I’d like you to point to me where those “walls upon walls of quest text and dialogue within these quests” lie in GW2, because at least 75% of the events I’ve played through hold no text-based lore; most likely far more than that.
The point I was getting at was the lore in GW1 was not available though the missions/PS, it was available out in the open world. In GW1’s instance it was through the walls and walls of text in quests, GW2’s alternative is Renown Hearts, Ambient Dialogue, Dungeons, and Dynamic Event/DE Dialogue. I’m not saying GW2’s perfect, but I am saying it’s not much different from GW1 in the way in which it shows it’s lore.
I would disagree with no/little lore via missions. And GW2’s personal story for that matter. In Prophecies alone, we got the biggest scope of the Flameseeker Prophecies’ themselves in the missions; along with this we got things ranging from the Tome of the Fallen and the curse it gives (Nolani Academy bonus), the charr’s fiery faith (Surmia bonus), to the centaur war against Krytans (The Wilds bonus and the Ventari-related primary quests), the druids (Bloodstone Fen bonus; Aurora Glade), our first glimpse of the Margonites (Thirsty River), our biggest look at the history of Elonia (Elona Reach and Dune of Despair), and of course, the biggest look on the mursaat and seers (including their ancient conflict) in GW1.
In the personal story, we got a large range of things – from Balthazar-related relics, to Malyck, to the Steam creatures’ origins, to old traditions of Orr (Ossuary of the Unquiet Dead), it’s the only source of the Elder Dragons consuming magic as far as I know, the only placement of the White Mantle in GW2, as well as the Ministry Guard’s corruption, and so much more.
If anything, the personal story is the biggest source of lore in GW2 – which is a shame, since you have such limited interaction with it.
We received plenty of lore in GW1 during missions. Rurik’s death and undeath were both part of missions. Dunkoro speaking with his dead son. Kormir telling us how she knew she was the one who triggered nightfall.
The cut scenes were a were a wealth of lore. Even some of the tasks that we had to perform during the missions mattered for the continuation of the overall story and lore. Like the mission that forced the Kurzick’s and the Luxon’s to battle the afflicted together. The mission that ascended the player in order to see the Mursaat. Almost all of the missions had an impact on lore and many actually set lore with cut scene information.
What I am saying is. Personally I restarted playing the game not long ago for nostalgia sake on a new character. I was just blasting through doing missions (after having leveled in Pre-Searing) and with just the missions the world was very, very shallow when compared to the world with included quests. Yes we get a bit of information, but it is nowhere near fleshed out enough just missions alone.
I found most of my lore by talking to people, asking questions, particularly to questgivers post-and-pre quest. Even random people in your home instance over time will talk to you and tell you interesting stuff. Depending on who you are.
For example, there’s a library in the Priory HQ that houses a lot of short reading material for you that might be hard to find elsewhere.
I personally loved the stories of GW1, especially Prophecies. I loved Devona’s group and I loved the in-depth characters you were introduced to as you travel. For GW2, the story extremely disappointed me. The group of Destiny’s Edge has great potential, but I can’t help compare them to Devona’s group in GW1, where they simply pale in comparison.
I believe one of the major flaws of GW2 story is actually in its promotion. The same mistake made with the first Assassins Creed game. You already know the end-goal, you already know you will fight the Elder Dragon. In GW1 you start in Pre-Searing and a major event happens that completely changes the world you just became familiar with, after that the real adventure begins where you travel to different places, discover secrets and uncover new plot changes. The story kept amazing me, kept me on my seat and kept me wondering.
For GW2, the story never really surprised me, it went exactly the direction that was known from the start with very little side adventures. Next to this I find the way the Personal Story is experienced in GW2 far inferior to the long missions in GW1.
On a side note, am I the only one that misses the green exclamation mark over NPC’s head indicating they have a quest to offer? I really like the dynamic events in GW2, but I’m at a point where I’ve done/seen them all, multiple times. Whilst for GW1 I always enjoyed doing some side-quests, traveling the world, finishing some small mission an NPC sent me on while learning new stuff about the area. (and after completion, it was really complete).
