Guild Wars 2

First, just a bit of background:

Profession Lore in GW1
In Guild Wars 1, the professions were integral parts of the visible lore of the game. In Prophecies you worked with a profession mentor and did quests that were unique to your profession, while discovering more about what that meant and what that represented. This continued later in the game, and in the later campaigns as well. The idea of what a ritualist was, or what role the monk profession had in Canthan society, was made clear in the game through quests and dialogue. In Elona the position of mesmers in the court of the princes of Vabbi was clear, and the role of mesmers in that society that worshipped Lyssa above all the other gods.

In Guild Wars 2
In Guild Wars 2, there’s no real equivalent to this. You never really learn about what you are and what role the professions have in the world. What is a mesmer in society? We learned recently that there may be some sort of organization that Kasmeer is a part of, but there’s no head or tail of it in the game. Where do Guardians come from? Why, in the lore of the game, is one person an elementalist or a necromancer? It’s questions like these that go unanswered in the game, and the problem is multiplied by the fact that the roles of the professions in the society go even more unanswered in the races other than human.

Why do we care?
Well, maybe we don’t. It’s just been something that bugs me, that doesn’t quite gel in the way the world is put together. The existence of the professions should have an enormous impact on the way that Tyrian society is organized and the identity that NPCs have. In Guild Wars 1, it did. Now… it doesn’t, though in Season 2 of the Living World there’s definitely been progress made in this direction.

At any rate, what are your thoughts? Have you ever wondered about the lore of professions in Tyria? Do you think there should be more in-game?

TL;DR – Professions don’t really have a role in the everyday lore of Tyria in-game, and they should.

I think the difference is that in GW2, we can’t explicitly told “Oh, that’s the guys profession!” like GW1 did.

You see several people in DR talk about being Necromancers. In GW1, pretty much everybody had a clear “their profession is this” marker because everybody used the player skills for attacks.

I think profession specific quests or missions would be… weird to pull off.

I would absolutely love to see more profession specific story or lore in-game. I disagree that it’d be weird to pull off, especially if translated directly in the form it served in GW1 as a way to unlock profession skills, although they did miss possibly their best opportunity with the initial trait revamp. I agree, though, that the dialing back of gameplay relevance has probably extended to a decline in lore relevance. So many fewer enemies are identifiably of a profession, and even those that are have been oversimplified to the point that your average mob has two, maybe three attacks. It’s hard to consider something important when it’s hardly present.

I mean, if they tried tying your profession into the personal story.

Where would it get added in, would it cause unique dialogue in certain ones? Cause that adds 8 additional choices/paths. I mean, the best place I could see it being put in is just before/after joining the orders, kinda a training arc to get your character better equipped. That’d at least mean you could just do 8 class arcs for each order, and remove the race unique ones maybe.

Oh, no, that’d be a mess. I wasn’t suggesting it be a personal story thing, but a character progression one- for instance, back before the unveiling of the lackluster exploration tie-in, there was a lot of buzz that the trainers could send you on profession specific tasks to unlock traits. That would’ve been fantastic.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

Oh, no, that’d be a mess. I wasn’t suggesting it be a personal story thing, but a character progression one- for instance, back before the unveiling of the lackluster exploration tie-in, there was a lot of buzz that the trainers could send you on profession specific tasks to unlock traits. That would’ve been fantastic.

Oh. Fair enough. Yeah that could work :P.

We don’t necessarily need in-game profession quests, but at the least the game needs to demonstrate professions in-game and ideally put some emphasis on those professions. For example, Braham is a Guardian, Kasmeer a Mesmer and Majory a Necro, but nowhere are they ever used to explore these profession. I’d love to know when Majory decided that resurrecting rotting corpses was a good fit for her.
Although maybe this is simply because professions are treated as being rather plain. Somehow an elementalist that can summon fire from the sky is no more noteworthy than random peasant #5 working in the fields. In other fantasy universes wizards or generally the magically inclined tend to be somewhat noteworthy, at the very least there are numerous version of Hogwarts that exists to train and guide what can only be considered great power.
Tyria does have the Orders, by they seems more like very separate entities with little interaction with the day to day lives of the citizens. I don’t see the Order of Whispers training kids to cut purses in the streets, and I don’t see the Priory helping to train young gifted magic users.

Minor detail…

I doubt any necromancer minion can be described as “rotting”… necromancer magic and all.

And that’s part of how GW is different. in DR you can find people randomly talking about being a necromancer. I think it’s just there is a difference between casual and adventuring/combat use. A random civilian may be an elementalist, but uses his water magic to help keep the fields watered.

Kalavier.1097:

Minor detail…

I doubt any necromancer minion can be described as “rotting”… necromancer magic and all.

And that’s part of how GW is different. in DR you can find people randomly talking about being a necromancer. I think it’s just there is a difference between casual and adventuring/combat use. A random civilian may be an elementalist, but uses his water magic to help keep the fields watered.

See, that’s the kind of thing I want to see! The professions having a role in the society, in everyday life. And right now they mostly don’t. Season 2 made strides in this by incorporating professions into certain dialogue choices and backstories. But still, this kind of thing where you just see how the professions and types of abilities and magic fit into the world, it’s few and far between.

For engineers, you might be interested in talking to Iogaer at Snow Leopard Lodge in Hoelbrak.

Oranos.3408:

Kalavier.1097:

Minor detail…

I doubt any necromancer minion can be described as “rotting”… necromancer magic and all.

And that’s part of how GW is different. in DR you can find people randomly talking about being a necromancer. I think it’s just there is a difference between casual and adventuring/combat use. A random civilian may be an elementalist, but uses his water magic to help keep the fields watered.

See, that’s the kind of thing I want to see! The professions having a role in the society, in everyday life. And right now they mostly don’t.

Pretty much this. We do have examples of magic and other profession abilities being used in dynamic events, to varying degrees, but the way it’s treated (as just another day to day part of life) isn’t reflected in the game. I guess Harry Potter would be an example of day to day magic (pretty much everyone is magic and magic is everywhere so it’s no big deal), where Dragon Age, Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time (which I’m struggling to get into XD, so I might be wrong on this one) would be an example of the opposite.
GW2 seems to demonstrates both and neither.

If I recall correctly, there were big plans in GW2’s development to have various things, including dynamic events, that key into professions. Skill challenged (now hero challenges), for instance, used to be profession-specific, but they decided against that so that everyone has an incentive to get them rather than only members of specific professions.

Personally, I’d like to see some of that idea be revisited. Maybe not events that can only be done by a particular profession, but events that can be done a different way if you have a particular profession. For instance, consider events that have a flamethrower for dealing with something: it would be a nice nod if an engineer with the flamethrower kit or an elementalist in Fire Attunement would also count for that purpose.