Guild Wars 2

Telling a story through open world content isn’t the best way to do it. I know quest are kinda a dirty word at Anet, but it’s needed. Every update doesn’t have to be big group kill kill kill events. Small quests scattered around Tyria that tell a different part of the story would work much better to

A: tell the story from different perspectives and characters, learning motivations and even mundane aspects of what characters are going through or what is changing in the world which ties to the overall story but may not do it in a direct way.

B: Battling zerg fatigue some players have.

We could have had quests delving into exactly how Scarlet formed her alliances or quests to the alliances themselves, who the hell are these aetherblades??

And some quests may be very short, start and end in one update, others progress with updates. Others could be hidden quests not stated in patch notes. Slowly bringing everything together towards the end of a season, giving players that Aha! moment.

Obviously the difficult part is this being a videogame, everything has to somehow tie to the players characters and also be somewhat fun…but I’m not a developer so I’m pretty sure someone can figure it out. Combing the quest like system and tie it into eventual open world content would make the game very balanced for all players and actually tell a multi-layered story while still having fun killing stuff.

I would like the orders to come more in play. In LA there could have been some quests for every order, priory study the miasma, wishper scouting or vigil escort/evacuate missions, just to name a few possibilites.

^this, oh god, this!!

I know AN wanted to get rid of questing as a way of leveling and rushing the player from zone to zone, but I miss actually engaging with npcs.
I recently watched the Extra Credits: Questing episode and was amazed how much you had to engage with npc’s to get to the quests. Waving at them, talking to them, using key phrases, having certain items equipped… We don’t need kill and fetch quests for exp, but we do need quests that show us the npc’s on Tyria actually do something. Quests that are worth completing because they tell a great little story, where fun is intrinsic rather than extrinsic.

Yea, those are good ideas, I had to look up what was miasma when I first entered LA, a studying and learning about it quest would have been cool. I think Anet knows this since they have been implementing small instances to progress the story but they haven’t committed to it as a means to tell the story.

Quests have gotten a bad rap cause they are associated with the repetitive fetch and kill quests, but used sparingly and creatively, they could become as engaging as an actual TV show.

JoeytheHutt.1742:

I would like the orders to come more in play. In LA there could have been some quests for every order, priory study the miasma, wishper scouting or vigil escort/evacuate missions, just to name a few possibilites.

Dailies based on this would have been an interesting approach and much more in keeping with the game than what we have now.

I think they should use all the different platforms, dynamic events, global search, gather and return AND your typical questing as done in other games.

Your typical quest is to go visit an quest giver whether that be an NPC, creature, talking statue, etc. They give you a bit of a story and a quest to do which is yours alone. You complete it and return to the giver to hear the results of your quest and the continuation of a story, which normally means receiving another quest or to seek out someone else.

What I like about these types of quests is you can make then instanced, personal, not time gated, and more in depth than you can with the larger zerg events.