Having played through numerous “sides” of the Personal Story at this point, I just want to say that I think it’s better than it’s typically given credit for. I don’t even mind Trahearne (I don’t feel the need to be the one supreme hero in a game). I think they made a mistake in doing an about-face with the format of LW Season 1 instead of iterating and building on the PS to expand the story, and I’m happy with what we ended up with for Season 2. I hope they can utilize phasing or something to re-implement most of Season 1 soon.
That said, there are a few a few minor changes I think would benefit the PS a lot in the game that shouldn’t result in too much work and it would unite the PS an LW into one cohesive concept going forward that can be built upon. I think this is important.
- Remove the weird dialogue cutscenes with backsplashes. This is actually immersion-breaking and causes an unnatural conversation flow. Dialogue sequences involving more than two characters are typically more interesting anyway.
- Replace some the generic unnamed NPCs with minor named NPCs, some of whom would appear in numerous stories and/or be found in relevant locations in the non-instanced world. Give them snippets of personality to establish a sense of story cohesion and continuity.
- Add an NPC/lore reference to the game that will talk about the NPCs you interact with in the story and let you know what they’re up to at the point of the story you are at. The individual story instances are too short and spaced out – you don’t spend enough time with most NPCs for them to be very memorable. This would also be used as helpful reference for other lore, like information on the orders and their ranks and hierarchies.
- Make better use of the home instances to talk to comrades, etc. Possibly even allow for minor customization for some of the more prominent NPCs.
- Add the ability to replay the Personal Story.
- Obviously, Season 1 needs to be rereleased in the PS format. Just turn some of the events that were open world into instances, and/or utilize phasing (this should especially be done for Lion’s Arch and the Kessex Hills).