Guild Wars 2

The OP wants something like final fantasy VII – X
where the main character is not a hero by definition..

@Roven Leafsong.8917

I think you’re looking for a sandbox mmo like EVE Online. You can basically do whatever you want in those type of games. I agree with you that GW2 should gain more sandbox-like game mechanics to provide players with more flexibility and options for game play. However, the focus of the story is to kill the elder dragons, so the options they give the players would ultimately have to benefit that cause.

I think what you’re asking may be too much…

Let’s look at some of the biggest titles in this area, Mass Effect and the Elder Scrolls.

Both of them do a very good job of giving you a sense of character, however they are both majorly flawed in their own way. Keep in mind I’m going off of a brief playing of Mass Effect, what I know from Dragon Age, and word of mouth so forgive me if this is incorrect.

In Mass Effect and BioWare’s other titles, you have an overarching story line that you have to complete, with side things on the way. You are the hero. However, you can choose what kind of hero you are.

With the Elder Scrolls, you don’t really know your character’s personality. What they like, how they like it, you don’t focus on the details (officially, anyway). However you choose to be a hero or not.

The ‘ideal game’ as mentioned before would be a monumental task, and unfortunately it would probably have to be tackled in a single-player game rather than an MMO, at least for the first go. And even then, we’d still have to wonder about ‘all the others doing the same thing.’ Bypassing that is impossible unless it’s a sandbox game.

Like said before, really all we can do is make RP fill the gaps.

Elder Scrolls games are some of the closer approximations to this, but they are still lacking something really important: there isn’t that much of a story. You can undertake quests, complete them this way or that way, but your actions don’t really have that many consequences. The world doesn’t seem to change when major storyline events occur, and in the end it winds up feeling like a very very big checklist. (You can choose not to check some of the boxes if you find the requests morally objectionable, simulating some kind of RP I guess – but they just sit there taunting you… forever…)

And you still resolve everything by combat. There isn’t a “diplomatic option” in Skyrim (or any of the other games to my knowledge) except in a few cases; you’re still sent on the same quests, and they’re still probably going to wind up with you killing someone. You don’t get to be the bureaucrat who never raises a sword on his own – you have to make everything happen personally.

I don’t think the whole deal is completely out of reach though. Sure, we’re not going to get a perfect life simulator, but there are guiding lights out there; the sheer amount that Dwarf Fortress manages to simulate is mind-numbing, and some pretty cool things result. It’s probably not reasonable to attempt to replicate all of that in an 3D RPG like GW2/TES/DA, but it’s certainly reasonable to reach some distance toward it.

Of course, you could sacrifice things by trying. As any DM who’s offered his or her players complete freedom in accomplishing their objectives knows, the course they take seldom winds up being particularly cinematically dramatic. But something tells me the DM is the only one really worried about this – players often like being spectacularly successful…

I’ll one-up the OP.

I’m sick of saving the kittening world.

I want an MMO that’s set in a complex and stable world, of competing nations and moral dilemmas, etc. Where there isnt some huge evil global threat that only we can stop. I want World War 1, not WW2.

Many JRPGs manage to pull this off pretty well. EVE and other sandboxes also do it.

But I have yet to see any major western RPG deviate from this cliche (well, except The Witcher maybe?). I don’t care how well written Mass Effect is or how deep the characters are, or how much control over the personality of the hero you have. I’m sick of saving the kittening world

Roven Leafsong.8917:

Maybe I want to take up an accredited profession well away from the ‘front lines’ and become a merchant? Maybe I want to specialise in a very esoteric area of spellcraft or martial proficiency, sacrificing my overall effectiveness in exchange for taking on a very uncommon but useful role in society? Maybe I want to express my creativity, principles or knowledge in a way that allows me to share and be recognised for my contributions? Maybe I want to join a particular village or city and set down roots, have a family, build a garden, or start a cult?

This is the very reason why EVE Online works.

I am still waiting for the day when one developer will one day pull his head out of WoW’s rear, have a sudden Eureka moment, and start implementing this to the fantasy genre too.

So far I thought that ArenaNet will be that developer, but I think we can throw that out on the window now.

What’s left to await I guess is The Elder Scrolls Online. Bethesda is kind of a hit-and-miss studio but after the positive surprise that Skyrim was I think it can go either way.

