Guild Wars 2

I am glad that there is someone looking at the personal story as it is a storyline that instead of draws you in and makes you excited to do the next mission it instead in the later levels gets to a point where you don’t even care if you do the missions.

The early human you get bounced around and characters are introduced and then fall off the face of the earth. Even if you were interested in them early on the fact they have absolutely no longevity creates a quick initial disconnect. However you are still interested on where you are going and what’s happening and most of all it “apppears” your opinions and choices matter. You get up into the choices of the vigil, whisper, duromond and again your choices still matter. You get hooked up with a mentor. In the vigil for me it was a bear of a Norn: Warmaster Forgal Kernsson. Voice actor did a great job. I at first didn’t care for him but then quickly he grew on me and for the first time I connected with a character in the storyline. No longer was it the wishywashy lovestruck Logan. I finally had someone I actually liked working with in the story and then…..you know what happens.

After that pointless, pointless, pointless plot device to try to create some sense of intensity we get supplanted (see what I did here) by Traeherne.

From this point forward the story just plummets into our character becoming an automaton lackey for some guy who just enters into the story.

The story goes from being a hero to being someone mediocre. We just take orders.

I just think you guys did a great job with the mentors in the triad and then destroyed them because it was a simple path to go with Traeherne (no offense to the voice actor who was fine).

BobbyStein.2315:

Chadramar.8156:

2) There are too many disposable NPCs.

Agreed. This is something that was discussed during development. I know that the personal story team tried to address this during the polish phase leading up to launch. I was in a few meetings where we added additional lines and talked about where the characters should reappear. The iconics got new voiced dialogue, and many of the side characters were reused in different places throughout the game.

I think the main issue is that many characters come and go every 10 levels, so it’s hard for people to really care about them in the long run. That’s something we intend to focus on more in the future.

I’d like to point out that new characters swapping in every 10 levels wouldn’t be such a huge deal, if gaining 10 levels didn’t come so easily. In 10 levels, you have something like 3 personal story quests, all of which can be completed in a half dozen hours. And those quests last maybe 10 minutes at most (and of that 10 minutes, 9 of them are running and killing things).

We don’t necessarily need more exposition, but more time spent with these characters before they swap out (or just a reason to relegate them to the background, while still keeping them around) would go a long way toward fixing the jarring nature of this issue.

I’d also like to note that the personal story tells very very little story outside of expository cutscenes. There’s a lot of time dedicated to telling me what’s going to happen before it happens, instead of just letting us play through the quest sequence and taking things as they come. Seeing NPCs react in real time to real threats with dialogue that isn’t the same canned response you hear every time you hit the F key would make the entire storytelling process feel a lot more realistic and believable.

The same repeated warnings that Trahearne utters without a flicker of concern or worry for his troops during the dragon fight in Taking Claw Island echoes in my head like a monotonous broken record.

BobbyStein.2315:

The iconics got new voiced dialogue, and many of the side characters were reused in different places throughout the game.

That is good! But are they supposed to recognize you properly if you picked the story-choice in which they were first introduced? Many players say recurring characters don’t do that, and it’s a huge bummer. For example, I heard we talk to the Pale Tree at some point, and if she doesn’t recognize my sylvari has one of her “children” (much less her Herald) but treats her like any random human … let’s just say such things kill a story for me.

I think the main issue is that many characters come and go every 10 levels, so it’s hard for people to really care about them in the long run. That’s something we intend to focus on more in the future.

I’m very glad to hear that. It not only adds to the sense of immersion/attachment when you meet someone again — it also adds replay value if you know that some of the NPCs aren’t just random Janes and Joes but people you can potentially meet earlier and repeatedly if you make different choices.

If you could bring back some of the early NPCs from the cultural story arcs, and focus more on that sort of content instead of a “generic hero” story that treats a sylvari just the same as it does an asura, I’d be a very happy player.

Chadramar.8156:

If you could bring back some of the early NPCs from the cultural story arcs, and focus more on that sort of content instead of a “generic hero” story that treats a sylvari just the same as it does an asura, I’d be a very happy player.