I’m a very big lore enthusiast and I simply loved GW1. GW2 is amazing in many ways, but the story was a huge disappointment for me, whilst that used to be the one strong point I used to advertise the game to my friends.
On a side note, am I the only one that misses the green exclamation mark over NPC’s head indicating they have a quest to offer? I really like the dynamic events in GW2, but I’m at a point where I’ve done/seen them all, multiple times. Whilst for GW1 I always enjoyed doing some side-quests, traveling the world, finishing some small mission an NPC sent me on while learning new stuff about the area. (and after completion, it was really complete).
I don’t miss the exclamation marks them selves (because they broke immersion a lot), but I do miss chasing down quests in my quest log. A lot of the dynamic events seem copy pasted to fill zones. Its basically the same quests over and over again:
-Kill 10 rats
-Kill one really big rat
-Protect an npc
-Protect an area
-Collect objects and bring them to the npc
That’s pretty much all of the dynamic quests in the game. And the fact that so many of them are the same, means we don’t get a whole lot of lore from them. The quests seem less personal, compared to the quests in GW1.
Half the time I simply have no clue what I am doing lorewise. I get the overall idea of a zone. But with zones carrying stories on from previous zones and events dragging you into stuff that has already started, it is hard to make much sense of anything.
Not to mention npc’s chatting while I am hearing "KABOOOOSH’ and trying to frantically stay alive.
GW1 took care of it with missions, a linear tale telling the tale of that particular area. I sorely miss that. Even just adding collectable books and journals would help. Like the journal pages at the jumping puzzle/vista in the south of Diessa. Allow me to pick them up, fling them in my vault and read them later. Not giving me huge walls of text before a quest is fine, but at times I want to read stuff.
In lornar’s pass (and continuing further) one finds steam creatures. What are these things. Apparently it has something to do with an infinity ball in an Asura personal story ….how the feck am I supposed to know this. Even some journal left by Shodd to explain it a bit would be nice.
Gw2 is fairly high paced at times. This causes me to move on swiftly, no time to read stuff. But if I could collect stuff and read it later…awesome. (I am one of the folks whom lugs around and stores every book in elder scrolls that I can find.)
I also kind of miss doing quests that span multiple zones. It allowed for better story telling to not have every quest be tied to one particularly zone.
I know what you mean, mark. It drives me to distraction that some bits of lore can only be picked up by talking to an NPC at a certain time, often a timeframe that falls entirely within nonstop waves of enemies. And to add insult to injury, NPCs won’t initiate dialogue if they’re in combat. That was a very poor design choice.
I also kind of miss doing quests that span multiple zones. It allowed for better story telling to not have every quest be tied to one particularly zone.
Oh yeah, although I did find some of them rather annoying. Such as one particular one where you are helping the Tengu within the Roost in Kaineng keep their area from being taken away from them. You have to talk to like 10 ministry officials throughout the city before finally finding and having to physically bribe the person to get them to back off. Man, I have to say if there was any one thing that drove home the worthlessness and corruption within the Celestial Ministry, it was that specific quest.
Which means that that was a quest well designed, because I strongly suspect that the person writing that particular one, was trying to show that the Empire was a maze of bureaucrats and red tape, which largely overlooked a glaring catastrophe: there was a Plague Outbreak in Mainland Cantha.
But that man stole a whole platinum from me, which was a lot back then. I almost wanted to just kill him and take it back :P
I think they need to utilize the Priory(and their library) more. Here is a huge in-game organization of scholars, researchers, explorers, and scientists, but they aren’t used to their full effect lore wise. We see them for renown hearts ever so often, but they can be used to greater purpose when explaining the lore behind certain areas as well. It would be nice to be able to stumble across a Priory explorer, camping in the middle of no where, researching. No renown hearts or anything. Just a lonesome npc that you can ask questions about a more in-depth history of the area. Events that happened there, important figures that might have lived here, certain aspects of the indigenous species… That sort of thing.
