Suggestion: improve accessibility for story

[getskilled.2481]

I can tell so much work has been put into this game and the story, but I've come to avoid doing the story content whenever possible.

For players who solo more often or those who don't always have huge chunks of time, the story is difficult to complete.

Many story sections take a while to complete, even with a group, and longer if you solo them. It can easily be over and hour between points where your progress is saved. You don't get experience during progress, and many sections also seem to have bugs that stall story sections that already take a long time, or make it likely for them to crash.

I've run into these issues in PoF more than other story sections. I really enjoyed EoD. I'd like to be able to enjoy the HoT and PoF stories as well, but working on them feels more like slogging through an obligation that carries a high risk of zero gain than playing a game.

 

Please add more "save progress" points in the stories. This would make it easier for players to complete stories more easily if they need to pause for some reason. It would make it way more accessible for EVERYONE--people who have health issues and need to take breaks, have kids to pick up, crash because they're running on older systems, or people who just want to do something else and enjoy another part of the game for a while.

I'd also like to suggest giving experience for kills within the story. Not an accessibility issue, but for people who suddenly need to quit a story section early or crash, it would be less of a loss if they could at least earn experience.

 

 

 

 

[Danikat.8537]

I'm completely in favour of adding more check points to story instances, but I also can't remember any which take me more than hour to complete, even taking my time looking around and checking for any optional dialogue with NPCs. An hour is often all the time I have from logging on to when I need to stop and it's relatively rare that I need to stop part-way through a story instance because I don't have enough time for it. (And yes, I almost always do them all solo.)

[JTGuevara.9018]

1 hour ago, getskilled.2481 said:

I can tell so much work has been put into this game and the story, but I've come to avoid doing the story content whenever possible.

For players who solo more often or those who don't always have huge chunks of time, the story is difficult to complete.

Many story sections take a while to complete, even with a group, and longer if you solo them. It can easily be over and hour between points where your progress is saved. You don't get experience during progress, and many sections also seem to have bugs that stall story sections that already take a long time, or make it likely for them to crash.

I've run into these issues in PoF more than other story sections. I really enjoyed EoD. I'd like to be able to enjoy the HoT and PoF stories as well, but working on them feels more like slogging through an obligation that carries a high risk of zero gain than playing a game.

 

Please add more "save progress" points in the stories. This would make it easier for players to complete stories more easily if they need to pause for some reason. It would make it way more accessible for EVERYONE--people who have health issues and need to take breaks, have kids to pick up, crash because they're running on older systems, or people who just want to do something else and enjoy another part of the game for a while.

I'd also like to suggest giving experience for kills within the story. Not an accessibility issue, but for people who suddenly need to quit a story section early or crash, it would be less of a loss if they could at least earn experience.

 

 

 

 

Great suggestion.

Also, the 'save progress' points already exists for major lengthy instances of living world season 1. So, it's not like it's never been done. It would just need to expanded outside of season 1.

[Solvar.7953]

They sort of did this with the very end of PoF - where it is 2 instances, back to back, and finishing the first automatically drops you into the second.

And there are a lot of instances where there can be obvious breaks - some step (meet someone, kill a sub boss) when after doing it, there is no combat, so there shouldn't be any issue resuming at that point.

My related complaint is that when playing through, one has no idea the length of the next story step.  There are some instances which are 5 minutes of nothing much going on, and there are other instances which are pretty long.  If I only have 15 minutes before I have to go off and do something, I have no idea if I can do the next story step in that time, and if I start and I can't, I get nothing for that 15 minutes, since as noted, most stories give no treasure or experience until completion.  Just putting time estimates at each story step would be helpful (and might help Anet identify some really long story steps)

 

[Khisanth.2948]

9 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I'm completely in favour of adding more check points to story instances, but I also can't remember any which take me more than hour to complete, even taking my time looking around and checking for any optional dialogue with NPCs. An hour is often all the time I have from logging on to when I need to stop and it's relatively rare that I need to stop part-way through a story instance because I don't have enough time for it. (And yes, I almost always do them all solo.)

Victory or Death ...but that is the only one and only because it used to be a dungeon

[getskilled.2481]

To reply to everyone here:

I honestly can't even remember playing through season 1, so I'm not sure what the intervals there look like.

I should say that if I just plow RIGHT through a story section, I rarely hit something that takes more than an hour, but that's if I skip all the parts that actually give you achievements within that section (often needed for masteries). Either way, I think an hour is WAY too long of an interval. Having had to deal with bugs in 20-minute sections before, I feel like even a 20-minute interval is pushing it.

I agree that it's also frustrating that there's no real time estimate, but on this part, I couldn't really tell you a good fix, because I think that's going to be pretty dependent on how you play, what class you're playing, and if you have a party etc. Looking up tutorials on YT isn't always helpful (plus, then you're adding in the time you need to go watch the tutorial).