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[Essay] Branching Options and Character Development - Opinions and Potential Spoilers!


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Recently, with the whole fiasco that really needs to be put to bed, I think an important discussion has gone unnoticed and faded into the background. This is the discussion of branching storylines, and their development. At this stage in the game, Guild Wars 2 will not have full-blown, multi-layered narratives in the vein of Mass Effect or SWTOR. They'd have to fit that into a new IP, IMO. However, there's been a lot of talk about how the 'footprint of an MMO' doesn't allow for branching options, which isn't particularly true because SWTOR has been praised for it over the last few years, regardless of how developed the narratives have been. The footprint of an MMO differs between companies, and their intentions for their particular game. If Guild Wars 2 doesn't require branching storylines, that's fine. However, there needs to be more ways to shape your own Commander, such as more branching dialogue options.

The reason for this is that games with 'universal protagonists' like Guild Wars 2 require interesting and complex characters around them. Guild Wars 2, for a large number of people, doesn't support that. The characters are quite bland, and work as stereotypes rather than possessing individual arcs that are well-written. So, if we're stuck with simplistic NPC writing, we need more ways to connect with our own character to feel attached to the narrative. At the moment, a lot of players are disillusioned with the direction of the story, and a lot of high-profile players readily admit that they don't play Guild Wars 2 for the story. If that's the case, then something isn't working correctly. The story should be the anchor for everything else, it's the only area where you should have the freedom over who your character is, aside from changing an outfit or appearance options.

I think more people would accept the tone and direction of the narrative, however, if we had a reason to connect with the characters. The process of a Guild Wars 2 Episode for me is 90% hoping that the narrative's characters are going to be engaging, and 10% realising that it's the same, bland endeavour as before but in a different setting. The NPCs need an over-haul if they're not going to do branching options, no matter how major or minor. Here are some examples of the directions that they could go in:

Kasmeer: >! Play on the religious aspect of Kasmeer, and the conversation that she had with Kormir about needing to find strength in Humanity and not relying on the Gods for guidance. Develop her as a co-leader to the Commander, and her trials and tribulations as she rises. Potentially, a character dies or gets injured on her own sub-mission because of one of her mistakes, and show how she reacts to that. Her independence as a Human should be an anchor for the wider Human characters, finally restoring the virtues of leadership and courage to a race that's been scattered and broken. However, she also represents a degree of over-confidence, which could develop once she has a string of decisive victories, and has been the common downfall of Humanity in the past.

Taimi: >! Taimi needs to lose. She needs a heavy defeat that makes her re-assess who she is as a person, and she needs to mature. Perhaps Gorrik isn't actually on our side, and he's playing us to get something that he wants? She allows him to have her research, and he converts it into something vastly destructive and she gets wounded in the process. We see Taimi breaking down, and she suddenly becomes quite a grey character. By grey, I don't mean edgy. I mean morally ambiguous. She starts to fall back to the traditional Asuran values of not trusting people with research, and becomes more cynical at critical moments. The arrogance creeps in, and she becomes a stumbling block for the other characters, and her weaponry becomes more brutal. At this point, the 'fun' aspect of Taimi begins to disappear, and she occupies a darker role. Remember that she's already experienced trauma at the hands of Joko.

Braham: >! This is a divisive character to the community. However, it's so easy to fix this. All that he needs is to have a one-to-one with the Commander, after building an ice statue of his mother in the Shiverpeaks to show a familial connection, and the Commander tells him: "Eir's looking down on you each day, you have her blood, and your blood is calling at you to fight.' He has a redemption arc where he starts stripping back the recklessness and becomes a shield for the other members of Dragon's Watch. He has a mentality of: 'First in, last out.' Eventually, he becomes the next Norn Hero, and through his virtues of self-sacrifice, he becomes something greater than he could've been before. During his arc, the torment of trying to be like Eir could return in flashes, but push him or pull at him to do better or cling to his past.

