Isn't it time to be bad?

[Shiv.5781]

GW2 was released in 2012, its been 7 years and we're all still here trying to play the good guy? Isn't it time to be bad already ...

This could be quality content about adding an option to choose if you want to play with the bad guys. I want to become Balthazar's Herald, I want to bring wrath to tyria ... I wanna experience all those things?

We should have an option of which side we want to play, instead of being told that we HAVE to play the GOOD side. I want to ride Kralkatoric and not Aurene...

Please think about it...

[Vayne.8563]

Guild Wars 1 is 12 years old and we never had the option to be the bad guy there either. Neither did Laura Croft. It's just not that kind of game. It's called Heroic Fantasy for a reason.

[ButcherofMalakir.4067]

Also it would be extremly hard to implement it. Especialy for new releses

[Shiv.5781]

@ButcherofMalakir.4067 said:Also it would be extremly hard to implement it. Especialy for new releses

@"Vayne.8563" said:Guild Wars 1 is 12 years old and we never had the option to be the bad guy there either. Neither did Laura Croft. It's just not that kind of game. It's called Heroic Fantasy for a reason.

I know it would be hard to implement, it could be made into a LWS, or an expansion, but would be totally worth it. "heroic fantasy" can mean heroic in bad ways as well, heroic when u burn down tyria, heroic when you kill the commander ... Just something that's been on my mind for a very long time.

[phs.6089]

When i feel I wanna play bad, I open Postal 2 ;)
on the other hand, look one more time, you still think the commander is a good guy?

[derd.6413]

@Shiv.5781 said:

@ButcherofMalakir.4067 said:Also it would be extremly hard to implement it. Especialy for new releses

@"Vayne.8563" said:Guild Wars 1 is 12 years old and we never had the option to be the bad guy there either. Neither did Laura Croft. It's just not that kind of game. It's called Heroic Fantasy for a reason.

I know it would be hard to implement, it could be made into a LWS, or an expansion, but would be totally worth it. "heroic fantasy" can mean heroic in bad ways as well, heroic when u burn down tyria, heroic when you kill the commander ... Just something that's been on my mind for a very long time.

heroic evil?

[ButcherofMalakir.4067]

@Shiv.5781 said:

@ButcherofMalakir.4067 said:Also it would be extremly hard to implement it. Especialy for new releses

@"Vayne.8563" said:Guild Wars 1 is 12 years old and we never had the option to be the bad guy there either. Neither did Laura Croft. It's just not that kind of game. It's called Heroic Fantasy for a reason.

I know it would be hard to implement, it could be made into a LWS, or an expansion, but would be totally worth it. "heroic fantasy" can mean heroic in bad ways as well, heroic when u burn down tyria, heroic when you kill the commander ... Just something that's been on my mind for a very long time.

You dont understand. If you playedvas a bad guy and win then all expansion, dialoges and everything from that point would be completely diferent. Even if you did lose then it couldnt he thae same. All future releses would be affected

[DoomNexus.5324]

This would be a completely different game and considering how much effort Anet would've to put in I'm pretty sure this will never happen and I honestly couldn't see such a thing ever coming to GW2. It would make zero sense to now play for the enemy as the commander and savior of the world so you'd have to introduce different factions for good and evil or anything for new characters to justify this. The whole thing would require 1000 different changes. You have to be consistent with what's already there and then we are back to the effort thing.@edit: ofc you could also just throw everything out of the window and say "well.. my character now turned evil, that's enough reason for me" but that just doesn't work from a lore point of view. (I'm not really interested in stories in MMORPGs but even I argue with being consistent at least)Also it's not just a one-time effort, you'd need to maintain two completely different storylines with seperate regions, npcs, etc.

[Vayne.8563]

You'd have to write multiple stories, have multiple voice lines for voice actors. It would be too costly to implement. It's not the game they designed. Would it be interesting? Sure it would. Would it be worth it? I don't think so. But either way it's not going to happen because that's not the game Anet intended to make.

[Samnang.1879]

y'know when i was a kid, i hated reading (& still do lolol) & the one book that fascinated me was the ones that had alternative endings or ones taht you can choose ur own paths... i still dont read but just having that autonomy made reading less torturous

so i blieve that if they allow us to choose to be evil or for example what if joko wasn't defeated (for e.g. if u can't kill in 1 go then a diff ending would show up for u)... you know what i mean?

it's probably a lot of work, but honestly... at the moment the story doesn't fascinate me much (besides the Joko Arc).

