Guild Wars 2 MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Last week Ten Ton Hammer brought you an exclusive interview on some of the more combat-focused aspects of Guild Wars 2, such as weapon sets, skills and the traits system. And while saying that we’re impressed with what we’ve seen of combat so far in the game demo would be a gross understatement, that’s only one aspect of the much larger gameplay package that Guild Wars 2 has to offer. The story of Tyria and of your character’s place in the world are of equal importance, so we set out to discover all we could about personal story and progression in the game as well.

Just how deeply does the personal story rabbit hole go in Guild Wars 2? How will the Hall of Monuments bridge between the two games, and how soon can we expect to learn the details on the specific rewards Guild Wars players can unlock for their characters in Guild Wars 2? All this and much more awaits in the second installment of Ten Ton Hammer’s exclusive interview with Game Designer Izzy Cartwright.

Many of the questions for this interview were submitted by members of the Guild Wars 2 community at Ten Ton Hammer, with additional questions by Managing Editor Reuben “Sardu” Waters. We’re committed to building a strong community for our Guild Wars 2 site, and giving our readers the opportunity to have their questions asked at events such as gamescom and PAX Prime is only one of the many awesome things we have in store for our readers over the coming months. In the meantime enjoy the second installment of our exclusive Guild Wars 2 interview from PAX Prime!

Question Submitted by Gorlag: How will personality play out in the open world apart from your personal story and home instance? Will there be the ability to affect it in the open world and conversations with personality choices outside of the instanced content?

Game Designer Izzy Cartwright: A lot of that type of stuff is very conversation-based, or reactions from the NPCs. The full extent of those types of interactions I don’t actually know, but I do know that there’s a lot of that kind of stuff. The decisions you make, especially the important ones such as the orphanage burning in your home instance, that’s something we do feel is one of the important decisions you’ll make, and we do have a bunch of those key decisions. And the NPCs do react to those things.

One of the things that I know we do have a lot of and that we do plan on is the personality aspect to the game where you get to be ferocious or charming and things. The NPCs in the game will interact with you, so that you can walk around them and if you’re really ferocious they may cower to you. If you’re really charming they may be excited to see you. So we do have a lot of NPCs reacting to things that you do and the personalities that you become, or even with your background if you’re a noble they may react to you in different ways.

Another cool part of that is, depending on your personality, it will give you more options in your personal story in that if you’re ferocious you may be able to bully someone in a way that you weren’t able to. Or you may be able to charm someone in your story that you weren’t able to before. And all of that will happen both outside in the persistent world and inside of instanced parts of the world.

But we do kind of have to be careful with that because you might burn down an orphanage but you might save a hospital so we’ve always got to be able to play with those different things. But with the personality parts, an NPC can cower to you but be in love with someone else depending on those types of choices. We’re kind of exploring and pushing that to its limits in terms of ways the world will interact.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will some of your personal story be visually represented with objects or trophies you can collect in your home instance?

Izzy: Your home instance will have a lot of different things you can interact with such as saving NPCs, putting different things in there etc. So not only will you see that orphanage, but there’s also a lot of smaller things that you’ll be able to do and collect in there. It’s really your trophy cage of your story and of your character and it’s a place you’ll care about because your story really matters there.