When I stopped playing Guild Wars 2 previously, I was on the final quest in my personal story chain – to defeat elder dragon Zhaitan. There was no way I was going to be able to handle it alone, and I got frustrated because most of my personal story up to that point had been solo material.
These days things are a bit easier, at least where that story is concerned. With help from girlvsmmo we went back to that period in time and together we defeated Zhaitan, completing what was (to me) an enormous amount of progression. I was so excited to finally be doing it. The cut scenes were top notch, the story telling fantastic, and let me tell you, when my character marched through the crowds – I felt like a hero.
The music in the final instance was also pulling at my heartstrings, it was incredible.
I can’t complete living story 1 any more because it involves content that is no longer available (way back from 2014-2015) but there’s an NPC who will tell me about it and then I can continue on with living story 2 – I also have Heart of Thorns to work on, and then yes, there’s the expansion coming out in September.
This time around I’ve been paying far more attention to the story being told and listening to what the NPCs are saying. My previous playthroughs involved a lot of skipping – and it’s probably how I got so burnt out.
In any case, it’s really nice to have my personal story completed (at least on one character) and it feels amazing to be back in Tyria. No pressure about having a subscription, no guilt if I don’t get a number of hours in each day, no worries if I have to randomly leave because of real life (I would love to do some group content, but my time is pretty restrictive).
Can you tell I’m excited?
You better believe it.
As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself.
Five years, twenty level 80s and 10,000 hours and I’ve still never completed the Personal Story on any of my characters. I did kill Zhaitan in a group way back in 2012 but only to help Mrs Bhagpuss get it done. I never really saw the point.
GW2 is all about the open world for me. The increased focus on instances for storytelling has become a necessary evil as they’ve chosen to gate various maps behind that progress. There are some good set pieces here and there but on the whole I found a lot of it quite tedious, particularly the “boss” fights.
The heart and soul of GW2 is in the open world events, particularly the big chains designed for large numbers of people working together. There’s an unfortunate and unavoidable element of repetition (can’t just do these things once or there’s no game) but the persistent availability of action and adventure solo, in small groups or alongside large numbers of other players, all without any pre-arangement or vetting of qualifications, is the experience MMOs were invented to provide and GW2 is still one of the few that offer it and pretty much the only one that gets it right.