Seperate the Personal Story into 3 different concurrent lines rather than acts
Posted by: Atmaweapon.7345
As the title suggests, there’s far too little development within each separate act of the personal story. Rather than have each one come one after the other, lets have all 3 stories run concurrently to level 80.
So it would look something like this:
Personal Story:
-Racial Story: 1-80
-Order Story: 30-80
World Story
-Zhaitan Story: 50-80
Notice that with this, Zhaitan (and by extension, Trahearne) are shepherded into a different category of “story.” This means that rather than having him as an integral part of your character’s plot, Trahearne’s arc will be focused on Trahearne himself as an individual and allow him to be fleshed out while the player character is an observer/soldier on the sidelines. Also, rather than have him as an ever present companion (to grate on your nerves) you’ll be sent on more solo missions.
With this we have the Racial and Order stories that can define our characters. Being fleshed out over a far longer span of time allows for better story pacing. Meanwhile, “World” stories will not require players to be shoehorned into a mentor role for Trahearne. Instead, Trahearne’s development will be the central focus to the story with the player character possibly being a random soldier who provides insight at times and recognizes Trahearne as a leader rather than a friend. It allows for more personal actions since a player character who isn’t locked into 100% supporting Trahearne from the get go and having him as a partner butting into to all your missions is allowed to actually speak his mind.
With this in mind, we can also have “dynamic personal story events” Somewhat streamlined with race and order. These events could be just say, a Charr helping out with his former Warband and random missions that utilize an order’s resources all over the world (I know that the Order of Whispers has plenty of hideouts scattered around to facilitate this.) Each one of these could offer a bit of insight into each of the npcs.
This could also be expanded upon to provide a more natural progression of a character’s ranking in an organization. Using the Charr as an example again, you could have a “Warband competency level” since you’re technically not a part of it anymore. Higher competency provides better benefits, events in harder areas, and possible side-story or unlocking the higher the end parts of that personal story line. With the orders, your rank and promotions would actually feel proportional to what you’ve accomplished rather than arbitrary.
As for separating the stories into Personal and World respectively, this offers a much more open-ended approach to storytelling since we don’t have to be railroaded from one end to the other. World stories can be used to describe any major event without the player character derailing everything by having to take the limelight while Personal story can actually be focused on the character rather than random hero X who will be your main character for this act so that lore can be coherent.
Optional: Perhaps add in a few new racial abilities or order abilities (balanced of course) that you can unlock depending on your current ranking. Almost every npc in the Order of Whispers can stealth, so once you reach say… intiate rank, you get access to the ability Shadow walk which is short blink + 2 second stealth. (Engineers can get some long duration/cast time cloaking device.) Upon getting to that event in the Order of Whispers storyline, you get the “Apple Bomb” ability (Engies get Apple barrage or omnomnom Apple toolbelt.)