Guild Wars 2

As Alaundria mentioned, one of the Halloween ghosts, Serene, was killed by her horse.

There’s also a GW1 Halloween quest added this year about helping locate the Mad King’s invisible steed, a pony named Gum Drops. What’s noteworthy about that – since the Mad King could potentially have an animal no one else had – is that the Emissary makes clear during that quest that the PC should reasonably know what a pony looks like. (The line of conversation makes sense in context.)

So while there may not be horses now, there would have been at one time, and they would seemingly have been sufficiently prevalent that the average person would know the basics about them.

For what it’s worth, I’m happy to party up for any personal story segments people need an extra level 80 Ranger to help with. I don’t promise success and I’m not an elite player or anything, but I made it through my own story solo and I have decent gear, so I should be able to help make a dent in the tougher stuff. Low level missions are fine with me.

I’m on Crystal Desert server, and will be willing to guest once guesting is enabled. My main character’s name is the same as my account name.

Feel free to whisper me if you need me. I may occasionally be too busy to help, but 90% of the time what I’m doing is interruptible and I can come buddy up.

Well… do you care how the story ends?

I’m not saying that in a sarcastic way. I think that’s actually the best way to evaluate whether to finish or not.

If you’re not interested in the story itself and would rather focus on loot, there are other things you could do with the same investment of time that would be more lucrative.

If you actually are interested in the story, it’s worth doing. To me, the rewards seem pretty on par with the challenge, and it’s fun to see a resolution to the plot.

It just depends what you’re looking for really.

There’s no guarantee the loot table will ever be changed – honestly I think it’s unlikely, because it would be pushing the line of over rewarding in my opinion. The main benefit of doing the story is seeing the story, and the loot is secondary.

I’ve been having this problem too.

GW1 had a system where it would save your progress for a couple of minutes after a disconnect, and if you reconnected within a certain interval, it would return you to where you were. The interval wasn’t very long so it would have been difficult to abuse for personal gain, but it would cover something like this easily.

It would be nice if GW2 could do the same thing, so you’re not losing an hour’s worth of progress when your internet drops for a couple of seconds. GW1 showed it was possible, and it would be good to have that feature back.

Another problem I would see with the suggestion is that by this point in history, most humans probably have some level of mixed ancestry. I doubt it’s all just Ascalonians reproducing with other Ascalonians, Canthans with other Canthans, etc. after families have been living in Kryta for many generations by now.

It makes sense to try to have the sister look something like the player character, but beyond that, going too far into ancestry would make Kryta seem creepily segregated (and rather inbred) if ancestry was never mixed but always just a single choice from the game menu.

It doesn’t have to be one character that defeats Zhaitan, can’t it be all of us?

Exactly!

This isn’t the kind of story where a singular hero is needed or even makes sense. Personally, it’s not that I want the PC to be the chosen one – it’s that I don’t see why there has to be a chosen one at all. The story about us all working together seemed to be just fine.

History could just say, “The Pact defeated Zhaitan.” Because when you play through the story… that’s what you actually see happening. The victory doesn’t need to have a singular hero’s name attached to it, because no one person alone could have done it.

It seems to me like there would actually be less of a continuity issue that way – after all, we can’t all be the canon second in command, even if Trahearne is named the canon hero.

There were times during the personal story that I felt like a GW1 henchman, and Trahearne felt like the PC. I assume that wasn’t intended, and I hope ANet rethinks the PC/NPC balance in future content.

Because nothing is perfect, even if it’s already good.

Although I’m overall loving this game, one thing that is really challenging my immersion is that the PC’s voice responses to things like combat, daily achievement completion, and leveling up don’t suit my character’s personality at all. It takes me out of the game world for a second every time I hear one, and it’s especially disconcerting when I’m surrounded by other players whose characters are also saying the same limited handful of things in exactly the same voice.

I would love to be able to toggle “my” voice on/off outside of cutscenes so that I don’t have to hear it but can still hear the rest of the sounds and music.

It would also be cool eventually to be able to select from a couple of personality traits (braggart, stoic, sarcastic, etc.) that would customize them to your personality. That seems like a lot of work, though, so I’d be content with just an on/off option like there is for many other game elements.

Yeah, I wish there were a few options to change the voice responses based on personality, or better yet, to just turn them off.

The human responses don’t suit my character at all. It works better when I imagine that she’s being sarcastic, but I’d rather have something suited to the character or no voice at all.

I feel sorry for all the ghosts except Adelbern. They were just trying to live their lives or (as soldiers) do their jobs, and their leader condemned them to a torment worse than death that they did nothing to deserve.

Adelbern brought his own fate on himself, as I see it. The others were victims of something they had no control over.

The Searing was wrong. The Foefire was wrong too. All the sentient races in Tyria are capable of evil.

That said, the only thing we can really do for the ghosts now is to lay them to rest. I don’t hate them, though, I feel sorry for them and see it as mercy killing.