[kharmin.7683]

@"Shiv.5781" said:

...., but would be totally worth it.Totally worth it for whom? As is often asked when people make suggestions on the forum, what's in it for ANet? If this were something "worth it" to them that could be justified by the cost/resources that would need to be allocated while still making enough profit for the shareholders, then sure. In this case, though, I kinda doubt it.

That's not to say that your idea doesn't have merit; rather, that it probably isn't "worth it" to ANet.

[joneirikb.7506]

Creating stories with alternative options really is a lot more work. You can see it in the start of personal story where you have a lot of choices (3race, 3race, 3pre-order, and even most of the order/orr story have 2-3 options). Just imagine how much work that is when the average player likely isn't going to try more than 1-3 of those.

But the main aspect is that all of those leads into the same continued story, many start positions leading into same end 3 > 1.

The moment you start branching the other way 1 < 3 you start a whole different bunch of problems, because each ending has to be different enough and thus have a different outcome, then every story after this needs to take this into consideration and thus making more work.

Then you either have to keep continuing with this effort, say 3 choices at the end of a story, which also means 3 different start positions on new story, which then must have branching options to basically go from one to another story line to get a different ending. That's not 3 times the work, it's near 6 times the work to get all those branching paths to work.

To put it simple, you'd look at 1 LS episode a year, tops, at the same length we currently got.

---

There is a reason why branching story-lines are so rare in computer games (and why so few so called cRPG's can actually be called Roleplaying games instead of just ROLLplaying games), They take a huge amount of work, and it's creative work which is the hardest to "force".

Especially this idea of playing "bad/evil" tend to be very counteractive to having a story-line, as it almost always disrupts story. For example if you wanted to join Zhaitan and fight the heroes, then Personal Story ends, you join Zhaitan (you become a risen zombie with some self awareness) and the world is devoured (and you with it) the end. Where do the next LS/Expansion start ?

The story is set up so that even if you're a typical bad or evil person, you will at least want to save the world (so you have anything to dominate for yourself afterwards), because the Dragons are supposed to be not "evil" but "utter annihilation". In that regard, the game does allow you "somewhat" to play bad/evil while still being able to progress the story. Much more so than most cRPG stories I've seen.

/rant

[Samnang.1879]

@"joneirikb.7506" said:

There is a reason why branching story-lines are so rare in computer games (and why so few so called cRPG's can actually be called Roleplaying games instead of just ROLLplaying games), They take a huge amount of work, and it's creative work which is the hardest to "force".

/rant

i dont believe its that hard, (storytelling-wise, dont know about programming-wise).

lets use ur example. we choose to side with zhaitan. that is that. then in HoT, mordremoth comes and it endangers even zhaitan and his minions, so we have to go n kill mordremoth. then you meet the "other" side (that side that play the good guys) and join in to fight with them. then both side may betray each other at the end or something like that.

Then comes PoF, Joko, a totally different enemy again... now it branches to others like what if joko didn't die etc.

idk maybe this comes naturally to me cuz i like telling stories, but it's not that hard to make up something to fit a plot. @anet feel free to use my ideas... i mean anything is better than linear storytelling

and what is the point of playing a story when we know the good guys win anyway ... . :expressionless:

[joneirikb.7506]

@"Samnang.1879" said:

Just to point out a few things:

i dont believe its that hard, (storytelling-wise, dont know about programming-wise).

Story-telling is always harder from a story-telling perspective than a programming-perspective. The game already has that in, most games have that or can easily add that during development/creation. I mean Diablo 1 could probably do that, it just didn't use it for anything. It is used several times in Personal Story for example, and the whole old Personality system did a light version of that before it was effectively removed from the game. Go talk to the Priests on the top of Divinity's Reach to see some of it still in action.

lets use ur example. we choose to side with zhaitan. that is that. then in HoT, mordremoth comes and it endangers even zhaitan and his minions, so we have to go n kill mordremoth. then you meet the "other" side (that side that play the good guys) and join in to fight with them. then both side may betray each other at the end or something like that.

Then comes PoF, Joko, a totally different enemy again... now it branches to others like what if joko didn't die etc.

I guess that really depends on how you viewed the story, the way I saw it when playing through it was that if we didn't kill Zhaitan there really wouldn't be much humans left to battle anything else. Essentially if Zhaitan won within months most of humanity would lose/become zombies/die. In that case there wouldn't be much of anything left to battle "the next big bad".

