Guild Wars 2

I don’t know if anyone else suffers from this, but my main pet peeve with the GW2 storyline, is that it’s too epic a storyline to feel connected to the normal, non-storyline world.

So the Pact is formed, and you’re named commander. The first few missions after being made commander, you’re just that, commander (already an immensely high rank though in world matters point-of-view). People are still skeptical of you, Trahearne and the Pact. You complete a few more missions and from skepticism, opinions of you that you hear about from NPC’s around you turn in to widespread praise. Cleansing Orr, beating the Eye of Zhaitan, if you talk to all the NPC’s that are circle around you and Trahearne, you’re apparantly going down in legends as an amazing hero. Wow. That’s really epic.
And then you beat Zhaitan and there’s world peace again (there are other dragons, but for story/world progression purposes, everything is now happy happy joy joy).

And then you end the instance, and you’re in the same old Orr as before. Risen are still everywhere. The land has not been ‘cleansed’. Trahearne and his Wyld Hunt mission to cleanse Orr? He obviously failed, because that cutscene where you saw all the lovely scenery. It’s not there yet in the physical non-instanced world when you return to the exact same spot, the well. Not even one single flower in bloom that wasn’t there yet before the instanced cleansing.
And all the NPC’s? If the NPC’s in the story modes aren’t lying, I should believe that people are talking about me from Rata Sum to the Black Citadel.
And when I talk to NPC outside of an instance? I get barked at more than not.

What the dynamic events -somewhat- achieved in GW2 that isn’t apparent in other games, is a sense of a changing ‘world’. You can capture and lose camps, and the zone (it’s hard to say the world) is then somewhat altered.
I say somewhat, and am cautious to say changing world, because the effects are still barely noticeable. But it’s a start and I hope a third installment of GW, or perhaps an update will finally get this right. But this is another story.

How Storytelling relates (or more specifically, does not relates) to dynamic events, is that it’s all fleeting for the game experience. I for one would actually love to see Orr showing signs of being ‘cleansed’ after Trahearne finally finishes his Wyld Hunt. I want to see the power of the Risen greatly diminished when Zhaitan is killed.
I know this is a lot to ask for in terms of game changes, but it’s the expectation you yourself (ArenaNet) set up when you made a storyline that makes you walk around as the Commander of the Pact, Legendary Hero that killed Zhaitan, that which the legendary group Destiny’s Edge could not complete, etc. etc.

I’m not a roleplayer, nor a die-hard story-mode person in games. I don’t care much about that great single-player experience. If anything, in games, I like grinding, especially dungeon crawling. So from this, you can conclude that I’m not a huge critic when it comes to story modes. They are a fun add-on to my overall game experience. So when I see a storyline, I’ll check it out anyway, hoping it will be a good fun ride.
And don’t get me wrong, the storyline is (although a bit cliche at bits) decently enjoyable all the way through. You even feel a sense of pride as your character progresses from Vigil grunt to Vigil Warmaster and even Pact Commander.
But when the story ends, it truly ends. From there, you’re just repeating what is probably the last of what little remains of lore, repeatable explorable mode dungeons.

And now Orr is just this desolate place, that I apparently have to go to as a level 80 for my main source of gold and karma income. There is no story behind it anymore. These Risen that keep spawning, these events that keeps throwing hordes at you? So Zhaitan is still throwing his Risen armies at you even from his death? Awesomesauce.
And the land is still barren and there is death everywhere? And this promise to this last king of Orr that you spoke to after Trahearne cleansed the land? The promise that we would restore Orr and honor his last wish? The Pact is restoring kitten in Orr.

To conclude: No cleansing, no restoring, no diminishing resistance from Risen, no apparent sense of victory in the non-instanced Orr. Just a dead Orr, every day, every single time I repeat the same event again for some gold and karma. If I knew the storyline would just set me up for disappointment concerning Orr, I would’ve been better off not doing it at all in the first place.

Well, it’s really hard to make those changes you refer to, since it’s an open world.

