They should add a story that's not personal
They have one…it’s a mix of your story and the rest of the world. Or haven’t you noticed the link to Orr?
The dungeon story already is.
Plus, Trahearne hijacks your personal story the moment you reach Claw Island anyway.
And then both of those hijack killing Zhaitan.
They did. Tons of them, in fact. They come in two varieties: Dungeons and Dynamic Events.
You guys obviously don’t understand what OP means.
In it’s current state there is no short term, story delivering group content in GW2.
Dungeons are generally either too long or involve skipping as much of them as possible in order to make them short and farmable. Dungeons also are shocking at delivering story. Both story and explorable mode do very little to tell a cohesive story that gives the player some kind of sense of involvement in the world.
DE’s are great, but they don’t deliver anywhere near the complexity of a GW1 mission.
I definitely agree with the OP. I loved GW1’s missions because I knew that they weren’t going to take an age to complete, weren’t going to be too ridiculously hard or too ridiculously easy and were actually going to deliver and develop on a story that I cared about and felt like I was involved in.
lets face it, I said a campaign, just a campaign in the same mould as gw1’s it was an epic adventure, now you do your single player story and then bits and bats all over the place.
lets face it, I said a campaign, just a campaign in the same mould as gw1’s it was an epic adventure, now you do your single player story and then bits and bats all over the place.
That’s precisely how GW1 did its story missions, too. You’d do a mission, then a couple of intermediate run-around quests, then another mission. It was bits of story sprinkled in between bits of doing other stuff. In fact, in GW1 you could actually skip the bulk of the story content in many cases and just run around the maps if you wanted….sort of like how GW2 works, also.
There is no core difference between GW1 and GW2 in that aspect. None. People need to take off their nostalgia goggles, take a good hard look at the actual mechanics, and then realize how similar they really are. They revolve around the same core concept:
1) You have to be in a particular location to start the mission.
2) They have an “expected” level, but you can conceivably run it at whatever level you want.
3) You’re removed from the main world and dropped into a personalized instance that only your party members can join you in.
4) You’re given specific objectives to complete before the mission is over, at which point you can exit the instance.
The only real differences are that GW1’s missions could be run in any particular order (which was stupid), that nearly all of them were balanced for party play rather than the solo experience (which was stupid), and that GW1’s missions could be replayed infinitely (which is actually a feature I miss, but I can understand why they might not do it in a game whose narrative changes based on storyline decisions).
You can argue that the “feel” is very different, but mechanically, they’re really NOT all that different at all.
Remember when our developers talked about “strengthening the core game”?
How’d that work out for us so far?
Now let’s try some ideas that will really work.
How’d that work out for us so far?
Now let’s try some ideas that will really work.
I disagree, Guildwars 1 story/campaign was nothing like Guildwars 2 setup, makes me wonder how some of these people say they played Guildwars 1…
And yes i agree op we need more open world content. be it stories, quest hubs whatever..
I disagree, Guildwars 1 story/campaign was nothing like Guildwars 2 setup, makes me wonder how some of these people say they played Guildwars 1…
And yes i agree op we need more open world content. be it stories, quest hubs whatever..
I played GW1 for several years. Mechanically, it’s exactly the same. You reach a certain location or point in the story, you’re pulled out of the main world into a heavily instanced event, you do whatever the quest tells you, and then you’re dropped back out of it.
But I’ll bite. Please, do explain how different they are, since I obviously have no clue what I’m talking about. I’m going to enjoy this.
Remember when our developers talked about “strengthening the core game”?
How’d that work out for us so far?
Now let’s try some ideas that will really work.
How’d that work out for us so far?
Now let’s try some ideas that will really work.
I disagree, Guildwars 1 story/campaign was nothing like Guildwars 2 setup, makes me wonder how some of these people say they played Guildwars 1…
And yes i agree op we need more open world content. be it stories, quest hubs whatever..
I played GW1 for several years. Mechanically, it’s exactly the same. You reach a certain location or point in the story, you’re pulled out of the main world into a heavily instanced event, you do whatever the quest tells you, and then you’re dropped back out of it.
But I’ll bite. Please, do explain how different they are, since I obviously have no clue what I’m talking about. I’m going to enjoy this.
The difference comes in the scope of a GW2 Personal Story mission in comparison to the scope of a GW1 mission.
In GW1 missions took a decent amount of time and covered quite a lot. You generally ran across an entire map area, compare that to the tiny little cutouts you’re confined to in GW2 personal story missions. One of the few longer personal story missions was one where I trolloped through potential future Orr with Trahaerne, and it was torturous.
The first mission you do in GW1 involved fighting through Charr, collecting some old bits of armour for a poor ghost and then coming across an amassing army of Charr who you then proceed to run away from. That is epic. GW2 personal story -go stand over there and watch these NPC’s have a conversation, now fight these mobs as they run towards you-.
