Guild Wars Diary #3

Overview: Guild Wars 2 is my first experience playing a massive multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG). It's an involving and sometimes overwhelming experience, since the game is steeped in genre conventions that have been built up over two decades, but also revolutionises and revitalises some of these conventions. My aim here is to record my critical response and analysis in such a way that it can be easily followed by gamers and non-gamers alike!

Links to previous entries:
Guild Wars Diary #1: Induction, The World
Guild Wars Diary #2: Character Creation

4. Story-telling

Although it's now normal for a computer game in almost any genre - from first person shooters to sandbox - to feature a story campaign, it's long been the defining feature of the role-playing game in particular, stretching back to Fighting Fantasy books I mentioned earlier, and the birth of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons. On some level, the genre is seen as part game, part collaborative story-telling, with the reader/player taking an active role in shaping the narrative.

In this part of character creation, the player can choose who their mentor was, a selection which affects the direction of the story.

It's no surprise that Guild Wars 2 promises a lot in terms of player involvement. At the time of writing, there is a section on the official website called 'Personal Story' which boldly claims that there are "thousands of possible variations" in the way the story can evolve and that "no two players will have the exact same experience". In an embedded video featurette, Ree Shoesbee, one of the designers, assures us that key decisions will affect the story's direction, and that "the story really reflects the game you want to see". The official Guild Was 2 sub-forum on the personal story section is bizarrely subtitled: "It really is all about you."

Emphasising 'you' and 'your' in marketing has been all the rage for the past decade, and it's perhaps unsurprising that the game falls far short of this enticing spiel. But before discussing the inevitable issues, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on just how ambitious the story-telling aspect of Guild Wars 2 is. In a game-world which is forever populated by dozens, perhaps hundreds of other players, many undoubtedly more skilful and experienced than you, there is still a sincere attempt to convince you that your own experiences are unique and that your skills might impact on the fate of the world. Plot points and events are divided between things that are visible to all players and things that are visible only to individuals (and anyone they've brought along for the ride). In the latter, of course, your avatar becomes a central character and a sense of chronological progression is allowed to pervade, as schemes are thwarted and dire eventualities draw ever nearer.

Cleverly, as certain areas of the world become explorable, they seem to reflect events in your personal story. For example, the Straits of Devastation zone features an imposing metal military outpost called Fort Trinity. It's always there, but players will likely only be strong enough to advance into this area once they've got to the stage in their story where the races of Tyria have formed a pact and elected to build the fort.

By the time you're strong enough to face this dragon, you'll have likely reached a part of your story where an all-out assault by its allies has begun, even though the dragon is technically present in the game world from the moment you start.

The way this is interwoven with the multiplayer activities is appreciably clever, if not ingenious: at all times, a green star on the map tells you where you need to be in terms of your own personal quest. Once you get there, you're transported to a kind of alternative reality. The immediate surroundings are identical, but there are no longer other players crossing your path (unless you've invited others to join you on your quest). Stray too far from the flashpoint where the story is occurring, and you return to the multiplayer world. Finish that short chapter of the story, and again, you return to the multiplayer world, this time with another star in another part of the map to travel towards.

Because getting between the story points necessitates travel, usually on foot, it's almost inevitable that you'll become entangled in many of the 'subplots' of the world before your reach your destination. These subplots are divided into 'dynamic events' and 'renown heart' quests. The latter are activities you can take part in in a certain area to aid some general objective - say, helping out on a farm or disabling enemy traps. The former are ever-changing cyclical mini-stories that can affect the surrounding area and often invite participation from large groups of players.

So for example, in the Harathi Hinterlands, there is a constant territorial war between humans and centaur. Help the humans take control of an outpost, and they will begin planning an all-out assault on a large piece of land which necessitates more players joining in. Leave the humans to their fate and the centaur may well in turn occupy a larger area, meaning less friendly faces as you continue your journey.

Here, a couple argue. He is thinking of joining a rogue enemy faction; she thinks he's betraying her. By following him and preventing him getting killed by the very faction he wishes to join, you can reunite them.

These mini-stories often feature the best and most immersive writing in the game. Help drive centaurs out of a village, and a child will tell you: "You were amazing!" A simple touch, but one which helps in convincing you your actions have real impact. The battlefield dialogue is largely uninspired, but the real treasures are in the smaller quests, where you're more likely to find flawed and witty characters. At the Meatoberfest celebrations in Diessa Plateau, one character insists he's the mayor of the event.

"Mayor? We never elected you," replies another.

"I won the barbecue competition ten years in a row. That qualifies me."

