Guild Wars 2

I’m a little confused as to where to post about the personal story on the forums. There’s a board for it, but it’s archived. Ok, so I get that there isn’t active development on it, but unless GW2 registration has been closed to new players… I would think it’s still quite relevant to anyone newly joining the community, no?

Anyway, here goes for the heck of it- sorry if this is in the wrong place or the whole topic of the personal story is considered to be totally closed and uninteresting.

First, I enjoyed the overall personal story experience a ton. Seriously, really liked it- no significant negative feedback.

A boss-sized monster in the freaking tutorial chapter? Awesome. See your character live through the high fantasy assemble-the-dream-team-and-fight-an-epic-last-stand trope? Awesome. Play around with different versions of the story and dialogue on different characters? Even more awesome. And best of all, perfect for the casual player with just enough time commitment in each chapter to feel like a small accomplishment but not enough to feel like work (unlike some previous attempts at a personal story- I’m talking to you, FFXI).

But then…

It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered something as jarring as the last story mission. Out of nowhere, after a carefully scripted, npc-centric experience through countless hours of storyline building up to it, a generic mmo standard 5-man dungeon?

Really?

REALLY?!?!

It was like suddenly I got kicked out of the game and it loaded up World of Warcraft. And I was left wondering, “how the heck did I get back here?”

I’m deeply disappointed. Not because I can’t or won’t do the 5-man and finish the storyline off, but just because it feels so… utterly, weirdly random. I could see it as an epilogue, a lightly rewarded final chapter to encourage players to try dungeon content. (In fact, it’d be kinda cool if there was a final branching epilogue that took you through some light WvW, a 5-man, and a quasi living story chapter.) Heck, maybe that was the intent. But as the final chapter of the main arc, the culmination of hours invested, a totally different style of storytelling and gameplay?

It feels like a bizarre bait-and-switch that totally disrupts the sense of completion.

Did you switch directors right before you decided on the finale? Seriously, what the heck? Has any developer ever meaningfully explained what they were thinking on this?

I was genuinely stunned.

It was intentional. Throughout pre-release they talked about how the story of GW2 was told through three different intertwining narratives (dungeons, personal story instances, and open world dynamic event chains), and if you play through all three Arah is obviously the end goal that ties them all together. I think you hit (one of) the problems on the head- instead of being an integration of the three, Arah is instead one doing away completely with the other two, and for casual players, it’s the one line they were least likely to follow through. It wasn’t a bait-and-switch or different developer or anything like that, though, just a design philosophy that they didn’t fully commit to.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

It was intentional. Throughout pre-release they talked about how the story of GW2 was told through three different intertwining narratives (dungeons, personal story instances, and open world dynamic event chains), and if you play through all three Arah is obviously the end goal that ties them all together. I think you hit (one of) the problems on the head- instead of being an integration of the three, Arah is instead one doing away completely with the other two, and for casual players, it’s the one line they were least likely to follow through. It wasn’t a bait-and-switch or different developer or anything like that, though, just a design philosophy that they didn’t fully commit to.

That makes a ton of sense, thanks. (I should say for the record I didn’t mean bait-and-switch as an intentional thing, more just as how it felt to suddenly encounter that.)

I think a lot of it is that as a player from other MMO’s, I personally never even considered doing dungeons until I hit 80. That tends to be the standard in, for example, WoW (in fact lower level dungeons were empty when I played that, an expansion ago).

Plus the living world content and other open-world pve, (which I’ve also really enjoyed, particularly after hitting 80 and with the releases over the past few months) tends to overshadow the dungeons, especially for relatively casual play, so even more reason to experience very little storyline via dungeons.

Then add to that a relatively high-level player base that tends to be much more focused on grinding end-game fractal content or harder dungeon modes… Not a lot of storytelling emphasis on that element.

Thanks for explaining the initial theory behind it. Definitely makes it all much more clear.

Well, a little update to the rant. I went ahead and did the dungeon this morning and…

Wow, that left a bad taste in my mouth. It was a much worse capstone to the story than I’d expected it would be. In fact, it basically wasn’t part of my personal story at all.

The one thing I didn’t expect was that all the dialogue was delivered by a different character in the party. Talk about jarring. It was like my character wasn’t even there, or was just a faceless, nameless henchman. I get how 5-man content works, but I’d expect at least the story mode of this one, pivotal dungeon to customize the dialogue to each player, instead of just the party leader.

The 100+ person zergs in the lion’s arch events felt more centered around my character’s story than this Arah run did. At least then npc’s said my character’s name from time to time, and after killing scarlet they made comments directly to me when I ran past.

I don’t think it would really bother me if the entire experience to that point had been similarly disconnected, but it was a 180 degree shift from the lengthy story leading up to that epic final battle. I really felt like I was just perfunctorily finishing content to get a flag set on my character, instead of experiencing a chapter in an otherwise good story. Again, it felt like I was back in WoW, except without clearly defined party roles (which frankly I feel makes the 5-man content in GW2 weaker than most other MMO’s, even while it makes all other content much stronger).

Ah well. It was really fun leading up to it, and I’ve got no complaints about other types of GW2 content in general. I just wish it wasn’t such a massive anti-climax. Figured I’d get my 2 cents in.