Guild Wars 2

->Let us vote on the possible villain (looks are important…i really hate scarlet looks, it’s something personal but it spoils her for me)

->Let us impact the story (if we fail, a sector of the map will change for the worst, if we succeed the map will continue as is)

->Make the villain someone we can relate to…the true trick to make us love the villain is to make him/her into someone we can understand, i can imagine scarlet as a freedom fighter fighting against the prison that the dream is…but make her do something ruthless so we can understand her but can’t agree with how she acts.

->Don’t tease us so much…i know scarlet has a master plan, but the way you’re presenting it to us just teases it to us, this leads to frustration on the player part…let us be impressed by how smart she is, by how ruthless she can be…don’t make her a teaser for the master plan that will only be revealed at the end…

->Use cinematics to show us her motivation for each step of living story…i know this spoils the suspense but it will allow us to know why were fighting, enabling us to be antagonists and to feel the weight of failure (she may have a plan and if we win, the consequences will be avoided)

Example:

tower of nightmares

->cinematic at start showing scarlet together with kraits negociating and bio engineering something, show us how she wants to use hybrids to have a better army, and plans to use that army to attack another zone.

->win (poison injected full in two weeks) map returns to normal, and scarlet goes to the next try of her master plan

->fail (poison injected not full in two weeks) map will be permanently corrupted and hybrids will start spawning in map and in scarlet’s forces. Next living story will be attack to the zone she showed in cinematic.

Let’s help arena net, I love u guys and thanks for making this wonderful game

“→Make the villain someone we can relate to…the true trick to make us love the villain is to make him/her into someone we can understand, i can imagine scarlet as a freedom fighter fighting against the prison that the dream is…but make her do something ruthless so we can understand her but can’t agree with how she acts.”

There is every possibility for players to feel that way about the Nightmare Court… That’s sort of why the whole dynamic between Faolin and Caithe exists and why before the release of GW2 we got Cadeyrn’s story.

make the villian a friend, who then loses someone important to them eg family (because we couldnt protect them) and make them blame us when they turn evil

design-a-boss contests

fail/succeed consequences (thought this was a icing, breathing world – make me care)
and give me a reason, other than loot, to want to succeed

but i think the most important is to not randomly create lore without reason or break existing lore (eg all of the alliances so far [except maybe aetherblades, but the inquest would never work WITH pirates, should have made the pirates work FOR the inquest {airship battles would have been awesome}])

• Will never truly work. There’d be nothing even close to a consensus and any villain thought up by the audience will always be infinitely superior than a writer’s recreation of the villain. It is best for ArenaNet to make their own villains. They honestly had good villains made for GW2 – the issue is that they killed half of them off (Ajax, Gaheron, many other folks from dungeons or personal story plots) before they could be properly fleshed and given better spotlighting.
• They actually stated that they want to improve on this quality. And if you note: we were told that the Tower of Nightmares plot’s finale would be part of Fractals. However, the anti-toxin bar is only half-full (at least on SoR server but I’m pretty sure the bar is cross-server). Something tells me that the finale will only come about when enough folks have repeated the Hybrid instance overall. So that is player-created. The threat won’t go away until enough players inject enough anti-toxin.
• Can’t disagree but I would note that relatable villains are not the only way to make good villains. Honestly, those villains are the “easy way out” villains are more often than not fodder for eventual anti-hero characters (aka redeemed villains who later fight for good).
• Fully agree. We’re getting too little too slowly. And most of the juiciest parts (probably about 80% of it) is not in the game. And of what is in the game, it’s mostly hidden away – which isn’t bad but with the temporary nature of the LS, it often isn’t seen.
• Depends on how it’s done. I hadn’t really liked many of the cinematics in the personal story – for example, in the Vigil path for invading Cursed Shore, there’s a cinematic where Deborah is attacked and Beirne goes in and sacrifices himself – meanwhile the player and other NPCs are doing… nothing, apparently. Just sitting and letting it happen. But on the flip side, if it’s something that the player character shouldn’t be witnessing, it again depends on how it’s done – it has to be placed properly to show a good reveal without spoiling too much.