Guild Wars 2

Not sure about every personal story, but im kinda bored by mine,

they putted animation in it, so we can listen them talking and see them standing towards each other and blubbering about some strategy, … bored fals asleep while that

there is… like no emotion at all, like face expression, body language?? If you use video sequences you could at least make something out of it >_>’

I thought the personal story was fine.

Do you realise how much extra money would have to be put in to use video sequences?

I quite like the art-direction. Sure, you can argue back and forth about that and perhaps some of the voice acting. It’s supposed to set the scene, not provide you with a “Lord of the Rings” type experience. For what it is, it’s absolutely fine and I am personally enjoying mine.

I rather like my personal story, though in a sense maybe i do not, see my personal story confronted me with the heroic death of a character i kindoff grew fond off, which pretty much had me tear up and i think as a consequence of some emotional griefing i have not played in over a week … … In part i blame my tearing up to being rather tired at the time, but i can’t deny that the feeling of grief is preventing me from wanting to play :/

After the first time; I usually stop after getting the to the Order parts of the story. After that, it’s all the same and seemed to fall apart a bit. I was playing to be the hero; not the side kick of a “cabage patch kid” with a Final Fantasy sized sword of uber-ness. hehe

Seriously though; it was OK. I found the story in GW1 to be a bit better. AND, in all honesty, I have never loathed an enemy as much as the Risen. So the design of these things really drag the game down to annoying (IMO). So as soon as they become a core of the story is when it tanks for me.

Risen = most annoying, un-interesting mobs in an MMO… ever. (IMO)

I dont think that the story line itself was that bad. But, on the other hand, the npc’s in the story have abut as much personality as a snail. I not sure if its the voice acting or whatever.

Well yeah, not every character in the story was a big star, or appealed to me as a character. But i think that is more than to be expected, it’s just that in the game you can’t avoid contact with these people as you likely would IRL.

I like my personal story. I got to save a mythical creature, take on the dastardly Nightmare Court, choose my own plans of attack, join the mighty Vigil, thwart a demon….and I’m only 43.

Each time I create a new character, I make sure to pick different story options so I can have a new experience each time.

I have enjoyed my personal story on multiple characters.

Loved my Personal Story on my Mesmer all the way up to 80, and the same on my Ranger all the way up to 80. Been working on a Thief now and loving their Personal Story so far. Taking different paths on each character so I can see the differences.

Getting ready to do my first time through the Whispers storyline, so can’t wait to see it. I am definitely happy with the Personal Story and in no way bored of it.

Story is boring. Good thing you can skip the stupid conversations.

I like personal stories, on my warrior and necro. If I really have to dig out something negative its that my Norn, stops being norn the further I go into story. She has voice of norn and all but the way she speaks, is more human than norn, you will notice clear difference once you done with norn starting personal story quests. Which is quite shame, but overall, I like it.

I love the story, and not everyone will just scroll thru it and ignore it. Im actually very interested in tyria and the dragons.

I feel bad for anet, having to go thru so much work only to hear 12 year olds complain that the story is boring…

I think the idea of a personal story in an MMO is boring. The less time and money they waste on it, the better.

i loved it but now that i have done it then it would be boring to do it again. i know you can make other choices but their all tied into each other somehow and you will eventually do the same ones again.

I leveled my mesmer to 80 and completed the last 5 quests or so after I turned level 80

With newer characters I often am late in doing the personal stories. So I asked myself why, since I normally like story lines.

Well, for me I’ve stumbled on what I see as Anet’s weak point. The main story line in GW1 was initially told mostly in missions. I think that worked really well. Later additions were mostly text explanations. So GW1 was pretty good for me, specifically Prophecies.

In GW2 we have more cut scenes of npc’s and my character talking to each other. I do see this as an improvement over the text in chat we got in GW1 but after having played games like SWTOR and other Bioware games, the story telling is rather a bit cheesy, even childish and clunky at best. Also because of playing Bioware games I miss being able to make choices in conversations. In essence the attitude of your character is now dictated to you and that’s a problem if you envisioned your character differently.

The only good thing about the story line to me is the difficulty of the quests. They can be challenging and because there aren’t too many challenging ones it’s just nice from time to time to have.

All in all, I haven’t felt connected to my characters much and the story even less. Half the time I don’t even remember why I am doing a certain personal quests because I totally lost the background behind it.

Then the last few quests were just tedious and dragged on and the final confrontation with Zhaitan was only epic in the sense that it was an epic disappointment. Not going to go into details but it took too long to get to the end fight, it made no sense to me what was happening except in the beginning and the endfight itself didn’t feel like my character was a hero in any shape or form.

The beginning says “this is my story” and the end was “we did it all together but we couldn’t have done it without you”. Doesn’t feel the same to me.

So, it doesn’t keep me from enjoying the rest of the game but it certainly isn’t a strong point for me in this game. A shame I guess because I do love a good story.

What saves the game in that respect is that Anet have created a rich world and history. It’s just the actual story telling side that, for me at least, they aren’t very good at.

