Guild Wars 2

In my opinion, the idea of multiple paths was just a “cool-factor” that they wanted to bring to the game based on feedback from GW1. Several GW1 players didn’t like how little control they had over the story and ANet tried to give them more control in GW2.

However, the control that we were given ended up being inconsequential. For example, I am a Noble Krytan, but neither Kasmeer nor Countess Anise has never acknowledged this when I speak to them. My choices to save the lives of certain characters typically only ended in a nod somewhere later in the story where that character would just be standing around and says “Thanks” if I spoke to them.

Personally, I think the Personal Story would be much stronger if it were linear. Also, I think it should deal with something other than the Pact and Zhaitan. The current story means that the PS takes place between the release of GW2 and the death of Zhaitan. However, you can play through it at any time, meaning there’s confusion in the timeline. I believe the events of the PS should be time-independent in that its events could have happened to any PC at any point in the timeline.

Also, I’d love for it to be replayable. I got the impression that one of the reasons they can’t make it replayable is because of the choices. They want the choices to be permanent per character, but allowing you to replay would probably allow you to make different choices (and get multiple rewards from the different paths).

i think the current structure works far, far better, and allows them to focus on the quality of each story instead of just dishing out dozens of them and hoping players like it.

the personal story is a disjointed mess of unrelated, untied short stories. there isn’t a clear arc as much as “player character keeps getting involved in progressively more important wacky stories that always get concluded within a few instances”

I disagree.

Yes, Malyck is a cool piece of lore, but the storytelling with him was short and lackluster. Like everything else in the Personal Story, our character jumps in, makes some quick decisions, and ends it. Also, depending on the story choices you make, you learn different things about Malyck.

In the Living Story, we got some very good storytelling in the form of time travel. Seeing Caithe’s memories was far more eye-opening than just being told about them by an NPC against a moving background.

To me, what the personal story should be is most of the branches laid out in sequence. Still separated by race, order, and racial sympathy, but that’s it. Everything else should all be experienced on the same character, IMO. We’d be able to see more of the story per character and ANet would probably be able to have NPCs react to our story more easily. They already have NPC interactions based on race and order, and that’s all they would ever need because those two flags tell any NPC exactly what story you experienced.

One of the biggest sins committed was when you join an order. You go from recruit to high command in a matter of 4 missions / PS instances, and you haven’t actually proven your worth. It felt rushed.

To address the OP- I guess I’ll get out of the way that I don’t think dungeons are included in that statement. The rationale was that they didn’t like players not experiencing content they made, and everyone I know of who played through at least one exp mode tried to play them all. The real question there, I think, is whether dungeons will return at all, but that’s for another thread and likely another sub-forum.

I like the idea of branching stories in general, but I feel the way the concept was applied to the Personal Story severely weakened it. Things like the clunkiness of the transitions between story arcs, shallowness of the impact of your choices even within future instances, and sometimes wildly varying quality between different chapters has already been touched on, but there’s another more central issue I’d like to point out: the decision to invert the typical branching formula. Instead of starting at the same place and working outward, the PS’s most significant differences were at the start, after which it bent inward. This did have a few notable benefits- enabling real identification with your race and lowering the barrier of entry to the content you missed out on cross the top of my mind- it also, imo, is the root cause of how tortured and convoluted the mid and late story feel. One of the main reason the racial arcs are great is that they can draw from the depth of an entire in-game culture, but instead of those roots continuing to nourish the story they’re torn up and you’re cast adrift as soon as you set foot in Lion’s Arch. They throw away their strongest story telling tool offhand, and for what? After that, it’s a crapshoot each time they decide to write a callback to earlier experiences whether you actually get the one that applies to you or not, with one notable exception. Trahearne’s character has been discussed enough in the past, so here I’ll simply say that reception of his character depends primarily on if the player in question rolled a sylvari, when the story would have been much better served moving the parts that make him likable to a point everyone experiences them. The result is what you’d expect from something cobbled together from several different wellsprings- disjointed, often jarring, riddled with holes, and leaves one with the feeling that it sunk.