Here, a treasure hunt has ended badly for the leader of the expedition, but well for her comrades; they've uncovered a keg of beer!

The player isn't forced to appreciate these instances. In fact, they're easily missed if you don't pay attention to your surroundings, since the interaction is often between other characters. Sometimes a quest won't even begin if you ignore the pleas of a particular character, because they need your help to even make a start on their task.

Unfortunately, as you return to already traversed areas, the artificiality of the experience becomes harder to ignore, as the same events play out again and again. Occasionally, though, this is the source of a good joke. When you fail to save a particular captain from a man-eating spider, his second-in-command stoically says, "We'll have to make do until his brother comes along." His brother, presumably, is fated to the exact same demise, and so on and so forth through an infinity of family tragedy.

But what about the personal story itself? This is the part of the game where you are the hero, where you can't rely on other players for support, and where the main narrative of the game unspools. Alas, it's something of an ambitious mess. Firstly, there is a jarring disconnect, in that the principle actors in the personal story fawn over you, praise you, promote you and generally treat you like a world-famous superstar, while the rest of the time you travel the world as an unknown adventurer.

Secondly, in attempting to stay true to their aim of giving each player a unique personal journey, much of the story is fragmented into individual assignments that have little to no connection to each other and offer no satisfying character development over the long term.

A particular problem is the rate at which characters enter and exit your story. Many will only be present for a single ten-minute mission, during which their role is purely perfunctory: to provide an info-dump and make it seem as if you aren't quite on your own. Those that hang around for longer are, for the most part, one-dimensional and dull, their dialogue rendered all too often in a monotonous drawl, whether they're caught in the heat of combat, arguing or providing sagely advice.

Two recurring characters, who also feature in the novelised prequel to the game. I would struggle to define them by anything apart from their looks and ''great warrior' status. Eir, on the right, is my character's personal mentor, yet there is a pronounced lack of chemistry between the two of them.

By way of emotional pay-off, there are several attempts to establish close relationships with certain characters. These are almost always forced. Typically, a friendly, bubbly character is appointed as your partner for a number of missions. To be fair, these characters are fairly memorable and fun to be around. They will then be unceremoniously removed or killed off in a contrived scene, causing your character to deliver a dour monologue about honouring their memory.

To make things worse, the way the in-game engine delivers narrative denouements is clumsy at best, ridiculous at worst. Most of the conversation takes place against a flat background, with two participants standing facing each other, taking it in turns to say their lines. The acting is wooden, and the models seemingly incapable of physically emoting beyond a flinch or wave of the hand.

Often, the characters in these staged scenes don't even make eye contact.

When a dramatic interlude is rendered in the midst of the action, Guild Wars 2 fares little better. One particularly poor example sees an offshore fortress being overrun by an endless tide of Risen enemies. At all times, the doors to the fortress remain wide open. The number of troops manning this supposedly important outpost seems to be not more than a dozen at full strength. The commanding officer remains rooted to one spot throughout the battle, at first refusing to believe an attack is imminent, then insisting that a loss is unthinkable, finally dying from a blow I never actually saw. At the end of the battle, with escape looking less and less likely, an ally takes an absurd amount of time to make his farewell speech before sacrificing himself. The sacrifice consists of finally closing the doors to the fortress - him on one side, my character on the other. To all intents and purposes, there's no reason he couldn't have remained on the less dangerous side.

A similar death report, later in the game, is delivered while the screen is filled with nothing but featureless sea.

A rare instance of genuinely witty dialogue in the personal story.

The story is not entirely without charm, and the over-arcing plot is suitably epic. But GW2's developers have, to some extent, ended up with the worst of both worlds when it comes to combining an event-driven story with a player-driven story. The merit of an event-driven story is that it can be tightly plotted, but that is not in evidence here. The merit of a player-driven story is that the player is immersed in the role of their character, but that opportunity is squandered by the character appearing in cut scenes and delivering dialogue (as well as making decisions) that fails to take into account any of the player's own ideas about who their character is. In fact, once you reach a certain point in the story, whatever you experiences leading up til then, all player characters will behave identically: a serious issue for a game that is supposedly about role-playing.

As a final remark, perhaps the single most disappointing part of the personal story is that at around the half way mark, the player's role as chief protagonist is subsumed by another character: a Sylvari scholar who is fated (Harry Potter style) to defeat the arch-enemy. This would be agreeable if this character were a well-drawn, complex personality who begged some degree of emotional investment. Unfortunately, he's a foppish charisma vacuum with a put-on upper class English accent and a cod-Shakespearean diction, who quickly pronounces himself a Marshall after seeing a vision of his future successes. As a result, the story quickly runs out of steam.

Twat.