Does Anet need to keep upping the ante?

I really hope this is what happens.

While Chrono Trigger was a wonderful game, its story was pretty much the most cliche-ridden thing ever.

Games don't have to follow that sort of plot path. Stories are often about subtlety. Just rescuing a princess, saving the world or even protecting your family isn't an idea that will save a game's plot.

For instance, let's say GW2 is about you, an everyman, being given a ring to carry into the enemy's land and destroy in the place of its creation, to stop an ancient evil from being reborn. On paper it doesn't sound like a good idea. But does it sound familiar? Lord of the Rings, for instance, wasn't good because of the plot synopsis, it was what it was due to the way it was presented.

Any one of the stories in Guild Wars COULD have been good with the right presentation. But Guild Wars is often incapable of decent presentation. And I don't see ANet ever trying to change that. It doesn't matter if in Eye of the North or Guild Wars 2, we save a princess or blow up the Death Star, or die in the end or learn that we're the villain's father - it's not going to be a good story unless ANet puts a lot of effort into the way the story is presented.

The lore in Guild Wars, the background information, isn't that bad. It's often pointless filler information, but it's not bad. The bottom line is that whomever is in charge of presenting the story in the game doesn't do a very good job of it.

A decent writer can take a plot synopsis like, "An Emperor's bodyguard is fooled by an imprisoned, fallen god into betraying his own master, out of fear of losing his own life, so that the god might set events in motion that will lead to his freedom, centuries later," into a pretty good story. It just didn't happen.

Yeah but the OP is on about "upping the anti", but what he really wants is just a decent storyline. Something we had in prophercies, but we didnt in factions in nightfall!

"Upping the Anti" to me, means making it harder, not making better story lines.

But with GW:EN being released, the idea is that it will finally give a climax to propherices and the entire game. Hopefully it will give the anti he wants.

GW should have a Ultima IV - type structure, where you must achieve a number of virtues to complete the game. No final boss, no linear plotline. Of course, this would mean that 95% of the players would not finish and would most likely be stuck on compassion or honor.

The word is "ante".

We are talking hypothetical story here, but Rurik probably made the correct decision in fleeing Ascalon. Adelbern wanted to fully retake Rin and I would assume Drascir at some point with a severely diminished military. You did little to nothing to combat the Charr in Prophecies...mostly guerrilla raids while a considerable force remained.

The White Mantle were in line with your goals at the time, repel the Charr invasion. Khilbron probably has the same corruption Shiro had in Factions. Essentially good people who were twisted by Abaddon into doing his bidding. Destroying Arah and Orr was probably not his intention but it stopped the Charr...stopped everything down there really.

Going to the desert was necessary for ascension, meeting Glint, and finding out about the Flameseeker Prophecies. The Shining Blade were going to fight the White Mantle no matter what our characters did and it seems like this was in the interest of the greater good. i.e. stay and die or live and save the world. The Prophecies themselves refer to the opening of the door of Komalie and the death of the Flameseeker, exactly what happened. The Lich character probably assumed your toon was the flameseeker rather than himself and that unchecked he would have an virtually unstoppable titan army from the Foundry of Failed Creations.

The Mursaat for all intensive purposes are wiped out. You did massive damage to their forces in the Southern Shiverpeaks and on the Ring of Fire. Anything that was left was under attack from the Titans that leaked through or from the Deldrimdor in the Shiverpeaks. Consider this story plot hole that needs fixing. Why the animosity between the Mursaat and the Titans/Lich? Wouldn't that imply the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Even stranger is the similarity in appearance between the Jade Armor and Abaddon. Maybe the Mursaat and the armor are apostates and would rather be worshiped by humans (White Mantle) than be the ones doing the worshiping (to Abaddon).

Comparing the depth of story and plot twists Prophecies is miles ahead of Nightfall. I stand by what I said, Kormir's role was far and away the most unrewarding aspect of the entire game. You do all of the work through 3 continents and she winds up as a deity. I felt absolutely nothing when she was taken captive, even hoping they killed her. Rurik on the other hand was a different story and Zombie Rurik was a great twist. If they absolutely had to do an NPC as the god of Truth it should have been someone from the Order of Whispers. Not some feel good PC garbage, yes I will say it, she was chosen intentionally due to socio-political climate.

