Guild Wars 2

Hello, I am posting to this forum to provide feedback on my experience of the Guild Wars 2 story to-date and to leave the entire team with things to consider moving forward with the construction of the Guild Wars 2 story. The true content is being added as an attachment. The document is fairly extensive but has a brief summary as I know most of you won’t have time to read much of it.

As of this writing I have not yet had the chance to analyze content released within the past month, as a result I will omit any comments pertaining to this content.
Note that this evaluation tried to minimize emphasis on elements other than the story; however, due to the nature of the video game medium, there are times where such comments will be made and may include (minimal) technical language.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-nyK76NiqpvcVJiWHRMMUJKTFk/edit?usp=sharing

I apologize for the lack of formality as I neared the end of this, it took longer than I anticipated.

My suggestions are as follows:

Moving forward, try to ensure that all people involved in story creation, especially writers and voice talent, are aware of story contexts and the way their message should be delivered.

Take your time, the best that you can. Time is money; however, in this scenario funds are coming in based on how many people are invested into your game as opposed to how many people are interested in playing from time to time. Quality story leads to a deeper investment in the game and therefor more revenues. Fail to do this, and you may even lose potential earnings.

Consider how you wish the story to progress and then find ways to accomplish the outcome that are awesome, and impressive to the player without overextending the team.

I hope you appreciate my comments and take them seriously and I wish you the best of luck ArenaNet.

DesertEagle_PWN

Well, I guess this is my first and only BUMP as I guess no one saw it the first time, or no one cared. Sharing is caring, I spent about 2 hrs on this.

I read this when you first posted it, but it seemed particularly directed at ANet (who I imagine are well aware of their failings in this regard) and also seemed to reinforce the consensus on what people thought about the story, there didn’t seem to be anything to add or refute. I imagine there’s some devs who wholeheartedly agree in retrospect and plan not to make the same mistakes in the future.

“Starting with a profession, while core to the established game-play, is inexplicable in the sense of the game universe”

I’m not sure what you mean here. The professions/roles themselves are reasonably well-established in the game. It would admittedly be nice to see NPCs training/drilling some of the more “exotic” skills (rather than just stabbing dummies and shooting at archery butts), but you’ll often see NPC rangers hanging out with their pets, NPC engineers alongside defensive emplacements, and IIRC there’s a quest chain in Kessex Hills involving an NPC necromancer. I certainly wouldn’t object to more content, though – it would be neat if you had to make a pilgrimage to the “Grand College of Elementalists” (and incidentally learn a bit more about the profession) in order to fully unlock your traits.

The separation of the professions is partially explained by backstory fluff: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bloodstone. You can’t be an Elemesmerist because the Gods say so. You can’t be an Engimancer because that’s just silly :p

Perhaps you mean “why does the story begin with me as a combat-capable [x] rather than an apprentice [x]?” Meh, it’s a combat-focused game. Many players would be annoyed by clicking through thirty minutes’ worth of fetch-quests and exposition before they get to pick up a weapon.

“If the idea is to restrict abilities, let classes who aren’t supposed to use a weapon have a default ability that sucks.”

Why bother? The only real use that I can see for such setups (e.g. a Warrior double-wielding Foci and ineffectually bashing people with them) is to humiliate opponents in PvP (“I’m so awesome that I can defeat you with off-class weapons!”). I’d rather see the developers spend time on content that will be widely used/enjoyed by the playerbase.

Your proposed system could also confuse/annoy new players. They might create an Elementalist, unlock all of the Staff skills, get bored, switch to a Rifle, and then file a bug report because “my rifle doesn’t do any damage and I can’t unlock any of the good skills”.

I agree with your general point about inconsistency (w/r/t the player character’s instant proficiency with any environment weapon) but in this case I’m happy to sacrifice consistency for the sake of variety. After all, many of the envWeapon and transformation minigames are fun!