The thing that really bothered me is that the “3-act story” they pieced together doesn’t flow at all. It’s like they had 3 different teams working on each part of the story, completely separate from each other, then tried to connect them with gum and duct tape. There’s no sense that the cultural story builds into the order story, which builds into the Zhaitan story. They’re just, quite literally, three completely disjointed and unrelated story arcs that happen to feature the same central hero (your character).

What’s even worse is that even some of the cultural stories feel like they’re broken up in this way as well. Say what you will about the post-50 story, it at least had better flow and cohesion than half the cultural stories, where each major plot point was completely unrelated to each other.

I’ve only read the start post and the dev replies, so forgive me if that was brought up already:
The personal story really lacks explanation, lots of it, making it hard to feel into a given situation. Many times, I simply have no clue who someone is, why they’re doing what they’re doing (Logan’s devotion to the queen and his complete absence in terms of centaur war), what their position, influence, history is (the three orders seem like amateurs in the story but kick kitten everywhere else), and what the outcome is (Zhaitan’s looming threat is mentioned nowhere but in Orr).
Although to think of it, it already begins with your choice of profession having no impact on dialogue at all – newcomers to the GW lore simply don’t have a clue what their necromancer/guardian/elementalist/mesmer actually is.

I felt the Charr story handled the story flow between the first 3 ‘acts’ better than most. On my latest character, a human necromancer, I apparently left the city, ran right into a centaur battle. That part was alright. Then I find my friends in the city under fire. I help them out, and then the only reason I see them again later is if I walk into the inn to talk to them, and all they say (commoner) is wish you would stop by more often.

I then embarked on searching for my sister, who I speak to once and actually have yet to find in my home instance. Then suddenly the orders show up and we do stuff. Hell, when Kellach is running around, I never actually got the sense that he was a major threat harming villages. I would have preferred to maybe try to lure him AWAY from the palace itself as the first time I ran through that with my elementalist, I didn’t know he used a secret passage to get in. I had the image of him running mad through Divinity’s Reach.

Now on the Charr characters,

I deal with my position in the warband to start. With Blood, I take command. With Ash, I weed out security threats and ease into my roll as command. With Iron, I perform the duties that make my legion famous. Second Act is father related, which I still felt strong if only because of how Rytlock introduced it. Mind you, I’ve only done the honorable father line, but he stated that I would be allowed time from duty to pursue this investigation. I felt as if this was an ordinary occurence for a charr legionnaire to perform. And then the Orders showed up, and they felt slightly less disjointed because Rytlock stated that they were pursuing a joint operation with the Orders and were trial running which Order I should join. The way the story was structured there made me feel as if the Black Citadel was involved in decisions.

With human, even the soldiers are flabbergasted at how much action I get as a civilian compared to them. I would have much preferred my middle act to involve joining one of the guard forces in DR, like the Seraph or the Shining Blade, or even the Ministry Guard. Or, if MG wasn’t allowable, the choice to either help Logan in by the book Seraph missions, or work with Countess Anise (an under utilized character if you ask me) and weed out threats to the queen in a subtle style.

Overall, the Charr story does a better job of making you feel proud of your race and understanding of why you go off to join an Order than the human one does.

i have to say i experience the same now too, the norn story is just terrible to compare the character im playing now as char

The Norn dialogue is just horrible. I’ve been a level 80 for weeks but gave up the story at level 59 because the dialogue is so simple minded and cheesy that I simply cannot stand to do it anymore. I also have a Charr and the dialogue there isn’t bad, and I’ve occasionally helped my wife do her Asura story line and it seems pretty good. But if you submitted the Norn dialogue as a script to any high school creative writing teacher I’d be surprised if it got a grade higher than a D minus. Whoever got paid for writing that mess stole their salary.

I don’t agree about Rytlock. I think he’s a fool. And I resent my ash legion thief having to take orders from blood legion officer. The only DE member that doesn’t act like a spoiled child is Garm.