Guild Wars 2

My Impression of the Personal Story

As someone who solos the vast majority of the time, the personal story is some of my favorite content in GW2, esp the first 20 levels.

The reason being that it is intensely personal, it is about you, your race, and the characters around you dealing with personal problems. It’s a lot of fun getting to know about your character and their race as you deal with problems and infighting, it gives your character character.

My criticism of the first 20 levels is the side characters who are meant to be important to you get zero character development, and hardly any screen time. They are little more the cardboard cutouts, caricatures really. I really wish I could spend more time with them and get to know them, and my race a little more, but the story whisks you away before you get the chance.

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After you join the order the focus shifts away from you and becomes a little bit more generic as to account for all the races, but each order at least has their own personality and interesting characters. You also get to pal around with the lesser races, which is always fun.

But the story falls off a cliff once cabbage head comes along and you join the Pact, and like it’s generic name suggests, everything from here on in is completely generic and isn’t remotely personal. So much so that your previous choices are constantly forgotten and your often reintroduced to characters or objects you already know.
It effectively white washes everything you’ve done up until this point, making you wonder why it’s called a ‘personal story’.

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A Suggestion : Side Stories

What I would like to see added going forward would be Side Stories, personally stories like that of the first 20 levels, that is separate from the larger story of becoming a hero and going off to kill dragons. With cut-scenes and instanced interactions, the whole bit.

Short 3-5 mission chains that tell the story of your race and the people in them.
For example, with my Charr I picked Reeva as my companion. So a Side Story could be about her dealing with her problems and I’m tagging along as her friend and warband member trying to help a sister out.

They could be triggered prehaps by talking with them in you home instance, so as you go along in the main story line and add more characters, you get more and more Side Stories to do.

This I think could help pad out the experience and give the game and characters some much needed depth, without having to entirely new zones or entire story-lines in order to do so.
There simple self contained stories that you can do at your leisure.

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So what do you guys & gals think?
What did you think of the first 20 levels?
Would you like to spend more time getting to know the side characters and your race?
And do you think this Side Stories idea has any merit?
Do you have any other suggestion to make the personal story more personal?

Cheers.

~Yoh

I agree. The personal story never develops very far because it is essentially 3 story arcs combined into one. I understand that they want something to push you into higher level zones, but it’s too disjointed. I think they should have had several parallel self contained personal quest stories. Each new one would unlock at a certain level but does not require you to start them until you wanted to. With level scaling, there’s never any danger of outlevelling your story’s quest level. With these separate side stories, the developers would have a reason to send you to different zones which would eventually let you cover all the zones and maybe even end the story off with a soloable version of a story mode dungeon. This would ensure that all players could finish story modes on the current dungeons.

yes. a million times, yes.

As a matter of fact, the more “epic” the personal story got, the less involved and invested I became. Sure, [SOMEWHAT OF A SPOILER] killing Zhaitan was cool, but finding out what killed my sister meant more to me.

As an asuran, I wanted a story that involved the inquest maybe stealing my invention that I picked in creation and then I gotta travel around the world looking for it.