Guild Wars 2

The Manifesto trailer, all those years ago, had a line that said, " It’s your story". That line is dead now.

In one of the recent interviews, ArenaNet mentioned they are not going to follow anymore the pattern they had with the original personal storyline – of a branching story that (in theory) followed what the player decided. They said the expansion’s storyline, and likely the story of any future content they make, will be linear and experienced by everyone. The old model, they mentioned, didn’t work that well.

The “It’s your story” mantra was heard quite often during the original GW2 hype. I would like to ask the community why do you think the personal storyline failed, to the point that ArenaNet decided to abandon it.

Here are some options, to start the discussion:

• Because the idea of a branching storyline is bad. It creates content that a player would only see if he played the game again.

• Because the idea of a branching storyline is nice, but it was poorly executed in GW2. The story never had that much cohesion, with things that happened in a chapter being mostly forgotten and never mentioned again once said chapter is over.

• Because the idea of a branching storyline is nice and its execution wasn’t that bad, but the GW2 storyline was so badly written that, no matter how it had been presented, it would still have been a fail.

• Because MMORPG players don’t really care about story, so investing a large amounts of resources on the storyline is a waste.

Other ideas? Opinions?

Point two, really. The idea of the storyline is nice and all (and it’s not too badly written, I think) but it has zero effects once the story tier in question is completed. It doesn’t matter that my Charr is Iron legion if she meets other Iron Legion Charr after tier 1 of the personal story, they will still slowly explain to her what the Iron Legion is, as if she never heard of it.

The main issue that I had with the personal story (bearing in mind that I haven’t completed it yet – I’m more of a casual GW2 player, I guess. Played since release, but never for longer than a few months at once, then I took long breaks) is that it a) follows a pretty foreseeable pattern. You get uh… 3? quests, then one quest where you decide something, often with really weird decisions where it simply doesn’t make much sense to decide between the two instead of, well, doing both simultaneously. They cite “lack of resources” as the reason there, but that’s only a thinly veiled excuse, the only resource the other party in those decisions is lacking is me, the player character. So when I have the option to either help the durmand priory with research or debrief an order of whispers spy, I really don’t think that this is a decision that needs to be made. Do both. Send people to debrief the spy while doing the research, or vice versa. It’s really not that compelling a decision.

Secondly (which would be b) I guess) the decisions have barely any effect, save for short “shock” value. Once the tier is done the decisions are forgotten and never brought up again… which is a common problem in story driven MMOs. SWTOR hat the same, most decisions there were purely cosmetical, with the quests still progressing in the same manner.

Ultimately I believe that taking the personal story out and making it a story that is experienced by everyone can be very much a good thing, mainly because it allows the writers to focus on one singular thread of story and hopefully flesh that out a bit more than they did with the personal story. Choices would be nice, but since they already had little effect save from “do mission a or b, but you will win nontheless” I don’t think there will be much of a difference here.

A branching story that is good almost goes hand in hand with procedural generated. For example, in shadow of mordor, I remember particular Orcs by name. Orcs that no one but me ever faced.

In GW2 all the content is crafted. Branching paths leads to wasted dev time, or Walking Dead smoke and mirror choices where your choices only feel like they mattered when they actually don’t, or the Mass Effect 3 route where decision were given a fixed number to affect the outcome in a binary way.

Yeah, I personally would like more of a choose your own adventure style of story lines. I really don’t like the new story line to be truthful. It seems so, less meaningful and empty.

You get some randomly inserted filler content to hold you off because hey youre level 40 so we have to do something but you’re not quite high enough to progress the real story so here’s filler.

I’m pretty sure they had to stop doing it because they want the Living Story to impact on the world outside of the story instances, and that’s not possible with a branching story.

Or more specifically, it means the impact of the choices have to be limited to extremely minor things like changes to non-voiced NPC dialogue, where it’s possible for all the people in a map to see their own version. At which point it’s not really worth doing.

They can’t let us make choices that impact things like which NPCs survive, or which towns/Pact bases are established or protected, things that really matter, because then they would have to create different versions of the maps to reflect each choice and split players between them. Which would upset a lot more people than are bothered by a non-branching story.

Well I liked certain parts of the story line, but even though i’m fond of sylvari, I really got fed up with Trahearne about the 1st replay (have 15 lvl 80’s and finished story 15 or 16 times now (deleted 2 lvl80 chars))trahearne was a unneccesary person in the storyline, and a frustrating one at that. Any commander could have been way more charismatic then trahearne would ever become… even if he lived to be as old as ancient sequoia’s

I loved gw1’s story though and was captivated untill I stopped playing a couple of days after i saw Gwen marry Thackeray… and gw2 started (3 yrs later.) I bought gw1 from a sale costing 7,99 euro I haggled and I payed 4,99 euro in the end which was the best price/game hour played ever in my life….

Gw1 only had 2 or 3 minor deviations form the major story line. even though all stories depended on which place you started your game (either ascalon/shing jea isle or kamadan…) but they all intertwined if you wanted and all chars could travel everywhere and do all lvl10+ missions

Also there’s actually a lot of Personal Story chapters that influence things that happen later on in the story, and points where your character will get extra dialogue with some characters because they met them before.

That’s why the level 60-80 story in it’s current form is such a mess. If it was true that each chapter was self-contained and had no impact on anything else then it wouldn’t matter that they changed the order. But because there are numerous references to previous events and reoccurring NPCs it’s almost incomprehensible. You’re close friends with someone in one chapter, then introduced to them for the first time in the next; someone thanks you for helping them get over the death of a friend, then later on you meet that friend and witness their death etc.

But maybe it’s only noticeable if you’ve played through the story on multiple characters with different backgrounds. There is a degree of “random” chance to it. For example my human character’s sister also joins The Pact and they could have had some extra dialogue, but didn’t because I didn’t play that mission, instead she meets my asura’s Krewe members and two sylvari wardens my sylvari helped in her early story. If I hadn’t played though the sylvari and asura storylines those would seem like random ‘throw-away’ NPCs who have no relevance outside of that one chapter.