The bottom line is, what ANet made wasn’t a true branching story, but instead one that started branching and tried to transition to linear halfway through. It was an experiment, which was the point of most of the things in the game, but this one failed, and we can see in the LS ANet swinging hard back into more tried and safe waters. It’s been a jarring experience, and I would have preferred leaning further into embracing the branches, but if the writers and developers aren’t confident in their ability to do that right, I have no choice but to reluctantly concede that they should give up the ghost. The important thing here is that they do linear right, and the biggest problem I’ve seen for that is the idiot ball plot crutch. If at any point the player is left feeling like he could’ve solved a problem better than the character did, the linear writer has failed in their task.

The best we can hope for personalization, I think, is that they’ll dredge the early PS the way we’ve lately seen them approach GW1 and then give us more nods to that. Someone mentioned that Dinky can’t be put in the open world? Then for Abaddon’s sake, put him in the instances! You’re Commander of the Pact, and the Iron Legion if nothing else has thrown their support firmly behind them. Wave your hand and say that the other forces operating in IL territory got dragged along for the ride if you have to. What about the formerly missing sister who joined the Vigil? Why shouldn’t she be with the fleet? That could even be open world, though I would expect a radically different dialogue instead of just having brother/sister tossed onto the end of one of the lines. Malyck has been on the tips of everyone’s fingers lately- would it be too much to ask that he approaches a character he knows and who has earned his trust differently than a complete stranger? Even if we don’t get any future choices, it’s not too late to make the decisions of the past feel like they matter, and all it’d take is writing two different dialogues for returning characters, or maybe if we’re lucky some events that only trigger in proximity to players who’ve gone down certain roads. Since none of our past choices really translate directly into present options, they don’t have to worry about actually having things play out different, but who knows? Maybe the creator of the ghostbore musket or someone who’s had contact with the White Stag will get a shortcut or an easy mode in some event, or even better, maybe the White Stag’s lingering influence could lure in additional Mordrem or cause them to target your character as higher priority. ToN, I think, was a good first try at this, and well-received for trying, but it didn’t go far enough. In the first expansion I’d really like to never find myself feeling like the story is failing to take me into account where appropriate.

What I don’t want to see- a move towards other entities driving the plot. I don’t think ANet’s done this yet, but it’d be easy of them to fall into the trap of illusion of choice, letting us direct our characters to make certain choices or voice certain opinions only to have it snatched from our grasp before anything actually comes of it. If a Pact officer asks me what we should do next, I don’t want to see him assassinated before he can relay the orders. If a head of state pursues the Pact’s perspective on a matter, I don’t want Trahearne to come striding through a door to overshadow whatever it was I thought. I know I’ll take it better if they’re honest about offering no choice than if they leave us feeling cheated out of our decisions.

I don’t really feel like writing a lengthy response, but my general opinion is “this is not a good move”.

One of my favorite parts of GW1’s main storyline was the division between Kurzick and Luxon, or Margrid and Jurah, or Koss and Melonni. We could always go back and “do the other side” but we chose which path to choose, even though in the end “both were done” and it didn’t matter (much).

They said that players ended up picking the same paths anyways – this isn’t to say that people didn’t enjoy chosing a path, it’s more that they ended up picking the same way for some reason; maybe the other path was not as good, perhaps they were recommended that path, or perhaps there just happens to be another kind of common denominator.

IMO, Anet should strain away from contradicting branches (which is a lot of the early chapter-split-for-a-single-step choices), but keep to the non-contradicting branches (which are often the chapter-full-splits themselves). E.g., no “chose to save Quinn or chose to let him die” that results in either Quinn being alive or him being dead, but instead keep the biography option-level of stuff, where we end up seeing figures like Deborah later in Orr regardless of whether you did the dead sister storyline and saved her from the bandit prison.

Another issue that the Personal Story has is that the chance to meet an early character later on is exceedingly slim. You basically have a 1 in 45 chance to meet a character twice (1 in 15 to see that character the first time, and 1 in 3 to meet them again, as most returning characters are part of the Further Into Orr split). This made it feel like the beginning was pointless.

