From what I have seen so far Guild Wars 2 offers excellent RPG style character building. Character creation includes a few key choices about the characters background, allegiance and outlook. It’s an interesting take on the standard MMORPG style of rules based number crunching, where actual backstory plays little if any role.
Choosing my Mesmer’s place in asuran society
These choices are not superficial as I am now finding out. I’ve created an asuran mesmer, a charr necromancer and now a sylvari elementalist. In each case the choices I have made have a direct impact on the personal stories in a dramatic fashion. I’m playing both the asuran and the charr as part of a static – so I get to see on my partner’s computer what his choices for his asuran and charr lead to story-wise. Some NPCs are the same, some locations are the same but generally the stories are very varied (at least up to level 13 for my highest character).
Each character has had to make a real choice which feels like it has impact on character’s journey in the game. The choices mean so much more to me because they relate to the original character creation decisions I took. Eventually I may unlock new character slots and play through again to see different paths. The stories certainly capture well the different races in the game and their perspectives on the world – it’s such an improvement on Guild Wars 1 not to be trapped in human-only mode.
Note: I always prefer to avoid spoilers in my blog, so I’m leaving out details of plotlines, actual choices and so no screenshots either.
Beyond the excellent storytelling, I also continue to be amazed by the stunning beauty of this world reborn. The imagination and layers of detail in the various starter zones is simply breathtaking.
Asuran architecture at its crazy finest!
Loving the charr home city!
A thing that bothers me a little with the choices though, is that I have no real way of knowing what they’ll do and how they affect my story later. for example in the betas, I seem to have made a different choice somewhere with my Norn Elem’s character creation; this resulted in a storyline on the centaurs and ending up in a sylvari forest at some point. I really liked the storyline and looked forward to return to it after launch.
Only…I didn’t. I don’t know if I chose a different sigil animal this time or where I iterated, but I am now in a completely different storyline about the Dredge, with lots of digging up weapons in mountain caves. so I still wonder – where did I change my ‘settings’??
There’s also the frequent NPC choices during the quests: who do I talk to, which do I choose to accompany me? they give a little info on their background, but essentially it’s a blind bet. it also seems to affect loot and as I frequently got useless items during my questline, I kept wondering if I should’ve chosen a different NPC to team up with. I guess much of that can’t really be helped, but yeah – it’s not just important to get choices with real consequences, but have a way to anticipate them?
If you don’t boycott such things, the official Wiki has most if not all of the 1-10 and 11-20 quest lines documented so you can check which one did you have before or roll a character with the choices that will lead to them.
I like that the choices have meaning – I often felt in SWTOR that the choices might take a different path but always to the same end, that the choices didn’t really matter in the longer run as it was Bioware’s story with the end result predetermined. These choices in GW2 really feel to me personally like they matter more even if that’s just an illusion.
Reblogged this on Gigable – Tech Blog.