I have to disagree with you, on most points. What you’re doing is akin to opening a book, reading the prelude, and tossing down saying “There’s no story here!”
In regards to this and the other points you’ve made while comparing Guild Wars 2 to Game of Thrones, it is all completely irrelevant because you are comparing storytelling in a book and storytelling in a video game. Any writer will tell you the two are inarguably incomparable. First and foremost because we can actually explore the world of Guild Wars 2. Furthermore, it is an RPG, a game where we can initiate contact with NPCs and choose what we say to them or what we ask them. The story in almost all cases is pursued, not told. Yes, you could argue ‘reading’ is a means of pursuing, but I mean purely in the sense that a video game is interactive, on a different level than turning pages.
In two of those examples, the threat could have been averted early on if people had just used some common sense and worked together. But they didn’t. They had other things going on. Things which, to them, seemed more important at the time.
That is a good example of how a book is wholly different from a video game. Most events in A Song of Ice and Fire cannot be prevented via common sense alone, the characters are on set paths that don’t always intertwine, and no matter how much you’d want Guy A to look behind him and spot Guy B sneaking up on him, it won’t happen. In a video game, the only instance in which that can happen is a cutscene. If Guild Wars 2 were a book, the heroes might be otherwise occupied in Lion’s Arch when they hear of refugees; you also provided your own examples, all of which were in book format. It is a video game, however, and I can teleport all the way to the refugee camps and talk to them myself. In which case, they spout the as-old-as-launch phrases like “You should visit more often”. That’s comical.
You’ve said that there isn’t any coherence or story so far. When it began, there was just a trickle of refugees coming through. We weren’t told why, other than vague hints about an invasion. Now, we get to see the face of the invasion, the Flame Legion and the Dredge, but we haven’t been told why yet. So, the ‘who’ has been answered, but not the why. A coherent chain so far. There are hints of what’s to come, but they’re implied, not explained. The next link in that chain will likely either be a full invasion into charr and norn territory, or will actually allow us to seek and and discover what’s going on.
You are right on this one, and it’s more difficult to argue on this front. Yes, we started out just with refugees, and now we know it’s the Flame Legion and the dredge wrecking havoc. However, coherence is lost because there is nothing connecting the dots. Compare this to the rebuilding of the fountain of Lion’s Arch. It was gradual. February update introduced the norn structure that you can ask no one about, and it appeared overnight. The dredge and the Flame Legion attack settlements mindlessly. A good writer would build up by, say, (and this is a quick, purposefully cliché example) having you find notes on the corpses, or better yet have only the dredge attack, but have them drop Flame Legion related gear.
In a way, ArenaNet is building up, I sadly cannot argue the truth of that statement. However, it’s the how that is bothering me. Like I’ve mentioned in the original post, it feels more like a series of ‘shots’. It feels like a collection of photographs rather than a seamless progress of the plot.
