Guild Wars 2

Arena sad that GW2 will tell us a story about our character. It’s not true. Yes our character do this and that, but we know about our character almost nothing. And our character is not a protagonist, it’s probably Trahearne, but not us. And other npc, but not us! Guild Wars 2 doesn’t tell us a story about our character as Arena promised.

Guild Wars 2 can’t make a strong rpg in an open world. Because in open world you are not along anymore. And plot must concentrate on one person. GW2 can’t give us the strong plot like in Neverwinter Nights (offline game), Gothic, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, Mass Effect, Star Wars The Old Republic and so on and etc. GW2 can’t give us such strong and interesting storytelling. Because of open world. In offline rpg you are the only one and main protagonist. Open world can’t focus only on you.

In open world exist completely different laws. And to make rpg the strong part of mmo, Arena should make GW2 a sandbox, like EVE Online.
Arena sad that we are the one who is responsible for changes in Tyria. This is so not true… We are not. Absolutely not! Only in sandbox game people are responsible for changes in the world. As far as I know, GW2 is not a sandbox.

Guild Wars 2 should have instanced pve, if Arena wanted to make a strong rgp, with strong storytelling. Sad but true. Or Guild Wars 2 should be a sandbox, where player is the one who is making his/her story. Where players are making changes in the world.

That’s a difference between offline rpg and mmorpg. In offline rpg the game is telling a story. In mmorpg the players must make a story, like in EVE Online.
GW2 are not a sandbox and pve is not instanced. That’s where the problem lies.

And that’s why, I don’t believe that GW2 can bring us a strong and interesting storytelling. Pity. It’s the main thing I like in the games. That’s why I loved GW1. And that’s why I’m not satisfy with GW2.

For me personally the reasons are:
-Bad cinematics
-Small quantity of lore in both presonal and living story
-very very bad dialogs and script in general
I got a thread that i made that i ask ppl if they even bother doing the personal story, some answers are honest and on the point…

The story is ok the first time but then Trahearne steps in..

Then there’s Scarlet. GW had a better story by far. Maybe because back then they still needed to try whereas now that they are already popular, they just half kitten it.

Okay, I’ll rephrase myself.

If Arena wanted to make the storytelling a strong part of the game, they should make pve instanced. So the pve in GW2 would look like offline rpg. They can’t make the strong storyteling in the open world.

If Arena wanted to make GW2 more social than GW1 than they should make GW2 sandbox, like EVE Online. Maybe sandbox is not a strong part for storytelling too. But at least sandbox allow players be responsible for what is going on in the game. Sandbox gives a proper interaction between players, which is the strongest part in mmo.

To me, seems to be two different ways to do historytelling. First, instance. And this is somewhat bad, because the only changes happend on that instance, not reflecting on the game. Maybe NPC’s should react different according your choices.

The other way is let player build his/her history. This can be made giving him choices, and that choices needs to be remembered. Some NPC’s will ignore to you, others will adore you. Maybe some npcs are killed, and cannot interacted with you character (but then you could with a different character) Maybe you can turn some enemies to neutral, and viceversa. If you killed a thousand of centaurs, maybe they offer some money for your head…

Anet have the mail system, with that can give you some more information, more contact with NPCs (asking for doing duties for them, for example) But instead only for global events, those emails custom because you personal history, and your bravery, etc.

I actually think that Guild Wars 2 does have a very enjoyable story. There have been multiple times in the story that the music and the story itself gives me goosebumps.

One thing that is in my opinion something that negatively impacted the storytelling was the sort of 2d cutscenes when characters interact with each other (just talking about character interaction, not the story dungeon intro’s or the character creation intro’s…those are well done imo).

Some of you give me the impression(I could be wrong)that you want to be treated as crucial, a real special flower, in a world as large and diverse as is Tyria. You are, but you are but one of many unique flowers. That’s in my opinion the strength of guild wars 2, YOU are your character, you create your own backstory and have a lot of freedom in how you do so. A lot of the story stuff, especially at higher levels, you are a part of something much bigger together with other players and npc’s and not Superman.

Imo the problem ist that npcs talk to everyone/each other randomly?to the first player in the area? at set times?, instead of just talking to the player when promted to do so. It forces the player to hang around for an unspecified time if you want to hear what they have to say.

Here are the two things that bother me most about the GW2 personal story:

1. The ‘stop and go’ aspect of it. I don’t like it when the story outlevels my characters and they have to do something else just to catch up again.

I recently discovered I had a new free character slot over in STO, so I rolled a Romulan character and played through the new (to me) Romulan missions which took my new character from level 1 up to level 35, all without any interruption in the narrative flow. I didn’t have to stop and go do anything else along the way (although I could have if I’d wanted to). I liked that.

2. There’s just not enough of it, and what there is, is more like an outline for a story.

I’ve said it before: the GW2 personal story needs more story. It needs more of everything. More breadth and width and depth. I think our characters need more more time and space to interact with the people they meet along the way. Take a charr character, for example. In his or her story, he or she puts together a warband… and then promptly abandons it. I hated that. Why couldn’t we have a series of rollicking warband adventures with those guys in which our characters forge lifetime allegiances and friendships before the story gives the warband the old heave ho? Why are there no story missions afterward in which our characters say, “Hey, so and so from my old warband – he or she knows a lot about some mission critical something or other! He or she would be very helpful with this mission. Let me see if he or she is available.” And then after the personal story’s conclusion, why can’t our characters go back to their warbands and have even more rollicking warband adventures? As with so many other things in this game, the personal story experience is rife with missed opportunities and untapped potential.

I wish they’d filled in those (things which I see as) gaps instead of giving us all this ‘fire and forget’ living story nonsense.

Part of the difficulty comes with the Personal versus Living story struggle.
The former helps build up key characters in a player’s life: the race mentor, the order mentor, whoever is ruling that race, etc.
The latter should continue that build up and reach conclusions such as character deaths, passing the torch to new generations, newer developments within said characters.

One of the big problems though is the Personal story is “locked” in a sense and cannot be altered, as such that means characters our players interact with cannot really feel like they are in jeopardy for fear of ruining the timeline of the Personal story.

There is a solution, albeit controversial, that I support: Scrap or alter the Personal story to be the Living Story. We’ve had the Zhaitan arc, now release the Scarlet arc or something better, when that’s concluded they can alter those characters however they want now. If you don’t follow the Personal Story then you don’t see the changes to NPCs.

One point I can see in resisting this is the question of how different is this to other instanced storytelling? Honestly not that much. In fact it almost harkens back to the days of GW1’s stories, minus the annoying mission spots that block parts of the map.

No matter what ANet does one thing is clear: you can’t have a Living World if part of it is locked in time. That means you have sections of your map, of your game, which are always “no go” because Gods help that poor player who hasn’t finished his human Personal Story arc when the Queen gets killed off in the Living World.

For the sake of storytelling the Personal Story, as we know it now, must die. That way we can truly have a world that always changes and have writing which would affect the characters we know and love/hate.