Marjory: >! Another divisive character, but brimming with potential. She represents the darker side of Humanity, the no-holds-barred flow of combat, but the intrigue that politics has created in Divinity's Reach. She's potentially the most likely character to betray Dragon's Watch, for her own gains. Her relationship with Kasmeer should become more strained over time, feeling inferior to Kasmeer as she develops into a co-leader. Marjory's approach should be the opposite side of independence, the representation of wrath and pride, where she aims to interrogate and dissect people's plans, rather than calmly collect information. However, Marjory's intentions are quite sound. She wants to bring about order again, but the time spent with Balthazar (as Lazarus) may have corrupted her logic into extreme thoughts of 'Chaos Before Order'. She believes in the break-down of a system to rebuild it from the ground-up because Humanity has failed with the same formula over and over again. This creates tension between Kasmeer and Marjory who become the opposing sides of the same coin in ideology.

Rytlock: >! He needs to become the mentor figure for Dragon's Watch. The rock to their newer issues, he's experienced failure far too many times before, but he's also had multiple successes. He needs to have a strong alliance with Braham, as they share similar traits, and I believe that he should be the one to inform him about Eir's legendary adventures and the realities behind them. After all, the tales are only a fraction of what actually happened. Rytlock's vice is his guilt for basically causing the current crisis in Elona. Balthazar's dead, his magic has been drained by Kralkatorrik, and the Crystal Dragon is launching a cataclysm over the various regions. Rytlock should be fighting internal demons, and trying to hone a volatile evolution of his Revenancy.

Rox: >! The Olmakhan links are quite thin at the moment, but I believe that Rox needs to become more spiritual as a Charr. She starts to delve into the powers of nature within Tyria and begins to construct a new way of living for the Charr. She becomes the 'healer' of the group, and potentially suffers a loss where she fails to keep a certain character alive because of her under-developed abilities. This loss plagues her mind, but this could be rectified by a pilgrimage to a Druidic location where she begins to understand that loss is essential for growth. This could be the start of Rox's character development.

Canach: >! I believe that Canach needs to hop in and out as a side character. His storyline is effectively done at this point. If they need to drag him out for a bit longer, they could show his development from a former scoundrel to a Hero, but I worry that this would be a convoluted.

Whilst these are just concepts, they provide a few directions for characters that have been poorly developed, in my subjective opinion. These concepts should not be reflective of their entire arcs, they're just made up from the top of my head. In conclusion, I believe that there's a lot of potential from these characters, but they've been mis-handled and their development has stagnated in recent Episodes, leading to controversy within the community. Hopefully, you find a degree of logic from each of the examples listed above, and the overall argument. In the absence of branching options, the NPCs need to be heavy in depth, not few and far between.

CLARIFICATION: To clarify, I'm not claiming that I believe that Guild Wars 2 needs sprawling branching paths with every single thing that the Commander does. However, it needs an expansion of how they created the Trial in Living World Season 4 Episode 3. Dialogue options that lead to a fixed result, but you feel like the character is in your hands. There's a balance to be struck here, and they're slowly getting there. Although this is the case, we need stronger and more developed characters to push the concept further.

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I started reading this but just couldnt be bothered, sorry.

But anyways the whole point why the narrative isnt really branching is the required overhead needed to allow for any "meaningfull" branching narrative. Not only would the narrative team require to keep track of all potential story threads they differenet players would be running so they know where people stand, they would need to go through the extra effort of making sure that regardless of the choices made the effect on the state of the world does not vary too much from each choice.With the more instances they add the more branches there will be making it exponentialy more complex to keep track of, which is what would be produced to make "meaningful choices".

and with the whole branching dialog, there are plenty of instances of the commander having a few options in how to aproach a task or convosation scattered through out the story, but all these cases are flavourful choices and in no shape meaningful. These means that, in essence they are not really choices and generally provide little pay off.

The following I found to be a nice explanation of what makes a "meaningful choice".Meaningful Choice in Games: Practical Guide & Case Studies

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There is another issue..... despite being an MMO, which is notorious for having the player be either without personality or personal motivation beyond events around them, GW2 seems to trip up people who think this game's format is supposed to be like Skyrim or Mass Effect. The difference between a "Character" and an "Avatar". This same argument gets brought up indirectly when comparing JRPGs to WRPGs, and that is what defines the character the player is playing.