And the Dragons specifically awakens, basically devour all the magic in the world, and then go to sleep again. From what we know they've never bothered fighting against each others before, they just go back to sleep when each of them sucked out all the magic. Which would also put Joko out of a job, after all the magic got sucked out of him I imagine he would die too.

The alternative is that the Dragons really feel very small compared to how the story represents them, so that Zhaitan isn't able to destroy humanity alone, which seems very different from the feel I got from the story. Ah well.

idk maybe this comes naturally to me cuz i like telling stories, but it's not that hard to make up something to fit a plot. @anet feel free to use my ideas... i mean anything is better than linear storytelling

It isn't hard to come up with stories when you do it for fun/hobby, but the moment it becomes a job and you're forced to make X different stories in Y amount of time, and uphold a Z amount of quality/standard. It becomes a lot harder. And unlike a lot of other things (graphics, coding etc) the creative part is really difficult to "push" to perform.

I've been a Game Master for Pen and Paper RPG's for years myself, and I'm pretty good with coming up with things on the fly. But I realize that if I had to do this as a job instead of a hobby, that would change a lot. And the more complex you make the story the harder it becomes, especially to keep quality to a standard. And the way to deal with this in P&P is to disregard the ideas the players aren't focusing on and concentrate everything into what they do focus on, which is a luxury that game-developers doesn't have, as they have to completely develop all the paths from the get go. And experience have taught me that everything sounds better in my head than when I present it to players :)

and what is the point of playing a story when we know the good guys win anyway ... . :expressionless:

Agreed with this to some extent, after all if the outcome is set in stone/predictable there is little excitement or tension (Why I don't bother watching hollywood movies any-longer).

Essentially the difficulty and chance to fail is supposed to be that tension in a computer game. But I agree there are better ways to do this, like using the idea that you can fail a mission and still progress in a different direction. But again that takes more work to add in.

Essentially the story in this game is built like a mix of Movies and Mini-series, not as a "rolePlayingGame". Only the Personal Story of the original game had some traces off this, but it was later completely removed when they started on LS 1/2.

If you want deep story and character development, I'd recommend to find another game, instead of disappointing yourself with wishing this game turns into that. Take this game for what it is, good action-combat and open-world with popcorn-flick story.

(Sorry, I'm physically incapable of writing short posts it seems...)

[AlexxxDelta.1806]

It would be a cool feature and better than the current linear story but I don't think it's feasible. If it was to be meaningful with branches and not just dialogue flavor, it would practically double the time and resources needed for story. And you may have noticed even the pace of current content delivery is...less than ideal. Not to mention it wouldn't make sense within the current narrative, unless the evil paths were more like "grey" choices. We are supposed to be saving the world after all.

"Evil" playthroughs and morality systems are better suited for actual cRPGs and MMOrpgs are not that. The closest I can think of is SWTOR's light/dark mechanic and ESO's "justice" system (although less narrative driven). Both had a head start since the mechanics are borrowed from their Single-Player predecessors.

[Kodokuna Akuma.9570]

@"Shiv.5781" said:GW2 was released in 2012, its been 7 years and we're all still here trying to play the good guy? Isn't it time to be bad already ...

This could be quality content about adding an option to choose if you want to play with the bad guys. I want to become Balthazar's Herald, I want to bring wrath to tyria ... I wanna experience all those things?

We should have an option of which side we want to play, instead of being told that we HAVE to play the GOOD side. I want to ride Kralkatoric and not Aurene...

Please think about it...

I like the idea and while Im sure I would enjoy this. They channeled this a bit with the whole joko's monologue, which was a nice touch btw. But im sure id love to have that kind of crushing movment where it turns out that your the bad guy, you thought everything you have been doing has been for the "Good of tyria" but well nope ;p

[Dami.5046]

and there was me, just hoping a teeny bit to be a Kurzick one day. sigh but no one wants pvp outside of the usual zones, at least that would make you the bad guy.

[Samnang.1879]

@"joneirikb.7506" said:Essentially the story in this game is built like a mix of Movies and Mini-series, not as a "rolePlayingGame". Only the Personal Story of the original game had some traces off this, but it was later completely removed when they started on LS 1/2.

If you want deep story and character development, I'd recommend to find another game, instead of disappointing yourself with wishing this game turns into that. Take this game for what it is, good action-combat and open-world with popcorn-flick story.

