Guild Wars 2

We need to remove Personal Story from Guild Wars 2.

This is a really bold and really unlikely suggestion, but I’m going to try to keep this brief.

Personal Story in GW2 was made as a mechanism to introduce story into the game, not unlike most MMO’s. The personal story was a pretty good idea (although mildly lacking in execution – we won’t discuss that here), but I feel that Personal Story would be more welcome in a game that abided by the expansion model.

Which GW2 clearly does not.

The GW2 meta at the moment is Living World – a concept where all of Tyria is subject to change. Lion’s Arch, a prosperous hodge-podge of services and attractions is bowled down by Scarlet’s army. That’s great! That’s new! That would be completely unexpected in a game that isn’t Guild Wars 2! But while Lion’s Arch lies in ruins from Scarlet’s army, the Vigil continue to carry out diplomatic relations with the people of Ebonhawke through Personal Story. This seems a little unlikely.

Scarlet has been defeated, and will disappear into history. For most, Zhaitan has been destroyed… but the undead are still littering Orr and the Tarnished Coast?

Personal Story needs to be removed to allow Tyria to move on. Personal Story was a great idea to get the ball rolling for GW2, but now that Tyria has another medium of storytelling that potentially contradicts its first, I think it’s time to move on.

I apologize if this concept as already been discussed, but I felt the need to voice it in case it hasn’t.

I guess I’ll start the discussion with two questions. First is what do you expect from a new player, who has seen videos about a hunt for a dragon in a lost city, a sense of personal endearment (to whichever extent is your opinion), and the background on how your character comes into play in the world, to find out that this is no longer existent when it was explicitly described as being a core focus of the game. For example my Blood Legion charr who made it his goal to live up to his honorable father. Or a human who’s looking for what happened to their parents (which actually ties in lore from GW1 if i’m not mistaken on this choice). Without even the first few levels of personal story as an introduction, my character is just a character. Not a Blood Legion Charr, not a hero of the norn, not a genius Asura who foiled Inquest. It’s a slot.
My second question is how would you see this placed (removed) into the game. The removal of a complete dungeon, the removal of the pact (they were only created in the personal story), the removal of Orr, etc. The personal story itself as fun or non fun as it may be is your opinion but you’d be surprised how much of the game exists outside of your sole character from that storyline alone.

Wait a moment………………
we need more personal story and interesting stuff stuff and less million stupid kids zerker raids !!!!! Period

It is a fact though, that with more time passing between the beginning of the Personal Story and the current Living Story, the less sense it will make. It is already a head-scratcher to defend the beach of Lions Arch with the Vigil from Zhaitans attack while LA itself is demolished by Scarlet. No matter the actual LS implementation there will always be a chronological confusion that pushes players out of their immersive experience of the PS.

People are not idiots, they know full well what is part of the history (PS) and whats part of the Living Story, even if they are new to the game. But that knowledge is practicly the seeing of the strings of the puppets. Breaks immersion too much. Consider this with the growing quality gap between PS and LS, and soon the PS will be just an underwhelming chore to go through, especially at Claw Island and after.

Something will need to be done to solve the PS/LS issue. I wouldnt advise the complete obliteration of PS. The early levels are actually the best, up to Claw Island and Zhaitans attack on LA. Its a good introduction to the world as well as your character. Maybe an overall update/overhaul to PS that would be written specificly to be compatible with LS? I dont know.

The destruction of LA was part of the living story and the PS is another thing. You can’t prettend that every time things like this happens, big events, that every single possible combination of personal story for every profession change according to it, because it’s impossible, like it’s insane.

Like yeah, it’s much easier to just delete the PS than looking for a solution, a non-insane solution.

I’m lvl 56 and my PS is still from lvl 22, me and i am sure many other players that comes from games like TERA and WoW where you don’t have this kind of things, it’s just no amazing or important or anything. Like i’m not used to have a story, i’ve only seen videos of lion’s arch of what happend and stuff, but if the PS and LS don’t match, i don’t care. This looks like a much bigger deal of what it should be.

I know there are people that Role Play, and care a lot about stories and make stories themselves about their own characters. But there are other people that just don’t, like if i do the PS is just to get rid of it, i do read what happens and stuff, but it’s not something really important to me.

