Guild Wars 2 story

AlnilamE

Danikat wrote: »

I play both games, I like both games and this is one of the things I don't think I really have a preference on.

While people are right that there is an over-arching story to ESO it's a lot more subtle. In GW2 it's more like if you jump into an expansion without playing the previous storyline you're not going to know what's going on - it would be like someone deciding to watch Game of Thrones and starting with season 5. Which is good if you want a huge, long story to play through, not so good if you like the story and want to jump straight into the latest content, but fortunately the game is designed so there's no pressure on new players (except maybe from their friends) to start doing the latest stuff right away.

My experience with Guild Wars 2:

A guildie started a weekly event there to show people the ropes, I made a character and ran around a bit. Did some of my story then started completing zones till I got to 80. In the meantime, I had bought HoT.

Went to Heart of Thorns without being even half-way through my story. Completed the first map and then stopped the story half-way through Auric Basin. Thought the meta events were cool.

Path of Fire came out and guildies and I ran around and did the story there, along with some map completions.

Guildies started playing hard core through the stories. I went back and finished my main story, then trudged through Living World Season 2, then went and finished Heart of Thorns and am now working though Season 3. Meanwhile my friends are at the newest chapter in Season 4 and I feel like I will never catch up and we can only play together for dailies or for doing stuff where I need help, not the other way around.

eso_nya

I do love the story (-telling) in eso, for me its the best part of the game.
[The rest of the post might contain minor spoilers]

What i miss a bit r choices with consequences.
end of mages guild, u have the choice between "doing the right thing" or "two skillpoints", no matter what u do there is no further impact in the story. raz and the ayleid crown, no matter what u do, there is no consequence, rather Cariel takes over "his" part in the story anyways. and he is back in summerset. I'd like to see the storyline develop different, based on choices. good choices, not that
"which one of the companions do u want to kill?"
- "Abnur, he's a jerk"
"nope, pick another one"
bs, that also had no further impact on the story. other than "u wont meet any of them again, because we didnt track your choice".

Would be nice to have options in some quests. side with little leaf and belkarth gets destroyed. side with the crows, abandon the nerd and raid cwc for shineys. use sunra on yourself. use the forbidden artifacts to play pranks on ppl. side with the iron wheel. whipe out the dak brotherhood. side with alga. give evermoore to the reach or the legion or to both and than backstab them.
it sometimes feels a bit off, to be the hero of every single dump in the game, but noone cares. or well, i killed the population of yellow npcs in morrowind a couple hundred times (for the motifs) and also noone cares.

Another thing that would be really nice, would be having different ways to complete the same task. in the "pick the lock", "bash in the door" or "knock" way. puzzles can be really cool, when u also have the option to avoid them by bashing in the ogres head or sneaking past the ogre. kinda puzzing, that with all the different sets and ways to spec, this is not a feature yet.

Even if the milestones stay the same, it would add alot of replayvalue for me. like a full playthru of kotor is a ls and a ds playthru.

kathandira

The best story, is the one that grabs you. Art is subjective.

Bhaal5

jainiadral wrote: »

Bhaal5 wrote: »

jainiadral wrote: »

heavier wrote: »

Linaleah wrote: »

heavier wrote: »

I want to be punished for pressing 'e' through dialogs and just following my intuition when I skip over something critical

there are quests in ESo that do that in that characters die if you rush choices, or you get different, sometimes lesser rewards. of course it requires you to actualy care about the characters that are part of the quests, and if you are skipping dialogue then you obviously don't so... don't know what kind of punishment are we talking about here.

like needing to listen to the NPC again because a piece of a puzzle is missing
I got a 200% EXP scroll in clockwork city because I did what I felt was good even though I knew choosing the other option would gran 250%
it's really frustrating because it was an arbitrary decision I didn't really feel like making personally and would have rather the whole thing been left to be dealt with by the proper authorities. I hate choosing to kill people or save them like WTF kind of choice. I don't care about this character or their betrayal enough to act as judge.
that's the kind of "reward for paying attention despite it not really mattering what's going on" that I want to avoid.

