Personal story repeatable

Hi, not sure if this should go under Lore or GW2 Discussion, and idk if this has been already asked in the previous forum (probably it was) since I didn't use it.Anyway, is there a reason why we cannot replay the personal story? Even forcing us to remake our previous choices, for example graying-out the other options.

I find the personal story wonderful. I cried all of the 3 times that I did it. I'm not saying it because I like to cry... but it's very well made, the words chosen by Trahearne, the efforts required by the hunt, that splendid music that starts to play while all the sounds are muffled... and I won't spoiler anything more, in case there's someone here that still has to complete it (tip: raise the volume of your stereo ;) ).I still have 2 characters available, so I'll cry again, that's fine. But it would be nice to know that I could repeat the last chapters with my favourite characters, if I wanted.Is it a choice, or there are technical reasons?

You can play it again i think, not sure tough. Open you story log from hero panel and klick The first mission, there should Be option for "replay this chapter". Atleast it Works for expansion stories.

@sokeenoppa.5384 said:You can play it again i think, not sure tough. Open you story log from hero panel and klick The first mission, there should Be option for "replay this chapter". Atleast it Works for expansion stories.

That doesn't work for the Personal Story.

This is one of those weird things which is a result of the ideas behind the game changing over time. Originally the Personal Story, open-world and Dungeons was going to be the only permanent PvE content and the story was intended to be played once and then it's finished like in most games. New releases were going to be temporarily available and again designed to be played through once (the first one was available for just 1 weekend).

That caused a lot of problems so it was changed to releases which were available for 2-4 weeks and many parts of them were repeatable so people who wanted to could keep playing it (Season 1 of the Living Story). Based on player demand that was changed again to permanent releases (Season 2 onwards).

But because the Personal Story was made before that it still uses the old model of non-repeatable content and apparently because of the way it was programmed making it repeatable can cause serious problems. I can't find the quote now but I seem to remember someone at Anet saying it triggered bugs which could permanently mess up your story or break the character. And re-making it like the Living Story would mean re-doing all the programming side of things again from scratch.

If you want to keep playing it the best option is to keep 1 character slot free, then whenever you want to re-play it make a new character and do it on them. If you save up Tomes of Knowledge/birthday scrolls you won't even need to level them up first.

Here’s something they said about the Personal Story.

Source

Q: Why can’t I reset my character’s Personal Story progress?A: The Personal Story was not designed to be replayable. Attempting to adjust a character’s story progress introduces a wide variety of bugs across various content and game systems. We investigated different solutions for partial and full story resets. In all cases, the changes led to unpredictable results in many different content types, including permanent blocking of story progress._

Hmm, that I can understand. But they were asking for a reset. Thus, the difficulty to adjust the character's progress. Maybe it wouldn't be so problematic to just repeat the choices we already made, not a real re-do.But true, I could keep 1 free slot; that will also bring some utility to that amount of tomes that I don't know how to use (I don't want to power-level-up a new class, when I start it).

@Urud.4925 said:Hmm, that I can understand. But they were asking for a reset. Thus, the difficulty to adjust the character's progress. Maybe it wouldn't be so problematic to just repeat the choices we already made, not a real re-do.But true, I could keep 1 free slot; that will also bring some utility to that amount of tomes that I don't know how to use (I don't want to power-level-up a new class, when I start it).

a lot of things have been "saved" as your progress, these would have to be used/changed even if you would just do a repeat. and using these saves can cause problems to the things we have in the newer stories that rely on some of the choices you made. an example would be your mentor showing up in the pof story line. even not changing who your mentor is can still cause unexpected problems which are hard to track down or repair, the older an mm gets the more code is being pilled atop of eachother, making it harder and harder to change the past, and sometimes core features. it's one of the reasons World of Warcraft for example, never really changed from it's core gameplay.

@CharterforGw.3149 said:

@Urud.4925 said:Hmm, that I can understand. But they were asking for a

reset

. Thus, the difficulty to

adjust

the character's progress. Maybe it wouldn't be so problematic to just

repeat

the choices we already made, not a real re-do.But true, I could keep 1 free slot; that will also bring some utility to that amount of tomes that I don't know how to use (I don't want to power-level-up a new class, when I start it).

I've only played PoF fully, but I do recall even after picking to stay neutral in my gameplay, it was locked in as that but I could've still replayed the chapters.I don't see how that's not possible with the personal story.

"Who do you want to help in this part of the mission? Whispers/Vigil/Priory?"and then it would just say "last option I picked" and then you go about playing it the way you did before still.

Because it was never coded that way. The latter stories are coded to be replayable, PS wasn't. Retrofitting it creates bugs, up to and including complete progession locking. (see above.)

@Just a flesh wound.3589 said:Here’s something they said about the Personal Story.

They did end up resetting the Orr story like a year later after doing that however, for those that missed the part they cut. It'll never be replayable like the newer stories due to the way it's linked, but they could fully reset it if they really wanted to. It's just not worth the cost, so it'll never happen.

It's easier for you to create a new character and experience the story a different way than it is for ArenaNet to refactor their engine to allow for repeatable content that was never designed to be repeatable. Personally, I won't replay much of my personal story... maybe one or two Oor missions.

After just finishing up the personal story on my third character, one nice thing about it is that in most steps, there are 2 or 3 different choices on what to do. So there actually is a certain amount of replay value since one isn't replaying the same content. But solution is already in place - just play again on a different/new character. Not like any of the soulbound loot given out is really good that you need in on a specific character - if anything, you probably care about the skin, and not the item itself.

@Healix.5819 said:

@Just a flesh wound.3589 said:Here’s something they said about the Personal Story.

To add to this:

The reworked the last 2 chapters numerous times. Each time causing problems for characters.

And each time they went to fix it, they broke it for other characters.

I had a character that had completed the personal story (I had the Pact chests/token/weapon equal to the number I had completed it on), that lost progress on about 5 steps at their last fix. I think I've replayed the missions again (and got loot again).