@Sollith – If it’s just a cardboard NPC that you grind to earn a ‘Spouse’ title over it, that’s easy enough to do. Emotional immersion where you actually care about what happens to that NPC is different thing entirely.

If the results are just simplified scripts then they won’t have any real weight. I think what needs to be specified are what expectations of the OP. If we’re just talking titles and simple scripts (follow character etc), that could be done today. If we’re talking endless interaction options that have a real impact on one’s gaming experience then that is something that is outside the realistic capability of an MMO (even a single player game would be pressed to achieve it IMO)

@Roven Leafsong – Can you post examples of other games that have achieved what you want to see? That would give context of the level of detail and immersion that you want. Do you expect a Mass Effect level of emotional attachment to the NPCs or is just getting a title over their head and some scripting changes enough?

Some of your posts make it sound like you just want a sandbox MMO that allows involvement in the economy with non-combat options. That is possible now, of course, but it is very different from attaining immersion with NPCs and story.

As good as EVE Online may be as a sandbox, single player games still deliver better emotional story experiences.
@solarus

I think what you’re asking may be too much…
-Edit -
The ‘ideal game’ as mentioned before would be a monumental task, and unfortunately it would probably have to be tackled in a single-player game rather than an MMO, at least for the first go.

I agree. It’s easy to write down a laundry list of cool features to have in a game. Consideration for the business realities, however, needs to be given and whether the expenditure of resources would result in a profitable return, insuring the game company doesn’t go out of business.

Are there really enough people who want to start a virtual cult or family rather than playing an adventurer that saves the world? There’s a reason The Avengers made a billion dollars, people enjoy stories about heroes that save the world.

Certainly people enjoy other stories like ones about families or cults as well, but those are often harder to do well. And when they are done poorly, they are truly horrid. Action stories are easier and this undoubtedly why they are such a focus of video games just like other fairly straightforward genres like horror.

We are seeing occasional games exploring outside the standard genres, but it will always be single player games that need to do it first. Suggesting an MMO dive into it is a risk no company (or investor) would be willing to take.

It would be interesting to see an MMO where the commercial world is controlled by players and not by npc’s. No auction houses, no repair bots, no instant production of goods… an environment where you have to interact with other players to get things done, where the players set many of the quests and provide the rewards. For example, a character who develops in to a merchant may have to pay a characters who has developed a warrior to go and get his spikey fruit eggs from the tree of the ten headed chicken so he can make a pie of ultimate healing for the character who developed in to a dungeon explorer etc etc…

The problem is the real world is slow and tough and the considerable majority of people wont swap that for button mashing mayhem.

I guess it could be done on some scale and it would certainly be different but it relys on a LOT more player interaction than is seen in MMO’s these days.

As others have said, OP, very good post.

Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, there’s no hope for GW2 in this area. It is a hack & slash game, essentially, with a single plotline and a choice of missions. There’s been no scope for character development programmed in, and I think to an extent, any of us hoping for that aspect have all been fooled.

I see ArenaNet’s nixing of the prospect of mods and player-generated content as indicative of this. They’re not interested in player creativity. It’s their world and we’re just living in it. The game is a system for keeping us occupied and entertained, not to facilitate our imaginative instincts or nurture our yearning for alternative ‘selfs’ to occupy in our downtime.

Obviously, ANet isn’t alone in this and it’s par for the course with MMORPGs, but I guess, like many people, I was hoping for a mini-revolution. I guess in my misty looking glass I see elements of Minecraft with GW2’s graphics and lore, with players able to script in-game instances, create unique objects and share them.

DoctorOverlord.8620:

@Roven Leafsong – Can you post examples of other games that have achieved what you want to see?

Certainly, but I do think that you’re quite right in that the last thing I’m asking for is some kind of developer-designed ‘emotional attachment’ or moving storylines to experience. In many ways, that’s the complete opposite of what attracts me to an MMO (as opposed to the best parts of a linear RPG, a good movie or a great book).

Don’t get me wrong, I quite enjoy initial cutscenes, an involving tutorial and even a small story arc to draw me in to the game, but then I’d like the puppet strings to be cut and the decision to be the typical ‘hero’ or not left up to my own actions and choices. Any developer-designed stories are best confined to very small, intimate sequences that might explain the consequences of events that I’ve chosen to initiate or participate in, and which don’t make any assumptions about the type of character that I am. If I’m still just a pawn in an overarching story that I haven’t yet ‘finished’, one where my character’s reactions and intentions and personality are already mostly defined, then it won’t matter how emotionally or richly or movingly it has been written, it’s still not MY story.

