Guild Wars 2

I’ve played quite a bit of Guild Wars 2 since launch, having 5 80s, 1 of each race, all having completed the story, with 4/5 at 100% map completion. The fifth is at 97%~. I enjoy all aspects of the game from PvE, to sPvP, and WvW. I participated in the early access of the original Guild Wars and am a huge fan of the lore.

After giving a bit of my background, I wanted to commend the team on putting out everything that they have and more specifically laying the groundwork for longevity in the form of features. Things like WvW progression, living story, spectator mode, and leader-boards. This is a solid foundation that surely is put in place to increase the longevity of the game, and I applaud them wholeheartedly.

But what about the map? We’ve seen holiday events (awesome content), things like SAB, (again fantastic), but no meaningful additions to the “personal story” or expanding the regions we can currently access.

The team has come out and said an expansion is not in the works yet, but rather that the focus was on pushing the monthly updates. That’s great, but I don’t feel that the overarching story and game-world expansion is receiving enough attention.

I thought the Lost Shores event was great, and with it we got Southsun Cove – (however empty it may be). It has become sort of thrown on the backburner when much of the focus has been in the shiverpeaks/ascalon with the living story. I know the Consortium is being tied in to this what with the refugee camps being setup, but it has not been pulled back to Southsun yet.

Maybe it’s a case of being on a “need-to-know” basis, and the future of zone-expansion/story direction will be withheld for the monthly teaser-page to encourage players to log-in, or to bring in new players. I can understand this.

It could be that the focus is indeed on the layering of features for every facet of the game so as to allow for faster content additions later in the year, which again is something that I understand. I agree with that decision then.

I don’t think this is a case of my burnout as I still find meaningful things to do every day when I log in (grabbing mini’s, sPvP ranking, and the occasional WvW battle or dungeon dive.) So it’s not a burnout issue at all.

I suppose it’s more of an information access issue. Even with understanding and following every aspect of the living story I still feel no sense of what direction either the personal story, overarching story, or zone-expansion are going. I’m not posting this to complain, but rather expressing an observation of my feelings after playing through the various aspects of the game.

What are your opinions, and do you agree that it is great seeing feature groundwork being added, and that this just means content additions will come later on in the year? Maybe saved for a 3rd/4th quarter push to pull in more players?

Any response is appreciated. Like I said, this is not a rant, just and outline of my observations.

Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant in regards to the Personal Story, but if what you meant was that you thought that the updates that would occour after the launch of the game would change the Personal Story, then I’m afraid that won’t happen.
The Personal Story is “complete”. It is a single story that involves you and some lore charactes.

So if we are going to experience a new story in the future, it will definitely not be a part of the Personal Story that we had at launch.

In regards to the living story content, I think ArenaNet is trying to build up a form of hype or something similair to that when adding new PvE content.
This is of course just my speculation, but I think that they want to build up the content over time, rather than throwing all of it in our faces at once, and then tell us how it actually came into being.

But when it comes to content being added, I think, and this is just my own opinion, that people need to be more flexible and patient with it. We are not paying a subscription in order to play GWII which means we are not nessecarily entitled to new free content.
We paid for the content that was available at launch, not the content that would be added in the future.

I think the overarching storyline will be moving forward with the living story, instead of the personal story. There are a lot of reasons for this.

First, the personal story isn’t particularly popular. A lot of people really hate Trahearne for example.

Unlike Guild Wars 1, where the area of the game you were in is tied directly into the personal story, the personal story in Guild Wars 1 is far more disjointed. It hasn’t really served the purpose Anet wanted it to, I think.

That’s one of the reasons for the living story. I think that it’s an interesting way to drive events, particularly if it changes the world as it goes.

I mean this alliance of the dredge and the flame legion is happening after the defeat of Zhaitan. The story of the game is moving forward…towards what, we don’t know.

I think they’re testing what they can do with the living world to bring larger, and more interesting content to us through it.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant in regards to the Personal Story, but if what you meant was that you thought that the updates that would occour after the launch of the game would change the Personal Story, then I’m afraid that won’t happen.
The Personal Story is “complete”. It is a single story that involves you and some lore charactes.

Small correction here – personal story does change, but it’s not getting new story lines, rather it’s getting more cinematics and cutscenes.

I suspect we will get a new personal story with each expansion. Not directly continuing from the one we’ve got now (and importantly not necessarily using the same NPCs) but a new story arc following (or leading) our characters exploration of the new areas which will be added and the events that occur there. Maybe ending in taking down another dragon.

Hopefully it will follow on from the story you’ve got now so some of your choices will make a difference (Vigil characters will have a different story to Order of Whispers ones for example) and maybe it will make more use of some of the biography questions which don’t have much impact currently like which god your human follows or who your asuras teacher was.

I don’t have a source for this but it seems like the logical way to do it – small updates get a short story arc like Lost Shores or Flame & Frost and big updates get a bigger story arc with more elaborate mechanics like choices which change the plot.