Guild Wars 2

Anyone who has seen my posts probably know what the tone is gonna be on this one.
Also, anyone who mistakes this as supporting “sub-par fanboyism” is terribly wrong. I’m allowed to have an opinion that doesn’t match up with the “masses”.

Trahearne. Some people just plain don’t like him. I get it for non-sylvari. He just pops up, and then, BAM. Leader. Others say he’s a Mary Sue. But the biggest problem people have is that he’s “stealing the show, and taking the focus off of you,” and that it becomes “his personal story”.

…How? At what point did the game force you to play the later level content as Trahearne? Oh, it doesn’t? Then how does he steal the show? He doesn’t. Not in the sense that some people are arguing.

The story is very much still your personal journey through the main story. I think many are taking it literally as “my character is awesome and will crush every dragon single-handedly as far as the story is concerned!” Well, as I’ve seen elsewhere, doesn’t that make your character the one-dimensional goody-goody hero that we’ve hated Trahearne for being? And to those of you who argue the character isn’t acting the way you want in the story, or asking why we’re all funneled into the same story obviously haven’t taken the time to stop and think. Could you imagine recording the dialogue for every possible choice/emotion you want your character to make? And why should they now that we’ve sufficiently kittened them out on the quality of the voice-acting? And telling them to take out all the voice cut scenes and just give us empty dialogue? One step forward, two steps back. And as for all being funneled into the main story line, the Devs have repeatedly stated that these elder dragons are stronger than the forces of nature. So no one person, race, or Order can stop them. So you all join up. And, guess what? No favoritism. So you can’t pick one group’s specific approach when you’re all trying to work together. You being Trahearne’s second in command? You can’t have over 2 million leaders of the pact. As it was pointed out, that also mean 2 million 2nd hands also doesn’t make sense – I counter that with “it’s the compromise”.

In short, GW2 is telling us a story. Certain aspects need to be put in place or dropped to keep a cohesive story that still can sensibly place the players within it. I’ve seen someone say this game was falling into WoW territory – I could not disagree more. Where WoW will just blatantly ignore or erase player presence in the official Lore, it looks like GW2 is trying to at least give us plausible mention.

When the pact forms, the story just goes down the drain. From then on I hated it. It was so tedious and the story felt horrible. I only did it because I pretty much had to so I could push on with the game.

The majority of your argument is that since something isn’t realistic from a budgetary/development perspective, that makes what we got instead good by default. That argument does not hold water. “This is the way it has to be” is exactly the opposite of the spirit of the Manifesto, and the personal story’s setup is at odds with it as well.

If your best comeback to 2 million second-in-commands is “it’s a compromise,” then your position is extremely weak. Go ahead and tell me how it’s going to be written into the lore that Trahearne had 2 million closely trusted allies, all of whom accompanied him on all of his formative missions, all of whom were appointed second in command, and all of whom did all the spoilery stuff at the end.

While I’m sure that some people are harping upon the fact that their character isn’t The Chosen One, that’s not the central criticism. That’s a tangential criticism. For me, it’s a question of making everyone’s story basically the same, but then, for some weird reason, not taking the final step down that single-player RPG path and just making them The Chosen One as a booby prize. The answer to that question, of course, is that NPC’s need to be the most important characters to keep the lore consistent and insulated from any actual player choice, because the story is going to move forward again at some point, because MMORPGs don’t “end” the way that single player games are allowed to. Within the context of a themepark MMORPG with a story component, the individual player’s choices cannot matter if their character gets inserted into epic events – at least not if the lore for those events is going to hold together in hindsight.

The individual player’s personal story is going to be written out of the lore, much like in WoW. WoW just skips the weird intermediary step of putting so much effort into the part that’s going to get written out.