PS is terrible in game. I thought it was a nice addition but now i think it actually takes away from the game b/c ANet wasted resources on amateurish writing, characters with no depth and bad pacing. few characters which could get interesting are killed off for mechanical reasons (it would cost ANet too much to keep them with branches in storyline etc.), missions are too short with constant loading screens or too long which made me fall asleep. Mind you I still didn’t finish the whole PS but I simply don’t feel like doing it. I absolutely think that if this is the level of storytelling ANet wants to have in expansions they should stop bothering with it. Put all this money in other spaects of the game which are actually good instead of wasting it on people who write like they are in high school.

Zhaitan isn’t even a good bad guy. it is like fighting a bad weather. Sure it sucks but we can’t say it has any kind of depth or motivation or… character. it’s just bad thing. At least in GW1 we had a White Mantle, then Lich, Shiro, Abaddon.

gW1 didn’t have incredible story but it was still miles better than what we have here. i strongly believe ANet was too ambitious here. they wanted to have all those branching story lines for each race and end up with disjointed, boring stories.

Having a single player experience within an MMO is a refreshing new element to a fairly stale genre of games, and certainly a step forward.

It could be of a higher quality in terms of presentation and narrative of course, but my fear is that Arenanet will simply not have the resources to fund this due to their subscription-free business model (which was also one of their main selling points).

I loved the personal story… up until a certain point. Norn storyline was great, then I joined the Vigil and enjoyed it immensely, then… the story seemed to go off the rails. I mostly blame a certain sylvari who pretty much embodies the concept of a “Mary Sue” character.

Story telling is still amateurish. Bad pacing, characters talking AT each other, not to, and the occational voice actor that makes you go “are you kidding me?? why is this ridiculously bad voice actor in the game??”.

It’s not engaging. I’m trying to convince myself that I should at least complete the story…

I didn’t think it was boring but after awhile the NPC’s started to sound like Misses Chuck from Peanuts “Blah blah blah blah blah” after awhile I skipped every cut scene that I could.

Gehenna.3625:

All in all, I haven’t felt connected to my characters much and the story even less. Half the time I don’t even remember why I am doing a certain personal quests because I totally lost the background behind it.

This is a severe issue for myself as well. Connection to character and character connection to game world.

When I first tried a Norn back in BWE1, I lost all “immersion” (connection) with my character the moment I saw him standing there dressed like a human. Looking around, I saw Norn NPCs everywhere. But not my character. He was standing there, out of place looking like an over sized human.
I didn’t care what the story had for me, all I knew was that I felt like the content was “broken” as it didn’t look or feel right.

Now that I have purchased the Norn T2 armor for my Norn, I am amazed at finding I’m no longer distracted by the human armor design – the first story part, Hunt or something was a fail cause I didn’t have access to the Norn Armor; but since then. I am enjoying the Norn story finally.

Anyway; distracting from the thread a little; but it applies slightly due to the nature of how it made me become un-caring about the story due to the “broken 4th wall” effect the armor design has.

It’s okay, it could’ve been better written and delivered though. I also dislike the cutscenes where the character talk in a random magical place, that loses it mainly for me.

I’ve enjoyed just about everything about the personal story. I think it provides a very nice compliment to the open-world game play…a change of pace. I like having a personalized set of content and story, with lots of choices I can make to supplement the other game play, but not get in the way or force anything on you. I also like that some of it is quite challenging.

I liked the story telling and the characters in Guild Wars 1 way more. The NPC’s in the personal story are empty shells with no depth whatsoever. I also dislike that every conversation is held with some odd background instead of the area itself and the attitude that my character was given automatically has ruined every bit of my storyline/lore I came up with for my character.

I just didn’t like the whole “lets invade orr” part. I mean, I get it that somehow we have to retake orr and kill zhaitan, but… trahearne? cmon -.- he’s the most flat and most boring character i’ve ever encountered. Even if I somewhat dislike Destiny’s Edge coz of their whinning (esp Logan, but except Rytlock), I find them more compelling than the Trahearne. I felt like HE was the main character, and I was just an overglorified assistant. :|

One thing I did notice is that in some places there seem to be big gaps in the story. Also, a lot of the “heroic sacrifices” and “sad death” moments were kinda meh because the characters weren’t that fleshed out to begin with and you had no emotional investment in them… or it was way too predictable/unnecessary. Let’s just say that when a character mentions he has a wife, etc. he’s a dead man walking, which is incredibly cliche. It just feels like they try to force you to like certain characters in a purely formulaic way, then kill them off to try to make the story more interesting. All it really did was tell me “Oh, you said something that someone thought would make me like you? Okay, you’re gonna die.” and stop caring at all about any of the characters.

I blame George R.R. Martin for doing the whole “Kill the characters you love” thing so well, now everybody thinks that “Step 1, make likeable character. Step 2, kill character. Step 3, profit.” is good storytelling.

Some of the missions can be fun but the writing is terrible for the most part, most of the characters are annoying and some lines are just flat out laughably bad.
I think there was a line in the Order of Whispers quest line that went something like “well if we keep fighting, then i guess we’re not dead”, read with complete sincerity.
If that was the point of the joke, then fair enough beacuse it made me laugh, but i got the impression my character was beeing serious.