hire the devs of Myst and Riven, talk to the people who made Portal and Half Life about what kind of physics puzzles and real time pattern matching you can incorporate to make stuff engaging.
play classic TERA dungeons/pvp and learn about how to design challenging bosses without giving them lockon oneshots

If ESO devs ever try to copy Portal, I'm gone. Environmental puzzles royally suck, even if you're not stuck with crappy MMO jumping physics. GW2 Living Story puzzles were nasty, Last Train to Cairo in SWL was a misery, and the Gemini Deception in SWTOR was utter misery, let alone the utter kitten mouse droid game in Eternal Throne. The stealth missions in this game are bad enough.

I do prefer any environmental puzzle over watching a loadscreen or constantly getting bluescreened because of the country i live in

Sorry, I don't get what you're saying here. I'm talking about game design and mechanics, not performance issues.

Oh sorry, you want the animatuon cancelling they couldnt fix so they made it a 'feature', class 'balances' and hit box fails? Sure
I love playing one class metas and sub par mechanics as well. They hasnt really been anything 'new' since hof in trials
Dungeons have been the same old mechanic for the "2 dungeon" dlc (because thats a HUGE amount of content) for the last 2 years.

As long as you are happy its the main thing. An ill keep enjoying my return to gw2 (along with saving all that money aswell since they can deliver content for free )

Daimmyo

Linaleah wrote: »

did you just say.. GW2 has better questing while complaining about ESO being repetetive? have we been playing the same games? I undertand if you'd say original GW had better questing but GW2 can go into enciclopedia as the best example of repetetive questing.

I'm not sure if you were addressing me here - but just to confirm and say no, I don't think that GW2 questing system is better than ESO, I may give it another chance though.

Linaleah

Daimmyo wrote: »

Linaleah wrote: »

did you just say.. GW2 has better questing while complaining about ESO being repetetive? have we been playing the same games? I undertand if you'd say original GW had better questing but GW2 can go into enciclopedia as the best example of repetetive questing.

I'm not sure if you were addressing me here - but just to confirm and say no, I don't think that GW2 is better than ESO, I may give it another chance though.

mostly adressing the person you were replying to who directly said that GW2 has better questing than ESO.

not saying GW2 is a bad game, though it lost a lot of its charm for me just before first expac was released and hasn't really regained it (and I did go back a few times), it has its charm it has a painterly beautiful art style and environments are lovely, but their version of questing is.... I wouldn't say its a strong point of the game. at least IMO. as far as repetetive tasks go - they are pretty much GW2 bread and butter. but I will admit, they have ESO beat when it comes to holiday events. at least IMO.

Ethona

Folks I have been a long time GW2 player, and I would never want ZOS to adapt what ArenaNet does with GW2. ZOS puts out FAR MORE like MEGA TON more content vs those short GW2 stories. GW2 a decent video game and the main story (not the two so called expansions of no story) is pretty good but nothing like ESO. Please be careful what you all ask for as ZOS would probably love spending less money and less time putting out tiny bit of story content like GW2. ZOS puts content out every three months anyways and the once a year zone chapter release has been great so far.

jainiadral

Bhaal5 wrote: »

jainiadral wrote: »

Bhaal5 wrote: »

jainiadral wrote: »

heavier wrote: »

Linaleah wrote: »

heavier wrote: »

I want to be punished for pressing 'e' through dialogs and just following my intuition when I skip over something critical

there are quests in ESo that do that in that characters die if you rush choices, or you get different, sometimes lesser rewards. of course it requires you to actualy care about the characters that are part of the quests, and if you are skipping dialogue then you obviously don't so... don't know what kind of punishment are we talking about here.

like needing to listen to the NPC again because a piece of a puzzle is missing
I got a 200% EXP scroll in clockwork city because I did what I felt was good even though I knew choosing the other option would gran 250%
it's really frustrating because it was an arbitrary decision I didn't really feel like making personally and would have rather the whole thing been left to be dealt with by the proper authorities. I hate choosing to kill people or save them like WTF kind of choice. I don't care about this character or their betrayal enough to act as judge.
that's the kind of "reward for paying attention despite it not really mattering what's going on" that I want to avoid.