Anyway, in answer to your question, I haven’t found this kind of experience in any graphical MMO, despite looking everywhere for it. (I wish I could get into something like EVE or Wurm, but they aren’t really worlds that appeal to me, unlike the phenomenally beautiful Tyria). Where I have found this kind of immersion is in textual worlds, and I’ll use my favourite example – the Iron Realms MUDs (Lusternia, Imperian, Aetolia). I spent years with those games, and spent more money through their item shop equivalents than probably all the graphical MMOs I’ve played in the decade since, combined. And I still feel like I got good value out of it.

While in many ways they were PvP-heavy games with a very strong gear, level and skill based grind, offsetting those systems were things like:

• Completely player-run governments (and profession schools), where citizens voted in players who could then make laws, declare wars, set tax and economic policies, buy city upgrades and initiate cultural events to contribute to the organisation’s coffers.
• A complex crafting system where (with enough skill/money) players could submit fully customized recipes for new items, and if approved as meeting prescribed quality/balance standards would then be able to produce unique weapons/armour/utility items/furniture/jewellry/etc that could be valued for their prestige as well as their stats.
• Player-run shops (or shop-keeper NPCs) that could be rented from cities and stocked with any amount of items to be sold to players for any price, and with no unified ‘auction house’ their location and entrepreneurial skills really mattered.
• Fully customizable housing that could be purchased mainly through instancing, but occasionally also at rare locations in the world – with purchaseable upgrades like simple customized flavour NPCs programmed with simple responses, gardens to grow herbs, regenerative rooms to restore health/mana/cure conditions/reduce tiredness from allies and which had absolute freedom in the shape, size and structure of the home.
• Conflict quests which were comprised of a series of very long and difficult to accomplish tasks that usually required multiple players working in concert, and which when successful could significantly alter some aspect of the world – and which would persist until one of the opposing factions either countered the effects using traditional means or completed a counter-quest to shift the balance again.
• Intricate library and theatre systems, where cities could compete each month to produce the best player-written book or essay, and the best scripted drama to be performed. Players would receive a commission every time someone read their book or watched their play, with the amount of gold depending on its player-judged quality.
• An influence system and skill-tree, which was a combat alternative consisting of using certain skills of persuasion against NPCs for similar gold/experience rewards to killing them, but which could be used on city and ally NPCs since it wasn’t always hostile. The same system allowed for a village influence mechanic, where all the cities competed in a particular town to sway the majority of villagers to align with their faction and hence provide commodities, gold or prestige for the next month or so.
• An enormous ‘planescape’ system which could only be navigated using player-created and customized ‘ships’, which had multiple stations to be crewed by a party of players working together on different functions, and which could then be taken out to ‘hunt’ the leviathons of the void.
• Well developed family and guild organisations, that could have fully customized internal structures, fees, leadership, assets and physical/recipe ownership.
• Staff and player-run roleplay events both small and large, sometimes without a predefined outcome and just for fun, and sometimes initiated by groups of players themselves.
• Heavily branching skill systems, where it was next to impossible to find two players of the same class with identical abilities.
• Customizable pets & mounts (of an existing species or a complete new one), in some cases with very involved training and development systems so that even pets that look alike could be vastly different.

Unfortunately, for all that and more, they were still just text.

I do think there are scalable solutions that exist for larger graphical worlds, and even as niche text games they comfortably make a lucrative profit, which I can believe. I think there is a commercial goldmine (not to mention a huge cult following) just waiting for the graphical MMO that decides to focus on the immersive world as opposed to ‘content’.

Wow. Thank you for pointing me in the direction of those Iron Realms games. I feel a new obsessions coming in …

The biggest letdown in almost every MMO is that you always have to be the good guy.

WoW was semi different, you were good to your faction, but atleast you had an enemy faction. However everything regarding PvE was good guy stuff.

DaoC, WaR and SWToR were different.

DaoC had 3 realms, none that were good or evil. The only true evil was in Darkness Falls really, but your character didnt have to be a hero anyways. The struggles within the realm were more an everyday fight for survival.

WaR was pretty much the same, good and evil could be discussed, although many probably saw orcs, dark elves and chaos as evil.

