Guild Wars 2 is really two games. Maybe three games, depending on how much you get into World vs World and PvP.
But the two games I’m talking about is the one where you run around doing MMO stuff. Collecting things, jumping off cliffs, exploring, killing a million little things, doing the public quests, stuff like that.
The other, parallel, game is the one where you are the only being holding the world together from any number of huge existential threats. EverQuest never really considered you the singular hero come to save the world; you were always just part of a winning team. In DC Universe Online, your hero — or villain — is part of the Justice League (or the Legion of Doom) and is more like the backup to the main DC heroes. In Star Trek Online, you’re part of Starfleet, the Klingon Empire, or some other faction. Part of a team.
Not so, in Guild Wars 2. It’s all you.
Last night, I tricked Team Spode into helping me with the last quest in chapter 6 of the personal quest line, “Retribution”. Having spent many months shuttling between various factions trying to build an alliance to defeat the great undead dragon Zhaitan, who is planning to send an undead army of his own to destroy the de facto capital of Tyria, Lion’s Arch.
Chapter 6, which all players share, deals with driving back the undead beachhead on Claw Island while forming three factions into a united front in a deal called The Pact. United, we cleared the undead from the island, and when the lich dragon Blightghast the Plaguebringer comes to aid the undead forces, we took him down as well. I was instrumental in attacking his right front foot, which is all I could actually see.
Because I’m short.
Back in the day, when we were playing GW2 before the five or six or seven year break, I was avidly working on my personal story. When we returned to the game after DCUO, there was just so much content and I had so many other games to play that I only dipped into the personal stories here and there. A little bit of some of the Living Worlds and expansion quests, now and then moving my personal quest forward, but most of the time, just logging in an hour a week to do whatever we were doing.
I still have a lot of games to play, but I really do want to at least finish the personal story. Two more chapters to go, at which point I think I will be able to name myself Empress and rule Tyria with an iron fist and a clockwork mech.
“Blightghast. His mom wanted to name him ‘Steve’, but Zhaitan paid off the Hatchery director” — thanks for this. LOL. It was a lot of fun playing your quest last night!
Yeah 🙂 Well if you liked that, there’s more coming up 🙂
I think I’d been playing GW2 as my primary MMORPG for seven or eight years before I finally finished the Personal Story on a single character. At that time I think I had seventeen level 80s. I’ve never done it on another character and probably never will.
One of the first posts Iever wrote about GW2, back when it was still in beta, was about how unecessary it was to have a specific narrative in an MMORPG, partiularly one that sought to be as “dynamic” as GW2 was claiming it would be. After a decade playing the game, I see no reason to revise that opinion.
Mind you, I might change my mind if they ever came up with a *good* storyline…
I just feel the personal story is perhaps my best way of getting back to feeling some connection to the game. MMOs are hard for me, now. Not hard in the sense that I don’t know how to play them, but hard in the sense that it all seems pointless to put hundreds or thousands of hours of my life into something that ultimately doesn’t have a purpose greater than wasting time. At least the story is a story.