Oh, Hey! Destiny's Edge! Didn't You Guys Used To Be Famous Or Something? : GW2

I had something of a GW2 epiphany this week. I was reading the Edge of Destiny novel and  suddenly I understood just why so many players really hated Season One of The Living Story.

Sure, it was episodic and fractured and all over the place, I knew that. Sure, Scarlet was a deeply unconvincing villain and the plot, in so far as there was one, made no sense at all. I got all that, even as we were playing through, but none of it particularly bothered me at the time. It was like the buffet at a wedding - you pick out the bits you like and leave the rest, don't you? And if that turns out to be most of it, well, it doesn't really matter because the food's hardly the reason you came, right?

Well, maybe. There's another way to look at it, though  Try turning that analogy on its head. It seems some people hadn't come expecting a big, flashy wedding at all. They'd come for a satisfying meal with some old friends and that hastily thrown-together buffet left a lot of them feeling very hungry. I was a bit puzzled by that but now I think I understand.

Edge of Destiny isn't great literature. It's not even great genre literature. It's fluent and professional but somewhat perfunctory, something Ravious picked up on in the review he posted back when the book came out, some two years before GW2 . Despite being over 300 pages long it often feels more like reading notes for a novel than the novel itself. In part  that's down to the minimalist prose style, which uses a lot of short, declarative sentences and one-line paragraphs, but mostly it's because of the vast number of fight scenes. Detailed descriptions of fights and battles probably make up almost two-thirds of the word count.

Nevertheless it zips along. I've read a lot worse. If I'd never played GW2 I'd probably still have finished reading it. Of course, if I'd never played GW2 I would never have started reading it in the first place. Edge of Destiny exists only as an adjunct to the game. Nothing unusual about that. Lots of successful enterprises in many forms of entertainment have spin-offs in other formats. That's fine.

It's fine, but it's not what's happening here. Not all of it by a long way. Having read the thing at last, I'd say that far from being just a bit of ancillary fluff or deep background for lore obsessives, a reading of Edge of Destiny is pretty much required if you hope to engage emotionally with the whole Elder Dragon storyline. They should have included the eBook with the game purchase. It's that essential.

MMOs always have an awkward, difficult, relationship with narrative but GW2 is even more problematic in that regard than most. For a start there's the vast iceberg of the original Guild Wars looming ominously below the surface. GW1 was a narrative-driven rpg that over many years produced several lengthy campaigns and a number of smaller expansions. The plots, characters and stories of many of these feed directly into the lore and storyline of GW2.

GW2, then, does not come clean to the table and neither do its players. Depending on their previous level of involvement with the franchise they will have highly varying degrees of both pre-existing emotional commitment and knowledge and understanding of the ongoing story and the world in which it takes place. But it doesn't end there.

ArenaNet chose to use a highly divisive Personal Story format, in which not only does each of the five races get served a different piece of the narrative cake but the slice they get is divided at least twice more, first according to the somewhat arbitrary and uninformed choices the player was forced to take at character creation and then again depending on his or her choice of Order in the game. Although everyone comes back together for the bulk of the storyline, a player's understanding of what is going on, why and what it all means will necessarily be highly colored by that point, depending on her race and the choices she has made.

As well as reading the novel this week I also played through the Asuran Personal Story as far as Lion's Arch for the first time. I've never been an admirer of the Personal Story in GW2 but I have run through variants of both the Human and Charr versions up to Claw Island. Neither of those runs told me much of specific relevance to the overarching Elder Dragon narrative that forms the spine of the entire game, or at least nothing I remember.

In contrast, the Asura personal storyline (College of Statics version) confronts that narrative head on. The whole "elder dragons are waking up and eating all our magic" thing is directly addressed and examined, along with the ongoing issues of governmental cover-ups and subterfuge that seeks to keep this information from the public. For the first time I didn't just feel I understood what was going on but also why we, as players, were involved with the Orders and why those Orders were necessary.

So, we already have a narrative structure in which it is entirely possible to play several characters to the level cap and complete their personal stories and yet still have no clear idea of what it was all about. Unless we assume everyone will play all variations, that's not ideal. Unsurprisingly, many, many players complained on completing the Personal Story that it felt hollow and they felt emotionally disconnected.

Much of the blame was placed on the deeply unpopular Trahearne and the anticlimactic Zhaitan "fight" but there's also a soggy hole right at the center with the supposed "getting the band back together" sequence in Lion's Arch. Just who were these people and why should I care? My character might be understood to know and be awed by these Tyrian celebrities but as a player my only real knowledge of their history came from the three children playing "Destiny's Edge" in the plaza as I arrived.


For all its faults as a novel, Edge of Destiny succeeds admirably in introducing the reader to several eminently likeable and well-drawn characters. For that reason alone, for those who came to GW2 having read the book, meeting Eir, Rytlock, Caithe, Zojja and Logan in game would inevitably offer a greatly increased potential to achieve significant emotional impact. I had seen that sequence several times before but this time, reaching that stage of the Personal Story just a few hours after living through the downbeat, depressing ending of the novel, watching them bicker, argue, trade recriminations and finally stalk off across the Plaza in different directions came freighted with a whole, new, powerful set of resonances.

Partly it's that I feel I know these people now, in that way all readers feel they "know" characters in books they have read, a mental trick that prose finds much easier to achieve than almost any other narrative form. Partly it's that I understand, in detail, what they achieved, what they failed to achieve and what that failure cost. My pleasure and interest in GW2's storyline has been immensely enhanced as a result of reading the novel and that's a problem.

MMOs already suffer badly from portmanteauism. They have no through-line. They exist as an often disparate, even conflicting, congregate of parts that, we hope, somehow contrive to form a  greater whole. There are many voices raised against the wisdom of including narrative in the genre at all. To hold significant elements outwith the game itself seems almost reckless and yet it seems to be the trend. Just this week SOE released the latest of their series of EQNext "Lore Books". I haven't bothered with any of these in the past; now I feel I probably should, although I imagine I have plenty of time to get around to doing that.

Reading is dangerous. It gives people ideas.

In a way, though, I'm quite glad I waited until two years after launch before I thought to read Edge of Destiny. Yes, I missed out on a deal of emotional weight that the game might have had for me until now and yes I'd have had a significantly better understanding of what was going on around me. On the other hand I saved myself a lot of what I now see as entirely justified anger and frustration over the year and a half that ANet spent fiddle-faddling around with a bunch of annoying second-string characters and an aggravating Mary Sue villain instead of just getting on with the real story. I was able to take Rox, Braham and the rest at face value and get to know them without strongly wishing they were someone else.

I was lucky. I had just enough GW1 background to get by on the lore and more than enough residual affection for the franchise to give the new game a pass when it needed one. At the same time I wasn't drenched in the world and all its trappings to the point where everything that didn't feel "just so" jarred.


GW2 sold a lot of boxes and a lot of them went to people who didn't know GW1 or Edge of Destiny from a hole in the ground. The Personal Story didn't seem to grab many of those people and neither did the big, out-of-narrative, one-time, dynamic open world events. Meanwhile the established franchise fans who knew all the lore and had read and played all the things weren't happy either.

ANet made several attempts to appease the uncommitted with varying degrees of success but in the end the difference is this: disgruntled fans stick around. They kvetch and complain and make everyone feel uncomfortable but it takes a lot more than a few badly-implemented game mechanics and a botched narrative arc to drive them away for good. Which, I think, is why we find Season Two playing so solidly and deliberately to the established fanbase. That's the mature market for the game.

And I guess, like it or not, it includes me. I'm contemplating starting the Sylvari Personal Story later today. No-one but a fan could possibly stomach that.