Many Pieces Make a Whole Picture

Do you listen to music by hearing the first 10 seconds and then fast forwarding to the last 10 seconds?

When you have time to sit down and watch your favorite movie do you enjoy the first part of the intro and then fast forward x8 to the credits?

Most likely not.

Now these may seem like strange questions with obvious answers but there are a number of players who play GW2 in this manner. Now, this isn’t wrong but what usually follows along with this play style is players expressing concern or complaining even about the lack of story as they speed through Ascalon. As I talked about this in a previous post and as illustrated by Emmanuel on his video site, players need to approach playing GW2’s like you would listening to a great song or watching your favorite movie.

To illustrate this I’ll share a few experiences my friend and I had last night while playing in Ashford Plains.

We started wandering around Duke Baradin’s Estate, just exploring to see what would happen next. We came across a number of events, we especially loved the harpy attack and the following fried chicken jokes as I ran around with my Charr engineer, flamethrower in hand. As we wentaround  Ashford Forum we came across a downed female charr. We revived her and then she explains that a catapult knocked her out. Reviving her kicks off an event where separatists, humans against the charr/human peace treaty, set up a road block with catapults and armed guards defending it. We engage, fight, win. Go our team!  Also, notice it took action on our part to start the event.  We could have just left her there and nothing would have happened.

At first view this looks isolated and singular. "Oh, we found a NPC which gave us a quest: check, done, yawn." But instead, look at it as a piece of a much larger puzzle. What is a separatist and why are they doing this? Why is this happening here? Part of the answers will come from talking with the scouts who explains those areas of the map. Other parts come from NPCs and events that occur as players move farther away from the more protected parts of Charr territory – the area closest to the Black Citadel. As players delve more into the world ANet starts revealing stories one piece at a time as players experience them. For example, after the road block, we talked to the scout. She points out, among other things, a small shipyard area that is having problems with separatists. Hmmmm.

We all live in a drab metallic submarine...

A submarine! These charr are building a full-on steampunked SUBMARINE! Okay, the ship ward is quite awesome already. We show up to a group of separatists attacking the sub trying to sabotage it. I don’t know what happens if you prevent it because we didn’t. Boom! Big hole in the side (which was cool since we could see the gears on the inside whirling around).  Now the sub needs to be fixed so off we go scrounging for parts littered across the lake bed. We turn in the parts and after enough the sub engineer dives down to fix it. Guess who shows up? Separatists and they are not happy we are trying to undue their explosive handy work. We defend the repair worker and drive back the separatists, who flee to an alcove on the other side of the lake and a charr follows them. I go over a talk to her and she tells me the separatist camp is in that area. I see one NPC setting traps or something.

Model # WHL-34

What happens next? I don't know. We both had to get to sleep so we stopped playing but I want to know what happens in that camp. Will there be more information about the separatists?  Why do they hate the treaty? Is Minister Caudecus behind them?  I'm pretty sure I will have to play through the whole area, I only have a few pieces of the story right now but I look forward to discovering the whole picture.





We just chillin

Hopefully I was able to illustrate how GW2 is more about showing players the story than just letting them read it in a log of text.  This was just a local story; imagine the ones using the whole world as its setting.  My friends and I have greatly enjoyed just following dynamic events just to see where they go and how they connect to other aspects of the world.  Take a curious moment and I think you'll enjoy it also.

See you in Tyria!