I just finished the main story campaign.

[Hashberry.4510]

I find the perceived story quality varies with my state of mind. Some days the story is everything wrong with mmo story telling, others its a lovely relaxing play through (though Braham and Taimi are always annoying).

[Randulf.7614]

Core was fine for its time, it lacks the production values of later and thus has aged rather badly. LS2 is a lot better and actually a pretty good story, with two strong maps and well structured chapters and excellent boss fights. Again, it lacked production values esp in the removal of the commanders VA.

Generally speaking there are only a few high spots in the story. The narrative is messy, unfocused, unplanned and survives by much better dialogue, VA, cutscenes and gameplay than what came before. 
 

You do have to bear in mind that core and ls2 (incl dry top) aren’t as widely hated as you perceive, so this isn’t a case of piling on the devs. LS2 was a breath of fresh air to many of us who suffered the problems of LS1 and was the start of a change away from what they originally intended and is the result of overwhelming feedback for change during the ls1 era. It has always been my belief that LS1 did more damage to the player base than any other era of the game - more than HoT supposedly did which was at least popular with many and gave years of fondly repeated content.

 

 

[Makaloff.7912]

On 2/7/2022 at 11:04 PM, Triga.5038 said:

I guess I understand now why paying 15$ a month for WOW makes sense.

If this kind of ridiculous mess is what we get then 15$ a month is not that bad.

Uhm i dont know about you but if you think GW2 story is bad, oh boy then i suggest you should take a look at Shadowlands. not to mention paying 15$/month for non rewarding content, toxic community and just bad game design all over the place.

But anyhow to be more ontopic: I played throught most of the stories (just missing S3 and IBS to complete) and i personally did enjoy the core story for most part. (allthought S2 i had to bring a friend with me to not fall asleep from how sloggish that season was). But we are all different, some like story, some dont. i like story but i usually take it in my pace, its nice to learn a bit about stuff sometimes and alot is voice acted which makes it better aswell (FF14 have for example WAY too much text).

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Most MMOs don't even have stories to play, they just throw you into the game world and expect you to survive.

 

Flaming GW2 for having a bad story when it was one of the first MMOs to actually have a story outside of raids, (and play more like a single-player game at times) is silly,  considering that around 2013-2014 many games on the market were developed (including WoW's next expansion at the time), to be based upon many standards that Guild Wars franchise set. Since then its become far more common to have a storyline campaign in MMOs.

 

What if I told you the FF14 rebuild which saved that entire franchise was based upon Guild Wars 2's success? That's right, many people don't realise it because of how wildly successful that game became, but the egg came several years before the chicken. The FF14 that existed at the time was absolute garbage.

 

But ArenaNet made mistakes while other game studios got better which is how we ended up here. Because they set the standard, but they couldn't keep up with it.

 

That's changing soon, so be prepared.

 

Edited February 18, 2022 by Hannelore.8153

[deatine.2498]

Well, I liked it, but my enjoyment of it varies greatly by the starting race and other choices you make during it. Best so far (and thus now my main) was blood legion Vigil Charr with "Dishonor my allies" as greatest fear.  

I also liked that you didn't start out as the chosen one and didn't end up as the one and only heroest hero ever, I found that fitting for an MMO, but that was dropped in the later chapters. I also liked the characters more than later ones and the tone wasn't as silly. 

[Teratus.2859]

Ahh you mean the personal story, Gw2's "main story" is still ongoing and will be ending in the next expansion.
Then we're moving on to something else, a second story or side story or second campaign.. we don't really know yet.
You've got a lot left before you "finish" the main story lol

But yea the personal story is a bit dated compared to the later content that was added to the game.
Doesn't even have open world dialogue which became default in the first expansion.

You are part of the reason I support Anet improving the core game which a number of players have disagreed with me on over the years.
"Meh old content sucks ignore it".. as i've often heard which is such a poor attitude to have.
Most players in Gw2 now were not around at launch, they never played LWS1 and their first experience with Gw2 is going to be that so called "bad old content"

First impressions are very important and that's why it is so important that this old content gets some TLC if you ask me.

I can say that if I joined a new game and everyone told me to ignore the first few years of content because "it sucks" then I would probably just refund the game.
It's just a really bad look for what is overall a really great game.
It's absolutely worth it to go back and fix up the core game, especially because Anet has plans to release the game on Steam coming in the future, a whole new market of potential players to bring in, who's first experience with Gw2 will be that "bad old content" 
 

Edited February 18, 2022 by Teratus.2859

[Hashberry.4510]

Keeping older content relevant is a strong point of this game, though mounts and power creep have worked against that. I hated the way Wow would nerf everything, reducing the fun you could have leveling alts.

