Guild Wars 2

I was reflecting about the decision-making process on the stories and how they seem really flawed.
And following this topic discussion some ideas came to my mind:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/story/Choices-don-t-matter-AT-ALL-From-my-perspective
I think ANet should have a different approach towards the decision-making on the next stories.

If people have two options that negate each other over a matter, this means they can’t exist at the same time, so one of them will have to be discarded. Which means only one of them will be “canon” (for that player).

On one hand, this is nice because it opens a ton of different possibilities, and this means that each person has an almost unique canon for the world.
On the other hand, this is really complicated, because if you make it the existence of so many “parallel universes” in game possible, you’ll have to bear in mind all of them when you create more content.

Most companies can’t deal with making one story without having contradictions. Handling all these possibilities will require a titanic effort from the developer team. And the topic I cited above already discusses some of the consequences.

Personally, I think it’s better not to give players these kind of options at all, because they are destructive and create a lot of restrictions that are too complex to deal with.
But, I guess there is a simple and smart solution to that.

Instead of giving options like:
1) Lure the enemy and make a trap;
2) Face it head-front

why not:
1) Group A infiltrate the enemy base
2) Group B face the enemy head-front

No matter what the choice is, both group exists. People just decide what path they want to take (kinda like what happens with the decision of what order you wanna follow).
So, in this example what ends up happening is that both groups eventually meet and kill the enemy.

This way players could still make decisions that matter and experience unique content. At the same time ANet wouldn’t bind their staff, “creating alternate” realities and making it more difficult to create content.
Therefore, player stories would still be unique: they’d meet different NPCs, experience different events and so on. But, at the same time, the stories would all be united under a single official story, all parts of the whole.

Please, think about this.

I think this is a valid idea, but what is wierd is that towards the bottom of the personal story tree where there is a lot more going on, the game is actually smoother. It seems the problems occur later in the story where you become Commander and it’s like your life before thay never happened.

I don’t fully understand the problems, but a possible solution might be this.
In The Elder Scrolls games you have a journal where every time you take on a quest a jounral entry gets added. In programing terms, each journal entry has a code attached to it. NPCs and events and stuff in the game are told to check your journal before they do anything.
For example, your character has not yet joined the mages guild. NPCs know you have no journal entry about the mages guild so they respond by saying “You seem good at magic you should check out the mages guild you’d fit in there.” After this a journal entry appears saying “I have been told to seek out the mages guild, I must go to blah blah to do so.” After this all NPCs can see you have this journal entry so you wont get told the same thing by everyone you meet.

As the player has a record of personal story choices in the Hero Pannel, could a similar system not be used. Where everytime you speak to someone the game checks your record so it goes.. “I see blah blah choice has been made in the past so I shall do this.” or “I can see that blah blah choice is not record so I should do something else.”

While this is quite an extensive amount of work to get everything covered, I think the system would work pretty well