As for their library, they should add another function to the Priory’s skill point, the Heart of the Priory. Once you commune with it, you can talk to it again to get “imbued” with parts of its knowledge: the collective research of the Priory. (aka: You can read walls of text about certain parts of the history of Tyria.) Plus, since hopefully the Priory’s scholars were documenting the events of the LS, a summery of the event could be added to the Heart once that part of the LS is over.
That would be great i think! Even though i guess it should be limited to characters who actually joined the Priory. There are just some things you dont tell to every bypasser adventurer, say, where is the nearest old ruin to plunder before the Priory can set up a working research camp. The detailed explanation behind how Spectral Agony worked. That small fracture they found of the words that Khilbron read from the scroll.
But the idea itself is good, and it could work. Its not like 100% of every said word is voiced in the game. Much of the lore could be flashed out from simple dialogue boxes.
I agree here with Erukk and lakdav.
I keep wondering around Tyria thinking I will one day stumble upon this Great Library which contains the sum of all Tyrian knowledge. It will be a massive library you can go inside and spend the day there. There are stairs and lobbies and reading rooms and points of interest, it will be on a scale almost as large as some of the cities. You go inside and there are massive numbers of shelves in different rooms and levels where you can go to read up on any lore you have a question about in the game organized using the dewey decimal system or whatever system they implement. The Ascalonian Catacombs, all the other dungeons and their points of interests will have books to read up on. ArenaNet can even make it so that you can buy different things in the Gem Store to facilitate your exploration of this Great Library, such as a pass to special archives with more lore, to give it that special exclusive feel or cut scenes while you read some stories in the Great Library.
Anyway, I need my lore fix. I know too little about the interesting places and encounters I have in Guild Wars 2.
What you described right there is exactly what I had hoped the Durmand Priory was. And I had hoped that perhaps if you were a member of the priory you could go around grabbing books, tomes, finding carvings or journals around in dungeons, mini-dungeons, jumping puzzles, and just random hiding places within the game. Then you could add to this massive library with more books about the specific places you went, perhaps you even find a journal of one of the characters from THE GW1 ACCOUNT YOU LINKED TO THE GAME! I always thought this would add depth to the relatively weak Durmand Priory we find today.
They inject just anything they can think of, and explain it with the holodeck… -I mean Asura. Which makes everything else seem rather pointless really. Why are we still wielding swords?
I hear you. It’s lazy, shallow and begs the question of what anyone else actually contributes aside from a shield of warm bodies while the asura warm up their supermegawondertech.
And at the same time, having us “primitives” with our silly pointy sticks go toe to toe with high-tech like Scarlet’s BS ends up making both feel cheap.
I too would really like to see the magical/mystical dimensions of the game get more attention. Or hell, any attention.
ArenaNet doesn’t show that. Instead of showing the game has lore and story and background, they put their background on their official site, where it’ll be lost to the nether of news posts. Or removed entirely like their blog posts (thank god they got put on the wiki first).
Yeah, that is an awful, lazy (again), immersion-breaking problem and IMO shows how much importance is really placed on the game’s lore and story: very little. Instead, I get a feeling it’s all about k3wl pixel loot and “e-sports”, two things I for one could not possibly care less about.
We need the lore background to be in the game, explorable by our characters. And even more, we certainly need ongoing story information in the game! I expect my games to be self-contained like any decent book or movie. The moment you are expected to go outside the game/movie/book for information on WTF is going on is the moment someone needs a serious kick in the rear for terrible design choices. I know the game has limited funds, but a half-baked shallow mess of a story is worse than not having one at all.
I never played GW1 so I have no attachment to its story or themes, and I certainly would not have bought GW2 if humans were the only playable species. But I DID like what I about this game and its setting pre-launch, and it’s just hugely disappointing to see this rich, interesting setting get such a shallow treatment in the game story. Scripted background chatter and event-related chatter do a better job at portraying this world and sparking my interest than the actual story does. (Minus the early cultural personal story chapters, which convey some cultural identity and themes, which makes them enjoyable to me, while the rest of the personal story and the entire living story are just too kitten bland and impersonal.)