And a third issue was chapter length – 4 short story steps (or worse, 3) to get to know a character (often before killing them) is never enough. Even Belinda got this treatment; even the Master of Peace and Wynne got this treatment. Plots need more screen time. They need more focus. And in turn, fewer plots. This is part of what makes the mentors so great – they had plenty of screen time to develop and for players to get to like them being getting killed.

And the final issue of the Personal Story was the lack of replayability – and in turn, the lack of being able to play the other possibilities.

If they fixed those issues, they can easily keep split storylines that will be experienced by everyone.

I don’t like the lack of splitting, but it’s understandable. Shame all the same, and I hope they reconsider.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Even Belinda got this treatment; even the Master of Peace and Wynne got this treatment. Plots need more screen time.

I completely agree and hope that ANet is taking steps to rectify this for future characters. It feels like every time we meet a new character, they are snatched away before we get to learn anything more than their most basic, shallow backstory. I feel like I got to know some Heart NPCs even more than I got to know Belinda.

At the start of the Festival of the Four Winds (when I started playing GW2 after being scared off by the Queensdale champ train), I met the major characters of Living World by listening to them talk to each other. Just their interactions taught me a lot about them and got me interested in knowing more. That kind of “RP-time” with the characters was intriguing to me and I was disappointed that there wasn’t more of it.

i dont see the point of branching personal stories when they converge upon the same ending regardless. I also dont see how its really a viable choice for them not to have everyone on the same page at the end of the personal story

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I don’t really feel like writing a lengthy response…

If this is short, I hate to see your long responses. But enough gentle ribbing at Konig’s expense.

I have to agree that there was a lot of missed chances in the Personal Story. The characters in the early branches should have come back far more than they were. Having Deborah come back is a great nod, even if there was a 1 in 15 chance of her being seen earlier. Too often, the plot line is just discarded after the chapter is over.

Then again, some chapters have a reference come back without it being clear. For instance, the Honorless Gladium storyline ends with you either killing your father or helping him escape. Because of this split, his character, and the jailer you hunted him down with, can’t really be brought back down the road without careful maneuvering, but that’s not the part that’s relevent. Part of what he had been doing involved finding a relic of Balthazar, which is later used in the Durmand Priory path post-Claw Island. This is definitely an interesting link, but because of how the story was set up, it was easy to miss.

Perhaps part of why people kept doing the same paths is because of key farming, or they felt one theme was more interesting than the other 3. Personally, I feel any player which doesn’t WANT to explore all the paths (ignoring the impracticality of that in the current system) is missing out on so many little nods that were seeded through the entire PS.

As for the progression to the linear story, there are still a few variations to be had. People mentioned that Kasmeer never acknowledges the human nobility, but I believe there is a point in the first instance of season 2, chapter 1 where talking with Kasmeer as a human gives you a different branch from the other races, and I think being human noble gives unique dialog. (Last time I saw on the wiki, that combo hadn’t been included.) I wish more mentions or nods like this would be hidden in the game, letting the choices have meaning even now and possibly add some replayability.

To clarify, I acknowledge that all the Schrodinger’s charr from your warband, or Quinn, or Tiachren, or whoever else need be included can’t appear in the open world. What I was suggesting was that they can, and should, ideally, appear in the instances. That is, admittedly, assuming HoT uses instances, but as ANet veered hard back toward them and haven’t changed their approach since I consider that a fairly safe bet.

Our characters being subsumed in the biconics isn’t really for this thread, but for the short version- I think that was just a product of S2’s focuses, and will be left behind at least for the duration of HoT.

I’d much rather have different ways to accomplish stuff on a mission rather than story taking me completly somewhere else.

Leave the choice, but try to keep it in the same “episode” or instance.

For example, 1-3 points during an instance when you have to make rather simple choice like killing someone or not, then next decision etc. The outcome for you is a summary of your choices, doesn’t take enourmous work, because everything happens in the same location, every choice is important and you actually see what you did and where and how it ends.

Kind of similar like the summaries in Wolf Among US.

If we are to keep up with same “Achievement Run” after each story step, it would be nice to change your choice just a little with every try and get slighty different outcome.

It should not alternate the main plot. It stays the same.

I’d say no to expansive branching taking you to another part of the world, but yes to a small choice with quick and interesting outcome.

Example? Coming soon!