for example was characterized as some super long winded guy who gets his moments of brilliance in the caverns mission before finally revealing his vulnerabilities that lead to his long winded nature in the penultimate chapter of the game.

A more simpler, yet well written character could be found in General Morgan, best described as a well natured fatherly figure to Varesh, torn between his morals and his loyalty. Ultimately he needed to make a choice.

Going though my personal story, the closest character who remotely had an arc was Tybalt. Even then, his character was given so little time to develop. What gives Arenanet? Why did the idea to introduce a plethora of characters ever seem like a good thing.

I think the best way to determine a character is to simply ask someone else to describe them. And not just through appearances. How many descriptors can you provide for said character? So many characters in this game are paper thin and one dimensional.

Theres actually no problem with the PC being presented as a proxy (maybe except for the fact Arenanet vigorously advertised it as a ‘personal story’), but due to the nature of the game, it is also very hard to make the PC a good protagonist to relate to. We never actually get any ‘suspense’ through the character alone, because we know he/she won’t die. Our choices can’t actually affect his/her mood or emotions because that would require an unfeasible amount of vocal recordings.

I feel as though Arenanet would’ve been more successful if they carried more characters through the entirety of the story instead of just being ‘the NPC of the chapter’. There are also so many choices in the story so many of them just end up feeling completely pointless. I was so psyched to redo my personal story again on my alt, but after going through the first ‘chapter’ I realized, none of my decisions actually matter. I can save the orphanage, but there is no payoff for that story itself. I think in further expansions, Arenanet will be better off adopting a GW1 story telling approach, with a small set of decisions to make.

P.S. So after finishing off the Tonn story missions Logan sent me a letter saying ‘I know you’re still agonizing over the deaths blah blah blah’. No Logan, I’m not agonizing over the death of a paper thin character I knew close to nothing about. Its a bigger slap to the face when your PC tells Ceera that Tonn spoke often of her. Twice I believe. Twice.

Yes, you are beating a dead horse, but I think many agree with you.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to do stories in games. Method 1 is to plot the whole story tightly and drag the player into it, giving them no choice in what happens. This enables you to tell the story well and develop characters properly, but it also means the player lacks any agency.

Method 2 is to give the player lots of decisions to make and to shape events around those decisions. This makes them feel more like they’re actually involved in what happens, but also means you can’t spend much time developing characters or working out clever plot twists, because there are too many potential story paths to do them all justice.

ArenaNet aimed for the best of both worlds and somehow gave us the worst. The choices we make fragment the story and necessitate a coming-and-going of utterly forgettable characters between every mission, but at the same time, none of the choices are consequential enough to make you feel like you have any control over your destiny.

In future, my preference would be for them to stick with Method 1. Hire some good writers and craft a really memorable story line with brilliant characters, unexpected twists, betrayal, emotions, tragedy and comedy, then invite us players along for the ride.