Proceed to see post #idontremember:

Your idea of the plot of a game pretty much listed a number of quests in Guild Wars that allow you to do pretty much what you're asking. That's fine. Go play all the quests.

Save the kingdom from an evil witch? Try Villany of Galrath. Save the villagers from the bandits? That's almost your first task in Nundu Bay. You even get a taste of it at the Tihark Orchard mission. There's a lot of small heroic things to be done in the quests and in some of the missions. Why not just do those?

If it really is going to be that tiring to you, nobody's going to force you to get GW:EN.

...Assuming it's something the OP doesn't like, which is not a safe assumption.

I completly agree especially with the Kormir part. I hope the person responsible for this dribble, never writes stories ever again.
For me nightfalls story is a sequence of mistakes and holes, even worse than Neverwinternights official campaign.

Another bad part: With the player and Kuunvang being the only exception, the good guys and gods, don´t do anything. Why should I defend Lyssas temple, if she doesn´t give a shit?

I figure its intended to be some sort of invisible hand...something along the lines of "if its done right it will seem as though they have done nothing at all". I suppose this is why Balthazar is locked in an eternal struggle in the FoW with Menzies and why Grenth's domain the UW is under siege from minions of Dhuum among other things. Laziness and incompetence you play through the story to resolve but get no reward aside from the satisfaction of completion. If they had a mission to kill Kormir in the DoA I'd be the first to sign up.

Now that you mention it, I did enjoy Balder's Gate II because you could go evil and kill innocent people and merchants for fun. Being evil was a nice twist.

I do wish that GW would have different storyline options for "good" and "evil" paths. (well, hoping for more of shades of grey than totally evil or totally goody-good, but still) It would also add tons of replayability to PvE campaigns, not to mention a fresh twist in the general RPG genre of "Group of heroes travel the world and in the end beat the evil boss for him/her/it to resurface later on".

I'm all for a grim ending to GW:EN with the players failing to stop the Destroyer. Now THAT would be a nice twist.

I'd love to go evil lol, wouldn't it be nice if we could chose an eveil path instead of the same old one every time for 10 professions

You mean, Join the destroyer?

*insert random demonic laughter here*

It's be fun killing that damned king doric who helped assassinate my favorite prince....

I don't care a thing about being good or evil if the presentation continues to be this poor. Being evil won't mean much of anything if all that changes is a couple of text dialogue boxes.

Pft, that's weak. No, what you do is kill the destroyer. Then, as everyone proceeds to celebrate your victory over it, YOU become the next destroyer and proceed to kill them.

It's win/win for everybody! I think... *insert maniacal laughter here*

Honestly. It can be the most generic storyline ever. As long as the characters are interesting, and there's humor involved, I really don't care about the plot line. But Guild Wars (particularly Nightfall) has a cliche plot, with overall boring characters, romances and potential villains not expanded upon, and key characters not seeing their full potential as part of the story.

And on top of that Nightfalls has the worst ending.

mmm -_- i thought we as the player DIDN'T save the world of guild wars three times, in my point of view the world was only saved once and thats from abbadon.
but i did hope he world escape and turn the world upside down and inside out i mean killing him while he was still chained up does sucked.

in faction and prophicies it was only the contient tyria and cantha that was saved defeating the lich and shiro doesn't mean saving the world it was more like saving kingdoms from their certain doom and i doubt they would cause much of a trouble to the world even if they lived.

and the lich was really really the crappiest end game boss but then again thats the same for the other bosses when you know how to defeat them......

Seriously.

Goddess of Truth?

What the hell?

I thought that was Grenth's position already. And Grenth is 100x cooler.

And Kormir can't even use any of her powers to, oh, I don't know, clear out the realm of torment?

It's just one of those moments where you facepalm yourself.

I suppose from the info we recieve from missions etc, that since Abaddon was nto the first god of secrets that he was once mortal too, therefore would have mortal foibles that would make him easier to defeat.

There is also the point that he is enchained by the 5 other gods, deminishing his power, and during the final mission the heroes have to reinforce those chains to defeat him. Therefore even though he is a god he does have weaknesses and can be defeated by mere mortals.

