Guild Wars 2

I am not talking about /em chat, or hard-core “ignore all non-rp players” sort of stuff. More like, will we ever get the opportunity to interact more intimately with the bits of story that never got really fleshed out? Like the treaty between the Charr and Kryta? Or the Centaur campaign? Or will we ever be able to become Peacekeepers, or Wardens, and have interesting opportunities to integrate our characters more closely with the cities we call home?

My reasoning: I love that in higher level zones we can struggle against the Flame Legion, or the Sons of Svanir, etc., as a way of continuing the roleplay of our characters if we don’t want to only follow the main story, but I feel like a huge chunk of immersion got dropped by the wayside in lower level areas. You never get any sort of closure about the Renegades and Separatists in Fields of Ruin, for instance – you can do a couple of events over and over, indefinitely, but I don’t feel like a player can easily get into the mindset of an Ebon Vanguard-type character. Same thing for Seraph, or Peacekeepers – there are just so many amazing aspects of each race’s civilization that I’d love to get more into!

I guess what I’m saying is that I understand the majority of players will want to focus on being the hero who saves the world by doing the main quest/living story. I’m all for that – loved the story, and still enjoy the new content – but the whole reason I play an MMORPG is for the RP part, and when the living story chapters end, instead of playing PVP or grinding fractals/dungeons I’d really love to have an avenue for returning to the major cities and lower-level content areas to reconnect with who my characters really are, where they come from, their motivations. There’s a great post on here requesting “cultural outfits” like Asuran college robes, etc., that really tickles me for just this reason.

A friend read this and asked me to clarify the Ebon Vanguard comment:

Getting into the head of your character is obviously largely dependent on your own imagination. I get that. What I mean is, if I want to play as an Ebon Vanguard recruit, or officer, or whatever, there isn’t currently a system in the game for that. You can help them out by doing an event chain or two, but the fun there ends pretty quickly. You can dress up like them, but there isn’t a built-in system by which you can earn their weapons, or ranks – it all has to be in your head, which I totally understand, I’m just wondering if we could ever potentially see something like this implemented. It feels to me like there is a whole world of potential sitting there teasing us, but we can’t partake in it directly…. yet? :-)

ANet has never directly supported tole playing. Never had an official role playing server or QoL features favoring role players so I wouldn’t expect them to start now. Indeed, they have done a number of things that directly and adversely affected roleplaying, such as putting invisible walls around the Salma district and never responding to role players pleas to remove them and putting in Megaservers which devastated the role playing servers.

I’m afraid you’ll have continue role playing in your head and not expect the game to support you.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I’m afraid you’ll have continue role playing in your head and not expect the game to support you.

This, sadly.

However, I do think they need to go back and revisit a lot of those “dropped” story lines. I get the feeling that most of them are actually supposed to go on and connect to some of the big bad groups of the game. They need to build on that, so that instead of “I ran out of Separatists to fight” it’s “I’ve moved on to fighting the power behind the Separatists”.

I honestly don’t get it.
You are upset you are supposed to use your imagination (playing in your head)?

I think the OP’s comment could more productively be phrased as:

Will our characters ever get to pursue the challenges introduced in the personal stories that don’t relate directly to fighting dragons?

They aren’t really asking about “role playing;” it’s more about other parts of Tyrian lore.

However, the answer is similar: probably not.

The Tyrian universe is already wide in scope and relatively complex compared to a lot of other games (even single-player ones) and ANet can only afford to devote resources to so many stories. The epic tales of the entire world’s struggle against dragons rightfully takes precedence over the more local concerns, except where Svanir, Inquest, Nightmare Court et al interfere with those efforts.

Palador.2170:

They need to build on that, so that instead of “I ran out of Separatists to fight” it’s “I’ve moved on to fighting the power behind the Separatists”.

Ah! That would certainly be one way to continue the storylines into higher level areas – I like it.

As far as the “home instances” go, I think that concept was well intended, but the execution could have been done better. Instead of trying to give the player a “home” which by its very nature would be difficult to implement and keep “relevant” to the character’s life, the idea of “home” could shift with player stories. For example, as a human Salma district may be my home, but when I join an Order of Tyria its headquarters becomes my new home. I can see that being equally difficult to implement now that they have several “home instance” items you can buy/earn, but I still like the idea of a place my character can return to for a reason.

Yargesh.4965:

I honestly don’t get it.
You are upset you are supposed to use your imagination (playing in your head)?

No, I’m not. Just wondering if any structured content might be provided someday to let us play directly with these NPCs/organizations/themes/plot lines, etc.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think the OP’s comment could more productively be phrased as:

Will our characters ever get to pursue the challenges introduced in the personal stories that don’t relate directly to fighting dragons?

They aren’t really asking about “role playing;” it’s more about other parts of Tyrian lore.