For a good story (as commonly defined by typical gamers) requires the entire game to revolve around them. Whats ironic is that GW1 both did and didn't do this, yet it stands as one of the best executions in story and lore in the short history of MMOs. When examined closely its kind of generic; but it does something most "games" struggle with..... focus. GW1 is the story of Heroes and Villains, but it isn't the story of the player. GW2 is squarely pitched and written with the player being the center of everything..... and it suffers because the supporting cast has no way of knowing how to play off of countless permutations that are player personalities. This role was reversed in GW1, and to a different extent Warcraft did as well. Another Hero is at the forefront of an event, and you're along for the ride. This is about as ideal as you can get for an MMO that doesn't use emergent game play as its core..... you make players Supporting Characters with Agency.

By trying to assign a personality to player, it tends to struggle unless you can build enough of the game to be properly react (and not react) to their actions or decisions. Without that you're forced to rely on the Player being willing to "role play".... but the vast majority not only refuse to participate this way, those that claim to be Role Players don't know how to "role play". (In case anyone is wondering..... telling people what your character is, isn't really role playing. A good role player can work around limitations; and in video games there are A LOT of inherent limitations. But even in the free form of P&P games, one can be handed a filled character sheet, and should still be able to play it with their own interpretations. If I had to make a broad generalization of the problem.... too many are obsessed with "what" the character is, rather then "who" it is. And if you ask a person to describe it, that can tell you a lot of what they think of it.)

There is a 3rd option, but its a lot harder to make work with the typical types that seem attracted to "story driven RPGs". You build a main character's personality so strong and relatable, that a player will just roll with it. This is hard to do in open world formats, just on the fact that players get too much agency in when and where they can engage something. But given the trajectory, this is probably the only good option to get everyone on onboard on the limited resources ANET has to develop story assets. However, what isn't helping is depth in character tends to fly over a huge chunk of modern audiences.... and believe me when I say GW players have a bunch of those traits, because most gamers have those traits. On the one hand shouldn't treat your audience like emotionally stunted children; but when they have the power to immediately discuss and try to deconstruct every detail without time to reflect on it, does drag down their ability to properly process emotional information. To really dig into this would take hours to discuss, and part of me doesn't think people would even read this far into the reply. But watch this...

TL;DR In short, the Commander doesn't act like a person.

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Your markdown broke.

Anyway going to address the character specific problems you feel exist.

1) Kasmeer - She's not leadership material, far from it and I don't see this changing anytime soon. Strategist perhaps, but not a leader. She's already showcases she has no love for the political theater required to be a leader and only steps into that realm when absolutely required.

2) Taimi - has lost the most out of literally everyone in the cast. Scruffy lost, her waypoint research stolen, her love interest and krew mate a shell of his former self and all of this is before we had to save the Damsel in distress on multiple occasions.

3) Braham - Is already walking the redemption path, there's need for them to play the spiritual successor role. Braham's entire journey has been about being his own man, making him be ever present in his mothers shadow shackles him to being nothing short of her replacement.

4) Marjory - I don't follow your logic she's far from a turn coat or chaotic, her goals have always been the protecting of Kryta and subsequently Tyria. There's nothing in her story that suggest turncoat any more than there was for Koss in his. She's more likely to build an order or find one to serve.

5) Rytlock - Is sorta doing the help the new guys thing, but it really is about time for him to be sidelined until the next big thing. Right now the conflicts don't require the remaining core of EoD to be around and that's a good thing.

6) Rox - I don't see her needing to heal anything. Right now her journey is about finding a home, the olmakhan are showing her home isn't where you are it's what you have around you (people/friends). This is something Rox hasn't really had which is a real bond to people outside of a working one with her former warband.

7) Canach - He's probably the most complete character right now. So this i actually agree with he could come and go as he pleases now that he's found freedom for the first time. However, it's his freedom that's having him choose to help us.

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We don't need huge, sprawling branch paths to get a sense our character is our own.

  1. We need common-sense writing that takes into account what various actors are doing and how a hero would react, instead of just letting things happen. (I just went through this in FFXIV, and it still burns me. Much bad.)
  2. Perhaps equally as important, the way our characters respond to things should be prone to branching. The results would be the same, but the dialog tweaks a little, just a few lines. Not entire story missions like we got with Personal Story, just a few words on the situation.

