Guild Wars 2

Slyvari Necromancer here wanting to join the Priory when they come up with a stupid plan to go raid a tomb or something.

Meanwhile the Order of Whispers which have been full of useless ideas up till this point, have a surge of brilliance and come up with a great plan, however, to use this great plan I have to sign myself up for life.

AND to make matters worse, IMMEDIATLY afterward,

Trahearne: I’m still not joining your order… but yes. I will lend my aid

Why in all of Tyria can I not say that?!

Because a whole new storyline would have to be writen if you didn’t want to join anybody. Plus, who said the Order of Whispers was useless, they are perfectly fine so Im not too sure what your problem with them is. This really was a bit of a stupid question no offense

I dont actively hate the order of whispers but I’m being forced to go with them.

If I am going to join them, the reason for joining them should be, “I want to join the order of whispers”

Pretty simple right? But atm the reasoning for joining an order is A, I want to join and B, they have a good idea. They should not have paired the events up and instead just plainly asked, hey, what order you want join. Then they can tell me about their plan. I’ve read about this in my Uni degree. You’re giving the player a choice wherein they dont have all the information they need. Its bad game design and its the first I’ve encountered in this game.

I think the crux of the OP’s question is, ‘why is your choice of Order tied to your choice of action in that last mission.’ Presenting us with three missions and then asking us to make the choice would be providing all the information, in that you’d have had the opportunity to do a mission with each Order prior to choosing (if you wanted to play it that way). It’s also entirely plausible for a character to, for example, intend to join the Priory but think the Vigil or the Order of Whispers has the better plan for the specific situation presented in the final mission. The way it’s set up now requires the player to make a metagame/OOC choice rather than an RP-driven/IC choice. That may not be important to everybody, but I completely empathize with the OP.

Considering that the mission is a one-off occurrence and that the order choice is permanent, it’s obvious what your basis for the decision should be. However you are still forced to amalgamate your choice of which order you want to join with the decision about which order is the best tool for the job in that one situation.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that a player should always have the same answer to those two questions.

Maybe an option to change Orders once the Order section of the storyline is complete might work?

Yea I had the exact same dilemma. I (Norn in this case) wanted to join the Order of Whispers.

The Vigil’s plans seemed to not be very good so I didn’t even pick their missions. However, at the end, the Priory’s plan sounded (probably may have played out differently but just from the pre-mission discourse) like they were going to let Vyachaslav walk away with the weapon, the Order’s plan sounded like they were going to let the people who created and operated the weapon walk away with said weapon, where they may make more of them.

Only the Vigil tied up all loose ends. No more engineers, no Vyachaslav, no weapon.

But its alright, I got Forgal (Forgal is awesome ).

You don’t have to choose the Order based on the mission, though. I chose the Whispers based on the fact that I like the Order of Whispers. The missions were of secondary importance. Really, I’d have preferred the Priory’s mission, but I didn’t want the Priory for my Engineer, so I didn’t take it.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

The Durmand Priory likes to raid tombs

ahem

The Durmand Priory enjoys engaging in archaeological expeditions to further the understanding of the past, thank you very much. :P

With my first character, I ended up choosing the plan I thought made the most sense at the time, once it was Whispers, once it was Priory, once it was Vigil. They all had ideas that were workable. By the time I’d done those, I knew I wanted to join the Whispers, but I liked the Priory plan better. Still, I had to go with the Whispers one in order to join the group I liked for that character.

The Pact was formed with the idea that all the groups have useful methods/ideas that work. I didn’t like that the plan was paired with the choice of which group to join either. For me, I knew which group I wanted to join fairly quickly, including subsequent characters. But I don’t think which group you intend to join should determine which plan you go with.

Yeah, I go with the order that has the best looking armor for each particular character so I’ll have that option.

crystal.5930:

I think the crux of the OP’s question is, ‘why is your choice of Order tied to your choice of action in that last mission.’
…
It’s also entirely plausible for a character to, for example, intend to join the Priory but think the Vigil or the Order of Whispers has the better plan for the specific situation

VERY much this.

