Not sure if this has been mentioned (I’m certain it has ;p) but repetition gets things done! ;D
In Dark Age of Camelot they later added epic quests based on character class. These were end game quests that a player would do to unlock upper level loot.
I just hit lvl 80 last night with my Norn Warrior, and I loved how the Hero Story tied into my game play. I’ve played all the big name mmos, and to be honest, I never followed the game story lines, because I never felt my character was linked into it. Guild Wars 2 succeeded in actually allowing me to feel a part of the overarching story.
With that said, my brother has an asuran Engineer whom is also 80. There were differences in our hero stories towards the beginning due to the race differences, but obviously, eventually both of our stories ended up coming to the same point towards the later half. I found myself at that point making alternate decisions in quest choices just to ensure some of the side quests were indeed different for us. Since he was ahead of me in the quests, I also found myself telling him to keep any spoilers to himself :p
Anyways … All in all I love the hero quest, and it’s definitely one of the points of interest that make GW2 stand a part from any of the other mmos that are out there. In future expansions it’d be awesome to see how you expand upon that.
What I thought would be awesome is if (using my toon as an example) the hero quest expanded upon the characters class. Everyone wants diversity, they want to be different, feel unique, with the character they play. So it’d be great if a lvl 80 warrior could pick from perhaps 3 hero quests to journey down, which would allow him/her to further zero in on the complexity of their build. The rewards from each of those hero quests would make that warrior more unique than others. IE maybe the armor awarded was different, the weapons, some new utility skills gained.
This would:
1) Solve the dilema I heard from gametrailers this morning, that there is a lacking in end game pve content.
2) Allow people to further adapt, customize, and feel that their character is different than any other player in the game. I see a lot of talk on the Warrior forums for example about how people are annoyed that everyone uses the Greatsword. Perhaps this could encourage people to lean more towards Hammer, Greatsword, Great Axe/Polearm (cause you are going to add these, right? Right??? :p)
3) My norn warrior’s hero quest will be entirely different than my brothers asuran engineers, as it should be. The warriors quest should have him off conquering a gang of amazon women while the engineer is off playing Macgyver.
4) Depending on rewards, it may even encourage people to want to play the same class multiple times due to the way they can customize their character, or just to enjoy a different story. (although I do realize that part of the reason the system is the way it is, is so that people don’t lock themselves into a specific build)
5) It’ll create STORIES! … The greatest part about MMOS for me is the memories/stories that I have from them. I have friends whom for 10 years now, we still joke about the time that Hagbui Thane Troll scared the crap out of us and chased us for what seemed a mile, until we realized it was just ghosting cause of lag. Or the dozens of stories we have about crushing people on the pvp battle field. These stories were unique, and thats why they lasted so long. It’d be great if my brother could sit there and tell me about how awesome and different his engineers epic hero quest was without me saying “yea i know, i did it too.” Because it would be that much more unique.
Anyways, to sum up. I hope to see more individualized hero stories in the future. Granted I know it takes a while, and I may have to wait a few years to see this come to fruition; but who knows, maybe you are ahead of me on this one and we can see this in the first expansion
Love the game btw, first one since DaoC where I actually feel I may hang around for the long haul again.