Guild Wars 2

Logan Thackeray, Trahearne, and Rurik (GW1) are a few examples of major characters that I’m pretty sure Anet intended for players to like; however, they are all universally derided. (Perhaps Kormir (GW1) too? .. not sure what most people thought of her)

What is it that Anet keeps doing wrong?

Rurik was just an idiot. Leeroy with less brains basically. I laughed when the avalanche hit him. There was little build up for him, so it was difficult to sympathise as well.

Logan was likable in the Edge of Destiny book. I wouldn’t say he was cool, but he wasn’t whiney, pathetic and annoying. The author at least tried to make him feel like a hero. The dialogue the voice actor was given just wasn’t strong enough to make him heroic.

Trahearne. Well I think he overshadows the part too much. If he was a bit part charcter I doubt the same hatred would apply. But the fact is, you feel like it is his story and you are playing as his follower. If it was you as the Pact General and him advsing you, probably people would have liked him more.

Never had an issue with Kormir

I don’t know of GW1 characters, but Logan and Trahearne to me lack any emotion. Which makes them less like characters and more like cardboard cutouts with flapping jaws, so it’s easy to throw disdain towards characters like that, especially when a collective of things can cause that.;
Their voice acting, the script-writing for each character, the situations that we see them in as a player (…do they help us or hinder us etc.)

I mean, we all know Trahearne literally gets credit for everything we do, but even in CM storymode, the final encounter to save Queen Jennah (?) knowing that you’ve done most of the work with Zojja, he never thanks you for saving HIS queen.

Honestly, I feel like they all lack true emotion …. or realistic emotion, at least.

Especially Trahearne, every time he says something his tone of voice generally sounds the same. Not to mention all of the goofy jokes or dialogue that is put in the midst of supposedly serious circumstances.

I’ve noticed Anet’s more popular charcters also tend to be the less “goody two shoes” type.
Rytlock, Gwen, Vekk (one of my favourites – he was awesome), Koss.

Abrasive, sarcastic, funny. But never out and out squeaky clean good. Maybe that’s the sort of NPC they should stick to.

Logan Thackeray
Somewhat decent in the book, voice actor isn’t too bad, but overall he doesn’t learn his lesson well until our character comes in after two missions and finally gets he was thick. Though he finally apologizes of sorts in Citadel.
Overall a wash really, I don’t like him but I don’t hate him.

Trahearne
The problem here was ANet put so much focus on the Destiny’s Edge before this game launched we knew nothing about Trees and Oats here. He should not have been the hero proxy of the Personal Story. I pity him more than hate because he was trying to compete with Destiny’s Edge for our attention and didn’t do well.

Rurik
Thank the Gods for the Stone Summit roflstomping him! I didn’t mind his logic of reaching out to Kryta, but his AI was so idiotic I muttered in one mission “This boy is going to get me killed”. I was partially right, but wrong target. I will spare one Stone Summit dwarf as a thank you for ridding us of him.

Kormir
Nobody loves you Kormir.

Randulf.7614:

I’ve noticed Anet’s more popular charcters also tend to be the less “goody two shoes” type.
Rytlock, Gwen, Vekk (one of my favourites – he was awesome), Koss.

Abrasive, sarcastic, funny. But never out and out squeaky clean good. Maybe that’s the sort of NPC they should stick to.

SPOILERS CONTAINED WITHIN

This is actually correct. From what i learned in my publishing classes, no one likes the perfect character. We want them to have faults, to make mistakes, to seem REAL. If the character is perfect, or neverdowrong, we hate them and are annoye
Lets look at trahearne, bland, boring, and never makes mistakes (since you are doing the choices, though it doesnt matter what choice you make, the other side will be successful no matter what).

I mean, the pale tree shows he’s the general in the future, he protests once and then, oh ok.

On to logan, he has some ‘faults’ but its more of the choice objective we should have. He could stay and fight the dragon, or go to his queen, either has a consequence, but yet each was rigjt in his mind, thus still making him better than anyone in his mind. We see this with he conflict between him and rytlock. Rytlock is mad for logan leaving, but he believes what he did was right.

