Guild Wars 2

We already know that an issue with Guild Wars 2’s personal story and character personality system (brutal-dignified-charming), is that our characters are forced to be very stereotypical good guys no matter what. Cookie-cutter characters, white knights, goodie-two-shoes, you name it. There’s no real personality.

However, another issue with the character personality system is that our characters are forced to be immature, and very narrow-minded. When we encounter NPC’s who are unconventional or controversial, our only reply options when we talk to them are thoughtlessly immature, or just plain narrow.

For example, in Mount Maelstrom, a group of Asuran scientists are dissecting Risen body parts to look for ways to defeat the Risen. When they tell you about it, you only get two reply options:
1 EW! That’s revolting!
2. I see. I’m going to leave now. (AKA, I feel awkward and don’t know what to say)

The “Ew, thats revolting!” reply option is considered “Dignified”. I just don’t get that. How is rudely screaming “Ew, that’s revolting!”, after someone tells you about their difficult and important job, a dignified thing to do? How is it even logical, when your character is supposedly hardened by combat?

I wish our characters weren’t forced to act like narrow minded kids. “Holier-than-thou” reply options like the one described above leave a sour taste in my mouth. I wish Arenanet provided us with more diverse personality and behavior options for our characters. For example, in reply to the Asuran scientists, our character could have these choices:

Barbaric 1: “Ew! That’s revolting, and your krewe is vile!”
Barbaric 2: “I hear you take the parts you dissect by force. HAH! Sounds fun!”
Charming 1: “That must be difficult work for you. I admire your dedication.”
Charming 2: “You work with corpses all day, but you look so clean and well-kept! What’s your secret?”
Dignified 1: “For the good of Tyria, work like yours is nessecary, though unpleasant. Stay strong, friend.”
Dignified 2: “The boldness of your work is commendable. I would be glad to aid you, if you need it.”

Lol, I often got this problem in any kind of games. I don’t care very much and think up my own answers.^^

My Asura Necro would prolly say: “How thrilling. May I help?”

Yeah, my young necro would be like “Really? Wow! Can I see?”
Seems so weird for a necro to squeal in disgust at body parts XD

Weindrasi.3805:

We already know that an issue with Guild Wars 2’s personal story and character personality system (brutal-dignified-charming), is that our characters are forced to be very stereotypical good guys no matter what. Cookie-cutter characters, white knights, goodie-two-shoes, you name it. There’s no real personality.

However, another issue with the character personality system is that our characters are forced to be immature, and very narrow-minded. When we encounter NPC’s who are unconventional or controversial, our only reply options when we talk to them are thoughtlessly immature, or just plain narrow.

For example, in Mount Maelstrom, a group of Asuran scientists are dissecting Risen body parts to look for ways to defeat the Risen. When they tell you about it, you only get two reply options:
1 EW! That’s revolting!
2. I see. I’m going to leave now. (AKA, I feel awkward and don’t know what to say)

The “Ew, thats revolting!” reply option is considered “Dignified”. I just don’t get that. How is rudely screaming “Ew, that’s revolting!”, after someone tells you about their difficult and important job, a dignified thing to do? How is it even logical, when your character is supposedly hardened by combat?

I wish our characters weren’t forced to act like narrow minded kids. “Holier-than-thou” reply options like the one described above leave a sour taste in my mouth. I wish Arenanet provided us with more diverse personality and behavior options for our characters. For example, in reply to the Asuran scientists, our character could have these choices:

Barbaric 1: “Ew! That’s revolting, and your krewe is vile!”
Barbaric 2: “I hear you take the parts you dissect by force. HAH! Sounds fun!”
Charming 1: “That must be difficult work for you. I admire your dedication.”
Charming 2: “You work with corpses all day, but you look so clean and well-kept! What’s your secret?”
Dignified 1: “For the good of Tyria, work like yours is nessecary, though unpleasant. Stay strong, friend.”
Dignified 2: “The boldness of your work is commendable. I would be glad to aid you, if you need it.”

MMOs are not about dialog.

“Cookie-cutter characters, white knights, goodie-two-shoes, you name it. There’s no real personality.” – But that’s the story THEY wrote!

@Weindrasi: Well, you can see the second answer you posted like: “Oh ok, I see you got difficult business to do. I don’t want to waste your time any further.” Which does not really fit a curious Necromancer but is still away from screaming like a little kid who saw something disgusting.