Of course GW2 doesn’t get it wrong 100% of the time, there have been a few personal story missions that I’ve really enjoyed and were well constructed and fleshed out. But as it stands a lot of them just don’t stack up, there ends up being very little story communicated through them and what we are presented with isn’t fleshed out well enough. Most of the time you’re actually assisting an NPC which detracts from the fact that this is meant to be YOUR adventure. Yes NPC’s were often a heavy presence in GW1, but because everything was party based and you were already dragging around 7 other players or henchmen/heroes the NPC’s didn’t feel as if they were taking the spotlight away from you. In part because they served a seperate role to yourself. Unlike in GW2 where the NPC’s and you are rather interchangeable.
Im not knocking any existing dungeons, DE’s or anything currentlyin the game, I just think it would benefit from one of the thingsthat made gw1 as awsome as it was.
If it needs doing make the missionsnon repeatable “once you have all the objectives” and make it so you can only play the missions in order so if you havnt completed the primary for mission 1 then you cant enter any mission hub instance for mission 2 upwards.
GW1 story was better because the cut-scenes were continuing your story and not breaking it as it happens in GW2.
Example “Great Northern Wall” mission
- you go to see the Charrs’ hideout
- cut scene starts showing you and your team being spotted and you start to run [end of cut scene]
- you come in control of the character which was auto-running
- you arrive at the wall and talk to the captain
- cut scene starts showing prince Rurik and the captain analyzing the situation,You, the team and all run away together [end of cut scene]
- mission finished
- you are in a new place on the map
How does the GW2 story works now
- you go to do things
- cutscene starts and you look at 2 characters talking in front of a colored curtain/ background/ wall (you name it). Characters get changed but they are still in the same places. No action, just words [end of cut-scene]
- you are in the same place when the cut-scene started with no advantage/ advance in the story.
- you fight your way through in a linear way, no secondary objectives to discover
- cutscene starts and again you see 2 characters talking [end of cutscene]
- mission ended, press exit and you are in the same place where you started with no trace of the things that happened. You fought bandits and all sort of foes but now there are people walking around like nothing happend
To put it simple: In GW1 you were living a story in which your character took actions and felt emotions while in GW2 you are playing some missions and from time to time, instead of commercials you are watching some theater pieces or talk-shows.
You are not connected with your character, you don’t see it doing anything than just talk and most of the time you are not relating yourself to the words it is saying.
The character feels it has its own selfish personality that has nothing to do with being a good hero as A-Net wanted us all to be.
SPOILER
In GW1 it was all about team work. You helped Rurik, you went with him to Kryta when his father banned him from Ascalon, you took his leadership taking the refugees to Lions Arch after he got killed by the dwarfs. You joined the white mantle because you thought they are the good ones and later discover you were on the bad side. You rebel and try to defeat them but some circumstances take you to the desert. In there you fight to survive and to return back to the main land – the desert brought to you hallucinations like fighting the dopple ganger and you had to pass some trials for getting ascended which can imply you were under some ancient spells that chained you in there. After that you get to the land again and see the white mantle have done a great evil calling the Mursaat and you try to defeat them and the one that brought them to Tyria. You succeed and defeat the evil and the white mantle. You join forces with Princess Salma to put up a resistance to defeat the remaining white mantles and you gather the other races to help you out and finally you succeed and peace is brought back to Kryta.
THIS IS A STORY that is about helping the people of Tyria and not some stupid selfish reason to become a hero. In GW1 you became a hero in time through your actions while in GW2 you are just called like that after the tutorial.
GW1 wasn’t all roses… I’m sure people remember the stomach-talking that soon got replaced by Monty Python jaw? Any animations were emotes and usually nothing else? That pretty much hammered any attempts at believability right there – until you learned to look past that.
It had its highlights once you did (by EotN they got pretty skilled at working around it at least), but it still wasn’t without its flaws. Prophecies largely wound up being abandoning one group of allies after another, and after the end of the mission you hadn’t really solved any problems other than averting a cataclysm that you were instrumental in setting in motion in the first place. The charr weren’t solved, and neither were the White Mantle (that happened in WiK many years later). I didn’t really care at the time because it was more about the journey, which took you across vast stretches of the world – but that was the point. The story felt more like an excuse to trek around the world than a structured story with a build-up, climax and conclusion.
Factions had a more traditional story, but it just made it worse – it was very short, and even then half of it was filler (including everything to do with the Luxons and Kurzicks… spear and urn were useless, and their military support against the Shiro’ken felt completely unnoticed, even if in lore it probably wasn’t). And it had more than its share of dull (Togo) or annoying (Danika… you thought Trahearne was bad?) protagonists. It attempted to humanize the villain, but unfortunately his acting was so wooden that fell flat on its face. Not to say that Factions didn’t have some redeeming value, but the story really did very little for me.
It got better after that, thankfully – although I know most people take much more exception to Kormir than I did. EotN I would agree wholeheartedly was probably better than GW2’s story. Better characters, better character development, felt more like a story. But before that, hearing people tout GW1 as a paragon of what storytelling should be just sounds strange to me – it was almost an afterthought at the beginning, and it took them several attempts to find their feet. GW2 is off to a substantially better start, even if I find it pretty average so far.
Just a random PuGgle.
Stormbluff Isle ( http://www.stormbluffisle.com )
Stormbluff Isle ( http://www.stormbluffisle.com )