Now lets look at rytlock. If you play a charr blood legion member, you see first hand that he can be very brutal in judgements, if not fair, and sorta caring. I mean, you challenge your warband leader, the guy tries to back out, and rytlick laughs saying ‘no, get in there and fight’.

Now, the best moment to compare rytlock and logan is cof story. The bridge is destroyed, rytlock is fallin to his death, but logan grabs him just in time. And although rytlock says thanks, he says truthfully he probably wouldve let logan fall if the same thing happened to him.

Really, they had a chance to make logan more tolerable in arah story, sacrificing himself. Anet just ruined it bringing him back, and also ruining my hope of joining destiny’s edge.

Kormir
Nobody likes Kormir because she was not a well developed character (imo) and she ninja’s godhood from your toon. =P

I barely remember anything about Rurik, I just remember he was the prince that died, and later on became undead and you had to fight him.

Logan I actually like, I think he’s the cooler character in Destiny’s Edge. I like that he’s emotional in the beginning, and still stands for what he did when he wanted to save Queen Jennah. the voice actor Troy Baker is amazing too.

Randulf.7614:

Logan was likable in the Edge of Destiny book. I wouldn’t say he was cool, but he wasn’t whiney, pathetic and annoying. The author at least tried to make him feel like a hero.

He abandoned his comrades in their most dire moment of need because he missed his girlfriend. If that’s not pathetic, what is?

Rurik:
Probably his AI, which could cause a mission to fail without the player doing something wrong. His plans never even sounded good at the time and Pre-Searing having been turned into an ugly wasteland did not make it better. He was probably a victim of circumstance.

Logan:
He does not know whether he wants to be a whiner or some cheesecake character from a Brazilian telenovela. He seems fairly competent during the personal story, but quickly turns insufferable during dungeons. Caudecus story, my oh my. Koss & Melonni anyone?

Trahearne:
He is great when the mission “A Light in Darkness” moves to the Sylvari and the vision of the future. Soon after though, he will start to take all the credit for missions the player did and that is his undoing.

For the most part the characters of GW fail, when they are too rooted in reality. Pseudo teenage rebellions, angsty teenager stunts, permanent whining instead of heroics.

Sometimes you lack the context. Destiny’s Edge for example. If you never read the book, which I suppose is 95%+ of GW2 players, you just lack knowledge of the moment which defines the state of that group. You get a quick text and cut-scene, but that is not the same as having been there.

On the bright side, we had great villains in GW1. Villains who had us believe they were good guys (White Mantle/Vizier), villains who came around and joined the heroes (General Morgahn), villains with a rational which made sense (Shiro of all people) and villains which were just demented. They were complemented with allies which were sometimes in the grey area. Glint’s Prophecy caused the human sacrifices, Palawa Yoko was resurrected by the players.

That is the real loss of GW2. Now we just have dragons, evil, rooooar. Good guys did not improve, bad guys were reduced to being one dimensional. It was ok in EotN because there the good guy buddy allies were great.

Say what you want about Kormir, sure, she screwed up big time, but you as the player stepped in.

Every character should be Tybalt Nopaws. Then the personal story would be kittening amazing.

I’m suprised they don’t make it easier to download the books, say from their own website. It’s an easy money spin for them and would fill in some lore gaps for people, especially the destiny’s Edge one

I liked Rurik and Kormir (and Togo too, don’t think anyone has mentioned him).
To an extent. Their goals were noble, but as people said earlier they didn’t feel fleshed out nearly to the same extent as even Mhenlo was. And Mhenlo was basically just a henchman most of the time.

Rurik was fighting against both the charr and his father, which made it easy to sympathize with him, but apart from that he had less personality than tutorial text. Togo actually sacrificed himself, so that’s certainly honorable, but I didn’t really feel a character there. Kormir was a very interesting character but they didn’t do enough with her. I didn’t mind that she became a god, I liked that actually. But they really could’ve done a heck of a lot more with her character than they did; having the experience that she did in Gandara was enough to make any character fascinating.