I kind of agree. Somewhere in Metrica Province (I forget where) there is a quest to interrogate the Skritt to test their intelligence. I nearly fell off my chair giggling at the dialogue in that quest, but still a part of me wanted to tell my character, “stop being mean! They can’t help it that they’re stupid!”

I still think those skrit are play-acting, they prolly don’t want to do this test so they pretend to be hurt by these questions. They are probably way more intelligent than they pretend to be.

The most stunning dialogue in Mount Maelstrom:

You: Something the matter?
NPC: Oh don’t mind me, I’m just remembering my horrific death.
You: I sense a story coming.
NPC: My unit and I were sent here to abate the incoming Risen forces, but I caught a chill the night before our big battle. I stayed behind while my unit went on to fight the enemy.
You: What happened next?
NPC: My unit fell, becoming the enemy we were sent to fight. And worse, they found me, still with fever, and tore me apart. Now my corrupted body fights for Zhaitan.
You: Wow. That’s a bummer.

Really? My best response to that tragedy is “wow, that’s a bummer.” ?

Yup, my character is a kind and caring hero…. oh, wait, no she’s not. Bummer.

I was about to post that very same one. It really grates on me.

Urge to kill rising…………

“Ew, revolting!” doesn’t sound very dignified to me either. Maybe “Hmph. Revolting.”, might have been better suited. And that dialog snippet mentioned above from Mount Maelstrom, was one I ran into just last night, prior to logging off. It’s probably the worst selection of dialog in the entire game, and can’t be too far off the podium for the worst dialog EVER written for any game. Would have fit right into Bill & Ted’s Excellent Tyrian Adventure though.

I’m guessing some executive’s kid, fresh out of high school, was interning for ANet and was given the task of writing this sequence. Somehow it was “overlooked” prior to release and managed to make it through to gold. Hard to imagine a professional writer was responsible for that inane drivel.

Can’t agree enough with this.

It’s the biggest let down of the game that the writing is generally so limited and shoddy. Great writing can make even a click-grinding browser game like Fallen London fun and addictive. ArenaNet promised a story that reflected your character and personal choices, but completely dropped the ball. The best you can hope for in GW2 is an amusing exchange between NPCs – your own character is a self-aggrandising dimwit who eventually just fawns over Trahearne.

I’d really love to see them put some effort into a whole new story that you can play through with any character that lets you genuinely evolve into someone interesting. A bit of genuine literary ambition wouldn’t go amiss either – aim high, I say.

Yea, I always wondered who they got to write some of those character options. >_> The story script and the player choices does an excellent job of making the character someone that only some players would relate to lol. Sure, you might find a handful of situations you kind of agree with your character on, but it’s always balanced by a whole bunch of situations that make you go “wtf?”

+1 this thread.

I think that leads to a larger issue. The three choices; dignified, brutal and charismatic, ultimately mean nothing. They add nothing to your character and add nothing to Trahearne’s story. They seem to either be filler for the sake of having something at the character creation screen, or were forgotten when it came time to include them in the game.

If they followed (as an example) the Mass Effect system where your choices reflected if you become “good” or “bad”, with suitable alteration to your character then sure, but as it stands the system; and as a consequence the verbal choices that reflect those choices are meaningless.

It all still comes down to, see enemy, kill enemy, eventually mash button 2 to kill Zhaitan, game over.

Oh and edited to say, I wish we could become “evil”, join the inquisition or the flame legion or whatever. Then the choices mentioned in this thread might mean something

In all fairness, MMOs have generally been lacking in the story department. For that experience, single player RPG’s will universally provide a superior experience, since that is their focus.

The problem is no matter how many options they include, there will always be someone who wants to give a different answer. It true that some of the options are pretty lame. One that i recall is from the skritt IQ test. The PC says mind reading is not real and berate the skritt. But they are living in a high magic world with dimension travelling, dead raising from the grave and whatnot….

Flamenco.3894:

Urge to kill rising…………

gotta love Simpsons references

At the very least they could try to put an effort into their storyline… maybe not as involved as SWTOR but… SWTOR does have a pretty decent storyline. (Not much else is decent with that game, but, anyways…)

The storyline in this game however is… well, just insulting. Starts off pretty well, I was impressed at how I was pretty much conscripted into saving an entire village and fort from some nasty pair of hands, but then after the obligatory killing off the professional voice actors, it goes down hill pretty fast.