But what I take from mainly everyone is that there is little to no real reward on completing the Personal Storyline.

I’m still at level 49, going to check the sewers, but I can understand that. In GW1 we had titles to show that we completed every Story Mission, visual indicators of that in the World Map, and loot that could only be gained trough beating the last Mission.

I don’t know if the loot in the end is rewarding enough, but something like titles would be very welcome!

Anyway, let’s see how ANet responds to that :P

I totally agree with the OP – and it’s in no way a ‘reward’ problem.
Some instanced version of the regions in question would be nice for those that have completed the storyline. Like an overflow, but with different looks and stuff.
(I don’t want to go on about how WoW did it, but well yeah, they did it.)
It would make so much more sense!
mobs could still be present and such of course, but with some appropriate explanation.

I was really excited to see how Orr would change visually when the cleansing ritual was completed. I understand that persisten world etc.

But you could load diffrent visuals for diffrent players based on the personal story progress. I don’t know your coding so I don’t know how realistic that is but that would at least feel like we did something.

Well, when you have a fully persistent (non-instanced) world, such crap as personal stories don’t exist. You have events that happen once and may or may not impact the world, and you may or may not have been there to take part in it and perhaps grab a title from it.
This way, an event has happened, and now the world can stay persistent because the event happened for everyone to participate in and the world has changed indefinitely because of the influence of the event. This is not a player by player different outcome and regardless of player progress.
This is one way of doing events that should change things.

If you’re talking about personal storylines, the events are all based on the single player. One player can be further advanced in his storyline then another. Events can also be ran at different times, etc. To implement this, you’ll have to start instancing. Which is what the personal story quests are, all instances. So basically, the GW2 world is already instanced. (Based on, if there is a single instanced part in a game, you already can’t talk about a fully persistent world any more.)
Add to the fact that in GW2, every single map is an instance too. You can only travel from area to area through a portal. This means zones are not connected but separate instances.
Add to that Overflow servers (and different servers in general), which are really nothing more copies of the same zones over and over again, just to have different players in each, wait for it, instance.
Needless to say, there is a whole bunch of instancing in GW2. GW2 is far from an open or persistent world. That’s okay with me, I like a fully persistent world, if done well, but instanced games (disconnected zones and such) are often a bit more easy to play in and that suits me well, becoming older and all.
But I digress.
What I’m trying to say is, is that a developer could easily copy the three Orr zone maps, get a team of graphical designers to work on ‘healing’ the art of those three maps. Then proceed to add triggers to all methods of transportation into these 3 zones that checks for certain events completed (‘Cleanse Orr’ and ‘Kill Zhaitan’ specifically) and make the player transfer to Orr2 or Orr3 depending of how far in one is.
The last thing is of course to think of new content of things that can happen in Orr after said map change. Are there still Risen around but fewer, because of the few generals? Are there other issues now in Orr that needs the players attention? Dynamic events that now surround the ‘cleansed’ Orr needs to be designed and carefully implemented.

I know this can be a whole lot of work, I’m a developer myself, but I do feel that especially for the last two personal story quests, that change so much in lore, that I feel it warrants a real change to in the world. So it’s most likely only somewhat limited to Orr. (Although if you, ArenaNet really feel strongly about making a dynamic world, I’d love to see other personal story quest lines have larger affect on the general gameplay.)

I foresee one large possible problem after implementation of this in Orr, this may split the population across the three instances of the same zone. So Orr1, before Orr is cleansed, might be deserted, because people rush the story line. This means less players to play with when you are in Orr but have yet to do said story quest. Taking a temple back or something can then be difficult with just a handful of players. Orr3 on the other hand can very likely have the majority of the players. So then Orr3 should need to be shaped in a way that even though Zhaitan is gone, there is still a lot to do in Orr3 because of .. insert good story plot here.

Orrrr…, simply put.. if you don’t have the resources to make alternate Orr instances, then don’t let us kill Zhaitan and cleanse the land. These two are just to out there to do and then don’t see any after-effects in the world.