Is Guild Wars 2 Personal Story Optional Good Or Not?

By Author: Lamar Mackey
Total Articles: 1
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It is hot debated in the forum that Guild Wars 2 personal story should be optional or mandatory. Every player has their own viewpoint.

Some people hold that they cannot even play the game till 80 without optional. If anyone tried to pitch a single-player RPG with the story, quality of writing and gameplay like in GW2's personal story, they'd probably get laughed out of the industry.

They need to take a step away from an overarching "personal story" for each character and instead make "story arcs" available in game that are self-contained long and involved quests, but any character is free to do or not do any of them and have them not have a specific order (mostly, some "part 2" stuff is ok). In length and involvement, think of the 1-30 part of your personal story as one story arc, then the order part as another, and "against zhaitan" as a third.

Those were in a certain order and following that order was mandatory, but it doesn't have to be that way. Anet stated they want guild wars 2 item players out in the world everywhere and are going to re-balance down scaling and ...
... rewards towards that. Making independent story arcs available for several regions so that anyone can pick up goes towards that goal, too. You could see a specific "humans vs centaurs" arc going through the hinterlands and maybe the areas before then, whatever ploy by the auras and nightmare court in those zones, etc. Throw in some extra extended order missions and have you have a nice starting selection to build on, kinda like they introduced fotm.

Others tend to think that the personal story ended up being one of those GW2 features that managed to massively reduce my enjoyment of the game. And it's not the story's writing, rewards or something similar - it's the way it's implemented.

As to me, I agree that the personal story is completely optional is very good. The player must complete the tutorial, but after that, the guild wars 2 gold player really doesn't need to touch the story ever again. With that, ANet introduced yet another way of dealing with the game's story: in GW1, we experienced the story in different ways.