Guild Wars 2

When I first got through the GW2 story, I tried to imagine going through the game without having read any of the books and not having played GW1.

Here’s what I have concluded after 8 level 80s….the story is fragmented. Imagine taking your favorite book, keeping the ending, but removing 4/5ths of the chapters. After playing a ridiculous amount (which I truthfully don’t expect many people to do), I probably have the majority of the story figured out. However, even I am missing some portions. GW1 had branching story as well, but allowed every character to experience pretty much everything except certain tutorials and pre-searing.

Personally, I think that even a person who doesn’t like making alts should be able to at least experience 75-80% of the story. Perhaps certain these could be unlocked after the last mission?

Do you think we should be able to repeat our own story? How about important aspects from other storylines?

A ‘good’ story is conveyed in a ‘good’ way.

GW2’s story is anything but.

I’m still wondering what these kind of stuff are for.

Probably was meant to be faction currency for the armor and weapons.

But at the moment the factions are largely useless and have little to no impact on anything.

I would argue that the story itself was anything but good, and the manner in which it’s presented is even worse. What follows is my opinion.

Let’s take a look first at Destiny’s Edge. In order to fully grasp their story, you have to run story mode dungeons…. which is about as much fun as having my wisdom teeth extracted. And yet, you’re introduced to these characters during your story quest… and that’s it. You don’t see them again until you’re forced into a dungeon at Arah for the final story quest. They don’t have anything to do with the Pact, or that nimrod Trahearne… just dungeons.

Speaking of that nimrod Trahearne… what an epic facepalm. Let’s examine this for a moment: a guy appears about 1/3 of the way through your story (we’ll ignore the fact that the first 10 levels of story quest pretty much ended- that’s okay, I didn’t want to know anything else about my sister who’s a Seraph, anyway… /eyeroll), and suddenly, he becomes the hero. Wait, aren’t you playing the hero? Nope, sorry- glory goes to the plant guy over there… who almost never swings a weapon.

The entire story could play out without Trahearne even existing. You lead the Pact, you make the decisions, you fight the Elder Dragons… Oh, wait, that’s what happens anyway, and yet he gets all the credit.

Terribly written, terribly executed. There is one thing I agree with Trahearne on:

This won’t end well.

I would have liked it if the story was not spread out across levels. I really enjoy the story of my character and as you level it seems farther and farther between levels that you can do the next part.

I think they missed a great alternate way to level through the game.

Wow, you actually liked the story? That was one of my biggest disappointments in this game.

It is all over the place as well and half the time I didn’t even know what the story was about anymore (turned off the sound for the horrid voice acting and skipped as much as I could). I really didn’t think it was very engaging or original and it most certainly wasn’t “my story”.

After my second level 80 I couldn’t bear to level any toons anymore. Just too boring. Not just the story but that was a big part of that.

Let me clarify:

Going through the story once gives such a small amount of information about the world, that it all seems very muddled. You are basically given less than 1/5 of RELEVANT information.

After going through it on multiple characters, choosing different races, orders, and paths, I finally got most of the important plot points from the story (probably still missing about 1/5-1/6 of important information).

That’s an glaring issue, especially if you don’t make alternate characters. People with one character will never be able to understand the vast majority of the story, which makes the whole thing VERY disjointed.

I think being able to play through other story missions, even if it doesn’t effect YOUR story, would go a long way to rectifying the issue. Parallel story portions could be unlocked every 10 levels (would also help with experience points).

So yes, I did enjoy the story. However, I had to REALLY go out of the way to get most of the chapters. Otherwise, it feels extremely unorganized with a bunch of plot holes.

I’ve analyzed for a while what makes the GW2 story so poor, beyond the obvious stuff.

Probably the biggest thing for me is the pacing. On my first character I leveled to 80 purely through world exploration, and did not touch the story until I was nearly finished with gearing my character out with full exotics. From exploring the world I gathered this amazing sense of depth and lore in the GW2 universe that I loved because none of it was explained directly to me, it was just there in the world for me to discover and interpret how I will.

