Gw2 has stopped giving choices?

[mega.5871]

I feel that gw2 living world has stopped give us CHOICES. Last time I remember choosing a course of action is back in Heart of Thorns (choosing who to take to fight mordrmoth). LV season 2 and PoF seems to have stopped doing that. The choosing of your story is important to Gw2 it makes the "This is my Story" phrase feel less important and sentimental that it should be.

 

Maybe the devs have forgotten the thing. But creating many instances is probably time taking and it must take a lot of effort to create multiple paths; that could be a reason for them neglecting choice.

[Gemnaid.4219]

Play how you want has been gone for a long time now.

[Danikat.8537]

> @"mega.5871" said:

> But creating many instances is probably time taking and it must take a lot of effort to create multiple paths; that could be a reason for them neglecting choice.

 

I think that's probably the reason. Especially since it seems like a lot of people either only played the personal story once or didn't remember enough to notice when it was different. I can't count how many times I've seen someone talk about something that only happens in one of the optional instances as if it's something absolutely everyone will have to go through to finish the story - because they don't realise which instances are universal and which are based on their choices.

 

It's not unique to GW2. A friend of mine is a games developer who actually specialises in writing branching dialogue and stories for games and even he advises people to think carefully about how many choices they put in and how much difference they make because the majority of players apparently only play through a game once, so the choices don't actually matter too much to them. (Apparently a common 'trick' is to make dialogue that seems like it will have an impact - so players get that sense of getting to decide what kind of a person their character actually is - but with minimal gameplay changes so developers don't spend a huge amount of effort on building alternate storylines most people will never choose.)

[mega.5871]

 

> It's not unique to GW2. A friend of mine is a games developer who actually specialises in writing branching dialogue and stories for games and even he advises people to think carefully about how many choices they put in and how much difference they make because the majority of players apparently only play through a game once, so the choices don't actually matter too much to them. (Apparently a common 'trick' is to make dialogue that seems like it will have an impact - so players get that sense of getting to decide what kind of a person their character actually is - but with minimal gameplay changes so developers don't spend a huge amount of effort on building alternate storylines most people will never choose.)

I see thanks for clarifying :3

 

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

> @"Gemnaid.4219" said:

> Play how you want has been gone for a long time now.

 

"Play how you like" was never about making RP choices during the story. It was about being able to gear up and get some shinies regardless of what content you did. That has been true since launch, although how easy or difficult it's been to do that (and which shinies are available) has varied over time.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

> @"Danikat.8537" said:

> It's not unique to GW2. A friend of mine is a games developer who actually specialises in writing branching dialogue and stories for games and even he advises people to think carefully about how many choices they put in and how much difference they make because the majority of players apparently only play through a game once, so the choices don't actually matter too much to them. (Apparently a common 'trick' is to make dialogue that seems like it will have an impact - so players get that sense of getting to decide what kind of a person their character actually is - but with minimal gameplay changes so developers don't spend a huge amount of effort on building alternate storylines most people will never choose.)

 

An example of this are the choices people made in PoF. According to ANet:

* 55% of characters chose "upbeat" 3 times

* 19% chose "downbeat"

* 14% chose "vague"

* 10% mixed it up.

 

That's a lot of speech writing (and voice acting) just for the Small Victory (epilogue), with zero impact to the rest of the game.

 

Similarly,

* 43% aligned with Kormir

* 38% went neutral (Amnoon, in the infographic)

* 18% praised Joko

 

Would the game have been worse off without the Joko option? That involved even more effort (since there is an extra collection and related achievements just for making that simplistic choice).

 

>! 

 

[Danikat.8537]

And here I was thinking the obvious way to handle the speech was to make 1 upbeat choice, 1 downbeat and 1 vague - it was only the order that gave me trouble. In retrospect I'm not sure why I thought that, but it seemed logical to me at the time that a mix of all 3 would be the default and 3 the same would be 'unusual' choices for alternate playthroughs.

[Zedek.8932]

Excelsior.

 

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781"

Amazing that aNet even logs this stuff in such a large scale. I could understand to check the account's database for that info, but wow.

