Just the other day, Mr. Randomessa and I were discussing the methods of sharing personal storyline quests in Guild Wars 2 based on the previously-revealed information that said that if I chose a particular path in my storyline and my husband joined me on my quest, he would get karma for helping me, but his own story would be unaffected by my decisions. In this household we preferred this method to one where we could be overruled by other group member choices. However, we wondered what would happen if we happened to make all of the same decisions, from race to backstory to choice of faction. We found ourselves wishing that there was some way we could choose to “sync up” our decisions if we agreed on them, and have them count no matter who was visiting who’s personal story.
Whether we underestimated ArenaNet’s dev process or they simply read our minds, we will never know:
Eric Flannum: Let’s say you and I are playing together and you’re a human and I’m a Norn, we’re playing in human lands and we’re doing your story. What happens is that you’ll get the really cool rewards for the mission but I’m going to get experience and gold and karma for helping you. So every time you complete a story step the game is going to say ‘well this guy helped you’ so we’re going to reward him as well.
Every single story step has awards that it hands out to every person that helped you. If we do happen to be on the same story step then we can choose to – if there were any decisions made during the step – have the outcome count for me as well. If I didn’t agree with the choice you made then I can just say no and go back and redo the mission the way I want to do it.
*stares out at you from behind thick goggles while wearing tinfoil hat*
*cough* “What?”
“You don’t actually believe in mind-reading do ya?”
*glances away nervously…*
*furtively adjusts tinfoil*
“Kinda cool that they’re making the personal story so user friendly though, isn’t it?”
Very cool indeed
.