hire the devs of Myst and Riven, talk to the people who made Portal and Half Life about what kind of physics puzzles and real time pattern matching you can incorporate to make stuff engaging.
play classic TERA dungeons/pvp and learn about how to design challenging bosses without giving them lockon oneshots

If ESO devs ever try to copy Portal, I'm gone. Environmental puzzles royally suck, even if you're not stuck with crappy MMO jumping physics. GW2 Living Story puzzles were nasty, Last Train to Cairo in SWL was a misery, and the Gemini Deception in SWTOR was utter misery, let alone the utter kitten mouse droid game in Eternal Throne. The stealth missions in this game are bad enough.

I do prefer any environmental puzzle over watching a loadscreen or constantly getting bluescreened because of the country i live in

Sorry, I don't get what you're saying here. I'm talking about game design and mechanics, not performance issues.

Oh sorry, you want the animatuon cancelling they couldnt fix so they made it a 'feature', class 'balances' and hit box fails? Sure
I love playing one class metas and sub par mechanics as well. They hasnt really been anything 'new' since hof in trials
Dungeons have been the same old mechanic for the "2 dungeon" dlc (because thats a HUGE amount of content) for the last 2 years.

As long as you are happy its the main thing. An ill keep enjoying my return to gw2 (along with saving all that money aswell since they can deliver content for free )

Seriously, hunh? Are you actually talking to me or are you just using my posts as a space to unload your ESO frustrations? Because, if it's the latter, I'm just going to wish you a good day. May you have as much fun with GW2 as I used to.

I had fun with that game, mostly for exploration and festivals and general silliness. But I'm a story player at heart, and I don't like where GW2 has gone. So I'm here instead.

MLGProPlayer

The only thing GW2 does better than ESO is classes. GW2 classes are unique. Each one has a very distinct play style. In ESO, the classes just re-colours of one another.

Stamina classes = all the same (literally, they all use the same weapon skills)
Magicka classes = class skills are just recolours (i.e. ice AOE, light AOE, lightning AOE, fireball projectile, glowing bird projectile, etc.)

RedTalon

A lot of mmos and games do chapters or expansions, the two turns are interchangeable and have been long before guild wars

MrGraves

this has nothing to do with story but I just remembered how in GW2 90% of the npcs are just copy pasted of the same npc over and over again like exactly the same npc and they have crowds of people in places like Divinity's Reach and it's a crowd of the same 3 npc copy pasted.... Glad that's not ESO.

Sylvermynx

MrGraves wrote: »

this has nothing to do with story but I just remembered how in GW2 90% of the npcs are just copy pasted of the same npc over and over again like exactly the same npc and they have crowds of people in places like Divinity's Reach and it's a crowd of the same 3 npc copy pasted.... Glad that's not ESO.

*wince* Never played the game.... sounds like a good thing from my perspective! Stepford Wives anyone?

jainiadral

Linaleah wrote: »

jainiadral wrote: »

heavier wrote: »

Linaleah wrote: »

heavier wrote: »

I want to be punished for pressing 'e' through dialogs and just following my intuition when I skip over something critical

there are quests in ESo that do that in that characters die if you rush choices, or you get different, sometimes lesser rewards. of course it requires you to actualy care about the characters that are part of the quests, and if you are skipping dialogue then you obviously don't so... don't know what kind of punishment are we talking about here.

like needing to listen to the NPC again because a piece of a puzzle is missing
I got a 200% EXP scroll in clockwork city because I did what I felt was good even though I knew choosing the other option would gran 250%
it's really frustrating because it was an arbitrary decision I didn't really feel like making personally and would have rather the whole thing been left to be dealt with by the proper authorities. I hate choosing to kill people or save them like WTF kind of choice. I don't care about this character or their betrayal enough to act as judge.
that's the kind of "reward for paying attention despite it not really mattering what's going on" that I want to avoid.

