Guild Wars 2

So I am still playing GW1 instead of GW2 these days and we have this Mercenary system there.
Let me explain what that is for those who don’t know what that is.

By having a Mercenary slot in GW1 you would be able to fill 1 slot in your party with one of your own characters.
It would play like any other NPC, except you decide what build he would use and it would use the appearance on how your character actually looks like.

So I was thinking, it would be cool to have something like this in GW2.
But how would that work?

Atleast, it would be nice to find your own characters in your own home instance.
You could communicate with them and they would respond depending on their personality, race and choices they made.
For gameplay you could fill a slot in your party with 1 of your own characters and it would show up in your story missions (perhaps even help in story dungeons but idk how that would work out).

I think this would make playing story missions less lonely (think most people do them alone), and it would also add some kind of roleplaying elements in the game.

Thoughts?

I haven’t played GW1 which I’m sure I missed out because of that.
This idea sounds cool though, I prefer playing solo, having one of my own characters tagging along would probably be really fun.

I would love this so much. It has been something I think they said they didn’t want to do in development but maybe that has changed over time.

Anyway, it would be a lot of fun.

Friendly NPCs are far more useless in GW2 than they are in GW1 though. The AI is just so bad in GW2 that an AI controlled version of a player character would just would not really fit.

In GW1 the AI was able to do everything that human players could, and would use skills somewhat intelligently much of the time as well (such as interrupts, healing, buffing/debuffing), they would maintain optimal range, falling back to try to lose aggro if they are heavily injured, etc. AI in GW2 is more like your basic RTS AI when told to auto cast their abilities off cool down, and told to Attack-Move

If you just want a bunch of zombies following you, attacking things at random, not evading incoming attacks, and hitting their knockbacks whenever they’re off cool down, just turn on your commander tag.

Surbrus.6942:

Friendly NPCs are far more useless in GW2 than they are in GW1 though. The AI is just so bad in GW2 that an AI controlled version of a player character would just would not really fit.

In GW1 the AI was able to do everything that human players could, and would use skills somewhat intelligently much of the time as well (such as interrupts, healing, buffing/debuffing), they would maintain optimal range, falling back to try to lose aggro if they are heavily injured, etc. AI in GW2 is more like your basic RTS AI when told to auto cast their abilities off cool down, and told to Attack-Move

If you just want a bunch of zombies following you, attacking things at random, not evading incoming attacks, and hitting their knockbacks whenever they’re off cool down, just turn on your commander tag.

This is true.
NPCs in this game attack slow and use their skills poorly, which also makes it feel dull and boring.
An AI update would be highly appreciated though.

I would love this for the dungeons. It would allow for me and other to actually explore and have some fun with it instead of moving at warp speed to keep up with the people who treat it like an assembly line job that they want to be done with as fast as possible.

Not everyone plays at their pace.

Terrin.2685:

I would love this for the dungeons. It would allow for me and other to actually explore and have some fun with it instead of moving at warp speed to keep up with the people who treat it like an assembly line job that they want to be done with as fast as possible.

Not everyone plays at their pace.

I used the mercenary system extensively in gw1. It’s what I and a friend used to get 50/50 (maximum number of points) in the Hall of Monuments. We used my mercenaries to make a complete party of 8, us 2 with 6 mercenaries. I used necro/ritualist a lot and after a fight we might have 20 or more minions around us. They healed, interrupted, handed out Ritualist Spirit weapons and more.

However they did have their limitations and doing a dungeon hard mode or a quest hard mode was significantly easier with at least one other real person.

teams are great but it’d be nice to pace through a dungeon with ‘henchmen’