Guild Wars 2 is really two games. Maybe three games, depending on how much you get into World vs World and PvP.
But the two games I’m talking about is the one where you run around doing MMO stuff. Collecting things, jumping off cliffs, exploring, killing a million little things, doing the public quests, stuff like that.
The other, parallel, game is the one where you are the only being holding the world together from any number of huge existential threats. EverQuest never really considered you the singular hero come to save the world; you were always just part of a winning team. In DC Universe Online, your hero – or villain – is part of the Justice League (or the Legion of Doom) and is more like the backup to the main DC heroes. In Star Trek Online, you’re part of Starfleet, the Klingon Empire, or some other faction. Part of a team.
Not so, in Guild Wars 2. It’s all you.
Last night, I tricked Team Spode into helping me with the last quest in chapter 6 of the personal quest line, “Retribution”. Having spent many months shuttling between various factions trying to build an alliance to defeat the great undead dragon Zhaitan, who is planning to send an undead army of his own to destroy the de facto capital of Tyria, Lion’s Arch.
Chapter 6, which all players share, deals with driving back the undead beachhead on Claw Island while forming three factions into a united front in a deal called The Pact. United, we cleared the undead from the island, and when the lich dragon Blightghast the Plaguebringer comes to aid the undead forces, we took him down as well. I was instrumental in attacking his right front foot, which is all I could actually see.
Because I’m short.
Back in the day, when we were playing GW2 before the five or six or seven year break, I was avidly working on my personal story. When we returned to the game after DCUO, there was just so much content and I had so many other games to play that I only dipped into the personal stories here and there. A little bit of some of the Living Worlds and expansion quests, now and then moving my personal quest forward, but most of the time, just logging in an hour a week to do whatever we were doing.
I still have a lot of games to play, but I really do want to at least finish the personal story. Two more chapters to go, at which point I think I will be able to name myself Empress and rule Tyria with an iron fist and a clockwork mech.