(Sorry, I'm physically incapable of writing short posts it seems...)

The beauty of storytelling is that it doesn't have to make sense, I guess. See: commander coming back to life after being braindead.... yet Eir or any other dead characters couldn't. :confounded:

In regards to Zhaitan, i guess he could have wiped most ppl, but narrator could turn around and say that there are humans living underground, or people who are immuned to his attacks, or it doesn't affect people living in Crystal desert.

---

Nah, I'm not expecting anything from GW2 in terms of stories, I don't expect MMO's to have a deep story. I didn't play this game for the story.But this game seems to be focusing on stories more than ever especially with the releases of living worlds season 4 and soon S5, so just offering suggestions on how they can make it so I can enjoy the story.Am perfectly aware some people are fine with how the story is progressing, in fact, they still want to fight more dragons i.e. Bubbles or something, whereas for me, I'm tired of fighting Elder dragons... story-wise. From my perspective, it needs a change up, or let us have the choice to side with the Elder Dragon...

[MithranArkanere.8957]

The only way a player can be bad in being on an enemy team in PvP or WvW that is opposing my team. Then they are evil incarnate and must be wiped out of existence.

Instead, for PvE they could instead let us make a "Nemesis". We'd get a message from the pact or other local authorities to inform us about someone having a bounty on our heads, and when we go talk with them, we get a character creation screen, select race and appearance, a few background story choices, their profession, their choice of 'goons', change their looks selecting gear skins and other visual customizations, give them a name, and you get your Nemesis.

Then the Nemesis would appear in a series of new random open world events scattered all over the world, and at certain points in story, trying to hinder your plans and further their own agenda. They could get one pre-made build per major release that use player skills from that release (core, Hot, PoF, etc).

[Stand The Wall.6987]

@derd.6413 said:heroic evil?baldurs gate?

[luzonophir.7134]

if you wanna play a bad guy, go to wvwvw and teamchat pvp the players there.

and if you bring down the teamchat of the whole server and you still winning, that means your barz are as vicious as a tiger and a lion combined roars.

[Danikat.8537]

As other people have said this would be a huge amount of work, especially on this scale - as soon as you join one of the enemy factions or side with the dragons you're essentially playing a different game. You'd need entirely different story instances, not just for that section but for all future storylines too. (Or even more generic plot than we already get, with absolutely no references to any past events, no association with major characters or organisations and no long-term effects on the world, so it fits all the different versions of the story players might have gone through.)

And on top of that it has relatively little benefit. There are a lot of articles and even psychological studies which have shown that the vast majority of gamers will always try to choose the 'good' option when presented with a choice, and those who pick evil options usually do so on a second or later play-through (suggesting that they actually wanted to pick the good option then repeated the game to see what difference it made). Here's two examples:https://www.polygon.com/2015/3/3/8144573/game-players-evil-choiceshttps://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/morality-games-are-players-prone-good-evil-choices-1181699

That's definitely how I approach it in the majority of games. I like having the opportunity to choose what I'll do and start out intending to make multiple characters to see all the options but in practice it rarely happens. My first/main character will always pick what I think is the best choice and at some point I'll make a dedicated evil character to do the opposite but I've found I don't enjoy playing them and so rarely get very far, even in games where it makes a big difference. For example in Elder Scrolls Online my 'evil' character is a vampire and a member of the Dark Brotherhood, so he has two skill lines and an entire DLC story arc my other characters have no access to, and even then I barely play him because it just doesn't interest me as much. I'm actually more interested in less drastic changes, like the sarcastic options in Dragon Age 2 or racial/profession related dialogue in GW2 (although I wish there was more of it). I've got 11 permanent GW2 characters and have played every personal story instance at least once, but the idea of an evil character has never appealed to me.

Maybe it's different for people who would choose that path on a first play through, but I feel like that's better left for games dedicated to that which can do it justice rather than an alternate storyline for an existing game, especially an MMO with an on-going storyline like GW2.

[DaFishBob.6518]

You'll get another fractal as a lip service way to play the bad guys (i.e. Flame Legion, Inquest, Mordant Crescent).

[Trise.2865]

But you can already play as a Charr.

[wickedkae.4980]

It's been time to be the bad guy forever. Unfortunately that would require thinking outside the box. If you haven't noticed, anet does not possess writers of this caliber.