I think you and Danikat brought up a very good point that explains the thread pretty well. I love the voice of the male German Asura (he is the German voice of Sean Astin - Samweis Gamgee from LOTR for example) and I was luckily recording the whole instance to disk to get a long voice sample - and then I talked to all the NPC of course and then there was that long speech. Still listening to it once in a while.

 

I will never play through it ever again, so I don't know what's being said there when I would pick upbeat. I am the 10% mixing up, picking downbeat, downbeat and vague.

 

Also, the band in the background plays sad and slow music then, so it's not even just speech, but also soundtrack that changes.

 

 

[OriOri.8724]

> @"mega.5871" said:

> I feel that gw2 living world has stopped give us CHOICES. Last time I remember choosing a course of action is back in Heart of Thorns (choosing who to take to fight mordrmoth). LV season 2 and PoF seems to have stopped doing that. The choosing of your story is important to Gw2 it makes the "This is my Story" phrase feel less important and sentimental that it should be.

>

> Maybe the devs have forgotten the thing. But creating many instances is probably time taking and it must take a lot of effort to create multiple paths; that could be a reason for them neglecting choice.

 

About multiple different instances for different paths, I would hate if they went back to this. because it means that they have to create more instances for the same amount of content length wise, which means that either the overall story is shorter, or the quality starts to drop pretty quickly.

 

That said, I think PoF did give us some choices which were a lot of fun, just different than the type of choices in HoT. The instance where you command the undead army for instance, you can choose to use the army itself, which is a lot of fun, or to go at it alone, with your own skills. You can choose for Amnoon to side with 1 of 3 alliances for example. Choice is still there.

[Cragga the Eighty Third.60]

> @"Danikat.8537" said:

> And here I was thinking the obvious way to handle the speech was to make 1 upbeat choice, 1 downbeat and 1 vague - it was only the order that gave me trouble. In retrospect I'm not sure why I thought that, but it seemed logical to me at the time that a mix of all 3 would be the default and 3 the same would be 'unusual' choices for alternate playthroughs.

 

Heh, if I remember correctly, I started it vague, then gave them the bad news, then finished on upbeat. It seemed the best way not to freak out the crowd and ruin the victory party without lying and leaving them unprepared for the future. I remember not being happy with what my character chose for actual 'downbeat' words, though. (As in, "OMG, you did NOT just say THAT!" Something like, 'a big stinkin' dragon is about to chew us all up and we're doomed' or similar?)

 

As the story becomes more complicated and there seems to be more demand for ever-more-impressive graphics, skins and effects, I can see why there are not as many significant choices. Having to create three divergent chapters (and not contradict any of those separate event chains subsequently) adds a huge extra burden on the developers. And in the past, there have definitely been a less-than ideal splicing together afterward. (Such as my Asura character suddenly acting like old buddies with someone from the human storyline whom I had never seen before.)

 

In any case, what are our priorities as players? How much do you want story choices? Enough to wait an extra six months for an expansion? Enough to give up the thought of new skins and legendaries? Enough to give up new masteries and mounts? Enough not to whine about unimaginative bosses and mechanics?

 

I'd love to see more divergent story paths, and I'd like to see it prioritized over some of the other ways devs will use their resources, but for every thing I'd be willing to throw under the bus in favor of more story development, there will be other players who would absolutely not agree.

[Danikat.8537]

I'd love it if they did give us more choices that actually change the story. I'm one of those people who will go out of my way to play all the possible variations. If a game looks like it has branching storylines I'll create two totally different characters to see how different the story can be, and if it does make a difference I'll create and play as many different characters as needed to get all the variants. So for me it does add a lot of gameplay.

 

But that also means I can see how it can quickly get out of hand. The personal story in GW2 is a perfect example, there are 15 possible endings to the level 30 story arc and **30** different instances for one step in the level 20 storyline. And the majority of people will only ever see one or two of those, maybe 5 if they make a character of each race. Even I only know there's 30 because I'm looking at a spreadsheet I made to track which ones I've done.

 

No really, I did:


 

If there's a way they can give us the same sense of choice without having to make so many different versions of the same story that's probably better overall because it means less time spent developing each release and so more releases overall. Probably the ideal middle ground is including some relatively minor choices like when we picked who Amnoon would side with, combined with some of those 'illusion of choice' moments where you get to pick how you're going to do something but it doesn't result in an entirely different instance.