Then I played the story through, each mission back to back. I mentioned pacing, and this is why, playing the story like this became a chore. Not only were the instanced story zones so repetitive in their structure (an essentially on-rails experience one expects from an FPS story, not an RPG), but the obligitory combat in nearly ever zone that didn’t even require it was too long and drawn out, and not challenging in the least. It highlighted everything wrong with an MMORPG’s combat system and combined it with J-RPG levels of horrible linearity.
This came straddled on the back of your quick progression of a young person thrust out into the wilderness rapidly gaining favour of your race’s hero and becoming extremely wise and competant very quickly, to the point where people start taking advice from you when they have no good reason to. All the while you’re racing through the story at break-neck pace, leaving behind you story threads that were never fully resolved.
You transition so quickly from nobody to town hero to trusted advisor, and then to rookie of an order, quickly promoted to highest rank after about 2 or 3 missions, and then promoted to second in command of the pact. The progression is not believable because your character never develops through the story, your character never learns anything, and you have no say in how your character acts in your “Personal” story.

And that’s the biggest peeve I have about the GW2 story. They advertise it as YOUR personal story, when in reality, regardless of what choices you make, there is only one real story path. There’s nothing personal about it, just a thin veil of choice as to while missions you have to slog through to get to the most anti-climatic ending ever.

Ashes.6418:

I’ve analyzed for a while what makes the GW2 story so poor, beyond the obvious stuff.

Probably the biggest thing for me is the pacing. On my first character I leveled to 80 purely through world exploration, and did not touch the story until I was nearly finished with gearing my character out with full exotics. From exploring the world I gathered this amazing sense of depth and lore in the GW2 universe that I loved because none of it was explained directly to me, it was just there in the world for me to discover and interpret how I will.

Then I played the story through, each mission back to back. I mentioned pacing, and this is why, playing the story like this became a chore. Not only were the instanced story zones so repetitive in their structure (an essentially on-rails experience one expects from an FPS story, not an RPG), but the obligitory combat in nearly ever zone that didn’t even require it was too long and drawn out, and not challenging in the least. It highlighted everything wrong with an MMORPG’s combat system and combined it with J-RPG levels of horrible linearity.
This came straddled on the back of your quick progression of a young person thrust out into the wilderness rapidly gaining favour of your race’s hero and becoming extremely wise and competant very quickly, to the point where people start taking advice from you when they have no good reason to. All the while you’re racing through the story at break-neck pace, leaving behind you story threads that were never fully resolved.
You transition so quickly from nobody to town hero to trusted advisor, and then to rookie of an order, quickly promoted to highest rank after about 2 or 3 missions, and then promoted to second in command of the pact. The progression is not believable because your character never develops through the story, your character never learns anything, and you have no say in how your character acts in your “Personal” story.

And that’s the biggest peeve I have about the GW2 story. They advertise it as YOUR personal story, when in reality, regardless of what choices you make, there is only one real story path. There’s nothing personal about it, just a thin veil of choice as to while missions you have to slog through to get to the most anti-climatic ending ever.

QFT. This is it, in a nutshell. Dead-on.

I have stopped doing storylines, period. I would like to perma delete the silly prompt cluttering my screen.

See, I did not read the GW books. So.. from what I have seen of the storylines I did, Destiny’s edge are a bunch of /facepalms who make Alesia look like Voltron.

Granted, I only worked with Eir and Nimrod, er, Thackery. Thack’s special combat move was a faceplant in the dirt, and Eir was great at posing heroically with bow while her apparently toothless wolf gummed on one bad guy’s leg. So, for me, without the novel background, they are just really really bad AI help, nothing more.

Trahearne. I really don’t know how you could create possibly the most unlikeable, cardboard character in any MMO, and then give him all the credit.

It is a terrible storyline series, it is a personal to me as a walmart parking lot and less interesting.

Contrast the first mission in Proph (post searing) to the first mission here. In Proph, they send out a lowly little noob scout, who sees Charr, runs and screams like a little girl, with success determine by how fast you ran AWAY.

Here? Me (and 10 other noobs) gank one guaranteed success worm. (Norn) Now, for that I am THE SLAYER, known far and wide throughout the lands, feared, honored, and on the fast track to even more fame and product endorsements.

In GW1, your role grew as your character grew, less of the Mighty Hero and more of the dummy who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Far more engaging, continuous, and fun.

It seems that all I do on these forums is complain about GW2. Well, why am I here? For me, Jora was such a compelling character, the Norn were so fascinating, and Jora’s part in my story was fun and rewarding. I am here because of the success of THAT story, I can be a Norn, a “jora” somewhat, and this is the only place I can. I would call that a story success. It made me buy this game, and keeps me here.

I doubt Trahearne will do that for anyone.

