Why Don't We Have The Option To Replay Personal Story?

[Oglaf.1074]

My main just turned 5 the other day. I then just realized that I remember nothing other than my intense hatred for Trahearne when it comes to his personal story. I would love to replay it to refresh my memory and stuff. Like, I've no clue as to why my character is the Commander of the Pact...

[Ojimaru.8970]

The original core Tyria Personal Story featured multiple paths that would greatly affect the general experience of the story as a whole, unlike Season 2 and later stories which are linear. Depending on how it was coded, it may not be possible to repeat individual chapters of the story, like Heart of Thorns or Living World stories, and you would instead have to play through from the very beginning.

[Inc.4753]

Personal Story, like LS season 1, was not developed with instant replayability in mind, so there would be some work involved. Without dev comment we can't be sure but I think Anet does have the technology to make them available like LS season 2 (even with all the changes made to the Personal Story throughout the years). However, the urgency on this would be quite low. Developing new content and making other inaccessible content available (like LS season 1) would take priority, as the Personal Story can be revisited by creating a new character.

If you really wish to relieve your Personal Story you can read up on it in the story journal (fourth tab on your Hero panel) or, if you want to relive it, you can note the choices made by using the story journal and the wiki and use that as a blueprint when creating a new character.

[Just a flesh wound.3589]

They've looked at it and said this about resetting/replaying the Personal story.

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.

reddit threadforum thread

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Be careful what you ask for. ANet might give it to you.

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[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

It's the age old story: some stuff was designed in a way that made it cheaper to produce, but limited its expandability later. In this case, I feel that I can replay the personal stories by creating a new toon, so that's a "good enough" work around for me -- I don't think it's worth the time it would take for ANet to adjust the code for personal stories to make them repeatable.

[Zadoki.2374]

I kind of wish you could replay the story steps you chose, similar to the current LS models. Where you can replay the story for achievements but no actual rewards.

[Danikat.8537]

When GW2 first launched (and presumably before then) their intention was that the story would all be played through once and then you'd move on. So the personal story was permanent but non-repeatable and any other storylines were going to be added through time-limited special events.

Originally these weren't even going to use the 2 week/1 month format Season 1 had, it was going to be literally run one time only. They tried that twice - the first ever Halloween had a 'lite' version where parts of the event were added and removed as it progressed and then the Lost Shores weekend was the first full special event.

Things did not go to plan. There were bugs with some content which meant it had to stay up longer than planned to allow players to complete it, and some gating had to be removed so sections could be skipped. Some people ended up doing things out of order as a result. And getting everyone into the same map (Southsun) for the finale lead to lots of problems with lag, disconnects or simply not having a clue what was going on and having to just follow the crows spamming skills and hope for the best. On top of which a lot of people missed it because they couldn't log in for some/all of the event. So they didn't try that again. They switched to sort releases that could be finished in a day or a few days but were available for a month, later on shifting it so there was a release every 2 weeks and they overlapped.

Then because of player demand they finally switched to making permanent content - first Season 2 then a mix of expansions and Living World releases. But there are still some relics of the original design around. The absence of Season 1 and the non-repeatable Personal Story being the main ones.