Guild Wars 2

I understand there are things to be cricized about HoT, and I agree with many of them, however, for a change, I want to praise what they’ve been doing with the personal story in it, which, in my opinion, fixed MANY of the problems from the vanilla story mode.
Adressing them in order… I want to praise Anet because:
(Spoilers incoming, stay aware.)

1- Not having trehearne around and actually letting you be the one in charge, a commander, a leader.
You get credit for things you’ve done, you’re recognized, you lead a team and you call the shots. You have a voice. With Trehearne around, all you were was this “voice-less, name-less sidekick” in HoT, you get to be in the highlight, you get to have your PERSONAL STORY be YOURS again. Which, ever-since Trehearne steps into the scene, stops being the case in the original story. Thank you so much for making me feel like a really important character to this world again.

2- I actually care for the “New Destiny’s edge” characters.
I feel like many of them are way more interesting and thats a lot because, this time, we had the time to see they devleop as chracters: We seen Braham’s mother die, Kas and Marjory get together, Taimi and her issues to prove herself to the team and how she always feels like people make little ofher for being tiny… Anyway, I just feel like the characters developped through with us from ever since Scarlet up to here.
I cant help but feel much more part of “their team” than with the old Destiny’s edge, in which we kinda barelly get to know or see the characters develop much. Rytlock was the only one I really liked from the old destiny, and I was glad to still have him around. To top it off, I like how they made Caithe be a bit of a double-agent-like character and I like Canach a lot too, I feel like the characters became more colorful, instead of everyone being the “Good guy personality without much to it” that everyone had in the original destiny edge.

3- The way they dealt with the “battle with an elder dragon” situation.
To me, this was the most important bit, and the one I was happier about.
In the original story, the battle with Zhaitan, though “awesome” because of the music and the visual greatness of Zhaitan, was extremly boring and felt pretty much the same of what we had been doing all the time. I think everyone felt disappointed at that last battle, and I CAN SEE EXACTLY WHY the battle turned out the way it was.
Anet had a big problem in their hands: “An elder dragon is a HUGE thing, we cant make a couple of characters kill him on their own in a direct confrontation.” … They also couldnt let Zhaitan be a world boss, because that would make the story-mode extremly confituous, you could end up fighting zhaitan in the open world, without having evne finished your story, that would be awkward, eh ?.
…
Well, with HoT, I think they solves BOTH issues perfectly.
We get the Mouth of Mordremoth, which is basically fighting Mordremoth himself as a big-kitten dragon… Its a battle that makes sense, we’re 300 heroes together using every strategies we can to take down the beast. It feels epic, its big-scale. Its all an elder-dragon should be. And… It. Makes. Sense. After all, MOdremoth can regenerate himself for as long as his mind and the dream exists, therefore, there’s nothing wrong about dealing with him in the open-world version of him without having finished your story yet. WE get the elder-dragon boss battle we wanted… But… Something is missing: We need to feel like WE, in OUR STORY are responsible for his death… A duel! or something!
… WEll, we get that in the story. In his “dream” we fight him directly. And it was a very very interesting boss abttle to me. I loved the theme with mind-controlling, it made sense, and turning your allies back to your side to fight Mordremoth’s mind-gaming was a very cool spin on a over-used concept. It was a fun battle, and I culdnt help but feel like a kitten on the fact I was puppet-dueling with an elder dragon all on my own, toe-to-toe. Being the great hero I am in “MY personal story.”
(I reckon though, the boss-battle against modremoth’s mind, though fun and epic, could have used a bit of a balancing. He wasnt hitting hard enough to make me too worried most of the time, and the only time I felt like I could die was the gliding part, which I did, a couple of times. To top it off, he was TOO FREAKING TANKY… I run a full-zerker build on a full-ascended warrior, so my DPS is pretty high, and still, it took me a TON of time to take him down… I understand a “final boss” must be a lasting battle, but that was a bit too much IMO. I’m sure someone running a more tanky build would have gotten bored in that fight.)

… In the end of the day, I just think the story mode made many deicions that were on the right directin in comparison to what happened to the vanilla story. Not sure if people agree or not, but I used to read A LOT about people’s opinions in this game, and people used to complain about the exact same things that I adressed here.

I’ve only just finished the first chapter but to me it felt very unstory like, i wasn’t in my own instance and well there is no back story, i never did living story part 2 so i have no clue wtf is happening which for the price i paid is unfair in my book..

I really did like the talking though i really like seeing my character actually saying stuff to everyone, nice touch..

Sorry, I deleted my comments because I missed that you haven’t finished the story yet. lol

Gratz, for me the story is about the unremovable green thing top right and npcs annoying me by callig me commander or egg bearer for absolutely no reason, so i am glad you enjoyed it.