ToR same deal, Sith vs Jedi, good/evil was a point of view and opinion really. Plus you could be lightside Sith or darkside Jedi.

GW2 forces you to be the hero with a big H. Something I really dislike. I would love to be able to play an evil kind of character, force my will upon others through magic or steel and so on. I cant be a crazy evil engineer that wants to blow LA into pieces, or a necro in Zhaitans service, or a norn dedicated to Jormag.

I had the same gripe in D3, hero after hero, but never a chance to see it from the other side as an agent of big D.

The MMO industry really needs more immersive character choices. Pacifists, terrorists, antagonists, heroes, villains, misanthropes, humanitarians, thieves, murderers, lawmen and so on.

Focksbot.6798:

Wow. Thank you for pointing me in the direction of those Iron Realms games. I feel a new obsessions coming in …

My pleasure!

They really are well worth checking out if you’re looking for the extreme upper ranges of the immersion bell curve, at least for level-based and combat-oriented worlds.

Still, for all their depth, I don’t think any level of poetic description in text can quite compare with the visual splendour of any place or object in GW2. Now if only the mechanics and the opportunities had similar richness and scope!

Out of interest how old are you all? At 36 I’m about ready to give up on anything MMO in future, maybe I’m jaded but reading the entire thread strikes true for me as a gamer.

I’m tired of how shallow the industry has become, sick of the glossy veneer over everything, hate how graphic bling instead of a compelling and plausible story have become the focus of studios.

I appreciate the amazing work being done by Eastern European developers on things like The Witcher and Stalker franchises and wish games like The Last of Us and Heavy Rain were playable on the PC.

2012!!! I really expected more when I started gaming in ’94.

In many ways muds made better mmo’s because of their limited nature. People were more social because there was less to look at. Also, a lot of mud players were students bunking off lessons and all sitting in the universities computer rooms because back in the day people didnt have internet at home, and if you did, it was pay as you go and several hours a day online ment several hundreds of pounds a month on telephone bills.

but yes, Genesis, Hall of Fame, Ancient Anguish, Wormhole – all awsome fun. I remember playing Wolfenburg as well, one of the first commercial muds and a huge stepping stone towards the mmo’s we have today.

OP, there is fable/fable 2 Elder Scrolls series for that. Go play that. Anet can’t cater to everyone its too much money and you’d be looking at a 100 GB game (the game is already 30 GB to install from scratch) if everything everyone wants existed. If they could do what you want it would not be Free to Play after buying the initial box to run it.

I can see you’re a more tabletop RPG or role player. What happened to imagination and joining Tarnished coast server? We already do past what the limit of the game has. You don’t need all the flashy goodness you described to even do this. i for instance Play a ele that is a Mother and a guardian that is her daughter. They have pretty complex lives as well having to deal with their family matters with out any male heirs and dealing with the dragon threat. I made it work with Anet’s limitations. If there was a way to have a child, I would like that at least so she can fulfill her desire to begin her family a new.

But if your imagination isn’t enough and you need physical substance in this game then this is not for you go play a console RPG like the ones I described.

I seriously doubt anyone is going to play house (farming, owning a house, and raising a family while the world burns) with you besides the occasional RP. This is not the game and dynamic structure for it.

I don’t like being called a hero TBH, I’d rather just be “that guy.”

But you can RP anything you want. I think they should go more into the charm/dignity thing more.

One thing is becoming more and more apparent in these forums. The current generation of gamers appears to expect any game to provide them with all aspects of gameplay and enjoyment without taking any responsibility for using their own imagination to fill in the blanks.

Its pretty kitten sad.

great post OP.

indeed your “hero” in gw2 is shallow.
basically you are a gear hunter.

the game needs more reward that are not gear oriented.
politics, notoriety, ranks, role..

this is what the endgame of a mature and non shallow game should be imo.

“Violence and fighting is always their most effective and well-developed means of resolving issues”

This is actually a major theme in video games since the very beginning, and it’s not entirely because it’s the easiest to implement. Killing (in one form or another) is in almost every game ever created. From the earliest board games and chess to the newest, most modern video games, killing/fighting has always been a mechanic because of one thing: determining who wins and who loses. Yes, the level of violence and fighting can be modified, but it all comes down to who lives and who dies, because that’s what games come down to in general- who wins and who loses. Death is the ultimate mechanic for that in games. I mean, could you create a game where the premise was to comfort an old man dying from cancer in his hospital room? What would be the mechanic for whether you “win” or “lose” when you know the end is inevitable? How would you know if you’ve truly comforted him or whether it even mattered at all?

