Guild Wars 2

Hope this is the right section as it’s half lore, half PvE.

One of my concerns going into GW2 was that the removal of quests would make communicating lore to players a lot more difficult. I try to speak to event/heart NPCs whenever possible, but so far, this does indeed seem to be the case. Most of the dialogue is fairly specific to a region and doesn’t really tell much of a greater story. With that said, I think ANet may be in an amazing opportunity to deliver lore on an on-going basis, rather than having the big lore dumps that traditional quests provide.

As an example, the Fields of Ruin is my very favourite area thus far from a lore point of view. The way you could actually walk up to NPCs and speak to them about the pending peace treaty between humans and charr in Ascalon was amazing and really made you feel like you were present at a particular moment in time. On the other hand, I think if I go back to that area in a couple of years, it’ll be a little jarring if nothing has changed.

Traditional quests would usually mean that the relevant part of the world has to stay the same until the end of time. New quests could be added, but the story-telling opportunities are limited (they would have to be part of the same chain, and couldn’t alter the world much).

I haven’t analysed personal stories much with this in mind, but so far it seems like your personal story is usually pretty separate from the world and its inhabitants. This might be a little jarring for some, but it does free up ANet to make sweeping changes to the world without breaking anything (although they’d probably have to replace the events in the area to make sense in the greater scheme).

I really hope they take this approach and look forward to going back to Fields of Ruin every now and then to see how the treaty is doing!