I was actually thinking about this the other day as I was playing through with an alt and experiencing the LA portions of the PS following the destruction. In part, I think the OP is right, but only to a certain point.

The personal story, up to about the point where you join one of factions, is pretty personal. Everything following that gets heavy into Zhaitan, the pact, and Orr. If Arenanet had launched this game with the tools and mind set they have today, much of that would have been living story content instead of stationary personal story.

The amount of work it would take aside, I think the personal story should stop around the point you join the Priory/Vigil/Order and treat everything after that as living story. Obviously, some restructuring would have to be done, and the work is pretty substantial, but I assume we’re just spit-balling here.

How about no?

Yeah, not really seeing the pros outweighing the cons in terms of removing Personal Story.

@MrTiggs

I don’t think you can treat personal story as living story in any point. It’s ethier personal or not.

Personally i see the PS as an exp boost more than any other thing, like if it didn’t have a reward i wouldn’t even do it. I don’t see it entertaining, i mean it’s how i am. I know people that like to Role Play, making themselves a story and actually behaveing according to it to another players, i would love to be a person that can do that, but i don’t think i can.

So yeah, appart from what i think of the personal story, i think there’s people that do care and like it, and removing it would be a terrible idea.

How about we get rid of the LS and focus on personal storys ?
I mean i play a game to be the hero, i don’t wanna be unimportant to the world like in real live ?

has someone ever thought about that ?

Actually this made GW1 so entertaining. Gallrath is still being busy to repair his armor
i totally wrecked, Rurik couldn’t be more dead and I did it….. i call that living story
even without having one

I see both sides. And, I offer a solution that isn’t perfect, but nothing is, right? I love story and lore, I think most of us do, so I we should keep the personal story, but in a different way. What if the personal story was put into a journal and considered to be background story for your character? So, when you start the game as a new player, your story is the living story, but if you want more depth, then you may enter all of the personal story instances with the preface that this is the past and not the present…in other words, the personal story would be treated like flashbacks.

This solves the conflict of Orr. Now, we can modernize and show what Orr should really be after the destruction of Zhaitan for all current players and living story events without resorting to phasing. And, if a player wants the backdrop of how their character contributed to the end of Zhaitan, then they can play their personal story.

As for story, I would like to see Arenanet add a morality component similar to that of SW:TOR. I personally would also love to see more of a darker fantasy that is more in the vein of The Witcher or LOTR. I think the future of story telling in GW2 should be more cinematic, like SW:TOR as well.

I am no fan of Scarlet as a villain…her voice acting and characterization were pathetically atrocious. It felt like a little kid’s cheesy cartoon. I hope season two of the living story is much darker, with better voice acting, and more cinematic movies.

The living story could also incorporate choice within the events by using the same technology players use to choose which dungeon path to use. After the event resets, players can do it again and vote for different outcomes that would eventually take everybody to the same climatic ending with morality infused choices along the way to add variety and depth.

I feel we need more PS. I feel some of the PS should be tweaked. So nothing really takes place in LA. Then I feel the PS would flow nicely out side of the LW. What I personally feel is that the PS needs to continue. LW is fine and all. But once it’s gone it’s gone. The PS is constant and playable at your own pace. This is how a story in a games should be. Guild wars 1 had this spot on.

It’s Living Story that needs to be removed. Not Personal Story.
Almost 2 years in, we really need more personal story.

If you remove personal story, new players wouldn’t have any story at all.

Personal story is entirely optional. It’s just another way to get some experience. No one is forcing anyone to do personal story.

The first half of the personal story is awesome, and the second half doesn’t suck as much as the living world.

So, no.

I loved my personal stories so far. Yes, they are completely optional. You don’t like them, don’t do them. No one has a gun to your head.

Make the personal story 100% instanced so that the Living World is free to do anything it likes to the open world without having to worry about compatibility with the PS.

Another solution, which I have suggested before as a way to solve the Shrödinger’s Dragon issue, would be to pack up the current Personal Story, so that new characters wouldn’t start it to begin with (characters who already started their personal story could continue theirs through) but instead would start from Personal Story Season 2. New characters would start from a intro chapter like now, and characters with completed PS season 1 (as in, the current personal story) would start at a later point, retaining their status as the Commander of the Pact. With progression like this, both Living World and Personal Story would fit nicely into the same time frame.

