GW2 – They Had Personalities?

2 January, 2014. 455 words.

After reading over this article on Massively by Anatoli Ingram, I am stunned that the author can even remember the names of those four GW2 Living Story characters, let alone come up with a thousand words of an article analyzing their personalities and backstories. My experience of the last year of Living Story was something like this:

Oh there’s this cool new Living Story! Oh there’s nothing to actually do, but I got some achievements. Oh now there’s another patch, and now there’s this guy, and he helps with this instance, and he’s Eir’s son, and I got an achievement. Oh there’s this Charr, and she’s an outcast, and she helps with the other instance, and I got another achievement. Oh there’s some time where I didn’t play and missed some stuff. Oh now there’s a ditzy blonde porn star and another woman standing on a hill investigating a Tower in Kessex Hills for some reason, and I’m tired of doing this stuff just for achievements. Oh I missed most of the Tower story, but now I need to help the porn star and the other woman inject a thing into another thing so the thing blows up and I can get back to Kessex Hills. Oh now the Tower’s gone and it’s Wintersday so I’m going to Lion’s Arch to get some more achievements.

At no point did I even remotely care about any of those people’s stories. In fact only after reading that article did I even realize that the Charr on the hill in Kessex Hills was the same one from the Molten Core story. I am thoroughly impressed that Anatoli somehow managed to come up with so much insight about the personalities of the people who, to me, were nothing but interactive buttons to click on before getting achievements. Not only did Anatoli know every bit of story with all these people, but he (he’s a he, right?) knew enough to wonder about the future stories of these people, as if GW2 was a series of novels and not an MMO. Was there a summary of their stories somewhere else? Was there a press release or something? Because I sure don’t remember seeing anything remotely detailed about them in the game itself.

I guess that makes me “that guy” who doesn’t care about lore, but I swear I’m not usually so transparently shallow about game lore. I think it’s GW2’s delivery, not me. :) While leveling up my characters during the Personal Story, I was somewhat interested in what happened to Destiny’s Edge, although to me it was a distant side plot compared to the central plot of what’s-his-name uniting the factions and leading the good guys to victory over Ziatan.

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