The storyline has a lot of issues – it feels like Trahearne was a plot device so ArenaNet could record all the lines our characters should say using a single voice actor, as opposed to using 10 different voice actors – but many of the critics here doesn’t really make sense.

Ashes.6418:

Then I played the story through, each mission back to back. I mentioned pacing, and this is why, playing the story like this became a chore.

You shot yourself in the foot by playing the story like that. Not only you removed any challenge from your personal story – if you read the Personal Storyline forum you will see some complaints about how it is too hard, but the scalling system doesn’t work well enough that a level 80 wouldn’t faceroll through most of the levels 1-60 story missions – but you also asked for repetition by playing all missions back to back, instead of playing through them as they were intended (every once in a while, as you do other things to level up in between).

Gehenna.3625:

turned off the sound for the horrid voice acting and skipped as much as I could

If you skipped the storyline, you don’t really have any grounds to complain about it.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

In GW1, your role grew as your character grew, less of the Mighty Hero and more of the dummy who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Far more engaging, continuous, and fun.

The great majority of the GW1 storyline, and especially the Prophecies storyline, is a big joke. It’s so bad that even Nightfall laughs at the Prophecies storyline. As bad as GW2 is, Prophecies was far worse (and Factions was worse, too).

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

See, I did not read the GW books. So.. from what I have seen of the storylines I did, Destiny’s edge are a bunch of /facepalms who make Alesia look like Voltron.

…
It is a terrible storyline series, it is a personal to me as a walmart parking lot and less interesting.

…
Here? Me (and 10 other noobs) gank one guaranteed success worm. (Norn) Now, for that I am THE SLAYER, known far and wide throughout the lands, feared, honored, and on the fast track to even more fame and product endorsements.

I am in awe of your one-liners, which I have highlighted above…. because they were great :p

Also, i agree with the entirety of your post. This story was mind-numbingly boring, and very hard to become attached to.

I agree! I played Guild Wars 1 for years, read the lore obsessivley, and read the books. So I understood the implications behind everything, but there is so little depth, and so little information, in your personal story. If I hadn’t been a moldy vetran player, I would have concluded that GW2 was just… shallow.
Arenanet has tried to provide the information you need to get some depth, but not in a good way at all. Before and after you do your personal story tasks, if you make sure to carefully speak to every NPC, they give you details. But who the heck does that?

For example, while going through the charr personal story, you have multiple encounters with Flame Legion. My female charr PC has sexist slurs spat towards her (same thing happens with norn). Now, as a lore reader, I know Flame Legion’s history (And Sons of Svanir’s), so the slurs are understandable. But someone who has no clue would be like “The heck was that?”—and with no background information, it seems out of context.
This is just one example I can think of, because I’ve played a lot of charr characters. But you see similar issues through the entire game.

Ashes.6418:

I’ve analyzed for a while what makes the GW2 story so poor, beyond the obvious stuff.

Probably the biggest thing for me is the pacing. On my first character I leveled to 80 purely through world exploration, and did not touch the story until I was nearly finished with gearing my character out with full exotics. From exploring the world I gathered this amazing sense of depth and lore in the GW2 universe that I loved because none of it was explained directly to me, it was just there in the world for me to discover and interpret how I will.

Then I played the story through, each mission back to back. I mentioned pacing, and this is why, playing the story like this became a chore. Not only were the instanced story zones so repetitive in their structure (an essentially on-rails experience one expects from an FPS story, not an RPG), but the obligitory combat in nearly ever zone that didn’t even require it was too long and drawn out, and not challenging in the least. It highlighted everything wrong with an MMORPG’s combat system and combined it with J-RPG levels of horrible linearity.
This came straddled on the back of your quick progression of a young person thrust out into the wilderness rapidly gaining favour of your race’s hero and becoming extremely wise and competant very quickly, to the point where people start taking advice from you when they have no good reason to. All the while you’re racing through the story at break-neck pace, leaving behind you story threads that were never fully resolved.
You transition so quickly from nobody to town hero to trusted advisor, and then to rookie of an order, quickly promoted to highest rank after about 2 or 3 missions, and then promoted to second in command of the pact. The progression is not believable because your character never develops through the story, your character never learns anything, and you have no say in how your character acts in your “Personal” story.

And that’s the biggest peeve I have about the GW2 story. They advertise it as YOUR personal story, when in reality, regardless of what choices you make, there is only one real story path. There’s nothing personal about it, just a thin veil of choice as to while missions you have to slog through to get to the most anti-climatic ending ever.

