Guild Wars 2

I will use spoilers, so be warned!

Season 2 so far had some great moments but it still doesn’t catch me. I’ll talk about the different aspects why I think the Living Story could be made better.

Story:

I really liked the overall story, all the cliffhangers made me interested in seing more.
But I didn’t liked the specific implementation of it. I will give two examples:

Belinda. Her whole story arc felt like this: “This is a character the hero is caring about. Now the character is dead. Now the hero is angry.”
That was the whole purpose of her person so far and it is a very sloppy design element to create tension. “You want to make a thrilling story? Kill people! That will do the trick.”

The next example is the meeting with the leaders of the different races in the Grove. Each leader presented his thoughts and we defended our position. And in the end (who would have thought it?) all agreed with us. Wow. That was a waste of time.

There were a lot of elements that are either not fitting in the context or felt like taken out of a “How to build a proper story” building kit.
And I also don’t like the paperchase mentality. The first two Personal Story parts (lvl 1-10, 11-20) had a clear goal where we were heading towards. Take the Human personal story as example: The first ten level we’re solely dealing with bandids and how to stop them. That got lost after that. The only thing we knew from that on was that, sometime, we would fight Zhaitan. There was no golden thread. We meet the orders, become friends with our superior, he/she dies. We meet another persons, they die. All the time. We do something, we settle into the story, everything gets changed.
The common theme is missing.

The patch cycle:

I’m a very impatient person and the reason why I still like the Personal Story way more than the Living Story, beside being way worse narrationwise, is that I can choose when I want to progress. If I want to get the story done in one day, I can do so.
I know that wont be possible for the Living Story but it could be made far better. It should feel like a journey, not like timewarping every two weaks.
An example how this could be achieved would be to split the story parts in smaller part, that unlock on a daily basis, or to fill in meaningful timegates, like long eventchains that have to be completed first before one could progress.

The own character:

I think the story hasn’t improved here. It still feels like my character is either deaf-dumb or stupid. The conversations, not to mention the fact that they’ve all being mute, felt unrealistic.
The reason is that we don’t get any choice in what to say, we don’t have any personality, not even a gender difference in what we are saying.
There should be different choices in what to say, different answers based on our gender, our race and our personality (still remember Charisma, Dignity, Ferocity?).
A huge male Norn saying the same things as a Sylvari or a female Asura doesn’t make sense.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

I will use spoilers, so be warned!

Season 2 so far had some great moments but it still doesn’t catch me. I’ll talk about the different aspects why I think the Living Story could be made better.

Story:

I really liked the overall story, all the cliffhangers made me interested in seing more.
But I didn’t liked the specific implementation of it. I will give two examples:

Belinda. Her whole story arc felt like this: “This is a character the hero is caring about. Now the character is dead. Now the hero is angry.”
That was the whole purpose of her person so far and it is a very sloppy design element to create tension. “You want to make a thrilling story? Kill people! That will do the trick.”

The next example is the meeting with the leaders of the different races in the Grove. Each leader presented his thoughts and we defended our position. And in the end (who would have thought it?) all agreed with us. Wow. That was a waste of time.

There were a lot of elements that are either not fitting in the context or felt like taken out of a “How to build a proper story” building kit.
And I also don’t like the paperchase mentality. The first two Personal Story parts (lvl 1-10, 11-20) had a clear goal where we were heading towards. Take the Human personal story as example: The first ten level we’re solely dealing with bandids and how to stop them. That got lost after that. The only thing we knew from that on was that, sometime, we would fight Zhaitan. There was no golden thread. We meet the orders, become friends with our superior, he/she dies. We meet another persons, they die. All the time. We do something, we settle into the story, everything gets changed.
The common theme is missing.

The patch cycle:

I’m a very impatient person and the reason why I still like the Personal Story way more than the Living Story, beside being way worse narrationwise, is that I can choose when I want to progress. If I want to get the story done in one day, I can do so.
I know that wont be possible for the Living Story but it could be made far better. It should feel like a journey, not like timewarping every two weaks.
An example how this could be achieved would be to split the story parts in smaller part, that unlock on a daily basis, or to fill in meaningful timegates, like long eventchains that have to be completed first before one could progress.

The own character:

I think the story hasn’t improved here. It still feels like my character is either deaf-dumb or stupid. The conversations, not to mention the fact that they’ve all being mute, felt unrealistic.
The reason is that we don’t get any choice in what to say, we don’t have any personality, not even a gender difference in what we are saying.
There should be different choices in what to say, different answers based on our gender, our race and our personality (still remember Charisma, Dignity, Ferocity?).
A huge Norn saying the same things as a Sylvari or an Asura doesn’t make sense.

I’m with you, especially on the third point. However, don’t expect any improvement on that front. They’ve already decided that this is not your story — the exact opposite of what they said pre-release.

“For you, the game should be about the PC at the expense of the open world content and ambience. For me, and for Guild Wars 2, it’s about the world as a whole since it’s a cooperative, shared environment. Neither approach is wrong, but we decided to put more of our resources into bringing the world to life. I don’t regret that at all.”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Enough-of-your-GMPC-please/first#post4172047

Funny thing is that they keep killing — both literally and figuratively — the world they so much want to bring to life.

Well, their preproduction takes months so even if they decide to make changes, we wont see them soon.

Thalador.4218:

Funny thing is that they keep killing — both literally and figuratively — the world they so much want to bring to life.

I can’t tell you how depressed I am by the open world content in this release. It’s all basically, event pops up in this location on schedule and ends on a schedule. Do kitten or don’t, it doesn’t matter because all actions are meaningless when the world always operates the same regardless of outcome. There may be one or two events that chain onto an additional step depending on success, and they aren’t exactly telling meaningful tales or impacting the world.