That’d be a whole lot of work just to throw existing story out the window. I don’t mind them doing a temporal split… but it did work more easily in GW1 with much of the game in 4-8 player instances.

For the next season they could just throw a personal story component into it, which, like the release story, you could play through at a later date even if you missed some of the content that went along with it.

It’d be like an opportunity to replay all the instances from LS season 1, but with a bit more to work with instead of having to chuck a couple in the fractals and leave the rest behind.

Lol, I agree it was a silly move for ANet to create a storyline for the Personal Story that didn’t allow ample wiggle-room from creating a time paradox, but I think it’s a small price to pay for having a decent story to help you feel a little more engaged with the world of Tyria. Open-ended starter worlds work, I guess, but most of the time, you find yourself wandering around with no agenda, just completing one quest, then the next.

I guess it doesn’t bother me that much, knowing that the timelines have somehow diverged. I actually treat the evolving story of the LS as my focal story, while viewing the PS as a sort of flavour backstory for my characters. Which is also why I really want the LS to work.

Besides, there would be a riot outside the ANet office if players didn’t get the same stories as each other ("hey, I paid 70 bucks for this game, now give me the PS all my friends have been talking about!)

Personal story was just so not the right way to do the “campaign” of the game, as to me it never felt really connected to the world, and it didn’t feel personal, so it lost on both fronts.

Living story achieved one thing that PS didn’t in that the world felt like it was changing and evolving. But on the flip side, the story/lore was so incredibly shallow that I never fully felt fulfilled on that front. LS gave us a cutscene and an instance and then was just massive zerging events every single time.

My thought is this. LS served as a transition between PS and whatever is upcoming with the Jungle dragon. I’d be really disappointed to see that story follow the LS path as opposed to a “campaign” that was deeper, immersive, replayable. I really wouldn’t mind seeing a return of missions/quests format from GW1 in that regard. I thought it did a much better job for the story portion of the game. More so than a cutscene and an isntance with massive zerging events and PS which was more or less soloable and kinda disconnected from the world and not at all as deep as GW1 story format.

@Strama: Not sure why you’d believe that the LS of today is going to be the same as the LS of tomorrow? Maybe ANet learned something (albeit very slowly) about storytelling from this first season? Devs did take notice of that ‘15 Lessons from Months of Scarlet’ post on another thread.

Heraldusluminare.2946:

@Strama: Not sure why you’d believe that the LS of today is going to be the same as the LS of tomorrow? Maybe ANet learned something (albeit very slowly) about storytelling from this first season? Devs did take notice of that ‘15 Lessons from Months of Scarlet’ post on another thread.

I’ll have to find that.

I am not saying that it will be the same. I am simply saying I hope it doesn’t stay the same.

I actually don’t want to remove the personal story but the devs should put a disclaimer before every PS mission it should pop up a window saying. ‘’This is a historical event, anything outside the instance may have been altered due to the living story’‘. And then you can check in a little box ’’Don’t show this again’’.

Then every PS mission will be an instance only available through PS and on the borders of the instance we can have fog instead of, let’s say the rest of Lion’s Arch or Orr and then the usual red lines in minimap. This would make each instance pretty small in comparison to what it is now(in giga-megabytes). It would require some boring space on harddrive with downloads, but it would be a necessary investment in my opinion.

I don’t think we need to get rid of the PS. By my understanding, PS is more of a leveling thing anyway and LS more of the endgame thing.

I think we need the PS, if for no other reason than some people actually want to complete it for the sense of accomplishment. It is also the only linear story that leads you through most of the races’ respective zones, unlike hearts and DE’s which are pretty location dependent.

I do think, however, that in light of the destruction of LA, that those parts of the PS need to be redone to allow for it. I could see meeting up with Tybalt in DR or Hoelbrak, for instance, instead of LA.

i’d like to see them hack off the second half of the PS and replace it with a version that doesn’t butt heads with world changes. The whole part where Orr is cleansed in your PS but doesn’t change when you return to the zone is lame enough without even factoring in the LS.

Essentially, we can keep the PS in some form, but design it so i doesn’t have awkward paradoxes with the LS (and itself?!).