hire the devs of Myst and Riven, talk to the people who made Portal and Half Life about what kind of physics puzzles and real time pattern matching you can incorporate to make stuff engaging.
play classic TERA dungeons/pvp and learn about how to design challenging bosses without giving them lockon oneshots

If ESO devs ever try to copy Portal, I'm gone. Environmental puzzles royally suck, even if you're not stuck with crappy MMO jumping physics. GW2 Living Story puzzles were nasty, Last Train to Cairo in SWL was a misery, and the Gemini Deception in SWTOR was utter misery, let alone the utter kitten mouse droid game in Eternal Throne. The stealth missions in this game are bad enough.

All. OF. THIS. and you forgot to mention mad king's clocktower. I tried that thing twice years ago and I still have occasional nightmares.

and I have such love/hate relationship with last trait to Cairo... i love Nasir to pieces and I think Said is fascinating, but omg, that section of the train where you have to dodge oncoming crap while still fighting enemies. UGH. I was having Uncharted 2 Dejavu and Uncharted 2 is litteraly my least favorite of all uncharted games becasue of that train section.

and that mini droid game is number one reason why I only ever finished KOTFE on a single character. there are a few other reasons, but that one is one of the main ones. the party section at Vaylin's place is the other major reason.

aaaaanyways.

P.S. have they changed how GW2 world bosses work? becasue last i did them, they are pretty much ESO world bosses but requiring larger groups and not spawning as often. you can just join in randomly, or walk away a few steps and keep playing in a zone completely unaffected

I think I spent 2 seconds in the Clock Tower my first Halloween, got obliterated by something, went WTF? and never went back. Like most of the festival JPs, I forget it exists I HATE platforming with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I never got map completion in Core Tyria until I got my Springer.

I ran FEET several times, but only after I finished vanilla on 3-4 toons between each playthrough. By then, I'd forgotten how bad the mouse droid was. The walkers were worse, though, especially after Bioware nuked the west coast servers. And then there was trying to do Copero on a gunslinger when everything blasts you out of cover, makes you platform up levels, and keep moving. I couldn't do anything but basic attacks because all abilities require cover. I'm just glad this game doesn't do anything that egregious. At least you can complete every quest with every class here.

The worst part about Cairo to me was the train movement. Nothing like trying to time things when you're about to lose your lunch The SWTOR train was just as bad, and lots of GW2 HoT maps also gave me vertigo.

The world bosses in GW2 are the same. I miss those sometimes-- there's not the same feeling of collective chaos here.

JJBoomer

i play both eso and gw2 and to me its apples and oranges. but i enjoy both for what they are. for me an mmo needs to have a good story. i hate pvp, so that single player story/quest better be on point

warabi

I like ESO's current format. Each new story has been very well done in my opinion and they bring in elements from previous questlines so it doesn't feel isolated.

I have nothing nice to say about GW2. I adored GW1 and the way GW2 took the story is a travesty. It's vague and fragmented to start with and even when previous events are revealed I had no interest due to most of the characters being mostly unlikable. Removing important plot quests (Scarlet's War) and putting other ones behind a paywall is absolutely absurd. They introduced important plot points and characters during an event they took completely out of the game. It's a total mess.

Davor

idk wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Ok.

Since I have zero interest in GW2 I'm just not.... going there.... I like ESO the way it is thanks.

This pretty much sums things up. There is a reason most players that play ESO do not play GW2.

No controller support?

Davor

heavier wrote: »

I'm in the stay unchanged camp personally because change is dangerous

This makes no sense to me at all. If anything ESO is all about change. ESO changed so much, so I am not sure where the dangerous part comes in. First it was buy and sub to play. Now it buy to play. Before we had no crown store, now we do. Before we got free DLC, now we don't get free DLC. Before we were stuck to our own faction, now we can go anywhere. ESO keeps changing all the time. I don't see non of it dangerous, but trying new things. While some are hit and miss, nothing I have seen is dangerous.

I guess the only thing that really hasn't changed is lag and disconnects for people playing the game. Or are you saying if this changes as well, it will be dangerous?