[Nea.5936]

ya the core game's story is starting nicely but the more you move towards the end it feels like the developers haven't had enough time until release to finish it properly.

Specially everything behind the fort of trinity feels like it was rushed into the game and never really done in the way it should.

The endfight vs Zaithan is ofc not even worth to meantion. This fight looks like they had something else in their mind when theory crafting but could not do it cause of time reasons and just did something to have a finish at all.

Same goes for Arah. Back in the days when there was no other content, Arah was the endgame dungeon but it also feels pretty makeshift.

Im sure it was a matter of time running out before release.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Nea.5936

[Efar.8153]

.

Edited February 21, 2022 by Efar.8153

[Stx.4857]

The people making this game obviously played a lot of Mario and crash bandicoot as kids, because they design their maps and jumping puzzles like that.  It's very tedious and drives me nuts..  I just want to get on with the story, lore, and combat..  but no..  here's another puzzle.

[Mrs Lana.2506]

On 2/8/2022 at 6:09 AM, Fuchslein.8639 said:

Oh .. the point where anet decided that you can't skip dialog was the point, where i stopped playing the story.

I did it now for the legy amulet and it was one of the most boring thing i ever had to do in gw2 for something. The story has so many plot-holes, things that were started and then just disappear and more. Just Awful. I'll be glad if I never have to do that again since I'm not an achievment hunter thank god.

I've finished the personal story on all my characters, and tended to afk during the unskippable cutscenes, or at least find something to listen to/watch on my other monitor. Re-playing LS2 now, and it's much worse. There's so much VA'd dialogue, and then on TOP of that there's dialogue you have to click through. It's such a step down from the way it was set up in the personal story.

I love well-written stories, but there are so many holes in this game that I just constantly shake my head at. There's no definition of death, so every time a character "dies" it has no effect on me - often I'll laugh at how badly it's done.

[Dawnbreaker.4901]

I don't really care so much for most of the Personal Story. I don't love it and I don't hate it. They didn't really do anything egregiously bad, but I've never been really "bored" playing it.

 

My favorite part of the game is, without question, Orr - I go back to the zones every time and again to run around and see the sights just like old times when the game first launched. I played through all of Guild Wars 1 and not ever being able to visit Orr really disappointed me - That's why I looked forward to seeing in GW2. All of my characters are humans because I like the lore for them. Typically I don't play humans in any sort of fantasy game, but for whatever reason, it just works for me here.

 

The biggest letdown for me in the Personal Story is 100% the ending of the Zhaitan encounter. That sucks. No doubt about it. It's one of the most underwhelming parts of the entire game. I think if we were given a fully fleshed out encounter with the dragon, that it would be more well-received. I would love to see a revamp of the fight, but given that it's been nearly ten years with no changes in sight, I'm not getting my hopes up.

[Keehra.4621]

As a returning player ... as from the day it was released ... GW2 didn't grab me so I went back the WoW-way. It was slicker, well thought out, was the game for me.
Now, all these years later ... having raided, dungeon-crawled, grinded out (useless) stuff, reputations and whatnot, I couldn't get into WoW again. Although I like most of the lore, some personal favourite characters (Sylvanas 😉 ), I felt it was enough. So I played some New World but felt 'cheated' due to the bugs, toxic community and so on.
So I went looking for something to sink my limited game time in and decided to go back to GW2 as I found out it was still shining brightly and even had a new expansion on the near horizon.
Long story short, I decided to get back in. 
In all honesty, this was refreshing! It catered to everything of my very casual playstyle, a non-obtrusive gem store, interesting crafting, a lot of mechanics to learn again and TL;DR: the personal story. I made a lot of alts to go through all the different stories for the races and I've enjoyed it a lot. What I do like, is that they give you choices so that the story plays out differently based on your choice. So yeah, I'm enjoying this.

The one thing I don't like (and it's more tongue in cheek), is the drinking game before you break out Demmi. It took me ages to get the hang of this but now - as a beer loving Belgian - I smash it.

Anyway, it gets a bit repetitive in the end but making different choices, doing it on different races with different professions, makes it enjoyable.

Did I think things were difficult at times? Yes, I died a number of times but the system of getting back at the stage where you died, made this pretty easy.

Edited February 21, 2022 by Keehra.4621

[KeoLegend.5132]

It was better than many of the current kitten we have.

It just need some revisiting and polish and skip some chores

[Redfeather.6401]

I finished the core storyline twice and it was once too much.

edit: I'm not against how it started. The way it starts is fun with lots of variety across the races and choices. How it ends is just mission after mission, of doing something kind of interesting to suddenly be stuck fighting waves of risen, again and again, and listening to traeherne being all generic leader.

Edited February 25, 2022 by Redfeather.6401