Guild Wars 2

I played this game quite a lot when it first came out, but mostly ignored it until last month when I heard about the new patch making so many things account-wide. (I love making alts in MMOs, so only needing to do something once for all of my characters is valuable to me.)

However, I’m being reminded of one of the biggest reasons why I quit in the first place.

This game was originally billed to me as “do whatever you want to do,” that I can play how I want to play and get rewarded for it. However, in practice that appears to be “as long as what you want to do isn’t follow your character’s personal story without interruptions.”

Yesterday I went to complete a quest for the Vigil at level 35 or so. I finish the quest (which ended on a “quick, let’s get this information to what’s-his-name before it’s too late”) and I am so close to where I need to go to do the next step that I can see it from where I am. It’s just down the road! But no, you need to be level 36 to do the next part.

So I go wander around the nearby town for a bit, do a couple of events, grab a skill challenge and a jumping puzzle, and I hit 36. Step out of the town again to do that quest, which consists of a 5-minute escort mission, a couple of conversations, and a choice of what to do next. Now that we’ve ended on a “quick, let’s hurry over to the place before the bad guys can attack us” but WAIT, you need to be level 39 to do the next quest.

This is horribly immersion-breaking. Oh, the dialogue says I’m in a huge hurry to go fight these guys because they’re about to kill some ambassador, but no, I’m going to go to the other side of the world and complete an entire map worth of random chores for the locals before traveling all the way back and defending said ambassador. Three levels is just long enough that I’ve forgotten what I was doing.

Unlike some people, I actually enjoy the personal story… I just wish I could actually play it without constantly running into a brick wall. I don’t think there need to be more quests or more exp rewards or anything (gotta leave room for people who do want to do other things alongside it, otherwise you’d outlevel them quickly)

I just think that the parts of the story that lead directly into each other should have level requirements that let you do all of them at once, then have larger level gaps in places where it makes sense for your character to take a break. Start a new chain every 10 levels, but then let me complete that entire chain at that level rather than one at a time with big gaps in between.

I would just do this myself, but I’ve got no idea what level I need to be in order to complete all of the stages of the current chain. It only tells me the level requirement for the current quest.

Great news! Grouping the Personal Story into 10-level batches is exactly what will be (perhaps, sooner than later) coming to our game. The China version already does this. =)

As for what level each PS ‘quest’ requires, there is a synopsis and guide in the wiki:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Personal_story_line#Navigation