Heraldusluminare.2946:

@Strama: Not sure why you’d believe that the LS of today is going to be the same as the LS of tomorrow? Maybe ANet learned something (albeit very slowly) about storytelling from this first season? Devs did take notice of that ‘15 Lessons from Months of Scarlet’ post on another thread.

Because one after one year of LS, there were pretty much zero improvements in storytelling. Thus, barring news of personnel changes, there’s no reason to believe there suddenly would be changes now.

lakdav.3694:

It is a fact though, that with more time passing between the beginning of the Personal Story and the current Living Story, the less sense it will make. It is already a head-scratcher to defend the beach of Lions Arch with the Vigil from Zhaitans attack while LA itself is demolished by Scarlet. No matter the actual LS implementation there will always be a chronological confusion that pushes players out of their immersive experience of the PS.

The LS takes place 1 year after Zhaitan’s personal story not all the personal stories that will be added in the future.

Silvercyclone.1462:

lakdav.3694:

It is a fact though, that with more time passing between the beginning of the Personal Story and the current Living Story, the less sense it will make. It is already a head-scratcher to defend the beach of Lions Arch with the Vigil from Zhaitans attack while LA itself is demolished by Scarlet. No matter the actual LS implementation there will always be a chronological confusion that pushes players out of their immersive experience of the PS.

The LS takes place 1 year after Zhaitan’s personal story not all the personal stories that will be added in the future.

I am well aware. However, the Personal Story missions always use the current version of whatever map they are played on. Thus you can have the Destiny’s Edge meeting in the Wintersday season, and the city would be covered in snow. Or you can defend LA from the risen after the fall of Claw Island, while LA is a shambling ruin with signs of Scarlets assault all over the area.

The matter is not that its confusing, a brain-dead monkey can see whats going on, that it shouldnt be happening at the same time. But visually it does. While you know it should not. Hence the break of (whatever shred of) immersion in either the PS mission or LW or both.

The problem is not the personal story itself. That’s fine. The biggest problem are all those little pointers towards events in our personal stories. Such as Orr, where the NPC’s still act as if Zhaitan hasn’t been defeated.

My suggestion would be to make the Personal Story some kind of “remember how it was?” kind of thing. Where you go to a location where some important thing happened during your explorations of the world. The maps itself could change, the NPC’s could move on and the story of the world can then really grow.

However, the Personal Story missions always use the current version of whatever map they are played on.

Yes, and that’s, in my opinion, a big part of the problem. Some maps did change and move on in time. The story however, didn’t…

More permanent content, not less.

The Personal Story is better than the Living Story because I can start playing today and experience it all. The players in China who will be starting their journey into GW2 soon will know all about the three Orders, the Pact and the defeat of Zhaitan. To them, Scarlet is history. That will be the same for anyone who picks up Guild Wars 2 in the future.

The Living World is challenged when it comes to changing events because it could break the Personal Story but in most cases I think people overstate the limitations.

• Characters from the Personal Story can die. If the Personal Story is understood to be past events, players can play through it with the knowledge that the open world and the Living Story take place after the final step.

• Personal Story instances should use historical maps. I’m guessing it’s a technical limitation, but the destruction of Lion’s Arch conflicts with instances that take place there. If the instances use older versions of the maps, this wouldn’t be a problem. Anything instanced should be fine if they can use historical maps.

The only issue with the Personal Story as I see it is parts of the world that really need to change dramatically to move forward. Aside from the destruction of Lion’s Arch (which was unnecessary imo – I don’t think the story earned that conclusion) which is likely to be rebuilt, the only area in the game I see this being a problem for is Orr. The Personal Story doesn’t prevent this map from changing but it does kind of limit what can be done (because the open world events and locations are such an important part of Personal Story). I think Orr does need to remain a constant battle between the undead and the Pact but I think it would be OK to see some areas where fortifications become more stable, maybe even some of the corruption is cleansed and life begins to return to parts of Orr. We didn’t explore all of Orr, so if they wanted to show elements of the cleansing of Orr they could open up parts of Orr that are currently unexplored and pretend as though they have been cleansed. Just write something about how the fight against the undead continues in other parts of Orr and cleansing the corruption is taking longer there (which is believable because Tequatl got stronger, so Zhaitan’s defeat doesn’t mean the threat is over). They could even argue that the way in which Zhaitan was defeated resulted in an uncontrolled release of his power resulting in Orr becoming much harder to cleanse, this lesson could be applied to future Elder Dragons and a different approach to those stories.

