Guild Wars 2

To be honest, this game finally has itself figured out, and it seems to have a very bright future. So bright, that i heavily doubt there will ever be a GW3, just like there will probably never be a WOW2. The reason why there is a GW2 in the first place is because gw1 simply couldnt offer what the developers wanted to put out. Now the current game is doing great and i see a vast amount of potential, even more now than when i first started. There is one issue….the lore. Now that the lore has become more evident, I can clearly predict that the future of the lore will be very complex. We are talking about a lore that focuses on a universal system, energy, life/death, and a very deep concept. This is not your typical kill the traitor, war, deception, copy/paste lore….this is a complex universal truth we are talking about. My worries are that this game will become too complex for writers to continue. What im saying is that, unless the main GW2 writer is a very knowledgeable person, with a really good idea about how to develop the lore, or we will see major writer’s block….eventually.

So the writers are good enough to develop a complex nuanced story, but not good enough to … write a complex nuanced story?

Regardless, the point is moot: the story has been written already; it takes the rest of the team longer to implement that story, with foes and challenges and rewards. We’ll find out soon enough if ANet did a great job, a decent job, or a poor one.

And even then, I can guarantee that 20% of folks will say “great” and 20% will say “poor”, regardless of what you or I think.

If they ever have writer’s block they could always have a contest where people submit new lore friendly story lines.

This is what usually happens with fantasy. Warcraft is a perfect example. When the first game came out it was extremely generic fantasy with lore that could pretty much be summed up in the tagline of Orcs vs. Humans.

And that was fine. It was 1994 and games didn’t typically have the huge, elaborate plots and background we see today, unless they were adapted from other media and the lore was found outside the game. (Especially strategy games, they usually had exactly enough plot to establish why you were fighting someone else and then let you get on with it).

But then they built on it over the years, and built on that again as they made new things, and kept going and now they’ve got a hugely complicated series of worlds with a 25,000 year history, complicated overarching mythology and tons of detail.

Guild Wars is going through that process now. They started with much more detail, they had to because they were making an RPG in 2005, but not nearly as much as we had by the end of the first game, or have now, or will have in another 10 years.

It’s really not an unusual process. Yes it does require either a person with an excellent memory or a very organised system to keep track of it (or a mix of both, I believe Tolkien used a mass of haphazard notes no one else has ever been able to completely make sense of to prompt his memory on Middle Earth), but that’s perfectly do-able. Most professional fantasy writers can do it to at least some degree.

I would not guess “writer’s block” would be applicable at all. I’d say changes in staff/writers and changes in direction from the higher-ups would be more likely to impact the story.

That could account for some of the holes and unfinished storylines that exist now. One writer had in his/her mind how a story would go, but the current writers have no idea what was planned.

Add to that a change in focus from the designers, and a story that began has now been left to flounder.

Hopefully the main storyline won’t suffer from that.