Crash.5362:

…snip…

Dont want to destroy you perfect world but if it weren’t for Trehearne you would fail in fight against Mordy. It was HE who let you inside of Mordy’s mind and weaken him so much that he was easy to kill. HE sacrificed himself so that Mordy wasn’t able to reborn.

In the end HE transformed from marshall into a real hero that sacrificed himself for the greater good like a real hero should do – player was just a tool that finished the job.

As a famous proverb say There is no greatest thing that a human being can do then to sacrifice his life for others. So unless your toon dies permanently you wont become a true hero.

(also why whine of an NPC stealing anything from players – in a game? lolwut)

Frediosz.2718:

Crash.5362:

…snip…

Dont want to destroy you perfect world but if it weren’t for Trehearne you would fail in fight against Mordy. It was HE who let you inside of Mordy’s mind and weaken him so much that he was easy to kill. HE sacrificed himself so that Mordy wasn’t able to reborn.

In the end HE transformed from marshall into a real hero that sacrificed himself for the greater good like a real hero should do – player was just a tool that finished the job.

As a famous proverb say There is no greatest thing that a human being can do then to sacrifice his life for others. So unless your toon dies permanently you wont become a true hero.

(also why whine of an NPC stealing anything from players – in a game? lolwut)

I’m afraid you missed the point.
I’m not saying Trehearne wasnt important. I’m just saying that the way the story completly shifts towards him and his story in the game ruined a lot of it for me. And that is also the general consensus, or at least was, of almost everyone who played the vanilla guild wars (Just google it out and you’ll see people’s rants about that.)

I never said he wasnt important or that he did nothing :P. lol. But having been important or not, I believe the “PERSONAL STORY” is about being PERSONAL, as in being MY STORY. IN other words, it should be about me, not about some other character that I just happen to accompany. If I wanted to see a story about a different character than my own, I’d watch a movie, or play a game in which I play a character rather than a MMO. :P

There’s a reason why we call the Personal Story Traherneland after Claw Island. He sort of takes over and monologues his way through most of it.

Story progression needs one BIG improvement and that is the ability to “SKIP” all the cinematic scenes. My two reasons for this improvement is:
1) Stories have been buggy – so far I ran “Buried Insight” 4 times to get the New Horizon achievement and have done everything correctly but still I haven’t got it. This part of the story IS SO FRICKING LONG.
2) Doing story again on different alts – I don’t need to see that same cinematic over and over again. How many of us bother to watch stupid TV reruns.

The idea behind the HOT conclusion is really good, I agree, but the execution is poor, a buggy mess that still has not been fixed. The story progression overall in HOT was rushed and the story is too short. LS2 was better IMO. Lastly the death of a major character is horribly handled.

Crash.5362:

Frediosz.2718:

Crash.5362:

…snip…

Dont want to destroy you perfect world but if it weren’t for Trehearne you would fail in fight against Mordy. It was HE who let you inside of Mordy’s mind and weaken him so much that he was easy to kill. HE sacrificed himself so that Mordy wasn’t able to reborn.

In the end HE transformed from marshall into a real hero that sacrificed himself for the greater good like a real hero should do – player was just a tool that finished the job.

As a famous proverb say There is no greatest thing that a human being can do then to sacrifice his life for others. So unless your toon dies permanently you wont become a true hero.

(also why whine of an NPC stealing anything from players – in a game? lolwut)

I’m afraid you missed the point.
I’m not saying Trehearne wasnt important. I’m just saying that the way the story completly shifts towards him and his story in the game ruined a lot of it for me. And that is also the general consensus, or at least was, of almost everyone who played the vanilla guild wars (Just google it out and you’ll see people’s rants about that.)

I never said he wasnt important or that he did nothing :P. lol. But having been important or not, I believe the “PERSONAL STORY” is about being PERSONAL, as in being MY STORY. IN other words, it should be about me, not about some other character that I just happen to accompany. If I wanted to see a story about a different character than my own, I’d watch a movie, or play a game in which I play a character rather than a MMO. :P

Traherne had a role to play, however, he was not the reason our characters were heroes. All our characters were heroes long before Traherne. We had already earned the respect, recognition, and confidence of important leaders in Tyria before Traherne. We were leaders in our own right, but they wanted a Pact leader that hadn’t joined an order, so Traherne fit the bill. I see our characters’ roles in the story as exceeding Traherne’s in overall importance even though Traherne was very helpful.

The story was a mess, there wasnt enough time to connect to any character in HoT and I feel like that was its biggest weakness, while the commander certainly shined brighter than anyone else it came at the cost of everyone else feeling like a niche.

Eir’s death was forced for the sake of forcing it, it didnt feel necessary to kill her off but they decided to none the less in the most rushed way possible. Faolain’s death also completley undermined her potential as an interesting villian since she became nothing more than a generic modrem after that, which sucked.

