The Scrying Pool: Shards of Lore
This week's article of The Scrying Pool looks at how story is delivered in Guild Wars 2.
In each article of The Scrying Pool, I look at what is and what could be. After taking a look at what is present in Guild Wars 2 now, whether that be lore or game mechanics, I then ask What If? What if this happened in the lore or this feature was added in a future patch. Today’s article is about lore. It is not any specific lore in the Guild Wars universe however, but a couple of the systems delivering that lore to the players: the Personal Story and Dynamic Events.
I recently finished reading Ruins by Orson Scott Card. A common theme throughout this series of books is the idea that you never know enough, in terms of knowing what to do and or just not realizing what you don’t know. When someone says they know everything on a topic, more often than not it is just an assumption based on not knowing that there is something else for them to learn.
It then occurred to me that this is exactly the same in Guild Wars 2. Prior to launch the developers at ArenaNet touted that they were creating a living, breathing world. Like most people I took this to mean a world that changed through things like the dynamic events and NPCs around town and the world that have conversations almost meaningless to the game play but add depth to the world. Now, however, I believe that the living world also exists throughout the lore and story of the game by means of its delivery.
The Guild Wars 2 website has a page solely about the Personal Story. At the top of the page is this short paragraph:
“Guild Wars 2 is YOUR story. Your choices determine how your personal story evolves; with thousands of possible variations, no two players will have the exact same experience.”
At first this seems amazing; the ability to personalize your character’s adventure with thousands of possible variations. But then there is the next part: no two players will have the exact same experience.
It is here that the Personal Story fails as the main story of the game. Not only are players not getting the same experience, they are not getting the same story either.
Since launch there has been a lot of talk with how the personal story ended with the story mode of the Arah dungeon. Specifically, a lot of talk has been about how players kill Zhaitan: it is long and boring, that the players really didn’t kill the dragon and “That came out of nowhere!” in terms of things like the laser that commenters say has no history or anchor in the rest of the game and is thrown in at the end to kill the dragon.
The laser is a prime example of how the Personal Story is failing. Players who say that the giant laser came out of nowhere could be completely correct based on the storyline choices that they made. Due to the fracturing of the story between all of these story decisions many players probably never heard of anything related to that giant laser at the end of the Arah story mode.
Asuran characters that join the Order of Whispers, however, get some nice backstory on the laser. During the Orders arc, where players ultimately choose between one of the three orders to join, Asuran characters meet, help and protect an Asura who has a theory that the dragons consume magic and that this could be their downfall. During the Order of Whispers storyline that any race can follow, characters can choose to help an Asura test a weapon that absorbs magic, converts it into something the dragons can’t consume, and then fires it back at the dragon minions with devastating results.
This failing to tell the story to every character is compounded by a story ending that is set up to be the culmination of the choices we made. How are we supposed to be excited with the fruits of our labor when we were not part of large chunks of the labor bearing fruit?
Another example of the Personal Storyline splitting the story apart is the Ministers story. Human characters that are born of nobility, regret not finding their sister and join the Order of Whispers get a nice story of corruption in the Ministry of Kryta. This story starts with corruption and traitors to the crown and leads all the way through the level 40 dungeon, Caudecus’s Manor.