Is That Meant To Be Me? : GW2

We're coming up hard against the next beta weekend. It's The Secret World this time and I had a little more left to say on Guild Wars 2 but there's scarcely time. Maybe there's somewhere I could get some advice on pacing myself.

Luckily someone already covered the main point I had it in mind to make. Several someones, in fact. Syl, and Azuriel for two. The point in question is whether the MMO world is ready for a theme park that doesn't tell you where the rides are, which order you're supposed to ride them or when you get on and off. There may be some danger of culture shock and if we're talking MMO tourism, there did seem to be more than a few people on Yak's Bend last Sunday who'd found they'd gone on a Tyrian holiday by mistake.

That's 35xp right there!

Cries of "Where do I go to level up?" and "I did all the hearts and I'm still two levels too low for the next zone" echoed through Map chat in Plains of Ashford every time I passed by. Pointing out (as I did, frequently) that levels scale, events diverge and change, travel to other areas is fast and easy or even that you can get experience from pulling up an onion (a Ravious Top Ten Tip) was met by complete indifference. The most disheartening thing was that no-one even argued the point, they just reeled off the exact same prescriptive instructions you'd get from anyone trying to be helpful in WoW (oh, use your imagination - it could happen). "Go here, stay there this long, then go there", "Do this first, then do that".

My least-favorite "helpful" reply was "go do your Personal Story". Now I'm not knocking the quality of the Personal Stories. Wait. I'm not knocking the quality of the Charr Ash Legion Personal Story, that being the only one I've seen. Black Swans and all that. I did some more of mine and it's pretty good as these things go. My problem isn't with how ArenNet have done the Personal Stories. It's that they've done them.

Someone else in a similar place. Close enough.

I sent a good deal of negative feedback during the last beta test, using the bug reporting tool in creative mode. Most of it was about the UI, with which I have some serious issues. (I did try doing a post on that but even I was bored before the third paragraph). My other complaints were largely related to the existence of the Personal Story, which I felt was having the exact opposite of the intended effect.

Far from bonding me with my character,  I felt I was being invited to watch a movie about someone else entirely, with the screening being spasmodically interrupted and re-scheduled in increasingly inconvenient locations in and around The Black Citadel. It was enjoyable but it seemed to have nothing at all to do with the supposedly living, open dynamic world inhabited by my own character (you know, the one whose motivations, attitudes and personality quirks I decide).

Now this looks like a story I want to hear

Maybe it's possible to integrate an instanced, didactic, directed, inflexible Personal Story seamlessly with a quasi-open world filled with unpredictable dynamic events. If so, ArenaNet don't seem to have cracked it yet. I fear that, as Azuriel succinctly puts it, "You cannot start off with structured, instanced storytelling and then act surprised when someone asks when they can get to the next step". Which was what was happening all day Sunday.

Wake me up when it's all over

My personal solution is to think of my character's Personal Story as some kind of dream or fantasy he's having and not allow it to get in the way of him doing whatever the hell he feels like doing. That way I can enjoy the really rather good storytelling without being affected by the incongruity. Heaven knows I'm used to blinking at logical inconsistencies in MMOs. Sometimes I have to blink so often I must be at risk of strobe-induced epilepsy.

Ah well, plenty of people didn't "get" Guild Wars when it launched and that ended up doing alright. I'm sure it'll all work out in the end. Fingers crossed.