No. 2 is "illusion of choice", but the perception of our character is important.Thinking back on the Braham situation, especially in Bitterfrost, when he gets huffy about stuff. There could have been options set up that mapped to the old Personality system:

Charm: "Braham, I know it hurts, I've been through the same with someone who once guided me-"Braham: "Sorry, Commander, but it's not the same. She was my mother and a legend. Don't pretend you understand." [storms off]

Dignity: "Braham, please stop and think this through. With what we know about the dragons, killing Jormag-"Braham: "Killing Jormag is the greatest tribute I can give my mother who died fighting Mordremoth! And you're not taking that from me, Commander!" [storms off]

Ferocity/Brute: [Punches Braham] "You need to cool your head, right now! You almost got Rox killed!"Braham: "She's fine, okay?! You don't understand what's at stake, and you're not going to stop me!" [gets up, storms off]

Obviously dialogues would be a wee longer, but that's the idea. I assume budget constraints and the need to direct/animate the different paths might not be feasible, which is unfortunate from a narrative perspective.

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Let see how many people respond to just the TLDR part.

At any rate...... a good core narrative for a game like this is usually best as having someone else be the "main character", but drive the view point from the player. This leaves the player free to act how they want, without putting undue stress on the story to accommodate individualized responses. Players might think it robs them of agency, but in reality its preserving it.

But one thing worth noting is how the Commander kind of ping pongs between being a romantic and a rationalist. The story is framed to be an internal struggle with that, but doesn't immediately get that across well. I'm not sure if its the audience or how its written, because I fall more into the typical side of audiences, and it took me a while to figure that out. Or I could be reading too much into it. So you can kind of see why not being able to easily pin down their thought process is causing dissonance while following the story. The decisions they are going to make are obvious, but the apparent internal conflict is mudded and comes off more as "how long until they snap".

Next has more to do with audiences more then anything else. What is the game's core audience? And what types of stories appeal to them. This is a big deal in an era where people have very narrow vectors for exposure to new stories. And most of those stories try to fight over attention using the same set of traits. Game of Thrones is NOTHING like the books... and this can be ok. But GOT is trash TV; but incredibly hard to describe why. It has elements that should make it a great story, but it plays very heavily to certain things to point of toxic levels of concentration. Theres also a running joke about Netflix Castlevania's inital popularity being heavily attributed to people thinking its going like a Game of Thrones anime (and you can tell that was on purpose). Audiences like to be challenged emotionally.... but collectively, this gets undone through the way they hold discussions about it. Thus a lot of shows and movies are now going down the route of not necessarily being good, or generating good discussion, but about sparking social media reactions.

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@GDchiaScrub.3241 said:

@Twyn.7320 said:However, there needs to be more ways to shape your own Commander, such as more branching dialogue options.

Why do you believe branching shapes the character the most? Sorta need to address this first.

D:

Branching shapes a player protagonist more in an MMO sense because each character is individual to the player. When you create a fierce warrior, you don't want the fierce warrior to act like a pretty, goodie two-shoes hero with no ferocity in the main story. You want to have the choice to play with ferocity throughout every action/dialogue option that you have.

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To clarify, I'm not claiming that I believe that Guild Wars 2 needs sprawling branching paths with every single thing that the Commander does. However, it needs an expansion of how they created the Trial in Living World Season 4 Episode 3. Dialogue options that lead to a fixed result, but you feel like the character is in your hands. There's a balance to be struck here, and they're slowly getting there. Although this is the case, we need stronger and more developed characters to push the concept further.

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@Twyn.7320 said:

@Twyn.7320 said:However, there needs to be more ways to shape your own Commander, such as more branching dialogue options.

Why do you believe branching shapes the character the most? Sorta need to address this first.

D:

Branching shapes a player protagonist more in an MMO sense because each character is individual to the player. When you create a fierce warrior, you don't want the fierce warrior to act like a pretty, goodie two-shoes hero with no ferocity in the main story. You want to have the choice to play with ferocity throughout every action/dialogue option that you have.

Is fighting (the combat game play) fiercely considered a choice to help immerse yourself with said character? Real question. I dislike when people discount the actual game play when developing "story." As the years go on, when said character attains more responsibility would their ferocity not be curbed? Like when becoming a leader?

