Guild Wars 2

I’m wondering if I missed something in the Personal Story. You show up at the seashore and play through the Battle of Ft. Trinity module, then the next story piece after that has you running missions already in Orr with Pact camps well-established all over the place. So it feels like I missed the bit where the Pact actually has to invade Orr. Maybe the video after the end of the Ft. Trinity sequence showed it, if so, it was so stylized I didn’t notice what happened.

I think the three meta-events in that area are meant to show the Pact invading Orr

Yeah. The meta events are the invasion. Plus, you dont have to have your hand in everything. It is assumed that the pact is progressing on their own as well, so by the time you show up, they have pushed their way in and set up outposts.

GW2 was designed so that both the events in the open world as well as the instances tell the story. As said, the events in the open world are the invasions while your PS is just you performing high-risk high-importance tasks.

E.g., Defeat Risen guarding the Plaza of Lost Wisdom ruins and its subsequent events where two scholars are trying to retrieve artifacts from Abaddon’s temple is the prelude to Temple of the Forgotten God personal story step. Some events lead into, some events are based after the PS steps.

So while you’re doing stuff like destroying the defenses of the Temple of Melandru so that later the Pact can go and take the temple over, the Pact’s pushing further and further into Orr via the meta events and escorts.

In theory you could follow a chain of DE from Fort Trinity to the Gates of Arah.

Well GW2 has a persistent world but also attempts to tell a story. Well most MMOs suffer from this problem actually where you can go off rails and explore the world and see things out of order. Also for as much as I love the dynamic event system it isn’t the best way of delivering a story.
So the assault on Orr is a combination of the dynamic events and the personal story.

It happens off-camera.

Rukh.9287:

It happens off-camera.

Not really, it’s right there in front of the player. It’s just the magnitude needs to be down-scaled due to how much ends up going on at once. What happens after the Pact pushes into Orr and heads towards Arah, is pretty much behind the curtain.

I think the basic timeline is:

1. Battle of Fort Trinity

2. The invasion of Orr across the Straits of Devastation is launched, while strike teams go after the Temple of Abaddon and the Eyes.

3. Going after the Mouth is part of the Pact establishing itself in the east of Malchor’s Leap.

4. The ‘cut of supplies’ mission involves getting deep behind enemy lines to strike a target (either the supulchre or the barge).

5. The hideout beneath the Temple of Lyssa is established.

6. The next set of missions involves a push from eastern Malchor’s Leap to central Cursed Shore by land, sea, and air.

7. The Pact pushes on towards Arah while Trahearne and the PC look for and cleanse the Source of Orr.

8. Arah story.

1. is probably the worst offender if you choose the Temple of Lyssa since along the way you’re likely to encounter the Pact bases at Wren and in the hideout beneath (whose official name I can’t remember) which I don’t think were actually supposed to be established at that point. It also doesn’t help that while Straits and Cursed Shore have explicit invasion paths, in Malchor’s it’s just a matter of escorting reinforcements. That said, there are some oddities in #6 as well.

Frankly, Orr lasts a while in the actual timeline(Or is heavily implied to be), but we don’t actually do 100% of it in personal story. We do more of the super important missions vital to the campaign, instead of every piece. Much of the pushes and camp takings are in events in the open world.

The gatekeeper or Gates of Arah is a temple event which is basically between cleaning of Orr and the final fight. But the gatekeeper comes back like every champion temple guard. For story recognition it is a world boss event between two personal stories, but different steps on the same path to the dragon. Some events are hard to sort like Dwayna temple, because there should be just one statue or not? And there are still some open spaces in the Orr story (like how did Trahearne straggle through uncleaned Orr for several years, what happen underwater or why did Romke’s crew turn into ghosts).