The problem with HoT in terms of its story, is layers, it didnt have a kitten shred of them to save itself. Everything was face value and boringly lacking in character growth for your companions or for the antagonists motivations or why “you” should care about them.

The impact LS2 had was alot more personal in my opinion than HoT, HoT felt like a typical “bad guy attacks, we repell attack and we defeat the bad guy” story. It didnt feel like Mordremoth did “anything” truly impactful during HoT’s actual storyline except the death of Eir.

Caithe was terrible this time round, with no actual reason for screwing up than the sake of screwing up, she never developed at all throughout it and frankly the fact my commander didnt just outright shoot her in the head after all the crap she put me through was beyond me.

Rytlock was also a very “Meh” character, it was alot of Rytlock is awesome but not enough “why” is he awesome, what did he actually DO in the mists? Not gonna tell us? Well Im not gonna care much if he dies then because I dont really care about him.

DE 2.0 was a joke, Braham’s story is entirley, shaving his head after his mother died, and thats it.

Taimi was the only one that got any real char development with Scruffy dying too, but that wasnt even shocking anymore since Scruffy got broken at least 2 times before that if you played since S1.

Jory and Kasmeer’s romance just cringed as badly kitten after how amazingly it built up in season 1, plus they were just… there for the ride, it felt pointless even having them.

The only show stealing character in DE 2.0 I loved to bits and absoleutley believe 10000% stole the show was Canach. His development from season 1 shone brightly in HoT showing that he truly was a redeemed criminal with a strong conviction and yet he retained that cruel, sadistic side of his personality towards others making him a loveable kitten.

Treesus sadly was underplayed, again, another char that needed more time, as were the exalted, itzel and the entire story around the nuoch.

Simply put, HoT was too short.

It needed at least another 4-5 hours of story development with alot more character growth between it to make me care about the characters involved.

Moving forwards, my advise to A-net is, if your character has no reason to be in that situation that is going to contribute something productive to the group or to develop in a way taht would actually make a player care about them, dont include them.

Jory and Kasmeer were red herrings in this, as was Rytlock, Rox and most of DE 1.0

Nothing came out of this that honestly mattered and that dissapointed me.

I enjoyed the story a lot, I think it was etertaining and well done. I cared for all the chars, specially for a certain important female character death that made me very sad and angry.
I can’t wait for more story to unfold.

I thought it was pretty awful. They have all this lore that they could draw from and instead we get:
Gotta save people, guys!
Exalted are things and they like Glint, but that egg isn’t actually important to the HoT plot.
Dragons have weaknesses! (Good thing Zhaitan was weak to being shot with cannons! Lucky on our part).
I sure hope we figure out what Mord’s weakness is before we have to face him!
Oh look, Marshall is hooked up to Mord’s brain for some reason. I guess Mord wants us to kill him.
Magically enter mind for reasons.
Kill fat.
Over.
4-5 hours including artificial mastery padding. That is pathetic for an MMORPG. That is something I’d expect from Call of Duty. It’s obvious that they ran out of time, but shipped anyway so that people could be hyped about it in time for the holidays.

There are things that it did well though:
Canach
The Commander actually feeling like a commander
Having the story boss be tied to the final open world chain was great. It gave us the awesome Elder Dragon fight we always wanted, but also allowed us to face it on a more personal level.

I do like HoT, but IMO, the story was by far the weakest aspect.

I liked it in general even if I don’t agree with how some of the characters were handled. My fave parts were probably the Sylvari version of the story, Canach and the Norn Savage.

DE 2.0 was nice but Canach was great in this and kept worrying me every time he would wonder off. I’m looking forward to seeing the next part personally.

Honestly, I never understood all this hate against Trahearne. I can only guess it’s this mentality of you as the player being the hero, wanting all the glory for yourself.

Before I had finished my PS years ago I was reading a lot of these complaints, thinking that Trahearne will be some kind of backstabbing glory-stealing shady character. But he is always grateful for your contributions and advice, he always mentions you as being important and so on. And he is doing a lot of work behind the scenes.

Second point is probably true, but the PS wasn’t so much about Destiny’s Edge anyway. That’s what the story dungeons are for and where you could get some additional flavour and backstory about DE.

Third point is the only one I can agree on, the battle both in the open world and in the story instance are good, though the latter suffers from too much dialogue and resulting hyper armor for enemies that drags out an already long fight.

Overall though the writing in HoT was ambivalent, I feel. It had good points, like the death (that was executed a bit too comic-y, unfortunately, but hey we’re in PG13 land here) and bad points, like the Deus Ex Machina ending, and some inconsistent tones.

Sourde Noire.5286:

Honestly, I never understood all this hate against Trahearne. I can only guess it’s this mentality of you as the player being the hero, wanting all the glory for yourself.