As far as choice goes only the core game story dabbled in it IMO. Shelling your own soldiers because of a mesmer illusion checked off a game play element acting as a story telling one. I respect that. A lot. Simply picking emotive dialogue boxes didn't affect Mass Effect Andromeda (albeit a bad example) nor really did it change Dragon Age Inquisition (unless it was flirt...). I only bring up the emotes because of your use of ferocity. Their intensity wouldn't lend to branching paths since that doesn't deal with motive. Motives influencing their goals of course. Why is a character "fierce?" Unfortunately that's the limit of a MMO. It's open enough to give an impression that you get to choose a character's motives. The reality is ANET cannot react to the amount of character motivations you would come up with. So they give you some, as the leader of The Pact, and subsequently Dragon's Watch (or w.e. it's called now). Save Tyria, but by all means play fiercely in combat. There are, of course, practical resource concerns when it comes to branching paths.

Irony being they stopped using the Ferocity/Dignity/Compassionate stuff early on.

D:

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What many people seem to overlook is that the commander does have a defined personality. At character creation you were given the choice between the PC having a charming personality, being dignified and level headed or being ferocious and aggressive. And while you do still have constraints in regard of what you can and can't do you can easily write 3 versions of the commander based on these premade choices. Games like Borderlands 2 did it with 6 and it worked perfectly. To a degree Guild Wars 2 alredy does something like this in regards to the random dialogue your character says in various situations, for example if you choose to play as an asura one of the things your character tends to say is "where's a golem when you need him" which is already characterisation for your PC but it makes sense because one would expect an asura to say something like that regardless of whether or not you're much into role playing.

That being said I do thing this problem will solve itself over time. Once we have AGI we pretty much won't have a need for dialogue writing anymore. Whether or not GW2 is still around by then is another question. I doubt it but hey, Diablo 2 still seems to have sizeable playerbase even today so who knows?

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@"starlinvf.1358" said:There is another issue..... despite being an MMO, which is notorious for having the player be either without personality or personal motivation beyond events around them, GW2 seems to trip up people who think this game's format is supposed to be like Skyrim or Mass Effect. The difference between a "Character" and an "Avatar". This same argument gets brought up indirectly when comparing JRPGs to WRPGs, and that is what defines the character the player is playing.

For a good story (as commonly defined by typical gamers) requires the entire game to revolve around them. Whats ironic is that GW1 both did and didn't do this, yet it stands as one of the best executions in story and lore in the short history of MMOs. When examined closely its kind of generic; but it does something most "games" struggle with..... focus. GW1 is the story of Heroes and Villains, but it isn't the story of the player. GW2 is squarely pitched and written with the player being the center of everything..... and it suffers because the supporting cast has no way of knowing how to play off of countless permutations that are player personalities. This role was reversed in GW1, and to a different extent Warcraft did as well. Another Hero is at the forefront of an event, and you're along for the ride. This is about as ideal as you can get for an MMO that doesn't use emergent game play as its core..... you make players Supporting Characters with Agency.

By trying to assign a personality to player, it tends to struggle unless you can build enough of the game to be properly react (and not react) to their actions or decisions. Without that you're forced to rely on the Player being willing to "role play".... but the vast majority not only refuse to participate this way, those that claim to be Role Players don't know how to "role play". (In case anyone is wondering..... telling people what your character is, isn't really role playing. A good role player can work around limitations; and in video games there are A LOT of inherent limitations. But even in the free form of P&P games, one can be handed a filled character sheet, and should still be able to play it with their own interpretations. If I had to make a broad generalization of the problem.... too many are obsessed with "what" the character is, rather then "who" it is. And if you ask a person to describe it, that can tell you a lot of what they think of it.)

There is a 3rd option, but its a lot harder to make work with the typical types that seem attracted to "story driven RPGs". You build a main character's personality so strong and relatable, that a player will just roll with it. This is hard to do in open world formats, just on the fact that players get too much agency in when and where they can engage something. But given the trajectory, this is probably the only good option to get everyone on onboard on the limited resources ANET has to develop story assets. However, what isn't helping is depth in character tends to fly over a huge chunk of modern audiences.... and believe me when I say GW players have a bunch of those traits, because most gamers have those traits. On the one hand shouldn't treat your audience like emotionally stunted children; but when they have the power to immediately discuss and try to deconstruct every detail without time to reflect on it, does drag down their ability to properly process emotional information. To really dig into this would take hours to discuss, and part of me doesn't think people would even read this far into the reply. But watch this...