You said it perfectly, good sir/ma’am. You should stand in front of Arenanet’s developers and give this as a speech XD

I laugh at this NPC, but it is a funny example of how personal this all is.

Crusader Thurkill is a pivotal member of the Vigil in the Norn Storyline. He is the Vigil rep, is who you make choices with, who accompanies you on the missions, and who accepts you into the Vigil.

However, if you talk to him beside the bank in Hoelbrak, after your rapid rise in rank, after you save Tyria, this is what you get.

Thurkill. Interested in the Vigil? I’m happy to tell you more about it, but as you are not a member, I can’t be too detailed. I’m sure you understand.

Player. How do I join?

Thurkill. Join? Well, we’ll see about that. But not today, my friend.

You want an MMORPG with a good personal story and great character development? Stars Wars the Old Republic is calling you! Guilds Wars 2 Personal Story is anything but….. The Sylvari and their “betrayer” is where I called it quits on the GW2 story mode playing for me..

Trahearne is so bad of a character, I made a Sylvari Necromancer myself, called her Burnable and stand in the fire every time it is an available option.

I was watching the cutscenes of GW1 to get some information of what is going on. The personal story misses so much fundamental information that I felt like running around like a headless chicken, advised by a guy who gets everyone killed.

Erasculio.2914:

Ashes.6418:

Then I played the story through, each mission back to back. I mentioned pacing, and this is why, playing the story like this became a chore.

You shot yourself in the foot by playing the story like that. Not only you removed any challenge from your personal story – if you read the Personal Storyline forum you will see some complaints about how it is too hard, but the scalling system doesn’t work well enough that a level 80 wouldn’t faceroll through most of the levels 1-60 story missions – but you also asked for repetition by playing all missions back to back, instead of playing through them as they were intended (every once in a while, as you do other things to level up in between).

I played from day 1, there was no information on the “optimal” ways to play the game at that time. I played how I felt I would have the most fun, and tbh I only did the story to get the items it gives, namely the level 80 back piece.
It’s not really a personal story if you’re forced to play it one way to enjoy it. Furthermore, when I want to level, I don’t want story. When I want story, I don’t want to level.
Maybe I did shoot myself in the foot by playing it my way, but that doesn’t make it any less of an oversight by Arena Net to make their story missions all the exact same, boring, monotonous tasks. How the story plays out back to back should have been taken into consideration, because, oddly enough, that is how most stories are consumed.

I absolutely love the lore of GW2 and I enjoyed exploring the world and listening to what NPCs had to say. But whomever wrote the personal story arc has no grasp of pacing in story writing. They also forgot that the climax is the most important part of the story, it is what the entire thing builds up to. The climax of GW2 is standing on the deck of a ship for two hours as it slowly moves around the map, and then mashing one button for 10 minutes to kill a Dragon.
Furthermore, the story had a serious case of 24itis — introducing characters that could potentially be likeable, for the sole purpose of killing them off as a cheap attempt at giving emotion to the story. Even your own character is not likeable, because they do not grow. It is difficult to care for a character’s death when you don’t care about the character, and especially when they die in a stupid and needless way, such as Tybalt. He had the potential to be likeable, if only they’d kept him in through the story to actually grow as a character, rather than giving him a cheap and meaningless sacrifice.

Overall I felt my experience with GW2 was far greater, and far more personal before I ever started the “personal story.” There are things MMORPG’s are good at, and things MMORPG’s are bad at. Combat and Story are the two things they’re worst at.

Also, if you really want an RPG to feel personal, then you make your protagonist silent. Voice acting gives character to a protagonist and denies the player to put any sort of themselves into the character.

The story is actually great considering the fact that it is an MMO and rarely do you find MMOs with alot of story and character in it (Besides SWTOR). The story of this game hit me in a way that it made me want to protect the world. I don’t know about the others but I really felt shaken about the fact that the destiny’s edge is broken up, fighting and arguing along with orders arguing with one another. Another thing is the Claw Island moment… (SPOILERS)

…where you thought you are actually winning but then all hell breaks loose and now you are running away leaving your fave. mentor behind. I’m gonna miss that crazy sylvari….

(SPOILERS END)

Anyways, while my overall view of the story of the game is great, there are a few hiccups such as the voice acting. The voice is great in some parts, funny even but a bit cliche and overused in others. Overall, i’d give the story a 9/10, for an MMO.