Guild Wars 2

So I walk up to an area, and suddenly a UI interface pops up where my character apparently psychically KNOWS exactly what she needs to do in order to make the NPC in the area (who I may not even see on my map yet, let alone talk to) happy enough to give me stuff.

I walked through the norn starting area, and suddenly something popped up telling me to kill dredge and destroy their machines. I don’t know who or what these things are, but I’m more than happy to murder them and vandalize their stuff at the command of an omniscient voice from the sky.

I am asking for an option that will hide the renown heart display on my “quest log”, and only show it for a certain area AFTER I’ve talked to the NPC. I’ll still get credit for doing things, because the NPC recognizes that I had to kill a bunch of bandits or whatever to get to him/her in the first place, but the text and the bar itself will be invisible until I actually talk to them about what they want me to do. Obviously if I leave the area and come back, it should remember whether I’ve talked to them.

This would also make the game a bit more friendly to players who prefer the old-style quest system of talking to an NPC, completing objectives, then “turning it in” by returning to the NPC and seeing what new stuff they can get for Karma. If you’d rather play the current way, you don’t have to enable this option, and everyone is happy.

why? Dredge are bad. Is more realistic.

I want the rats of my house dead.
Some random guy come and kill 10 of these rats.
I will be pleased. Why he need to speak with me to help me?

Besides… you can always talk with the NPC to know what the hell is happening.

Silverwing.3416:

So I walk up to an area, and suddenly a UI interface pops up where my character apparently psychically KNOWS exactly what she needs to do in order to make the NPC in the area (who I may not even see on my map yet, let alone talk to) happy enough to give me stuff.

I agree. The game should wait until you are at least within earshot range of the NPC giving out the task. Then the NPC would do its generic “hey, you there, I need your help”, and the event / heart description would pop up.

The only thing that should be on your UI “automagically” should be a general description of the zone status (ex., “the swamp lies dormant”). Any specific NPC-related “instructions” should only be visible after you approach that NPC at least once.

Another annoying thing is when you pick up an event- or heart-related item and its tooltip says “[insert NPC name here] would be interested in these”, but you’ve never even met the NPC it mentions. Until you do, it should just say “I should ask around; someone might be interested in these”.

I mentioned both of these several times since BWE1, but I guess they think the pop-ups are just more “casual-friendly”, despite the fact that this is an RPG.

They were a major disappointment after all the hype surrounding the event system being a dynamic, organic simulation, sort of like how the map changes over time in an RTS.

I don’t know how they’d fix it post release though.

“I want the rats of my house dead.
Some random guy come and kill 10 of these rats.
I will be pleased. Why he need to speak with me to help me?
Besides… you can always talk with the NPC to know what the hell is happening.”

I’m mainly annoyed at the oddly specific requests some of these places have. How do I know that I should be picking these poisonous plants/mushrooms to bring to someone, or stomping on them to destroy them?

How do I know that I need to collect the nearby herbs for someone I haven’t even met yet? I shouldn’t psychically know what items they want when I don’t even know there’s a person over there yet.

How do I know that I’m supposed to just scare these animals over here instead of killing them? How do I know that I’m supposed to pick up this gizmo over here and press this button while targeting a frost imp? How do I know whether I should be setting these traps to help out some unseen hunters or getting rid of them so they won’t hurt unseen caravans?

And I know I CAN just talk to the person to find out what I need to do and why (though this particular NPC was less than helpful in explaining why I am killing these dredge) the point is that the interface just popping up and telling me outright without any kind of justification for it BREAKS IMMERSION. I lose the fantasy of being a legendary hero, and get brought back into the reality of being a gamer reading rote instructions off of an interface.

I really like the way this game deals with far-off events, where an NPC actually runs up to get your attention and asks you to help with something, tells you what’s going on, and gives you directions. We need more of that, and less “you know you need to do this because you are psychic.”

Agreed. Especially for on-going events, where you don’t have a clue what is really happening or the motivation behind the quest.

Some sort of quest tracker or journal would be nice, where we could look up quests and the like. Perhaps even add lore entries to this journal, because so far, the game is very bare in the lore department.

It’s is one of my top pet peeves about this game. I’ve done a lot of these hearts and I don’t think I could tell you what half of them were about.

There is no presentation to these quests. It’s just magically know what to do, do it, run off. There is no story, no reason.

People have told me, “Go talk to them first then.” However this solution really doesn’t work when the quest has already been spoiled.

My two suggestions for hearts and dynamic events is to hide the quest until you’re close enough to either see, or hear what’s going on. I realize that ArenaNet wanted to eliminate the idea that you had to physically visit NPC’s, but this is way to far in the other direction.

As someone who plays these games for the stories, and the RPG element, this pulls me out of the game every time. There is no mystery, no discovery, no understanding…it’s just all spoon fed to me, and I can just blast through without even caring why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Disagree. I love the renown hearts and this newer model of questing. My only big complaint is that there are not enough of them to actually lvl my characters as they complete them. I still have to do a lot of grinding. If you want to go talk to the NPC for RP purposes, be my quest, but I don’t want development hours spent here instead of on the other things that need to get better on GW.

I don’t find hearts to be a “newer model of questing”. They replaced the NPC who stands in the same place forever with a ! over his head, with an NPC who stands in the same place forever with a <3 over his head