Speaking with ZAM, Guild Wars 2 writer Ree Soesbee has suggested that the majority of activities offered to players by World of Warcraft do not constitute a story.
“I don’t consider doing those raids and instances the same thing as telling a story. It’s not. You’re getting to see awesome stuff, but you’re not really experiencing a story,” she said.
Reiterating the point, Soesbee added “The story in WoW is that you run into a guy’s home / lair / castle and you beat him up. It’s cool … but not a story.”
She seems to have played enough of the game to make a fair judgement, stating “I have played WoW for a long time and have a stupid amount of 80s.”Soesbee has also detailed how Guild Wars 2 will try to approach narrative a bit differently. “Like a play, I think the story has to unfold in acts … in segments” she said, “Those segments can be different as long as they’re both telling the same story. While two people may want to destroy the great dragon, one may want to kill the dragon because he’s threatening his home, while the other is because of the threat to her mother.”
“There’s a whole world out there, and you’re actually a piece of that grander story that’s going on with every character in the game. The story has meaning all the way through, from beginning to end.”
All of this presumably tie-ins to the dynamic events system in Guild Wars 2, which we’ve already heard quite a few things about.
Again, it sounds extremely ambitious. We’ll be interested to see whether Guild Wars 2 can pull it off.
