Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing through the game levelling from scratch with no exp boosts, reading heart quests etc. for the full experience…

I’ve realised that many of the heart quests are extremely bland. It seems that the NPCs sole motivation in life is to tell the player what the quest requires. They have no real motivations in and of themselves as characters other than the most shallow. “They are taking our scrap, go kill them and pick up the scrap”.. “Why” “Because scrap is good”.

So I had an idea. What if the community were allowed to re-write the heart quest texts of all the NPCs in the game? (Starting from the starting zones and working up to ALL of them).

Basically each week or few weeks a zone in the game would be ‘selected’ you would be able to submit text for a heart giver quest (within certain character limits and what have you)… These would then be able to be voted by the community up or down… and the of the very top of the highly voted ones ArenaNet could select one to put into the game. They could approve maybe a handful of these per week, and the implementation could be just copy-pasting the text and the reply options etc.

Adding something like this would allow the devs to tap into a pool of creativity MUCH wider than anything they could produce internally, AND it would be completely free (other than the approval which might take a guy an hour or two a week to get through, and the implementation).

It would also make the heart quests (which is a key part of the game for a new player) MUCH more immersive to fully read and understand, and also relate to with the characters in the game as opposed to just ‘instruction pages’ in NPC form.

They still provide the game in 4 different languages, so every text going into the game has to be translated and checked over 4 times.

Thing is, I doubt devs want to touch these old quests for simple reason – nobody really knows anymore how the parts of the game were created 5 years ago. You start to change things, and you end up with weird bugs. If it works, leave it, and create new content instead.

FogLeg.9354:

They still provide the game in 4 different languages, so every text going into the game has to be translated and checked over 4 times.

Thing is, I doubt devs want to touch these old quests for simple reason – nobody really knows anymore how the parts of the game were created 5 years ago. You start to change things, and you end up with weird bugs. If it works, leave it, and create new content instead.

I think the heart-quest text features are uniform through the game so if PoF has them, the same mechanics SHOULD apply in the base game.

But more importantly, MMOs fall into a trap where the negelect the leveling expereince for always focusing on the end game… and then they eventually just say “skip the leveling start at 80”. This I think is the beginning of the end for that MMO, because you need an influx of new players levelling to replace the old players that quit after finishing all the content. If the first taste of an MMO for a new player is “Don’t worry just skip that part”.. or 80 levels of the most bland questing that would be laughable for a single player game (which is what leveling is a lot of the time for a new player)… then that player will deem the entire game as bad and quit.

WoW pioneered this problem I think. They focused so much on the end-game that they started accelerating the leveling process, and just giving people fresh max level characters… which basically said “The work we did as developers for the last 5 years.. means nothing in the face of what we did last month with this new patch”.. This isn’t sustainable.

The languages aren’t as big a problem as they seem because the translator would in the end just need to translate the final approved text for each quest.. That’s maybe 10 pages per zone.. And 1 zone per week. That’s something that could probably be done for less than $100. Completely inconsequential in MMO dev-world.

I am not even trying to argue you about that this could improve gameplay for old zones

Just saying that large games developed over many years with multiple patches, expansions and changes, all become sort of mess in the end. People who originally developed the zones, wrote the code and created the developer tools may have left the company long ago. There are probably very little people in the Anet who have nothing better to do then to go over old content and apply small improvements.

Yes, the game changed over the years but much of the starter zones has not. They are not perfect, but personally, I enjoyed low level zones a lot, and did not find anything truely wrong there.