Logan…well. He’s made mistakes but his mistake was kinda so large that people pretty much universally dislike him now. I’m sure plenty of people wish that Logan had perished and Snaff had lived, although Snaff’s death made Zojja’s character quite interesting. That’s another point: many members of Destiny’s Edge are well built and others are not. Logan is eh, Eir is…I don’t remember her having much personality but that might just be me not having a norn that’s gone through too much. Rytlock is almost universally liked. Zojja is fun, witty, and smart, so I think her character is certainly likable and possibly well-built. Caithe is interesting but seems too emotionally detached in some cases. There’s a reason for that obviously but there feels like a disconnect.

Trahearne isn’t actually a bad character although they certainly should have fleshed him out more. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t mind that the player character isn’t the leader like Trahearne is; it creates a consistency between players that they otherwise would not have. For example, think of the catastrophe if the player character had become a god in GW1 instead of Kormir: different player characters stood for different things, came from different cultures, and had drastically different professions. How do you clear that up later on in the lore? You don’t, is the answer. If the player had been the leader of the pact instead of Trahearne, first of all, what makes the player more qualified than Trahearne to lead the pact? The player has never been to Orr, and Trahearne has spent almost his entire life on the peninsula. He is, without a doubt, the expert in this case. He knows the land and the enemy better than anyone else. The player character is a hero from one of the orders and a hero among their race, but they haven’t proven themselves beyond that. Trahearne is well-known and renowned for his work in and around Orr.

I just wish Trahearne was more fleshed out…or chloro-filled out as a character. He had so much more potential to be a dark character, or a reclusive character, or a character at all. As it is, he points to where to do and what to say, but doesn’t seem to have much personality.

Now a good example that Anet knows what they’re doing is Tybalt, who is an excellent character with a backstory and personality. If only they had spent the time to flesh out all of their characters a little more, the game would be better than it already is.

Randulf.7614:

Rurik was just an idiot. Leeroy with less brains basically. I laughed when the avalanche hit him. There was little build up for him, so it was difficult to sympathise as well.

Logan was likable in the Edge of Destiny book. I wouldn’t say he was cool, but he wasn’t whiney, pathetic and annoying. The author at least tried to make him feel like a hero. The dialogue the voice actor was given just wasn’t strong enough to make him heroic.

Trahearne. Well I think he overshadows the part too much. If he was a bit part charcter I doubt the same hatred would apply. But the fact is, you feel like it is his story and you are playing as his follower. If it was you as the Pact General and him advsing you, probably people would have liked him more.

Never had an issue with Kormir

You pretty much summed it up for me. I especially loved your synapses of Trahearne. As soon as he was introduced he basically took over and it DID in fact seem like you were a follower in his story rather than him being a supportive role in yours.

darkace.8925:

Randulf.7614:

Logan was likable in the Edge of Destiny book. I wouldn’t say he was cool, but he wasn’t whiney, pathetic and annoying. The author at least tried to make him feel like a hero.

He abandoned his comrades in their most dire moment of need because he missed his girlfriend. If that’s not pathetic, what is?

Read the book, learn the story, before you know what you comment on :P

He didn’t run away willingly. Since Queen Jennah was in danger.

To sum this up simply, they are all canon Sues – just like Gandalf.

The player is to Rurik or Trehearne, what Aragon was to Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. Aragon is one of the most important characters in the entire story, yet Gandalf is the guy who gets center stage in all the big climactic scenes and gets all the credit.

Logan is something else. I don’t actually dislike Logan as a character, just as a character in a shared universe I feel he’s a spineless wimp. But he’s not a badly written character

Farzo.8410:

darkace.8925:

Randulf.7614:

Logan was likable in the Edge of Destiny book. I wouldn’t say he was cool, but he wasn’t whiney, pathetic and annoying. The author at least tried to make him feel like a hero.

He abandoned his comrades in their most dire moment of need because he missed his girlfriend. If that’s not pathetic, what is?

Read the book, learn the story, before you know what you comment on :P

He didn’t run away willingly. Since Queen Jennah was in danger.