I didn’t find the story missions themselves prohibitively challenging (I was a Ranger, though, so I absolutely believe they can be for other classes,) but the issue I had was that the difficulty level seemed to swing wildly back and forth from easy to challenging back to easy etc., rather than gradually increasing in difficulty on a curve.

For example, I managed to solo Estate of Decay, but it took many deaths and a hefty repair bill. I found myself thinking, “If I’m struggling so much with this mission, I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the even harder ones that come after it.” Except… harder missions didn’t come after it. I don’t think I died a single time in a story segment between that mission and the final encounter in the Romke mission, and the Romke issue was mainly from not knowing what to expect and charging in too quickly.

So I think that as well as looking at whether individual missions are too easy or too hard, the developers also need to (when they get time) look at the continuity of progression. Ideally, missions should gradually get more challenging, rather than cycling back and forth between extremes. I think that way players would have a better idea of what to expect from their next mission, and would be able to plan accordingly.

Yep, if you interact with Deborah before the combat portions of those missions start, your character refers to her as “Sis,” so she’s definitely meant to be the same person.

For me, the issue with Trahearne was not that he’s the leader instead of the PC (since the PC would naturally be on the front lines rather than holding a desk job,) but that the fact that he’s the leader is constantly being talked about and treated like a central plot point, and he’s around so much of the time, as if he doesn’t trust you to handle a mission without him or doesn’t have anything to do besides tag along.

A character can hold an important role without being central to the story or being the focus of so much dialog and cutscene time. The Pact leader could (and I think should) have been a lot more peripheral.

No one complains about General Soulkeeper, for example, although she was also your superior if you were a Vigil member like I was – but Soulkeeper mostly just gave you your marching orders and left you to get the job done. She wasn’t constantly tagging along expecting the PC to prop her up emotionally and then taking credit for the PC’s work.

It’s not just about Trahearne being leader. It’s about how his leadership position was implemented in the game.

The storyline works fine when it’s just about loads of people working together, with no one particularly special or chosen. We don’t need a chosen one, PC or NPC. I would rather have the story be about my character as just one among many of the Pact, than have the spotlight firmly fixed on Trahearne with my character off to one side. It’s not about wanting the PC to have more glory, it’s about being the focus of one’s own story – even if that story is about being a footsoldier in the fight.

The door to this POI is unusually sluggish for some reason. I was stumped on this for ages because I thought it didn’t open and was searching for another way around.

If you persist in standing by the door (turning a circle in place often helps for me,) it will offer you the option to enter the instance and you can get the POI.

I can for the most part understand why these are done, but the Beirne one was problematic for me because my character should have had an equally significant emotional attachment to Crusader Deborah.

At least for some of us, Deborah was our sister.

So it was bizarre for me that my character was apparently just standing there watching for several seconds of fighting without making any move to intervene.

I think if this is going to happen (and I can see why it needs to,) the whole thing needs a quicker pace. It needs to be so fast that another person literally couldn’t intervene. I realize watching first Deborah and then Beirne fight with the thing made his death more heroic, but the pacing also increasingly raised the question of why the player character didn’t get off a single shot during the whole fray. The cutscene is significantly longer than most people’s real reaction times, let alone a supposedly hardened battle veteran.

It was probably especially glaring for those of us whose characters had been given a very significant reason we should respond instinctively to Deborah being in jeopardy, and felt a bit sociopathic when we couldn’t.

TL;DR: I get what the writers were going for here, I think the execution may require some rethinking for next time.

I’m so glad this thread exists. Thanks very much from me too, everyone at ANet!

My favourite part so far is the Mad Memoires quests. It gives some interesting (and suitably disturbing) background for the Mad King, and gives us a nice Halloween-themed change from the normal gameplay. I can’t wait to see more in future acts!

I also love how Lion’s Arch looks decorated. It’s fun to run around in my Halloween costume with one of my new spooky minis trailing behind me. The ghost mini is particularly well designed and executed in my opinion.

I’m having a lot of fun with this event. Thanks for the good times, dev team! :-)

For me, that POI wasn’t available immediately after the completion of the mission; I was moved to that area two missions later. It’s just that you have to get past the initial Fort Trinity mission to progress to the missions that follow it.

It may be different for different story paths, but how it worked for me was you’d just need to play a little further. Hope that helps. :-)

I ran into the same bug other people have at the “Defending the Gates” step my first time through, playing solo and not skipping any cutscenes. I was doing the “make someone suffer” story branch. Just thought I’d mention this for testing purposes since it seemed different from what most others were doing when they hit problems. After the first wave, nothing else spawned.

I restarted the client and it worked the next time. The main thing I did differently the second time was run to the camp via the road rather than the woods, but I’m not sure if that made a difference or if it would have worked anyway just from restarting. (The mission before this was bugged for me too, and restarting fixed that one too.)

My second time one of the Risen spawned in a weird place, up the hill and to the right of the gate toward the outskirts of the circle, and seemed stuck there. I was able to kill it and progress anyway, though.