I totally understand that the primary focus of ANet’s finite resources should be the main dragon-fighting, world-saving plot line – and I’m all for that. My question is about roleplaying though, insofar as allowing more opportunities for your character to participate in these other parts of Tyrian lore allows one to craft a more complete character within the game framework, and that is why I’d like to see it happen. I believe you are correct, though, that the size of such an undertaking makes it unlikely to occur. But here’s hoping! :-)

Sadly, extremely unlikely. This is why I call GW2 an MMOAG or MMO Adventure Game since roleplaying isn’t really in the equation at all.

With the extremely crude way we are just dumped into the open world with no back story (the character creation options barely even count in this regard), have all our choices and character attributes ignored by the game with its one-mission-for-all-professions layout, and not even the ability to put a backstory dialogue in our character menus, I can’t even pretend to call GW2 an RPG friendly game let alone an RPG in itself.

I love the game, I love the open world content system, but the personal story and any roleplaying aspects are worthless.

I think it’s a fair request to suggest. I mentioned once before how the game starts to feel small when the game world doesn’t grow. Focusing on the elder dragons plot is important but the game becomes shallow by introducing more areas, plot points and the like that don’t get developed and forgotten about once it’s served it’s small purpose in the “main” plot.

That isn’t to say that “focusing on the main plot” is bad, but the main plot isn’t advancing at lightning speed. We’ve only defeated 1 elder dragon and are on the trail of the next main threat. We’ve only really encountered the others’ champions and not much development beyond that. At this pace, there’s plenty of opportunity to develop the other plots a bit unless we’re to believe the rest of the world just stands still in the meantime.

I am enjoying the LS storyline. LS1 was disjointed, felt a little like random short storylines Sellotaped to make one larger one, but still good. LS2 was excellent, really good narrative and enjoyable content.

There just seems to be a lot of story being told to us, and not enough of us being able to tell our own stories.

GuzziHero.2467:

With the extremely crude way we are just dumped into the open world with no back story (the character creation options barely even count in this regard), have all our choices and character attributes ignored by the game with its one-mission-for-all-professions layout, and not even the ability to put a backstory dialogue in our character menus, I can’t even pretend to call GW2 an RPG friendly game let alone an RPG in itself.

Could always suggest it! I mean, adding a backstory character sheet for characters wouldn’t be that difficult to implement. We just need a UI to bring it up, save and edit it and a means of looking at other players’ character sheets. I think it could be a start…

It has been suggested time and time again. They can’t even implement multiple build saving…

GuzziHero.2467:

Sadly, extremely unlikely. This is why I call GW2 an MMOAG or MMO Adventure Game since roleplaying isn’t really in the equation at all.

That’s an interesting acronym – I like it. I agree that it is more an Adventure Game than a Role Playing Game, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. My personal preference is for more RP options; I may just have to settle for hoping more stuff like that gets added.

I always wondered if they meant to do more with the Dignity/Ferocious/Charming personality traits, until they basically removed them from everything but toon creation and the odd dialogue choice. It wouldn’t bother me at all if that completely disappeared and we got more of something else.

Thank you all very much for contributing your thoughts on this thread – I love having intelligent conversations with the GW2 community. :-)

GuzziHero.2467:

It has been suggested time and time again. They can’t even implement multiple build saving…

The two situations aren’t remotely comparable. Build saving is a mere UI/mechanical issue. Sounds easy in theory; probably more complicated than we think (although I do wish they would explain why it’s taking so long).

Adding events is much more complicated:

• You need dialogue and voice acting; neither is simple to design or implement.
• You need event chain scripts and need to ensure that these don’t interfere with other things going on in the zone.
• It gets even more complicated if any of this becomes instanced.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

GuzziHero.2467:

It has been suggested time and time again. They can’t even implement multiple build saving…

The two situations aren’t remotely comparable. Build saving is a mere UI/mechanical issue. Sounds easy in theory; probably more complicated than we think (although I do wish they would explain why it’s taking so long).

Adding events is much more complicated:

• You need dialogue and voice acting; neither is simple to design or implement.
• You need event chain scripts and need to ensure that these don’t interfere with other things going on in the zone.
• It gets even more complicated if any of this becomes instanced.

Well, I was really referring to the adding of a character story dialogue box in our character UI that was Inspectable by others but…

If it helps, I offer myself as a voice actor for free if Anet wants me. Thas if thee cost wurk art wot ah were sayin bah ow ah tawks! (British Potteries accent!).

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

GuzziHero.2467:

It has been suggested time and time again. They can’t even implement multiple build saving…

The two situations aren’t remotely comparable. Build saving is a mere UI/mechanical issue. Sounds easy in theory; probably more complicated than we think (although I do wish they would explain why it’s taking so long).

Adding events is much more complicated:

• You need dialogue and voice acting; neither is simple to design or implement.
• You need event chain scripts and need to ensure that these don’t interfere with other things going on in the zone.
• It gets even more complicated if any of this becomes instanced.

Don’t confuse “work” with “complicated”. Cutting the grass is work, but it’s not so complex as harvesting a crop. Making more content that is, by all definition, the same as every other content that exists, is not as complex as creating a new type of instance or map-branching event that alters the map (which would be asking a lot for this particular suggestion…would be nice but I’d keep my expectations low) that tends to get introduced with new areas like Silver Wastes.