Guild Wars 2

Very simple feedback for the Personal Story:

The problem is that the characters keep changing. From Lord Faren to Logan, to Tybalt, to Trahearne, to Apatia, to someforgettableguywedon’tcarebaout.

What if instead, Lord Faren remained with us the entire game?

Taking it a step further, what if our choices for example, leads to the characters we bond with in the story? For example, whether or not our main partner is Quinn or Riot Alice, depends whether or not we allow one of them to die?

Imagine for a second, in the Carnival storyline, instead of Logan and his buck teeth telling us what to do, we sneek around the Ringmaster’s base with Riot Alice raving on about government mind control conspiracies, and blowing our cover?

Characters who develop and react. Their own personalities and different ways of tackling a problem lead to altered mission tactics and branches. Most importantly, characters we can be attached to, who grow.

How would Riot Alice have helped combat the Risen Threat? Try to imagine how she would react, and how she might grow.

(Come to think of it, the story of a Street Rat overcoming their personal issues by being exposed to the world, could’ve been a great idea for a plot…)

On a more personal note, I do hope Episode 2 of the Personal Story has us revisit our starter storyline characters. How would our warband react seeing us commander of the Pact? What about Petra, and the barkeep?

Not feasible. They’d have to come up with dozens and dozens of different sets of stories and dialogues for that, and you can tell by the way it’s implemented that they’d already scaled the current implementation back after level 30 when your race/character creation choices stop mattering.

I mean don’t get me wrong, your idea sure would be cool, and they already know that, it’s just not a realistic one at all.

Even the more reasonable idea of having your previous story characters in your home instance react to your current position in the story ended up being more than the developers were willing to bother with. Though the characters are usually there in the home instance, they don’t say anything. And I think the only one where NPCs react to your story progress is the human home instance from levels 1-30.

The good news is that some of the early storyline characters have been making their way into the living story. Faren had some cool moments in last year’s Crown Pavilion, for example.

We’ll just have to wait and see what future implementations are.

Me personally, I’d like to see a personal story campaign based on the living world season 1. So players that missed those things (and even ones who didn’t) can unlock and play through that campaign after the original one.