Before I had finished my PS years ago I was reading a lot of these complaints, thinking that Trahearne will be some kind of backstabbing glory-stealing shady character. But he is always grateful for your contributions and advice, he always mentions you as being important and so on. And he is doing a lot of work behind the scenes.

Second point is probably true, but the PS wasn’t so much about Destiny’s Edge anyway. That’s what the story dungeons are for and where you could get some additional flavour and backstory about DE.

Third point is the only one I can agree on, the battle both in the open world and in the story instance are good, though the latter suffers from too much dialogue and resulting hyper armor for enemies that drags out an already long fight.

Overall though the writing in HoT was ambivalent, I feel. It had good points, like the death (that was executed a bit too comic-y, unfortunately, but hey we’re in PG13 land here) and bad points, like the Deus Ex Machina ending, and some inconsistent tones.

I posted a poll once and it seems (though I’m not sure it’s true in your case) that people that played a Sylvari first liked him more than people who didn’t. If you played a Sylvari he showed up earlier in the story and you already knew him.

Non-Sylvari characters basically have him come out of nowhere and take over at level 30ish.

In the poll 80% of people who played Sylvari (if memory serves me) liked him, but less than 50% of people who didn’t liked him.

I like that they put Ceera (Tonns wife) in Auric Basin and that she won’t talk to you if you’re on a character that completed Breaking the Bone Ship.

It’s a nice tie in to where you and the NPCs were then and where we all are now.

Despite the fact that she can’t forgive us, she still continues to help the cause. Which is what it’s really about, though we are in charge, we need a team to defeat the threat.

Well I must confess I liked Trahearne. And I did not mind not being the commander. But my first character was indeed a Sylvari.

But otherwise I agree – I like the personal story of HoT as well. Especially the way it is tied to the maps. (But they should remove the “penalty box” of the end fight – or is this fixed by now?)

Nice to see that some people appreciate something about HoT for a change. The way some still call for nerfs I am afraid Anet will thumb down HoT until it is another Orr :-(. Then I will feel cheated…!

Sourde Noire.5286:

Honestly, I never understood all this hate against Trahearne. I can only guess it’s this mentality of you as the player being the hero, wanting all the glory for yourself.

My criticism of Traherne has nothing to do with glory-mongering. Traherne’s character from the very beginning never seemed to really shine to me. The voice acting was, imo, not that great. Too many of his lines were delivered in too much of a monotone or with a real lack of emotion for the situation.

And I have no idea why anyone thought having Traherne monologue about himself nearly every second we weren’t fighting was going to be a good idea. This just ruins the character even more for me since it makes him seem completely oblivious and self-absorbed. Also, there were too many comments that spoke of false modesty to me, just the way the lines were delivered, making him see even more disingenuous.

More than once to me his character comes off as being insecure and needing constant affirmation. At the end of the Zhaitan fight, he’s off by himself instead of with others at the party, giving the impression he’s moping or expecting someone to come and beg him to join in. Little things like this is why Traherne’s character didn’t hit the mark for me. Other people will interpret his character differently, but this is how he came across to me.

I’d give the story a B. However, I wish they had a skip option on all cinematics that occur during the story IF you already did it once. Some of the stories are too long when repeating on alts or doing achievements and could be shorten w/o the cinematics.

I agree with a lot of what you have said. My opinion on the story has been largely positive as well.

I very much enjoy my guild in the story (DE 2.0), as it was mentioned, because I’ve been with these characters since the Living World updates when they were added (especially Taimi! Ever since Dry Top in Season 2, when the Inquest were going for her… and I was like “oh HELL no!” I feel very protective over her!). I love their voice acting and dialogue; they’re very well done.

I think my only real major issue with how the story in HoT is playing out is that I have a lot of mixed reactions about actually KILLING Mordremoth and Zhaitan. I remember some extended dialogue with Ogden Stonehealer in Season 2 (after the Glint’s Lair bit) where he talks with you more extensively about the dragons. And my sense from that dialogue was that the dragons serve a very important purpose; as we know, they absorb magic and seem to act as a balance for certain types of energies and magics (corresponding to their spheres of influence). Allowed to grow without a natural check like that, won’t there be some intense consequences? I’m no lore buff, so perhaps there’s good answers to these problems in Tyria’s history somewhere.

I guess I’m seeing things in a bit more of a big picture way than perhaps my character is. DE 2.0 is just consumed with fury and the need to kill Mordremoth (for understandable reasons) but is that truly the most desirable outcome? I’m hoping the Living World story that progresses from this point takes these things into consideration.

I’m really loving the HoT maps, side events and stories. I appreciate ANet’s great work on this expansion that I’m continuing to enjoy.