Guild Wars 2

Hi all,

I curious about the development history of the GW series and was looking for someone to give me some details. I have seen it mentioned that the same writing/creative team on GW Prophecies changed at some time during the expansions, and that is why the direction/flavor changed so much during the releases even to today with GW2 and the LS. So what changed? Who left and who took over? Who is in charge now of the LS/Scarlet and were they even part of the development of GW1 and and any of its expansions?

I ask this because what captured me most about GW1 was the lore. The stories were better than average, but I love the rich history they had developed as a purpose and motivation behind in game missions & quests. I realize that at some pt during the series things changed slightly, but the general formula stayed the same.

What captured my interest and fueled my anticipation about GW2 was again the lore, specifically the dragons and their roles in the world of Tyria. I remember watching the cut scene of a band of heroes taking on the Shatterer and thinking this game would be so epic!

Then I bought the game and played through the personal story. At first I was annoyed and then greatly disappointed. With Scarlet – that disappointment became even greater. Heck! The Wooden Potatoes videos speculating the purpose of the stories are more exciting than the actual release. All his work done on the Thaumanova reactor was intriguing, and then to actually play through the story to find out that Scarlet was behind it with no greater explanation than that was sooooo disappointing.

So what happened? I know I could just stop playing the game, but I feel too invested in the previous series to just simply drop the game without understanding some how the game evolved into this.

Funnily enough back during Prophecies people were complaining about how bad and disconnected that story was as well.

And yes, they have made some changes, which happens to every creative work sooner or later, but people like Bobby Stein is still there.
The main risk with keeping the same people on the same ship forever is that sooner or later they will end up out of “good ideas”.

Without new blood the story WILL become worse over time. With new blood that can of course also be the case, but at least there is a chance that it will become something better, whilst not adding new blood is almost guaranteed to make the story worse at some point.

I would disagree, using examples of many successful authors that have written numerous books. I don’t believe people just run out of good ideas. There may be rough times where one story seems to be pretty poor compared to the author’s other works, but I don’t think we should assume that rut will last forever.

Artistic inspiration is a fickle beast.

lordkrall.7241:

Funnily enough back during Prophecies people were complaining about how bad and disconnected that story was as well.

I agree with this statement. In fact I forgot all about that until you mentioned it. However I don’t think I truly understood how all the separate plots came together until I played through the missions a second time. Therein lies a valid point. Maybe this LS would be more enjoyable once it has concluded and a player can play through it again with no pauses between chapters. I don’t think that would likely happen.

One key point I was referring to about differences in story-telling is the difference of tone. The tone lately for the LS and huge part of the personal story has been light, childish, and weak humor. Granted some of those elements where in GW1, but not to this degree.

lordkrall.7241:

Funnily enough back during Prophecies people were complaining about how bad and disconnected that story was as well.

Have to agree here, gw’s CAMPAIGN story was never a strong point.

ValeN.3129:

lordkrall.7241:

Funnily enough back during Prophecies people were complaining about how bad and disconnected that story was as well.

Have to agree here, gw’s CAMPAIGN story was never a strong point.

The problem is that Anet’s storytelling improved from Prophecies to Factions to Nightfall (I didn’t get EoTN). It was never great, and there were always major mistakes, but it did get better.

What we have now is a huge step backwards. That the Scarlet storyline passed all the way through the Anet chain-of-command and was approved at each step means Anet is incapable of creating and properly vetting storylines.

So not only are they bad at writing stories/characters, they can’t tell when those stories/characters are bad. Needless to say, this is very very bad.

The thing is many people thought Prophecies “got better” when Nightfall and Abaddon was released, due to it tying stuff together.
Why assume it won’t be the same here when we see the ending of Scarlet?

I was always of the mind that some of the loss came, at least in part, due to the loss of traditional quests. I don’t mean to parrot Wooden Potatoes here, but the huge text walls we got prior to setting out did do a good job of at least fleshing out the world or implying deeper inner workings. A good example is some of the quests in Kaineng City Center that imply the incompetency/distance of the ministries.

Whereas… GW2 mostly wears its story on its sleeve and thinks “subtlety” just has too many darn syllables. It’s charming in its own way, though. And GW1 certainly had a number of overtly goofy moments too. That mesmer/warrior duo from Nightfall comes to mind.

That said… anyone who thinks the soul of GW1’s more mature and intense moments are gone, I invite you to talk to the NPCs in the Iron Marches after you bring down the fire shaman. Holy heck the flame legion has crossed some lines that I didn’t think video games were ready to cross yet.

The charr in general retain some of that subtlety and intensity more generally speaking, though.

lordkrall.7241:

The thing is many people thought Prophecies “got better” when Nightfall and Abaddon was released, due to it tying stuff together.
Why assume it won’t be the same here when we see the ending of Scarlet?

It’s not that we have this assumption. It’s what Anet did with time gated updates – their choice actually.
I wouldn’t blame gamers for not keeping track between fractured updates and being forced to use wiki/dulfy/blog to connect disappearing dots.
Not to mention fact, that devs really can decide what are they selling to us (classic story moment with Scarlet [not]being graduate of all 3 asuran colleges. Devs said she was only accepted, ingame NPC named Emissary Vorpp stating opposite – that she graduated with honors.)
Stating that I (personally) think that while NF enriched Prophecies, both campaigns were meant to stand on their own and it worked more or less. I can’t see how LS is enriching PS and I feel that it’s definitely not standing on it’s own. Maybe that wasn’t the plan, but whatever the plan was – it’s not working for me.