This post is plea to the developers to put more emphasis on personalized dialogue and immersion. I’m not here to argue about things like why the Pact didn’t show up to Lion’s Arch.
TL;DR: There is glaring lack of personal recognition in the bulk of NPC dialogue in Living Story releases. Much of the dialogue treats all players the same, regardless of your personal history in past content. As a current example, most of the Lionguard in Lion’s Arch don’t even recognize you as a comrade who stormed LA with them or as the slayer of Scarlet and just treat you as a random tourist. For me, this is immersion-breaking and feels like it devalues my accomplishments and my participation in previous content. I understand that writing multiple versions of dialogue and coding in conditional checks takes a lot of work. As a player, I value personalized dialogue very highly and would like to see more attention paid in future Living Story releases.
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“This is my story.”
The opening cinematic on character creation is very powerful. When I made my character, it got me pumped up. I was ready to return to Tyria, to fight against whatever evils threatened the lands. I was ready to be a hero, to live my story.
Whatever your opinion is on the execution of the Personal Story, there is no doubt that it was about you and your endeavours. You first become a hero in your local region, then you join an order and work your way up the hierarchy. Eventually, when Zhaitan makes a major attack against Lion’s Arch, you lead the counteroffensive to retake Claw Island from Zhaitan’s forces. Afterwards, regardless of Trahearne’s role and what you think of it, you become Commander of the Pact. You are number two. You are a leader, not just in name but also by your actions. You make decisions, and you personally execute daring and dangerous operations in Orr, culminating in the death of Zhaitan himself.
Hero of Shaemoor. Magister of the Priory. Hero of Claw Island and Savior of Lion’s Arch. Commander of the Pact. Slayer of Zhaitan. I am a pretty big deal. I have formed relationships with many notable characters, and I have accomplished some mighty things.
All of this gets pushed aside when the Living World hit. The dialogue treats you as a random adventurer who happened to answer the call for help. You can make whatever rationalizations you want about NPCs never having interacted with you before or MMOs having many heroes, but the fact is that it’s really a practical consideration. There will be new players who haven’t done the PS who are going to be doing this new temporary content. At each step of the way, there will be new players in the current LS release that haven’t done previous LS releases or the PS. The simplest and least work-intensive approach is to have only a single set of dialogue. Who does the dialogue target? It would be much more disruptive to have new players hear about things they didn’t do or some mighty Pact that they haven’t yet seen form, than for veteran players to have their past accomplishments ignored.
But what is the dialogue there for, if not for people to go out and discover and read? I’m the kind of player who normally makes an effort to experience all the content and to actually go read NPC dialogue, and it really discouraged me yesterday when I explored Lion’s Arch. The bulletin board lists me as the one who stopped Scarlet, but it doesn’t recognize my very relevant exploits as Commander of the Pact, the hero of Claw Island, the hero who stopped Mad King Thorn from coming out of the fountain, the protector who saved several Ship’s Council members from the Aetherblade attack, and the captor of Mai Trin. All the Lionguard say something like “Get out of here, random guy. We don’t need any more tourists or looters,” despite the fact that I spent the past four weeks fighting alongside them, rescuing citizens, defending their rally points, taking down Scarlet’s generals, assaulting the Breachmaker, and being the one who finally killed Scarlet. Normally, I would really enjoy talking to the NPCs, but this is isn’t really very fun. How can my comrades in arms not know who I am by now, after all I’ve done for them on multiple occasions?
(continued…)
