He raises really good points. no matter how good the new content they put out is be it HoT or Living Story, for new players first impression is what sticks and matters the most. You can’t blame ANet for not trying to work on this, however, I don’t think anyone would say that they have succeeded in any major way.
Personal Story narrative at launch was fragmented for the lack of a better word and the only way to get the full story was to play through it taking advantage of different races and choices (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if all it would have given you is context and detail, but they executed it really badly… well see below). I guess the way story journal bundled stuff up was their attempt at addressing some of this fractured and messy narrative, however, without a total overhaul on the available choices fixing it is impossible.
Example: if you are an Asura, they should have made the late game choices either greatly emphasize the steps where Gorr story takes part to you over the story of some random NPC from human side of the personal story or even lock out some choices based on that and include some sort of “after action” reports for the choices you have no access to or didn’t choose (namely for the very last segment of the story, where these issues are really relevant, which is probably why they tried to reorder them in the first place, although they royally botched that up).
In my opinion what ArenaNet needs is either really stellar gameplay or great narrative, ideally both… even if HoT can deliver on these perhaps, if new players don’t get that far because the early game certainly doesn’t it isn’t really all that great for anyone just now coming into the game. Since there is this huge buffer of uninteresting narrative that can’t be skipped at least not entirely (and honestly, while lot of the core zones have great little tidbits and things in them for the inquisitive to find, I wouldn’t want to level a toon entirely in PvP or WvW let alone open world PvE).
