The one thing I miss the most from Guild Wars 1 is the fact that the PvE game was driven by an all-encompassing story that could be played through by a team of people. These missions had a great sense of scale, discovery, and mystery as you moved through the world and came upon new allies, enemies & creatures with friends. They weren’t amazing or anything, but I’ve never had a greater story-driven experience in an MMO than the first time I played through GW1 when it first came out. Revisiting the game over last summer brought the nostalgia back, and it was wonderful for the couple weeks I played it.
Do you guys think we’ll ever see such a thing again? I suppose GW2 somewhat does this with personal story and story mode dungeons, but both of these lack what made the GW1 missions so great. They focused around the fact that groups of heroes were needed. Those groups were the players. Now in GW2 it’s only about Destiny’s Edge (in dungeons) and kittening Trahearne (in personal story). I want to see my friends and I in cutscenes as we run with the game’s NPC heroes to save the day. The back and forth conversations between only 1 player and the NPCs needs to be done away with. At least recognize and show the presence of the players who helped achieve these things.
Involving things outside of lore, I’d love to see the return of hard modes and timed dungeons to the game. Fractals of the Mists seems to be the current attempt at making something like this, but it still lacks an obvious competitive aspect. There needs to exist some sort of leaderboard and competitive rewards system (titles, skins, minipets, tonics, etc.) for the hardcore players. Let people try and beat timed and hard mode dungeons and then track their accomplishments in the view of the public. It’s kitten these players want, so give them a way to compete. Update FotM to track everyone’s accounts in terms of how high they are in difficulty levels. For this we don’t necessarily need all-new dungeons, just an update to old explorable modes so that players want to go back and compete for speed runs. People love speed running, so instead of trying to stop them, take it and make it a whole new game mode. That way we can have story mode for well, story. And then explorable mode with an option to activate a hard mode option on entry.