This week's article of The Scrying Pool looks at how story is delivered in Guild Wars 2.

So how do you fix the Personal Story? Well, you don’t. Story is one of those few things that can never be patched. Once it goes live, it is set. Fixing this fractured story would involve deleting, moving and adjusting story that you just can’t do in live where players have already finished the story.

One solution would be to allow players to go back and relive different stories. While I think this would be good for players who missed parts of their own story, going back to different stories would be a little awkward. They wouldn’t be “my” story as the personal storyline proclaims, but some random character’s story that is lived and voiced by my own character. Then there are the small one mission this-or-that choices. Do players just go back for that one story or do they need to relive the whole arc to gain the context? Then there are rewards to consider. If this system unlocks after players finish their own story at level 80, the standard rewards for those low level story missions would be worthless.

So no, the story can’t be fixed. It is possible to at least see each individual story mission; it would just take 15 characters to do so. Even then you might not end up with the Noble, lost sister, Order of Whispers Human that learns all about the Ministry’s evil.

If what is out can’t be fixed, what can be done to prevent future stories from falling into the same trap? After finishing the Orders arcs, every player joins a single Pact arc. This is what ArenaNet needs to build upon for future story: a single, purposed storyline.

So there should never be any branching storylines ever again in the future? No. What needs to happen is when players finish the story they get that feeling of actually finishing a story. The current story does not fully accomplish that. There can be branching stories, as long as those branches either don’t tell a story centered on the main storyline or that all of the branches tell the same story through different means.

The minor races arc is a good example of a side storyline. When players select a minor race such as the Grawl, Hylek or Skritt, among others, they follow a storyline that just doesn’t matter in terms of the main storyline of facing down the dragons. This way players didn’t miss anything important because of their selection. And how many minor races are selectable? Five, the same number as the starting character slots per account.

A future side storyline that would be good is each race going back home. Players haven’t been home for most of their story. This could be a good nostalgia moment as we see our warband or krewe again for the first time in a long time. What else is great about this? There are five races, the same number as the starting character slots per account.

The low level story arcs were not all bad, however. They showed that it is possible to have small branches in the story that all convey the same story. In the first article of the Scrying Pool I talked about Malyck and the arc discovering that there is a second sylvari tree. During that arc there is a mission choice where you can either follow Caithe or Trahearne to learn about Malyck’s origins. In either case you learn the same thing, that Malyck is not of the Pale Tree.

It doesn’t have to be one-off missions that branch either. There could be a choice that has players go off on two or three mission long branches, but again, if the story is part of the main storyline all the branches need to convey that same story. Many other players, including me, who are “altoholics” would get these stories eventually, but even then and for people who have a single main we wouldn’t get that story during that epic first journey.

Having all of those different branches and the storylines at the beginning of the game does add a lot of depth and personality to the game and the character’s personal story. Is that depth really all that good if most people will never see it? Not only are most people not going to see it, but developers are spending time creating all this content for a very small audience. I think most people would agree that they would rather see five arcs that are 15 missions long instead of 15 arcs that are only five missions long.

This would diminish that “thousands of possibilities to create YOUR story”, but when was the last time you heard someone even comment that they were a Human noble? On the other hand it is probably more common to hear someone say what race and orders they chose with the smaller pool of choices at five and three respectfully, even though these choices do have the added weight of visual consequences or rewards through special armor and weapon sets or just from the races looking different.

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