Guild Wars 2

So, Hearts and Dynamic events are great. It’s great when I come across a DE and get that ‘hey, that wasn’t here before’ feeling. However, I’m finding that they tend to be a little too short. With the exception of meta events, most are over in a couple of minutes, and sometimes you have to look really hard for the story. I’ve heard people comment that the zones have no story or history in them, which is sad. It’s there, but oftentimes you need to have gone over the entire map before you get a full sense of the issues and activities of the NPCs that live there.

This is why I think it would be a good idea to re-introduce some more ‘traditional’ type quests. GW2 has a lot of named characters in the world, some of them have pretty interesting dialogue, but unless you’re really trying to understand the world there’s no reason to talk to them. If some of them gave quests, I think a lot more people would talk to them.

The kind of quests I’m thinking of would have an extended storyline, like talking to a bunch of people in Beetletun (such as investigating where ‘the butterfly lands’. Sorry I can’t remember the names of the characters, but there’s some dialogue where a guy in Beetletun is being a bit stalkerish over ‘his girl’). Another reason for these would be for more cross-zone quests. I’ve noticed that there isn’t anything at all pushing you to move on from a zone. While this is great in some respects, not feeling pressured to move on for one, in others it’s not. If you had a quest of some sort where you were asked to take a letter to someone or check up on some guy’s sister in a different zone they would feel more connected. At the moment they feel a bit self-suffficient, like no one ever travels from one to another.

For a last point, Dynamic events can do a good job of telling the story of the map, but text quests, when done well, are a great way to expand on that story. Characters could gain more depth, connections could be made between different characters, and a bit of folklore or local history could be told more easily. At the moment, coming into the middle of a DE, you miss much of the storyline.

Thoughts?

I like it. I understand why Arenanet took them out in the first place, not having to grind the same quest over and over and blablabla, but it’s not like we’re not doing that with DE’s. I like to do quests, especially if they have fun rewards (banana scythe, GW1 for example, I loved that one). It’s also a benefit if you want to RP a bit. +, and that’s a big + for me, quests can give you more lore to study and explore, which I love to do.

I wouldn’t mind having a semi-traditional questing system implemented either; it would give me something to do other than watching the borderlands map hoping that the POI I need opens up…

I think the problem is that they went from one extreme to another, all ‘walls of text’ to none at all. A mix of the two would be ideal.

The renown hearts are the tradtion quest but with a slight spin. Their intent is to break the long time MMO’er from them.

I see no advantages to this suggestion.

People are having a hard enough time switching to this system without throwing up a road block to move folks barkward

I actually thought the same thing. I do like the renown hearts and dynamic events, but having something that gets me talking to more NPCs and getting engaged in the extended lore would be invaluable to me.
Honestly, the problem with other MMOs isn’t quests — it’s BAD quests. I’m sure ArenaNet is clever enough to introduce something that’s a little more like a guided questline, or a mini personal story episode, without having you go kill 25 boars for their tusks.

Interestingly, I have noticed a couple instances where something vaguely quest-like happened to me. There was a little girl in a village in the southern edge of Kessex Hills, who mentioned really wanting to have some flower/berry (I forget what, exactly) that grew on an island just north of there. I remembered I had actually seen such a thing when I was there, but didn’t think to carry it with me. So, I went back to the island and found it again, picked it, and brought it all the way back with me. The little girl actually acknowledged my gift happily, and I was pretty impressed that I had stumbled upon this rather minor character, even if there was no tangible reward for it.

Similarly, there’s a lab in Metrica Province that you can’t enter unless you have the key. Apparently, the key drops from mobs randomly (I found it once, but I stupidly destroyed it without knowing what it was for).

So, it was neat to know what these little secrets were out there — but without any kinds of cues as to where they are and how many of them there might be, nor if there are any rewards to them, it’s kind of discouraging.

I’d rather they just add more dynamic events – To the existing zones.

Make the experience in the current world richer, so that it has more depth to it like the real world does.

Krosslite.1950:

The renown hearts are the tradtion quest but with a slight spin. Their intent is to break the long time MMO’er from them.

I see no advantages to this suggestion.

People are having a hard enough time switching to this system without throwing up a road block to move folks barkward

I know that the hearts are basically reskinned quests with multiple ways to complete it, so you don’t feel locked in to doing one thing. The thing is, these are very local. They cover a pretty small area, only giving information about that one part of the map. So we could say that they cover local goings-on. DEs, on the other hand, tell the story of a larger swath of the zone, often the meta events tell the story of the entire zone. Personal story then covers the story of the world itself (one-time events, like the lost shores, does the same thing, but you get what I mean).

See, the thing we’re missing here is connection between the zones on a smaller level than the personal story. How do the charr who live in Diessa Plateau interact with the norn in the Wayfarer Foothills? Do they have any friends over there? The “traditional quests” would not be “go kill/gather x of this”, since the hearts cover things like that. The only purpose these quests would serve would be to tell short stories or the goings on of the world. One quest could hop between a few maps, connecting people that live in different spots.

Not to mention, the reknown quests stop when you get to Orr. Having some more ‘traditional’ quests that make you traverse the world would give players, of all levels, more to do without having to spend their ‘endgame’ in WvW all of the time.