[Underdark.3726]

I would like to see something like the Cutthroat Politics release where the whole community had a voice of choosing who will win the elections and what fractal will we get.

[Stitch.1794]

> @"Underdark.3726" said:

> I would like to see something like the Cutthroat Politics release where the whole community had a voice of choosing who will win the elections and what fractal will we get.

 

I didn’t like what they did with Cutthroat Politics. The fact that one of those fractals would never get made was a bad idea. Choosing which one to make now, with the other coming later would have been much better - I’d have loved to have seen the gods taking down Abaddon, but apparently that’s no longer an option. It goes away from what was said above, about the trick being giving the players enough of an illusion of choice without having it have a major effect on the world or story.

 

Where CP went well, I think, is in the story side of it, where we now have Ellen Kiel on the council. We got a meaningful choice there, but nothing in the main storyline since then has really relied on which of them sits on the council.

[Zaklex.6308]

> @"mega.5871" said:

> I feel that gw2 living world has stopped give us CHOICES. Last time I remember choosing a course of action is back in Heart of Thorns (choosing who to take to fight mordrmoth). LV season 2 and PoF seems to have stopped doing that. The choosing of your story is important to Gw2 it makes the "This is my Story" phrase feel less important and sentimental that it should be.

>

> Maybe the devs have forgotten the thing. But creating many instances is probably time taking and it must take a lot of effort to create multiple paths; that could be a reason for them neglecting choice.

 

You do realize that the "This is My Story" ended with the death of Zhaitan...it was only ever intended to carry you through the original personal story...and that was it.

[TexZero.7910]

We never really had choice before anyway....

 

We've always had the illusion of choice, but because this is an MMO story can't be divergent based on individual choices otherwise the narrative team would lose track of every plot point created.

[Donari.5237]

I also like having different "phases" of dialogue based on choices, but others in this thread have compelling reasons why that's very hard to do on an MMO scale. So instead I hope they'll give us more variants within the stories. Dialogues based on our race, puzzle solution options based on our profession, like we've seen on a small scale already in Caudecus' manor and in the Awakened prison, and back in the LS1 Tower of Nightmares we had a room that could be solved either by puzzles or by beating things up. A little of that goes a long way to making players feel like the writers care about which character the player has chosen to bring.

[Danikat.8537]

> @"Donari.5237" said:

> I also like having different "phases" of dialogue based on choices, but others in this thread have compelling reasons why that's very hard to do on an MMO scale. So instead I hope they'll give us more variants within the stories. Dialogues based on our race, puzzle solution options based on our profession, like we've seen on a small scale already in Caudecus' manor and in the Awakened prison, and back in the LS1 Tower of Nightmares we had a room that could be solved either by puzzles or by beating things up. A little of that goes a long way to making players feel like the writers care about which character the player has chosen to bring.

 

I think that's a good compromise. I like it when we get extra or alternative dialogue because of our race, profession or other choices.

 

There was one recently in one of the Current Events achievements - you collect parts for an asuran to make you a gizmo to track awakened invasions and if you're an asuran, an engineer or an Iron Legion charr you can offer to help build it (and therefore get it quicker) rather than leaving him to it.

 

It doesn't actually change the overall story so there's relatively little extra work for Anet to do, but it makes it feel a bit more like my characters are different people who the NPCs see as individuals.

[lagrangewei.8516]

gw2 always depend on illusion of choice because as an mmo, the story will become longer and wider, it simply restrictive to the writers if they use up all their "options", this become progressively harder as the game ages and character become more complex and hard to keep track. having a single plot and a tight story cut cost and development time while delivering more content. also most player don't replay the story or even play the story entirely so the effort would be wasted. that energy can be use to develop maps, raid, dungeons that has more replayability.

 

personally i find it ok. it not going to be a bioware game, bioware game deliver great story but after that u just stop playing, gw2 doesn't want to be that kind of game and I don't want gw2 to try and be swtor. sure I would like my action to mean something and it always anti-climatic to know my action doesn't do anything then to change a few dialog and what npc i see, but it not why i play gw2.

 

idk, i have a great sense of adventure with POF, and the concluding speech thing, i feel was a good touch even if it doesn't really influence much. i think they improve their pacing which was a problem in season 2/3 transition with HOT.