Guild Wars 2

I know many on this forum laugh about the story and find it juvenile, but I disagree. I think the story is well written and encompassing. I find it much better too now that it doesn’t have all the crummy cutscenes. With text or an active conversation happening in “real-time” such as what they’ve done with Living Story 2 (they also followed this approach in WiK/WoC in GW1) seem to be vastly superior stories and more involving.

However, does the speed still feel slow? I am glad with the amount we have gotten in LS2 compared to LS1 but, again, look back at Guild Wars: Beyond…they crammed so much story into just 3 updates for WoC and we’re halfway through Living Story 2 and except for the main conflict regarding Mordremoth, a lot of plot elements seem to be in the Exposition phase still – such as Master of Peace, Aerin and the Zephyrites as a whole.

Oh, and the marionette? That’s still something that happened.

It just seems they add a lot of stuff, never quite top it off and we have to wait forever for even a remote inkling of a literary climax. It’s like spending over a year reading a book. Personally, this is why I think the story would feel much better if they introduced it less often but introduced in larger portions.

I know the story is replayable and the current solution is to wait it out – but do you think they should change their story introduction in the future? Give your reasons why or why not below.

Well I’ll agree on plot-threads and pacing, although I’m not sure how changing how they introduce there stories can address these things.

I wouldn’t call it “juvenile” but rather, it has a case of “making amateur mistakes periodically.”

The lack of the two-person cinematics does improve its quality, to a degree. The lack of PC talking doesn’t help but doesn’t downright hinder.

Regarding speed and pacing, I disagree. I think it’s going too fast. Or rather, it’s spending too little time on each element, trying to cram so many things in such little time without properly, which is giving it the “checklist” feeling that some people have mentioned – that the entire storyline was based off of a list of things to cover, some of them being cleanup duty for Season 1, and the writers don’t flesh out said list properly before moving on. For example:

• What was the purpose of finding Scarlet’s lair, except to elaborate on her history that was overlooked in Season 1, and to push us on to the ley line hub (which could have been discovered in other means)?
• There was no development of Belinda before she died.
• Each of the race’s side plots except Taimi/Asura got adequate attention to them, with half of charr and all of norn being subjugated to pre-existing open world events (albeit updated slightly).
• Mordremoth’s name and the Mordrem term come out of nowhere in the story.
• We’re never given a real, proper, reason for why we need to have a world summit, when we have the Pact (which is not once brought up in discussing Mordremoth until said world summit), leaving the entire E3 and E4 feeling like the purpose was just to render the Pale Tree unconscious and make sylvari vulnerable to Mordremoth.

Season 2 has been covering a lot of ground, but it isn’t covering it very much. It feels more like the writers are just saying “hey, these things still existokaynowbacktoMordremoth.”

You attribute to this to being “slow” but I attribute it to being too fast. They’re just passing by things without giving them the depth they need. Any slowness that’s caused is due to the continuous breaks.

And comparing GW2 to GW1 is very poor. Especially comparing to Beyond. Beyond was done by a minimalistic team, sure, but it almost never brought in new resources (WiK brought in a grand total of 2 costumes, 1 weapon set, and 1 new enemy model), and there was absolutely no voice acting in it. The Living World has a bunch of new models every update, a vast number of lines are voiced, and sometimes new maps too. Far more new things get made for the Living World than Beyond, so naturally Beyond would be at a faster pacing as it reused old models.

I agree with introducing it in larger portions. Winds of Change was done right, and except for the repetative nature of cleansing out the Afflicted, I don’t recall a single complaint about it (mind you, a lot of the praise that Beyond got was due to the fact that GW players went two years without any substantial content, and it’s pretty clear that Beyond – War in Kryta specifically – was a prototype for the Living World, though there’s a lot of things that GW1 and Beyond had that GW2 and the Living World cannot which made Beyond such a larger success – such as instances, which allowed players to experience the new changes at their own pace, rather than at ArenaNet’s pace), and WoC should be the model that ArenaNet follows rather than WiK. Even Hearts of the North was released in two large pieces, rather than a continuous flow – right away after War in Kryta, John Stumme (he took over after WiK as the lead of GW1’s Live Team) realized that large chunks is better than continuous flows, so why hasn’t GW2’s team picked up on this?

And for that matter, why isn’t John Stumme on the writing team when “his” story for Winds of Change was so well received? (Note: I say “his” story because he was the lead writer; naturally, the entire Live Team wrote the story – the attribution is akin to a movie director getting attribution for a movie’s story and success, so I mean no offense to the others who worked on Winds of Change’s creation).