And I really hope Anet will take heed of this glaring dilemma and allow us to do just that during the next expansion.

It was OK and made even sense to get only order specific quest while making your way up the “ladder”. But now that we are “the Chosen Ones and Zaitanslayers” it would actually make more sense to get the option to help other orders out.

It´ll be quite the undertaking to interweave not 3 but 9 different story paths, but it would help replayability immensely.

I think some story branches do a better job with this than others.

When I did the Asura branch, it was clear that the overall plan was to gain the help/trust of one of the Orders, and the immediate mission goal was secondary. So when I was playing my Asura character, it made sense to pick based on the Order you wanted to join during the final mission rather than focusing on the plans at hand.

The first time I played through with a human (and again as a Norn,) it seemed completely arbitrary that choosing an Order was tied to how I wanted to approach this particular mission.

It’s a good mechanic that you get to try out the different Orders before you pick one, but I also think that why choosing an Order permanently is tied to the last choice is better explained in some storylines than in others.

What really sets me off in this is, when one order presents one thing that needs doing, and another order presents a completely different thing that needs doing… it was like that all though the sylvari storyline but right now, im standing as a human, and have to decide weather i want the vigil to go save a town, or the order of wispers to go gather information! gee seriously who swallowed their pacifier there? what idiot would not tell the order of wispers to go gather information and the vigil to go save the town… its not like they intend to work togeather anyway… and then i can make the choice who of them i want to work with while both of them are freaking working…

Zelanard.5806:

…but right now, im standing as a human, and have to decide weather i want the vigil to go save a town, or the order of wispers to go gather information! gee seriously who swallowed their pacifier there? what idiot would not tell the order of wispers to go gather information and the vigil to go save the town… its not like they intend to work togeather anyway…

Yeah, I found that moment extremely nonsensical, especially since not only did it disregard the possibility of the Orders going separate ways, but it also disregarded the fact that defending the village would generally be a job for the Seraph rather than an external group in the first place.

So to me, the most logical course of action would have been to send in some extra Seraph reinforcements to hold the town regardless of which mission the PC chose to undertake… but it was like the writers temporarily forgot that Kryta isn’t entirely a lawless wasteland.

The choice as presented was that the town would fall if the PC didn’t personally go hold it, but that doesn’t make sense. Since the PC is having to travel all the way from the city, there’s no clear reason that a Seraph unit couldn’t get there in time but the PC could.

I just imagined that my character alerted the Seraphs to the threat before going to gather information.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

As it is now, they each present a plan that gives you a feel for how they approach things, and you choose the plan/Order that makes sense to you. The Durmand Priory likes to raid tombs, explore new areas, etc. So if that doesn’t sound fun to you, they’re not the Order you should choose.

I think we all get the game design decisions behind the personal stories. It’s just that it feels contrived as you play through it. I understand that it’s a game and the design choices are good from a game-players/makers perspective. They’re just not so good from a role-players/immersion perspective. Which is slightly different.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

It’s exactly the opposite. If the game just asked “What Order do you want to join?” with no background, that would asking you to make a blind choice. As it is now, they each present a plan that gives you a feel for how they approach things, and you choose the plan/Order that makes sense to you. The Durmand Priory likes to raid tombs, explore new areas, etc. So if that doesn’t sound fun to you, they’re not the Order you should choose.

I disagree with this. For one we are making a blind choice because we really know nothing about the orders even though our character should have ingame knowledge of these orders even if that knowledge is only heresy. We know that at the end of the day our character is going to be killing Zhaitan so the selection of the plan is relatively unimportant in the larger scheme of things. The only thing which choosing an organization to side with does is decide the NPCs we get to see while we are with this organization. And since the NPC you get saddled with is not presented to you at the time you choose your organization but only after then you can only be thought of as choosing blind because you have no idea who you are going to be spending the next 20-30 levels listening to.

