Guild Wars 2

Buckle up, readers, this is likely to be a long one. If you don’t have the patience to scale walls of text, I’ll repeat the essentials of the proposal at the end after I’ve discussed the reasons why I think it’s worth considering.

One of the unfortunate side effects of the MMO medium is that we rarely get to see the true accomplishments of friendly NPCs. So the players can feel like the heroes, the contributions of such NPCs are (as is necessary to keep the game fun) usually limited to a token effort in comparison to the PCs when the PCs are around, so as not to overshadow the PCs – even when said NPCs are, according to the lore, great heroes in their own right that are tougher than most enemies that are classed as champions. On the other hand, because we’re not there, we generally don’t get to see what the characters are doing while the PCs are not around beyond the occasional hint and overheard conversation, and most players would prefer to play the game than watch extended cinematics of what the NPCs get up to when the PCs aren’t around.

As shown in the recent election, this has been leading to an increasing frequency of what I term ‘Kormir syndrome’ among NPCs – where an NPC received disdain or even hatred from the player base because that NPC has received some position or reward that the players feel they have done nothing to earn. As the name suggests, Kormir was the first character in the Guild Wars franchise to suffer from this – since then, Trahearne and (particularly relevant for the election) Ellen Kiel have also come to be subject to this.

While discussing the evidence (or lack therof) of Ellen’s competence in the political debate, the thought struck me that the same accusation levelled against Ellen – of having to rely on PCs to do all her work – could equally be applied to every single NPC with a leadership role. In fact, the picture we see from events in the open world is that, without the PC’s intervention, the civilisations of Tyria would likely collapse within days – not to the looming threat of the dragons or other epic foes, but from the failure of the militaries of Tyria to protect their people from skritt raids, criminals, and other nuisances.

This got me wondering if there were any cases where we could point at an NPC and say “This! This shows that such-and-such a character is heroic in their own right without needing PCs to hold their hand!” And then it struck me – Keiran Thackeray. And then the Bonus Mission Pack missions. Each of these allowed the player to see something the NPC in question achieved without any assistance at all from the PCs – by playing out those events through the eyes of the NPC in question.

So my thought is… could the idea behind the Hearts of the North missions and the BMP missions be extended to the Living Story in Guild Wars 2? And would doing so curtail the number of players that come to be hated by the community as a result of Kormir Syndrome? The Living Story instance structure seems like it might be perfect for this – such content would only need to be undertaken once per account in order to avoid people feeling they’re being repeatedly denied the ability to play their own character, and could even be made to be something that’s completely optional for those who are interested in the full story, without needing to be done for the player to be considered to have finished the LS arc. However, it would give the players an opportunity to see how awesome (or otherwise) a particular NPC can be, without having to worry about that NPC overshadowing the players or about whether the AI will be able to carry out certain tasks. Such missions would also allow for the creation of interesting scenarios that would not work if applied to the game in general – for instance, content could be made assuming that the player(s) have access to a certain skill or feature without discriminating against players whose professions lack that feature (and without breaking the game by introducing a skill that would be particularly unbalanced if introduced into the main structure of the game), since the designers could ensure that the NPC have the required skills.

TL;DR: Guild Wars NPCs have been having a growing problem where their skills and achievements have not been clearly visible to the player base, causing some of them to be held in derision by some groups in the Guild Wars community. Could missions of similar style to the BMP and HotN missions, where the player completes a scenario using the NPC in question, serve to arrest this by demonstrating what the NPC is able to accomplish when the PCs aren’t around?