Guild Wars 2

Hello! Just to start off by what I mean by the title is what really is the point of choosing certain characteristics over another when creating your character other than RP? What is the point of chosing this spirit over the other? What about this dream over the next or this college over another?

There seems to be no real reason where as humans: they choose which God favors them, There is no impact and no reason, just because? When GW2 launched, I thought choosing grenth for a necromancer would give me a chance at a later quest that involved grenth. Or choosing a raven spirit for Norn would mean to awaken the norn spirit of raven- but I found out that eventually as a norn you could at some point purchase all the spirit transformations through skills and it had no meaning, atleast it lost the meaning for me what it was to be a norn. In GW1, you escort Jora**spoiler*******] to help and eventually kill her brother, svanir. She had lost her spirit of bear & gained it back; [end spoiler]I was hoping for an awakening for norn with their spirits.

Humans- the only thing that really matters is whether you’re noble/poor/commoner but hardly, it only effects your beginning missions even choosing your personality has no real purpose. Why are do only some backstory options effect your characters story, but not the other? I feel the Charr have the most complete and indepth story (just my personal opinion)

Maybe I’m only seeing it one sided, these were just questions I’ve had and wanted to ask someone from Anet.

I’m not sure, but I think they did intend them to have story effect only they ran out of time and/or resources, or found them too complicating for game pacing. There was also the charm/dignity/ferocity trait choice and you could reset your balance of the three in game depending on chosen dialogue reactions — depending on the balance, you got a number of different adjectives applied to you. That was vestigial from the start and ended up getting dumped completely when the New Player Experience came in (or at some other point, but NPE seems likely).

I think back when the game was first being developed that they were going to do more with all that but it didn’t work out. The backstory is for the different branching story lines of the personal story. The part about charm/dignity/ferocity was quietly dropped. You can still see elements of it when speaking to various NPCs but the original idea where the NPCs would react to you as you speak to them and you could punch one out or get special bargains didn’t work. So personal story and the remnants of the personality system are all that’s left of what they tried to do.

By the way, to use spoilers you do this (look at the post like you’re going to quote it to see what was typed).

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If no space above or below your spoiler will look like this

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Biography

There are 5 ‘biography’ questions to answer when creating a character. They do all have an impact but some are more important than others and aside from the equipment one you really need to play multiple different characters and pay attention to all the dialogue to notice what they do.

1 is your ‘personality’ (charming, dignified or aggressive), this has less of an impact than it used to but will occasionally alter how you speak to NPCs and how they react.

1 is about your starting equipment and the choices are profession specific. Rangers choose their pet, necromancers, elementalists and mesmers choose head armour, warriors choose a helm or pauldrons etc.

The remaining 3 are race specific. 2 of them will determine the level 10 and 20 storylines (and are occasionally referenced later on) and the 3rd will only affect some of the NPCs in your home instance and dialogue with certain NPCs.

For example humans have to choose their ‘rank’ (noble, commoner or street rat), their big regret (unknown parents, dead sister or not joining the circus) and which god they follow.

Their rank determines the level 10 story, their regret determines the level 20 story (so a noble with dead parents will have a completely different story to a commoner who never joined the circus) and the 3rd only determines how some NPCs speak to them.

• For the asura it’s their College (level 10), first invention (L20) and mentor (dialogue).
• For sylvari it’s the figure their saw in the Dream (L10), most important teaching (L20) and Cycle (dialogue).
• For norn it’s their most important quality (L10), what happened at a moot (L20) and which spirit they revere most (dialogue).
• For the charr it’s their Legion (L10), who their father is (L20) and their best friend (dialogue).

There are also other choices you make during the game which have an impact. Some are fairly minor, you solve a problem one way or another and the only impact is which instance you play next, but others will be referenced later on. Probably the most important is which Order you join, but I also remember references to which race you help, your greatest fear and how you go about the invasion of Orr (and therefore which NPCs you meet along the way).

(You need something like 30 characters to see every possible variation of the personal story, although most of them only need to get to level 30, and only…3 I think need to get to level 80. I’ve actually got a spreadsheet laying out all the story choices and how they connect so I can track which ones I’ve done on which character, but I’m not on my computer to check it.)