A wealth of new information on the personal storyline system in Guild Wars 2 was released yesterday and today ArenaNet’s Ree Soesbee follows up by answering a few community questions on the topic. There isn’t any new media to be found, but it’s definitely worth a read. There is also a great interview up over at Massively. And of course a straightforward bullet point list with all the new information follows below.
We’ve already been told a great deal about how Guild Wars 2 will work and even been shown some actual gameplay footage. So if you’ve missed any of that, then be sure to also check out previous coverage of the design manifesto, combat system and elementalist profession, dynamic events system #1 and #2 and the personal story system.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for more Guild Wars 2 information on the official website, ArenaNet Blog and of course the recaps over here at GameDrone.
General
- It’s possible to invite other players into your home instance. So in effect there will be a form of player housing.
- There has been no word on whether players can decorate their home instances, but they will change as a direct result of your decisions during character creation and personal story missions
All players start within their race's capital city and have a home instance within that
Personal Story
- It will be possible to compare achievements and deduce what choices a player has made from that, as well as their home instance, which changes depending upon choices made in the personal story. This also seems to indicate that it’s not possible to directly view another player’s history page.
- Not all personal story missions are instanced.
- Dynamic events will never affect your personal story nor the other way around, so the two are wholly separate in this regard.
- Personal story missions may coincide with dynamic events. An example is of an event chain that leads to an attack on a centaur camp, while the player also has a separate personal story objective to find a lost soldier, whose last known whereabouts were said centaur camp.
- Only the character whose personal story is being played can make the decisions. So if I decide to take a friend along on a personal story instance, then (s)he can see everything I can and participate in all of it, but cannot actually impact my story in any way.
- In most – if not all – cases it is impossible to change your mind after the fact. So you can’t go back to a previous personal story mission and choose a different outcome, but will have to create a new character if you wish to choose differently.
- Alternate characters that you create will never appear within your character’s personal story.
- It’s possible to gain family, friends, rivals and even loved ones during your personal storyline. However, none of this is ever a requirement for advancing. You will not have to fall in love in order to advance beyond a certain point for example.
- ArenaNet have tried to prevent the game from deciding too much of your background if you’re an RPer and don’t want that sort of thing. This is done by careful phrasing of the biography questions and answers during character creation. So while it’s possible to give an answer that will result in the game generating a NPC family for you, it’s also possible to choose another answer which will result in no familial ties dictated by the game itself.
General – New
- Only a small portion of the game world is instanced and this instancing will mostly just be used to display world changes in a very visible manner.
- There are also instanced areas that aren’t part of the personal story, such as dungeons (likely Guild Wars 2′s version of raids).
- Guild Wars 2 will handle crafting differently from traditional MMORPGs. There will be no need to craft 10-20 copies of the same sword just to level up the crafting skill, unlike a World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online.
- ArenaNet intends for crafting to only be used for useful items. Be that items you want to use, items you want to sell, or items you want to give to your friends. Their intention is to remove useless crafting gear from the equation.
- It will be possible to upgrade existing items, both crafted and found, by means of upgrade components. It is unclear whether this will be a system similar to the one found in Guild Wars or something entirely different.
- Skills can be acquired from skill trainers, loot drops or as rewards for completing different types of combat.
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