Almost every map is stuck in time (including changes from the Living Story), that’s not a problem specific to personal story, it’s a problem when it comes to trying to make world changing events but not having the resources or thoroughness to change the whole world in response. So much of the zones around Lion’s Arch refer to it as a trading hub and several hearts, NPC dialogues and events are built on the premise that the roads to Lion’s Arch are full of traders and travellers on their way to Lion’s Arch. Currently this stuff doesn’t make sense.

Finally I would argue that the Living Story doesn’t even come close to replacing the Personal Story. It’s filler content. If I believed the Living Story of last year was the future of story telling in GW2 I would probably quit right now.

I kind of agree with this, but at the same time, the PS is pretty much optional. You are not story-gated from going to the other zones and doing the renown hearts and whatnot. I got one character up to the point where I could join the Whispers and then pretty much stopped doing the story. I’ll proby finish them up sometime later.

The PS from the human side would have been SO much better if they hadn’t caved under the “no canthan district” whining from NC Soft and we got the canthan/elonian/tyrian storylines instead of the very blah and uninteresting commoner/noble/street rat stories.

And that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it. :P

I represent a real minority in GW2.
Our little community is not doing any raids or grinding or any outcome related action.
We don’t farm gold or farm for materials for legendarys.
We don’t do anything repeating to reach a specific goal.

We simply logg in to have some fun and enjoying adventures.
Of course that leaves us little to do since all of us play since moving over from GW1 to GW2 when it came out. Absolutely everything is repeating and loot related.

A PS is something to enjoy and has nothing to do with leveling.
There are still people who want to enjoy a game instead turning it into a 2nd job.
We really miss the little excitement where out little character is experience a wonderful story in a wonderful detailed landscape.
After you finish your personal story there is very little to enjoy for us.
Even dungeons don’t have anything to do with the lore or fantasy.
You run through, collect your gold and thats it. it could even be without the landscaping details and nobody would notice.

just bring back the creativity and some meaning to the game please. if necessary separate the PvE skills from PvP like in GW1

More personal story and no living story is my vote. Personal story may have been a bit uneven in quality, but it is actual story paired with actual content. Living story has been light on story and content, being little more than a psychological manipulation of the player base into adventure by checklist, run this treadmill, jump these hoops, get this limited time reward mode of game play.

GW2 isn’t a browser game, nor a smartphone/tablet game. Why are we force-fed content not appropriate for a vast game with mega-tons of content and massive world space?

I’d actually love it if Living Story would become quality extensions to a new branch of Personal Story, in support of new, permanent world content and changes each month.

Despite it’s flaws, Personal Story is a much better delivery of quality story and content than Living Story has been. LS only survives due to the rewards structure. Very little of it has been stuff players would have just done for fun. If personal Story had provided better rewards, it would have been a much more fully utilized batch of content by the player base.

The story about Zhaitan (personal story) is permanent. Zhaitan has it’s own permanent zones and dungeon dedicated to him. I expect nothing less for the other dragons.

It would be really stupid if in 2 years, new players can still defeat Zhaitan. But not Mordremoth and [insert elder dragon here] because they have been defeated already.

NO, I love Personal story and would rather have Living Story Remove so they work on it than the other way around. PLAYERS ARE THE STORY, take that away and the game loses a big piece of the essence of it, well… Living story mostly kill it… but its still there.

So, NO.

What if Personal Story was reworked so that characters would evolve their characters’ backgrounds, but they wouldn’t go into the pre-Zhaitan Pact story since it conflicts with the current world.

For example, someone’s human male commoner will be able to go through the process of finding his lost sister and joining the Vigil, but since the Pact story happened in the past, they wont go through anything like that.

Maybe Anet would have to redo some of the individual stories since a lot of them coincide with Zhaitan and the Risen, but I think it would be fun to be able to evolve your own characters separately from the overall story of the world.

This way Anet can go ahead and evolve the world without awkward conflicts with pre-Zhaitan Orr or elsewhere. Plus we get to actually evolve the various backgrounds of our characters (:

What do y’all think about this idea?