“And then Trahearne wants you to run off and do some inspections and then you almost get killed but it turns out they were actually trying to kill Trahearne and everyone loves his monotonous voice and he’s so wonderful and oh could you go pull that lever?”

Yes.. I totally agree with this thread. I know this ain’t real rpg, but still I find it quite annoying that my all characters have to be holy and pure. I made a “street rat thief” because I wanted her to be malicious criminal who had a hard life. Instead my character helped that fool Logan to catch other criminals.. BLEH… :P Or if you make a char.. Like a charr would act like that. Taking orders from humans and sylvari.. But I don’t play this game for it’s story. There are lots of games to play because of their amazing storylines. This ain’t like that.

Here’s an idea for Anet…(similar to Demon Soul/Dark Soul message system):

Allow player to submit custom responses…cost ~1k karma (cost scaled based on story progress)
If other players up vote the suggestion, the voter gets +1 karma, and the creator get 5% of the cost back.
If other players down vote the suggestion, the voter gets no karma and the creator get no karma.
To keep the system from being abused, put a cap on karma gain to ~500% of the total costs and afterward reward the creator with a random boon everytime someone up vote the suggestion.

Anet would need to provide a UI to create these responses, perhaps a text area and 3 sliders, one for each personality. The creator would type in the response and adjust the sliders to appropriately indicate the mood/tone. —not that hard to do.

Keep the top 3-5 responses based on your personality for selection (don’t clutter the screen)

Imagine how much livelier Tyria would be with this and the Guild created missions…

I have this problem with just about every single RPG I play. No matter how good it is, even some of the better Bioware games, someone is always going to say something totally annoying.

At least in the Bioware games you can be a dark horse, which is fun. Not so much here.

But I can’t think of any game that I’ve played where I haven’t run into this problem. The witcher, Dragon Age, Skyrim, no matter what preprogrammed responses exist, I’m going to be annoyed by a percentage of them.

Then you can submit your own.

The problem is rather that we as players create our own image of our characters in our minds, since the game allows us a lot of non-story-supervised-play-time we reaffirm this image since our character barely reacts or interacts during hearts or dynamic events (so we fill in our own responses or reasons). The story then presents us with ANets idea of our heroes and these two are in conflict with each other.

CassieGold.7460:

The most stunning dialogue in Mount Maelstrom:

You: Something the matter?
NPC: Oh don’t mind me, I’m just remembering my horrific death.
You: I sense a story coming.
NPC: My unit and I were sent here to abate the incoming Risen forces, but I caught a chill the night before our big battle. I stayed behind while my unit went on to fight the enemy.
You: What happened next?
NPC: My unit fell, becoming the enemy we were sent to fight. And worse, they found me, still with fever, and tore me apart. Now my corrupted body fights for Zhaitan.
You: Wow. That’s a bummer.

Really? My best response to that tragedy is “wow, that’s a bummer.” ?

Yup, my character is a kind and caring hero…. oh, wait, no she’s not. Bummer.

To this day i still don’t get that part one lone ghost in a cave, was that going to be a Event and never made it or what?

And yeah i agree we have no control over what our characters say or do, sometimes its frustrating. especially in Story line Quests….

Trahearne “I’m coming with you you can’t do this alone!”
Trahearne “I think i’ll tag along its been a while since i toured this fort”

Me “oh hell no bugger off Twig” ……i wish…

ophidic.1279:

MMOs are not about dialog.

“Cookie-cutter characters, white knights, goodie-two-shoes, you name it. There’s no real personality.” – But that’s the story THEY wrote!

SWTOR.

.

I’m comander Shepard and this is the best unidimensional mmo character on Tyria.

Well overused memes aside this is a solid history for MMO standards yes the pg 12 hurt it a little but its not that bad… if they remove Treharne we can call it “good enough”

*remove=incinerate him with a flamethrower

EasymodeX.4062:

ophidic.1279:

MMOs are not about dialog.

“Cookie-cutter characters, white knights, goodie-two-shoes, you name it. There’s no real personality.” – But that’s the story THEY wrote!

SWTOR.

.

You can be a goody-two-shoes or a puppy-kicking, maniacally giggling mass-murderer. You can even play someone who alternates between two personalities!