Anybody could come up with any type of plan. The fact that one plan is being presented by one member of an order cannot be thought of as suggesting that every member of that order would only come up with that type of plan or even would be able to come up with that type of plan. Indeed our character who sees the intelligence in a specific course of action could by joining one of the other orders come up and enact the same type of plan that was created by another order which they thought was intelligent. The only thing which really seems to seperate the orders is what they do during times of relative peace since presumeably during times when the population is being mobilized for war the three groups will have to act together. And this is exactly what happens. You go from working towards solving the big problem facing the world before joining an organization to immediately carrying on completely irrelevent activites that have absolutely NOTHING to do with solving this big problem after joining the organization.

For example I joined the Vigil and my character went immediately from a meeting where we needed to get the agreement of the representatives of each of the species to commit troops and resources to bringing down Zhaitan (and the meeting ended in disaster with everyone going storming off and our friend telling us that we will need to resolve the problem that the representatives had with each other to get their support) to being at the hall of the vigil where I was sent to go save some frog things. And these frog things were of no importance to anyone because they had no material resources and no troops to commit to the destruction of Zhaitan. In fact all they did was saddle us with even more needy mouths to feed because their home was destroyed and I have no doubt that I will never see them ever again. Being in the vigil clearly had no more effect on the overarching plot than being in any of the other orders because you are doing nothing of any importance to any when you are in that organization. And that was clearly going to be the result when you do decide to join an order rather than continuing to be a mediator between the organizations. At least when we were mediators we actually got to do things that seemed like they were helping us get closer to figure out how to defeat Zhaitan.

Actually I would suggest that it doesn’t make sense for our character to join any of these orders because their purpose is solving a much bigger problem facing the world and not getting bogged down in the day to day activities of the seperate orders. Since the game already shows the orders coming together to solve this large problem looming on the horizon, it only makes sense that they would continue to work together until this problem is resolved and not randomly break up and go their seperate ways once they start making some headway. And these orders don’t represent a significant portion of the population, they are actually incredibly small organizations. The problem that our character is dealing with affects everyone and requires much more rsources than all three of these small organizations have available together never mind seperately.

Its good to see people got my idea. We want to know what the orders do and then have the choice to pick what order we want to join.

I want to be able to choose what order I’m in. Its that simple
The final question you should be asked, is “What order do you want?”

Why is mission choice such a low priority that its stuck onto my order choice.

I understand the logic behind it. However, that last mission is very often an array of really stupid choices. For example, in the human storyline, there is absolutely no reason given why they cannot protect the queen using both Vigil troops and the mortis verge. That was setting the mission up to fail.* Still, in a Sylvari mission, I went with an Order of Whispers plan and the Vigil said they would have troops standing by in case we failed. Makes sense. Why could no reason be given to exercise multiple plans? It would have been a simple matter of saying:
“The Risen are attacking on multiple fronts to distract the Seraph while sneaking 3 forces into Divinty’s Reach. They are sneaking in here, here and entering the Queens’ chamber. [Name], the order you choose will defend the Queen while the other two will take care of the other locations.” Then, it would have made sense.
This reminded me of getting a DVD and watching “Deleted Scenes” and saying, “Oh, including that 45 second scene makes the protagonist’s action make so much more sense!” I often try to pick out where scenes were deleted and zero in on scenes where characters make huge logic leaps or do something that does not exactly make sense, and if this were a movie I would pick that scene.

I let this pass and not interfere with my enjoyment of the game, but a little more thought could have gone into making that last choice make more sense without changing the mission at all.

*That one was especially vivid for me because the mission bugged and the fighting continued during the cinematic. When the cinematic ended, the first set of guards had nearly all fallen and I was fighting what was clearly a larger group than I would be intended to fight solo.