TL;DR In short, the Commander doesn't act like a person.

I agree with all of this. I think ultimately the decision to make the PC "the hero of everything" was both arbitrary and misguided in that it just doesn't work in an MMO context for numerous reasons. I think making the story more about the heroes and villains driving the setting and not the player is the right way to do an MMO, which is part of why, story-wise, GW1 was vastly superior to GW2.

With branching paths, I think their attempt at this is a lot of what made the PS execution very lackluster.

I also think they've shoehorned themselves with the way they've designed the narrative that makes it overly difficult to do things that MMOs really need to be able to do, like add new playable races, for example.

With that said, I think there are ways to improve the status quo without starting from scratch. They could do more variations of dialogue based on chosen personality, and they also need to add depth and presence to the games various NPCs, most of whom just aren't fully realized as characters.

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@GDchiaScrub.3241 said:

@Twyn.7320 said:However, there needs to be more ways to shape your own Commander, such as more branching dialogue options.

Why do you believe branching shapes the character the most? Sorta need to address this first.

D:

Branching shapes a player protagonist more in an MMO sense because each character is individual to the player. When you create a fierce warrior, you don't want the fierce warrior to act like a pretty, goodie two-shoes hero with no ferocity in the main story. You want to have the choice to play with ferocity throughout every action/dialogue option that you have.

Is fighting (the combat game play) fiercely considered a choice to help immerse yourself with said character? Real question. I dislike when people discount the actual game play when developing "story." As the years go on, when said character attains more responsibility would their ferocity not be curbed? Like when becoming a leader?

As far as choice goes only the core game story dabbled in it IMO. Shelling your own soldiers because of a mesmer illusion checked off a game play element acting as a story telling one. I respect that. A lot. Simply picking emotive dialogue boxes didn't affect Mass Effect Andromeda (albeit a bad example) nor really did it change Dragon Age Inquisition (unless it was flirt...). I only bring up the emotes because of your use of ferocity. Their intensity wouldn't lend to branching paths since that doesn't deal with motive. Motives influencing their goals of course. Why is a character "fierce?" Unfortunately that's the limit of a MMO. It's open enough to give an impression that you get to choose a character's motives. The reality is ANET cannot react to the amount of character motivations you would come up with. So they give you some, as the leader of The Pact, and subsequently Dragon's Watch (or w.e. it's called now). Save Tyria, but by all means play fiercely in combat. There are, of course, practical resource concerns when it comes to branching paths.

Irony being they stopped using the Ferocity/Dignity/Compassionate stuff early on.

D:

The Personality System is the only way to consider branching dialogue options at this stage in the game. We just need more of it.

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I think they have enough on their plates just trying to keep track of 5 races, background variations in each, 9 professions, 3 orders, and so on. That said, I wish they would more often alter dialogues to leverage those differences to make our commander feel like our own. They do sometimes, but then there are big missed opportunities at other times (e.g., while non-humans might be dismissive of human religion, Charr would be outright hostile to the notion of gods. None of this "I respect your beliefs, Kasmeer" nonsense.) It's especially true of racial differences, since they already require separate VA for the line even if it's word-for-word the same and therefore it's not so much of a marginal cost increase. Maybe they could do a second racial writing pass on PC lines to check whether alterations could help produce a consistent and lore-friendly tone?

It's also nice, especially with non-voiced lines (which dialog-box conversations often are), to more often give us a selection of lines to express personality or different approaches. It just depends on how much it adds versus the cost, though. For a lot of conversations, multiple options don't add much over a single fairly neutral tone. Sometimes it adds a lot, though, like the options in Seized.

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My biggest issue with the way the Commander is portrayed in the newer releases is the fact that all the choices we made in the personal story have gad to be forgotten. Since not everyone joined the vigil, we have Braham for the thick headed ready to fight attitude. We can't all be priory, so Taimi is our resident know-it-all. Marjorie turned into our order of whispers surrogate. So with every member of the guild filling the roles that our version of the Commander could have filled, where does that leave our character?