I’m not saying that violence and fighting shouldn’t be questioned. We see indie games every day with extraordinary game mechanics on winning and losing (and inbetweens). And then you have games that don’t even necessarily have such conventional mechanics (Dear Esther comes to mind), but then can that be considered a game?

Okay I’ve ranted enough and perhaps not everything I said even related to this post but it’s what came to my mind when I scrolled through.

OP, I love you. Deeply.
I was planning on being a cute and curious Sylvari who is just an eentsy bit manipulative (so much for charm…). Instead I am a generic mage who is 100% ok with horrific massacres because some Skritt stole some garbage and need to be put in their place.

chronus.1326:

Roven Leafsong.8917:

Maybe I want to take up an accredited profession well away from the ‘front lines’ and become a merchant? Maybe I want to specialise in a very esoteric area of spellcraft or martial proficiency, sacrificing my overall effectiveness in exchange for taking on a very uncommon but useful role in society? Maybe I want to express my creativity, principles or knowledge in a way that allows me to share and be recognised for my contributions? Maybe I want to join a particular village or city and set down roots, have a family, build a garden, or start a cult?

This is the very reason why EVE Online works.

I am still waiting for the day when one developer will one day pull his head out of WoW’s rear, have a sudden Eureka moment, and start implementing this to the fantasy genre too.

So far I thought that ArenaNet will be that developer, but I think we can throw that out on the window now.

What’s left to await I guess is The Elder Scrolls Online. Bethesda is kind of a hit-and-miss studio but after the positive surprise that Skyrim was I think it can go either way.

We already had it, in Ultima Online.

And then Everquest’s sales and revenues beat the pants off of UO, and every game since except for EVE has used the EQ model instead of the UO model.

Roven Leafsong.8917:

Where I have found this kind of immersion is in textual worlds, and I’ll use my favourite example – the Iron Realms MUDs (Lusternia, Imperian, Aetolia).

That does clarify your expectations.

Correct me if I misrepresent your goals, but it sounds like you are simply interested in a sandbox MMO with player-run economy and government that has various player-centric features including things such as player-designed crafting, customizable housing, enormous worlds explorable only with player assistance, persistent effects from players and social player mechanics such as theater/libraries, guilds/family trees etc. It is not surprising, however, that you’ve never found all those features in anything but text-based MUD.

Text-based MUDs are cheap to make compared to even the simplest graphical MMOs. MUDs don’t need to expend vast resources on development and QA of art, sound, animations, voice acting etc so all their effort can be focused solely on the game systems.

One can write a dramatic text description of an evil castle a few minutes. In order to place such a thing in a graphical MMO you need an art designer, a modeler, animators for the torches, drawbridges and flapping flags, then the QC to do bug checks. And all those people need to be talented which costs money. That’s just for a castle, think about the effort for NPCs.

The second you get out of MUDs and into modern graphics-based MMOs the investment becomes millions of dollars to make one of these worlds. And that means it’s a huge financial risk for whoever sets foot in the genre.

That’s not to say developers should not take risks but let’s look at what you’re asking from a viewpoint of risk. Which I’ll continue in the next post.

You want to place much of the control of a multi-million dollar virtual world into the hands of MMO players. You want them to control political, economic and even aspects of content in the game through crafting and such. That may have worked in a close-knit community that evolved from MUDs but the playerbase you see today is very different. Read a few threads in any current MMO gaming community and you’ll see a population that I wouldn’t want to trust with Flash-based game of Tetris.

Not everyone is a troll or griefer, of course, and those kind of players are not even the majority. But it has been seen that the trolls and griefers are the loudest, most active and most persistent element of any online community. You would need an army of GMs to keep that percent of the population from kittening all over that multi-million dollar world just for the fun of it.

Another issue is the reason why we do not see more player-driven content in online games. It’s actually a very funny acronym called TTP or Time To Kitten. The P actually stands for a certain male organ that the forum censor won’t allow. This is a real term used by developers to point out the amount of time it takes for players to start to create explicit and lewd material when you give them the freedom to create content in an online setting.

