11/26/2012

Guild Wars 2: Personal Quest

Lets get straight to it people: I am still loving (see: addicted) Guild Wars 2. Its a great game, but not a perfect game. I question frequently why I can't trade items with players.. I can't think of an mmo game that i've played where there were issues with it. But when you have a free mail system.. it doesn't cause too much of a bother. The main issue i'm encountering these days is the Personal Quest system.


 I love the Personal Quest system in that when you customize your character, you have a background story which affects your actual over-arcing story in the game. You experience your story via a Personal Quest, which is a persistent quest that is always available to you; you can zoom through it (although it increases in level difficulty) or wait til you hit max level to tackle (it will of course de-level you so that it is still challenging). Your friends can join you and it will take you to the appropriate map areas that you normally would visit anyways, so its rather convenient. It gives a good chunk of experience, has good loot rewards, and you can save the gear for transmuting in the future.

While I haven't encountered how indepth/special your story gets (thanks to my alt-oholicism), the beginning always seems to be very tailored to how you chose your background story. But after you get over that beginning part, it seems to become a generic storyline of you needing to defeat the dragons.

That isn't my main issue I have with the game b/c I don't expect Arenanet to develop such a detailed questline for the many ways you can customize it. My beef is that the dialogues between you and NPCs are not engaging. I wish it was more like SWTOR; in SWTOR, you got to pick your responses, finding a balance(or extreme I suppose) between Light and Dark side choices. In GW2, there is a preset dialogue that you must just listen to. I guess we should be happy that your character has his/her own voice and isn't just a silent mute.. but its really boring to just listen to these preset dialogues. I would have loved to see (we can never expect to have choices in the future; NEVER! I have thus predicted it) dialogue options implemented in the future, but doubt it will ever happen.

To nitpick a little more, your party members that join you on your personal quest have no input (a la dice roll per SWTOR) and get no rewards other than the loot and xp of the monsters you kill in the instance. So very little reason for them to join you, other than to be helpful and participate in one's personal story.

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