For me it's not so much about the branching dialogue of the old personality system (though I did enjoy the illusion of choice at the trail). It's about what we've already committed to our story journals as having a point. Otherwise, our story is going to end up looking like Mass Effect 3. All choices, with no choice at all.

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@"Rauderi.8706" said:

  1. Perhaps equally as important, the way our characters respond to things should be prone to branching. The results would be the same, but the dialog tweaks a little, just a few lines. Not entire story missions like we got with Personal Story, just a few words on the situation.This! I especially like deciding how the pc responds to events/people, and it doesn't have as high a cost as branching plots.

@Twyn.7320 I agree branching dialogue adds a lot to a game! As for the character suggestions, I feel pretty much the opposite, though. I would like to see Braham leave permanently. Too much time has been wasted on him already this season. In contrast Canach is my favorite, so I would like him to play a bigger part.

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I like having more agency in directing my character's progression, but (a) that's not what keeps me playing a game, so (b) I'd just as soon see more content rather than less content with more nuance.In particular, the part of GW2 stories with the most branching, the L10-L30 personal stories, is interesting to me without the branching. There are three really interesting charr origin stories, three really fun asura stories, and yet the human story is mostly trope. Though I get to choose, the results are nothing that special.


@"Twyn.7320" said:However, there needs to be more ways to shape your own Commander, such as more branching dialogue options.Why? I see you make a case for why you would prefer it, but why does that game require it? How is it crucial to the game's success that it should have to cover multiple contingencies and 'remember' them for long enough to matter.

The reason for this is that games with 'universal protagonists' like Guild Wars 2 require interesting and complex characters around them. Guild Wars 2, for a large number of people, doesn't support that. The characters are quite bland, and work as stereotypes rather than possessing individual arcs that are well-written.Yes, and that was explained in the the very posts to which you referred at the start. The entire idea is for the player character to be bland, so that people can project as much as themselves into the story as possible.

So, if we're stuck with simplistic NPC writing, we need more ways to connect with our own character to feel attached to the narrative.No, the entire point is for the character to be simplistic, because it allows you to choose how much you care.

At the moment, a lot of players are disillusioned with the direction of the story, and a lot of high-profile players readily admit that they don't play Guild Wars 2 for the story.I think it would be a terrible idea to cater the story to "high profile players". That's like balancing all game combat towards high profile players.

If that's the case, then something isn't working correctly.Only if you think the story is the only hook to the game. And clearly (also considering some 'high profile' players), that's not the case.

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I don't know how ANet could do this without phasing, but I think ESO does a good job of getting around this problem. Albeit with a crap ton more voice acting, which is a limiting factor for ANet.

In ESO's original starting story, before expansions, your character is the one and only Vestige. You've gone through a trauma and become soul-less. You get a story line, many of the instances of which you -must- solo, that ends with a climactic battle against the big bad. On the way there are many, many side quests that give you options on how to approach them, with permanent consequences (in your phased version of which characters you can see and what they say to you). So you can write your character to be any sort of person who has this big thing happen to them, and what you do during the story is filtered through that. Everyone does the same fights, but everyone brings their own generated reasons for doing them. It's highly immersive, even if you don't want it to be canon that you are the Vestige. And while NPC's will comment on things specific to what quests you've done and what parts of the story you've completed, it always seems to be from the perspective of people that heard the news of your deeds (or else were part of doing those deeds in the branches you chose), rather than what sort of person they presume you to be. You can even never do the main story and decide you're just a regular person in the world and still see a ton of in-depth lore on what's going on.

Now, could GW2 do that? I don't think so, due to the technical limitations they face and the game design they have in place. They do a lot of things better than ESO, too, because they've put their focus on those things rather than deep layers of story. Yet in the end, really, ESO is also writing a blank slate main character; they just give that blank slate a lot of things to use to write on it. So while it might not be a good model or even possible at this point for ANet to emulate (GW2 is very much its own thing), it does stand as an example and inspiration on how depth and branching can work in an MMO. Which I believe is what the OP was looking for, maybe?

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