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

Queen Jennah basically put a mind control spell on Logan in the book. Whenever she needed him, he were forced to come to her.

I know what happened.

Randulf.7614:

I’m suprised they don’t make it easier to download the books, say from their own website. It’s an easy money spin for them and would fill in some lore gaps for people, especially the destiny’s Edge one

You mean like the link they have already?
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/shop/

Atlas.9704:

Randulf.7614:

I’m suprised they don’t make it easier to download the books, say from their own website. It’s an easy money spin for them and would fill in some lore gaps for people, especially the destiny’s Edge one

You mean like the link they have already?
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/shop/

Exatcly like that!! Wow they implemented that idea quick!!

You are welcome Anet!

Logan is a prat, thats all ill say. The only time I enjoyed his company was when hinting at LoganXRytlock in the CoF story mode. Otherwise, Logan is a wreck who constantly needs reviving who has the DPS of a bald seal.

Even Jennah was more useful to fight alongside in the CM storyline. At least she didn’t die.

I think we all agree here that the writers need to step up their game a bit more. Rox and brahm were ok starts, though plenty of holes still left to fill.

It really just feels like even though i am talking to everyone, ning the story, yet not at the same

Best character in GW2:

Gavin.

I’m sad that nobody mentioned Gwen as a major character in GW1. I loved the fact that I was there for her at all her major crossroads in life. I began liking her as a child in Pre-searing, up to when she met her dead mother in the Underworld, while accompanying me throughout EoTN, looking for Kieran and then attending her wedding. I related with her when her mother was captured and tortured by the Charr until she died, and I understood her absolute rage against that race. She was captured too and I got to play as herself in her escape. Her life was not without ironies. Her (our) teaming up with Pyre (which she didn’t trust to the end) eventually resulted in the fall of Charr Shaman influence over that race and paved the way to how we see the Charr today. I withstood her emotional outbursts (which was often) and her coolness towards many things, even towards his future husband. She was always warm to me, and I’d like to think she considered me as one of her closest friends. One of the highlights I had in GW2 was discovering her grave in Ebonhawke and me paying my respects. So many good gaming memories she gave me.

As to Rurik I respected him in pre-searing and it quickly went downhill from that. That realization grew from when he constantly aggroed Charr parties in the Great Wall mission to the Shiverpeaks after which I was actually glad that I wouldn’t baby sit him any more. When I met him again as undead (where I can still remember typing in chat “Rurik, I respected you once!”) I actually felt pity but satisfied after putting him to rest.

Kormir. Ah my dear Kormir. I still can’t believe she ascended as a human god after all the headaches and heartaches she gave me doing the Nightfall missions. From the start of the missions when she will accompany the player, to the final fight against Abaddon, she was literally IN THE WAY, body blocking me at crucial times during battles while doing nothing but give me directions, complaining, and standing pretty (which she was not imo) while my party was being pummeled to death. In hindsight, i should have body blocked her into stepping into that dead Abaddon portal and get ascended myself :P

Logan I have mixed feelings for. Although his intransigence towards defending Queen Jennah at all costs is understandable, his actions and decisions borders on the cliche (which most of GW2 is btw). His sudden realization that he could not always be at his queen’s side to protect her while correctly stating that the elder dragons were the greater threat — to my eyes — only made him stupid and unfit for his stature in Krytan society.

Trahearne. Oh my, I could not even think of where to begin on how or when I disliked this chap. Since I have brought all my eight characters through the story line (representing 5 races and 8 professions) I believe that I have seen his character from all angles, including the Sylvari story line, and guess what: from any perspective, he is a boring one-sided character that is easier to hate than to be fond of. I’ll not even go through his horrendous voice acting, how he hijacked the story, and how useless he was in the actual missions. Suffice to say, and it is with great understatement, that I say that I didn’t like him.

I highlighted Gwen earlier in the thread (albeit in less detail than yourself) as a character who worked. A flawed, good character who the writers seem to be more at home with for sure. Oh and she hated Charr, so +1