Guild Wars 2

I wasn’t quite sure how to put the title, but I want to know if anyone else feels the way I do about the way the personal story is now given to you.

I have leveled 3 characters to max and taken them through all if not most of the story. When I was leveling I always felt like I was working towards that next story step, and it always told me what the next step was AND what it’s level was. I was always excited to get to that story,. I had a goal to get to the level required to see what happened next.

I have been helping a friend level who is basically completely new to the game, and the story behind your character/race/culture just feels…. gone. You are basically thrown into a world with no goal besides “oh hey… a heart…” and expected to enjoy yourself until level 10 (or whatever the next story chunk is at) while receiving no story or reason behind who you are and what you’re doing. Then when you GET to your story you zip through it and go “wait where’s the rest? what happens next? I finally had story!” The fact that it’s all the same level means that you just jump from chunk to chunk of story rather than working your way through the whole experience of the game. It doesn’t even tell you that you have a chunk of story coming up, everything about the story disappears until you hit the right level. The story doesn’t guide you through the game anymore. As someone who has played through the story quite a bit, I felt lost when starting a new character and having no story to clearly work towards.

If this game had regular quests this new grouping wouldn’t be a big deal, but the way the hearts work means that you don’t interact with npcs that often or even talk to people. If you had to go up to people and talk to them about doing things it would give you information and at least somewhat of a purpose. The gw2 hearts simply tell you what the people in the area need, nothing else. (Don’t take this the wrong way, I do love how the hearts work, they just don’t work with the new story grouping.)

Granted, this may not matter to those who just care about the end game, but I know there are others like me who love the lore and story this game has to offer, and I do not believe this is how it should be presented to the players. The way the story was set up before may have been a little odd (I never thought it was, but apparently someone wanted it changed), but it helped you through your leveling by constantly giving you a clear goal/guide.

I’ll just put my hand up early and say I don’t feel the way you do. How Anet have it arranged now is actually how I did the personal story anyway. I don’t expect anyone to feel the same way about it that I do so so I’m not having a go, just chipping in with a comment.

Okay thread, carry on.

I understand exactly what you’re saying OP, but my experience is completely different.

First of all, leveling to level 10 is really really fast.

Secondly (and more importantly to me), the story was already broken into parts. It’s not a personal story as a whole. It’s different things that happen to your character.

Every single opening segment gives you a reason to do what you’re doing. As a norn you’re helping out because you’re trying to build your legend. As a Charr, you’re trying ot settle the non-soldiers down after a bevy of ghosts attacks. You’re actually being ordered to volunteer to do that. In the human story you’re told to go out and help people and that that’s the best way to recover. So it’s not that the game doesn’t give you reason for doing what you do. As a Sylvari you have a wild hunt to slay a dragon and you actually say, “one doesn’t just run out and kill a dragon.” And a helpful Sylvari suggests you make yourself useful and help some other people and get some experience.

But the level 11 story has nothing at all to do with the level 10 story. It’s a different story arc. There really is no reason for it to start right at the end of the last one.

Also, when you get that chunk of story, and you finish it, you’ve usually gotten about 3 levels to the next story.

Which means you have about 7 levels left.

The old way you might have two levels three times and have to wait every time. My preference was always to do them together. And that’s all it really is…a matter of preference.

This gives you each story arc as it’s own separate arc.

I don’t mind the grouping. I would prefer the first chapter to be unlocked sooner, however, and I wish they didn’t mess with the step order of chapters 7 and 8.

I would have preferred chapter 1 unlocking at level 5. Yes, getting to level 10 isn’t that hard – but in all honesty, I rather feel that it’s too easy, and it was made that way simply because of the placement of skill unlocks. I ran through on a new character and the new directional system makes it feels like all there is to do is mapping in a zone, and this feeling was enforced by how fast I leveled, because I’d rarely hit an event (or the directional system would highlight mapping over events).

All in all, I don’t think that the new level unlock system is all that bad. It gives a sense of time having passed between the chapters, which I felt had seriously lacked in the original format. Now you’re no longer going from Novice→Explorer→Magister (or the Vigil/Whisper equivalents) in 2 hours, but you have to put in effort to do things between each promotion.

What I find bad is the speed of leveling, the skill unlock system, and the directional system (why is there no “events only” option!?).