The player written theatrical books/plays in your MUD sound like they were very fun. Unfortunately, the TTP on that kind of material be incredibly short and one can only imagine the flood of porno that would hit such libraries if they were opened to the modern MMO playerbase.

All of which would press the staff and GMs to constantly monitor and police the game. And you would have players constantly pushing the envelope with explicit content insisting it was ‘art’. It would be an unending headache eating up yet more employee hours that could be spent on bug fixing and content development.

And then there are the bots. Did MUDs like the Iron Realm MUDs ever have to deal with gold spammers and farmers and bots? Imagine what a field day they would have in a world where players are given widespread economic influence and responsibility.

And so the multi-million dollar investment becomes an endless cycle of dealing with griefers, spammers and players overstepping the limits of good taste, maturity and sensibility by using all of those countless possibilities that the game was designed to offer. It would be a hard sell to convince investors to expose a finely crafted virtual world that cost millions to make to such an environment.

EVE Online has been brought up as an example of a working sandbox and CCP have found answers to some of these issues. They openly embrace the greifers and even encourage such players. But even then CCP retains certain controls over their game and they do not offer the ability of their players to freely create content (No TTP spaceships).

Also EVE Online has never been a MMO with a fully developed world and characters, only recently have there even been actual characters. CCP was actually very smart in this regard, they understood the risk they were taking with their sandbox so they restricted the game originally to ship avatars and space nebula. They made the game look very good but comparatively spaceships are much, much simpler, for example one doesn’t have to worry about falling through holes in the world when one is floating in space.

The kind of considerations and compromises need to be part of the suggestions you are making. They actually should be the first thing to consider before bringing up all the cool features you want to see. You can’t expect a game that has the costs of a detailed virtual setting of WoW or GW2 to take the risks with all of the player-driven mechanics that you want.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know finding one will be much harder than just writing down a list of features you want to see from MUDs. That’s where the effort of this discussion really should be focused . How do you make a virtual world-based game that gives players the kind of freedom you want and still keep it profitable while preventing it from turning in the kind of kittenpool you see on the WoW or other gaming forums.

I have a post on reddit that brings up some related issues I have with GW2’s over all design decisions regarding player actions.

Does Guild Wars 2, despite all its awesomeness lack something fundamental that other MMO’s have?

Does the world REALLY need more Grit?

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6068280/gritty-superhero-reboot

I agree with Doctor Overlord and its juts not possible with today’s youth and mentality, Yet we all know about the game Second Life and how they have special areas that are designed for TTP or sexual content. Second Life was so huge, or gotten so huge that it was the feature of a murder mystery on a CSI: NY Episode.

For all intents and purposes, GW 2 could add a more SIMs 3 mechanic to the game but then we’d have to watch more than health bars…

Although I have no big problems with this game, I would like to see more RP features and other things that can make you feel like you’re living in Tyria. (eg. Player housing, town activities like the ones ANET mentioned pre-launched, and etc). Player interaction is what I love the most about playing MMORPGs. At this moment, GW2 doesn’t offer that much and unless I’m in a crowded area like in Cursed Shore farming Plix, I barely get to talk to anyone.

I’m sure these will all come in good time but I totally agree with the OP. Killing things may be fun but I would definitely love to see features that add more flavor to the game. The addition of Costume brawl was a step in the right direction but there’s definitely room for more features.

So why play RPGs if you don’t like RPGs? That’s the question.

The stuff you don’t like is common to all RPGs and most games.

If you designed a game around what you want – what I could call the quest for mediocrity – almost nobody would be interested in it.

ANet missed a great opportunity with player character development by choosing to make all our characters the same heroes. Despite the different paths, everyone ends up as the same hero with a different name.

I have a hard time envisioning my Necromancer as the good guy hero type. I’m not saying he’s evil either, but he dabbles in dark arts in a big way and I have no doubt he believes that the end justifies the means. I can’t really play him that way though.

Character development in the manner ANet approached it is one of those: do it right or don’t do it type of things. I mean GW2 isn’t a single player game, it’s not Skyrim, so trying to act like it is doesn’t work because the development of your character comes nowhere close, nor do you have the same freedom of choices.

By forcing us into their idea of a hero mold, we have less choices, not more. It would have been better if ANet had simply left the personal story out for those who like to have a sense of uniqueness…if only in their own imagination.