There is also the point that unlike the christain god that is all powerful and omnipotent Abaddon, and the other gods, seem more in line with the greek gods, with limited powers, and weaknesses, therefore its not something that should be looked on as impossible to achieve, that is the defeat of a god.

However with all that in mind I must agree that Kormir getting to become a god seems rather a weak element, as many point out she does not further the storyline much, is partly to blame for all the troubles, and seems shortsighted.

While I do think it would have been a nice reward for our hero to become a god, i can see why this would be unsatisfactory from playing point of view, its not like they would allow gods to run around playing the game.

I agree with the op to the extent that upping the ante can become somewhat tiresome as the further up it goes the more unbelievable it becomes. However I do think that when designing a game that has a long story and achivable ending that there has to be some wider story arc than just travelling around the world and defeating minor problems.

The thought to keep in mind though is that any person that is ammassing power will tend to aim for eventual world domination, and it does depend on the time you defeat them,

I think GW2 will tend to be more in line with the op request though with the deminishing of instances, and the examples of combating dragons attacking towns etc,

Overall i liked the storyline of all three chapters. I prefered the Shiro one best, it had more depth for me, and shiro was an interesting character, and at least he was out for one thing revenge, the Tyrian chapter however was a lot of twists and turns, where you seemed to deal with regional problems, but found depth over time to the story, however I did think it took a long time to resolve it.

i'm tired of males
i want to fight agains a powerful female endgame boss
varesh was colorful in nightfall
why not have a female goddess boss something similar to lyssa with 4 professions at a time maybe ^^

I don't think we killed Abbadon in NF, merely weakend him enough so he could be imprisonned again, and that is made clear by what is said in the place at the end (forget it's name :P), something along the lines of 'Grenth won't make the same mistake teh otehr gods did...'.

I enjoyed NF, the scenery and instances were nice, but the story was a bit dis-jointed. I hated Kromir aswell.

Does it really matter why you are killing stuff? Maybe to some, but if you don't care, just ignore the story/cut scenes, etc. You can always play WoW, which I've heard has no point at all.

Eventaully we'll run out of Gods to kill, that is unless we're living on the Discworld.

(That would be mad.)

Ooh! Ooh! I sense a pun!

Yes it does matter, much like it does when you're reading a book. You can't honestly read a book unless the story is good, even if the fight scenes are great.

WoW is not entirely pointless. It has such an amazing and diverse back-story that it gives a lot of compelling reasons to continue "fighting for your race." Also, many of the quests and instances wrap up unfinished business from WC3 as well as add new threats and a new story line. So while your character is essentially free to do whatever he/she feels like, you can tell there is an overall greater story above what you're doing.

Shiro Tagachi: My Energy is over 9000 of 9000!

(apologies for making this joke for the 9000th time...)

BTW, Shiro was the worst, most god-awful hackneyed 1-dimensional Macbeth-stealing piece of crap NPC I have *ever* seen in an RPG. He's the worst thing Anet has *ever* done to GW -- putting him into the game. Bad. Bad, bad, bad. Just... bad.

all in all, ch1 was the most enjoyable to play from start to finish as a noob,
ch2 was god-awful horrible in just about every way,
ch3 was pretty decent until you get to ROT, then it kicks your arse and makes you call it daddy until you learn how to play there.

seriously though, ch2 was like watching someone drag out their 6th grade notebook with their old D&D campaign in it, and say, "this is gonna be SO COOL, guys!!!" :/

Horrible idea,
horrible writing,
horrible terrible god-awful main character (shiro).

eudas

............gw sucks get over t **sighs

And yet... here we all are!

Good. I just wished that happened earlier in the game, so people wouldn't be so successful with horrible builds.

I think you mean chapter 3...I thought Factions was good (not great) because at least it wasn't the same as 1. Ch 3, not too different from 2...

i dont see any thing bad about having unbelievable stories most of the games that are out there is like this anyway and there are too many to list.......

besides without stories like that most games would be pointless

Agreed. At least copying Macbeth isn't such a bad story. :P

Tragically, the best part about GW's story is how it brings everyone together in the joy of mocking it. A truly bad story is so bad you want to forget it. A story that's laughably poor is fun to talk about.

Saving the world?
*Yawn*
Been there.

/Dance in Abbadon's Gate ftw.