Just finished the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns story. I have been playing Guild Wars for almost 10 years, when I bought Guild Wars Factions and Prophecies.
The one thing that always stood up to me was the storytelling. I always felt like I am a part of something big. Every time I finished a story (defeated the Lich, Shiro, Abaddon and the Great Destroyer), I felt that I have really accomplished something.
When Guild Wars 2 came out 3 years ago, my good friend and I were so excited about the story. Yes, it had many conflicts solved in idiotic ways’ and Trahearne was kinda forced into the story, but the Game still felt like it was taking me on an adventure, the content was lead by the story. I felt like I was on an adventure stopping Zaithan,but my character has grown from a simple commoner in Divinity’s Reach to a fully trained warrior’ ready to take the fight to Zaithan. all the content, e.g Dynamic Events, was like a sidetrack from the story that was fun to do, leveling was fun, interesting and grindless…
HoT was the complete difference: this 16 episode story (that some episodes were "walk over there and click F), looked more like Arenanet was forcing me to pay for a full Living Story update. While I did not always like the way the stories went’ the end of LS2 was a huuuuge hype build up for me. When Colin Announced the new features of HoT back in January, I always told myself “wow, that’s new cool means to advance in a new story!” the masteries made me imagine a story where my character enters the jungle, learns to glide’ learn the ways of the Exalted, the Itzel, the Nouch. I imagined a story where you need to become a part of the jungle life in order to save it. the story we could have gotten could have been amazing if combined properly with the masteries, if through the story, and the missions, we could have learned them and master them. the story did little to no use of the Masteries. the Gliding mastery was used to glide away from the twisted Faolin, the bouncing mushrooms were not seen a lot, the Itzel poison requirement (which was lifted) had N-O-T-H-I-N-G to do with the final battle with Mordremoth.
the big and complex event systems, which are awesome on large scale numbers of players, became setbacks for gaining masteries. the story requirement for masteries was simply to move us slowly through the fast story. the final mission did feel epic’ it is the best mission, IMO, in the GW2 (and perhaps entire GW) history, but the ending. My character is forced to kill Trahearne, the marshall of the pact, one of the destroyers of Zaithan, and a close friend to the character’ and then just the “mission complete” plays with no cutscene of anything that gives us a final closure to his tale (a funeral, perhaps?). this was a complete reverse to the amazing twist of Eir’s death’ which left me shocked for 5 minutes.
Summing it all up: Guild wars 2 was an amazing story that was leading all of the content. HoT is a short’ undeveloped and nearly conflictless story to serve as an excuse for charging us 50+bucks for new content.
I really hope someone in A-net is reading this. Guild Wars has been a huge part of my life, it has been there with me through tough times, and I really got drawn to the world of Tyria. I don’t want all those awesome memories to be washed by the terrible direction this game is heading. This game had an amazing story binding amazing content to it. Don’t Give up on it Arenanet! don’t turn Guild wars into some Generic “pay for some few new stuff” kind of MMO.
sorry for the long post’ if you want a potato, go look at Fatty Mordy
I would love to hear you guys’ reactions (and the devs’, if anyone of them is reading this
