Guild Wars 2

I was really excited when I 1st found out that GW2 had a story quest that tied into the game. And that the story quest would affect your world (well at least your personal instance in the cities.)This was before launch.

I’ve been playing since headstart and at first I was really intrigued by the quest line. It seemed to have twists and turns. Also, alot of difficulty bumps. But I persevered through, my human and then Durmond Priory story line. For the longest time I’ve felt that although the personal story was good it was not fully fleshed out. There are some parts of the story that simply don’t go anywhere once the quest is done. For example what happened to the Big-Ghiz Whorl (I think) inventor and who was he working for? I ran CM not only to complete the dungeon but to also find out if CM story mode would actually tie into this. Nothing doing.

But now that I’m reaching the end (did Arah story mode but hadn’t gotten to that point in my personal story,) I’m left wondering what it was all about. That is, what is the point of completing the personal story other than gaining the satisfaction that you completed it.

I find no emotional attachment to any character in my personal story (unlike ME2/ME3) and could really care less if they lived or died. I’ve been back to my personal instance all of 3 times since completing that part of the personal story and didn’t notice any difference.

Also, I find out that the end of the personal story is the Arah Dungeon story mode. And you run it as a normal story mode dungeon.

So really, I’m left wondering, what was the point of the storyline quest?
It guides you from zone to zone? It only guided me to a few zones. I nearly finished map completion (1 poi and 1 vista left in the mists) without really focusing on the story.
It introduces you to characters in the game lore? You don’t really run across any of them outside of the story quests.
It gives you an advantage in the Arah story mode Dungeon? Not as far as I know.

More materialistically:
It helps you gain some equipment/skin/etc that’s not found elsewhere? Nope.
It gives you some token that goes into your Legendary? Nope, not as far as I know. I mean, come on, you farm 500 tokens in the mist and get the Gift of Battle (from what I heard, if you are a mist warrior, that’s not exactly hard to do, just time consuming.) Farm 500 tokens from Arah Exp mode to get the Gift of Zaitan (biggest challenge here is to actually find a group and path 3.) Yet you go through the entire story chain from level 1 to 80 and come out of it with Black Lion keys, some RNG items (usually greens and not always useful).

I’m going into a bit of an analytical discussion here, because I think this topic has come up a few times and I’ve always wanted to weigh in but never have.

If you’ve been spoiled by Bioware-esque writing, I think you can have a bit of trouble getting emotionally invested in GW2’s story. Those games make you spend a lot of time with certain characters and let you see multiple sides of them. GW2 usually keeps a character around for only a single arc (of which there are three: your racial arc, your order arc, and the Orr arc), and in many cases much less. I did feel something of a connection to your mentor in the orders arc and I do think Tybalt and Sieran are examples of well-done characters in amidst a sea of relatively forgettable ones, but still.

The thing is, GW2 has a really big problem that I think they tackled reasonably admirably: having enough characters so that the story feels “big”, whilst simultaneously keeping the cast restricted enough that there are recurring characters you’re supposed to build some sort of rapport with. When you have a ton of characters, developing them (giving them all equal ‘screen time’) is really hard.

If you wanted to know who your cast is (everyone has a different one based on the choices they made), wander around Fort Trinity after completing “Victory or Death” (after the cleansing Orr mission is good too). Those are your “main characters” so to speak. Trahearne, your mentors and the Destiny’s edge member related to your race are supposed to be the characters you get attached to, but I felt like it fell through a bit as well.

Thing is, what’s there is good: it just needed more. More missions in every arc. Double the amount to even approach Bioware-esque, coupled with a stronger writing staff, but it won’t happen because it’s not really the selling point of the game, it’s ancillary to it, and it would take a whole lot of work that I don’t think would be that appreciated. In that way, it’s a bit of the inverse of Guild Wars 1.

I’m reserving my judgement for the big January (Feb?) update, however, because I want to see how that effects the story and if there are any additions. God so help me if they forget everyone they introduced in this story and don’t bring any of them back, though… There were a lot of characters I want to see again, but I fear that we won’t get to see ‘em even though they technically work for the pact. Or worse: tons of them get killed off to make room for new characters, because GW2 writing staff seems to think that kill a character = it’s sad because death is a recipe for good emotive writing. It isn’t. In every instance other than the mentor’s death, it fell pretty flat.

TL;DR: It was meant to be enjoyed as a story. It just needed more content and more polish. Mind you, I though the exp from the missions made it worthwhile as well as the black lion keys early on.

It sounds like part of the issue is a comparison between GW2 and ME2/ME3, which is comparing an MMORPG to an RPG.

The story in GW2 to me anyway always just seemed like adding a single-player story to a game like Battlefield, where the point of the game was always online multiplayer, not Call of Duty-esque stories. It’s nice to have and better than nothing, but can’t really be viewed as anything more than some bread at the dinner table. It’s not the entre.

I have to agree here, the personal story is definitely not the entre (but then one might argue what is?). I see GW2 with a ton of features, and the designers tried really hard in effectively making a decent all-around game, but doesn’t excel in any particular field, and certainly not the story.