The only parts i acually enjoyed were the charr,asura and some of the vigil storylines.

I am really enjoying my personal story it ties in nicely with he zone advancement. I am looking forward to doing my story every time it’s available.

penatbater.4710:

I felt like HE was the main character, and I was just an overglorified assistant. :|

Unfortunately, I completely agree with you on that. At the end it certainly wasn’t “my story” anymore.

Personal Story was fun until after Claw Island. It just got… really stale. Also, I’m extremely disappointed that I couldn’t have Lord Faren stay with me the entire way. I love that guy, and it was such a waste to only keep him around for ten-ish levels.

ANet needs to stop killing off characters and stop with a formulaic pattern. They also needed to give us a choice in how we wanted our character’s voice to sound and what he could say. Overall, Personal Story is an overglorified traditional questing style that didn’t achieve much. It needs far more depth and better writing if they want to keep the player’s interest.

I would say to personal story is interesting at the beginning and as then starts getting more and more tedious to do. At the start there was a sense that I was developing my character from a role playing perspective, then as the story focuses more and more on the dragons that’s when the story turns boring and generic. And the fact that the later missions are bugged to hell doesnt help either.

Overall the story has been patchy. Some very enjoyable quests and interesting twists, particularly early on. But then some quests I couldn’t wait to end because they were either so boring or far too long (the one where you rescue some scientists from a cave springs to mind). I’ve found the story got worse as the storylines for the different races and orders began to converge and it all became much more generic. Plus it meant spending ever more time with Trahearne who must be one of the dullest and least inspiring leading characters I’ve come across in any MMO.

I don’t mind the style of the cutscenes with the characters facing, though I would have preferred to see them standing in the correct environment and have more than 2 characters in view at once when it’s a multi-person conversation.

Voice acting is patchy. Very patchy. Some of it is actually rather good, especially the Asura and Charr characters, with some good laughs along the way (especially the early Asura missions) but this tends to be the incidental acting outside of the fixed cut scenes, which are mostly rather dry and dull.

But all the voice acting is eclipsed by one huge issue – just how terrible Trahearne’s voice acting and scripting is. I don’t know if the problem was that the script was so poor the actor just couldn’t get inspired by it and phoned in his performance, or if the actor wasn’t up to the task. But however you look at it, it’s an awful, lifeless, emotionless performance that sounds like it’s being acted on first read through and it really turns the clock back to the bad old days of amateurish voice acting in games.

Its mostly the writing and characters. Its just not all that memorable. I watched it all, but I was barely paying attention in the later sections when its supposed to be epic.

It had its moments, but overall, its nothing memorable or special. For a MMO, its pretty good, but that’s not saying much. Kinda hard to go from Dragon Age or Mass Effect to this.

The story is a nice feature but in all honesty for me it is boring. Seems like they were trying to be like ToR in having their own storyline but failed bad. It has been boring to where I skip a lot of the conversation now. That’s just me though but I appreciate the fact they took time to add one. It isn’t exactly horrible, but just meh.

You can click through the animation if it bugs you. Lower right hand corner. Why gripe about something you don’t really have to “suffer” through? After the animation, its just another instance to be solved.

I enjoy the storylines though.

I’ve got 2 level 80 characters.
Necro, Elementalist.

My Necro hasn’t touched his “story” since around lv32ish.
My Elementalist only did 4 missions..

It’s not that it’s “bad”.. it’s that it feels unrewarding.

Personally… I kinda think this is why SWTOR fell appart and isn’t very popular. Sure story is important, but gameplay trumps it.. everytime!

I’m finding all of the stories kind of bland, plot-wise. About as engaging as an after school special. Probably because they seem to have been written to the level of pre-teens, rather than adults.

The presentation is fine though. Of course, I’d prefer fully animated cutscenes, but I don’t find the storytelling mechanics as they are, to cause that much of a disconnect. It’s the substance of the stories that’s lacking. All tofu and no red meat. It gets the job done, but tends to put the palate to sleep.

Try playing a different race and class etc. if you do not like your story. I was only amused by my human guardian, however I loved the story behind my warrior charr.

Oh and no thanks to fully animated cutscenes, I by far had my fill of that in Swtor, so no thanks.

Yeah, you do have to give them credit in the fact that making a compelling story in an MMO is crushingly difficult. Even BioWare had the same kind of problem with SWTOR and they’re one of the best storytelling companies out there.

Other parts of the game, like DE chains and some heart quests, feel very organic and alive. It does just seem like the story was a it rushed though. Could chalk it up to the multiple paths everywhere. Even though each character will only get something like 40-50 story missions, there’s probably a couple hundred of the things total between all races, orders, and path choices. Ironically though, it seemed like the story dumbed down as it converged. IE, the Orders and Race missions were great, but when it got to the Pact part where all those storylines converged into content that almost everyone would see, there was a big drop.

Yes, I stopped doing it around level 30.