Guild Wars 2

While I was looking at the screenshots of the new Equipment/Wardrobe UI, I noticed that while the class emblem was still there, the Personality indicator next to it wasn’t.

Does this mean that Personality is being taken out of the game? It certainly seems like something that had potential that was never really used, and perhaps meeting that potential just took up too many resources that were better spent somewhere else. Or perhaps there’s still some question over whether it will remain or be taken out, so it wasn’t included in the UI?

I did like being able to Charm people, and a lot of the threats from Ferocity were pretty amusing, so I’d be a bit sad to see the system go away entirely, but I’d… kind of understand why, given that ANet’s policy now is apparently not to leave “loose ends” lying around if they’ve decided not to pursue a feature further.

Twyll Blackleaf.9641:

perhaps meeting that potential just took up too many resources that were better spent somewhere else.

There is seldom a better way to spend resources in any game than to give players choices and to let them feel the consequences of those choices.

I mean, I agree, but there’s been quite a bit of conversation around how the Personality thing doesn’t really accomplish that, I think?

Honestly, if there’s a tradeoff between a greater quantity of writing being done (more choices, such as with Personality) and greater quality of writing being done… At least when it comes to new content, I’d say quality should win out there because at the moment, it isn’t winning at all. The writing done for NPCs across the world that was done before release is mostly very high-quality, and likewise the early stages of Personal Story (originally mistyped that as Living Story, oops) (basically everything before Claw Island, although it sort of deteriorates up to that point before hitting bottom). But the Living Story stuff has been pretty atrocious, and if it takes a more focused and less wide-angled approach to make it, well, NOT so atrocious, I can see the rationale behind no longer using Personality.

Gotta remove all those filthy RPG elements from their MMORPG.

Maybe in the in-house test system they use they don’t need the personality stuff so it isn’t activated, or something. It would be a shame if they ditched it.

Also that there might be more content in the future that can be influenced by the character personality.

Curtis Johnson.8456:

We try not to allow too much ‘hoarder’ design where we just keep stacking more and more options on leaving lots of unsupported things hanging around.

That’s a quote from the Town Clothes thread. I’m not sure how wide a swath that blade’s supposed to cut, but it sure looked to me like that was ANet saying that they don’t like to leave “unsupported” (read: “we don’t want to do this any more”) features in the game, which I find pretty daft personally. It looks like they don’t want to do things involving Personality in the future, which makes it “unsupported” and puts it on the chopping block.

If that really is the case, it seems like this policy might come back to bite them, though, given that while I’ve seen people wishing the Personality thing were better used, I haven’t seen anyone who just outright said “yeah, completely getting rid of this is a good idea.”

I suppose we’ll see in April— although given the whole “getting rid of unsupported content” thing, I’m not terribly hopeful.