Then you could add to this massive library with more books about the specific places you went, perhaps you even find a journal of one of the characters from THE GW1 ACCOUNT YOU LINKED TO THE GAME! I always thought this would add depth to the relatively weak Durmand Priory we find today.
YES! YES! THIS! All we have right now is the HoM, which completly SUCKS, because it’s so unpersonal. How hard is it to atleast give me the names of my freaking characters in the HoM, Anet? Or my tapestries, or anything that let’s me know that this was my HoM.
Then you could add to this massive library with more books about the specific places you went, perhaps you even find a journal of one of the characters from THE GW1 ACCOUNT YOU LINKED TO THE GAME! I always thought this would add depth to the relatively weak Durmand Priory we find today.
YES! YES! THIS! All we have right now is the HoM, which completly SUCKS, because it’s so unpersonal. How hard is it to atleast give me the names of my freaking characters in the HoM, Anet? Or my tapestries, or anything that let’s me know that this was my HoM.
The Priory area seems PERFECT for this!
I’d LOVE to have a library filled with books, with lore on GW1 and GW2. Every area you unlock 100% gives a book.
Just imagine….. hnnnnnggngnnn
Each group could honestly have sections like this as well. Priory fits the exploration and finding of tomes, but I would be honestly surprised if the Vigil didn’t keep a library full of books on war strategy, and of course the Order of Whispers would keep logs of the actions of leaders, nobles, and anyone of any importance who can be manipulated. Over the course of history these books could give a load of insight.
Adding new lore every two weeks doesn’t seem to work too well
Adding new lore every two weeks doesn’t seem to work too well
Yeah, it doesn’t, but expanding on already existing lore could do well. Writing lore is like building a house, before you stack new things on top, you first need a solid foundation. Now GW1 was a solid foundation for vanilla GW2, but recently they just add and add, creating an unbalance. Granted they made allusion here and there, like the Zephyrites and their connection to Glint, but I think it should be more than that. Forget about Aetherblades, give us something on the White Mantle instead.
And most importantly, acknowledge that the playable character from GW1 existed! That still drives me nuts, that there is no mention of the single greatest hero in Tyria’s history, besides a freaking unpersonal HoM!
^ HoM is the biggest disappointment to at least myself.
I mean I spent hours making my HoM look exactly how I wanted with the different monuments, heroes, everything laid out to look good. I didn’t expect to come into GW2 with a pristine Eye of the North or a pristine HoM. I kind of liked the idea of walking up and seeing the hero statues with maybe an arm missing or just weathering effects, my armor was somewhat rusted out, and the Oppressor’s Weapons that I filled my Weapons with would be a bit dingy. Perhaps even the mini-pets would be wandering around, no longer trapped standing in place. I mean it wouldn’t be a perfect HoM, but it would be yours. You would own it.
^ HoM is the biggest disappointment to at least myself.
I mean I spent hours making my HoM look exactly how I wanted with the different monuments, heroes, everything laid out to look good. I didn’t expect to come into GW2 with a pristine Eye of the North or a pristine HoM. I kind of liked the idea of walking up and seeing the hero statues with maybe an arm missing or just weathering effects, my armor was somewhat rusted out, and the Oppressor’s Weapons that I filled my Weapons with would be a bit dingy. Perhaps even the mini-pets would be wandering around, no longer trapped standing in place. I mean it wouldn’t be a perfect HoM, but it would be yours. You would own it.
I know what you mean. When I saw it, I felt the same. What made me OK with it was that I figured after 250 years it would be completely looted. After that I was good with just being able to see something that looked much the same as it did in GW1. We certainly don’t have much of that in GW2.
Back to the OP, I think lore is presented poorly for two reasons.
The Living Story often seems like it’s laying the ground work for something, or hinting at something else going on but it’s rarely developing anything. Things happen, but it’s always shallow. With Tequatl we didn’t get a sylvari with a strong personal tie to the conflict, we didn’t get a hylek who’s trying to fight back, who can characterise the conflict of Sparkfly Fen, we got Rox, who is doing the same thing she did when we met her, a generic mission for Rytlock. The plots and motivation just feel really shallow a lot of the time.
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