Our Characters Apart

[Fensfield]

As I follow the new main scenario through, while the story and characters remain incredibly enjoyable, it's continuously undermined by the fact that they all insist on continuously singing the praises of my character. There seems never to be a scene without my character being lavishly glorified, let alone a scene wherein my character is offered the opportunity or perceived to be somehow at fault - at least not by anyone who isn't already clearly written out to be a bad person, like Ungust the corrupt and treacherous merchant.

The game is going to great lengths to make sure we know that our characters are special, apart and separate from the mere NPC's. Worse, the efforts of NPCs - or even other player characters - who fight alongside us not only go unrecognised, but oftentimes are actively downtrodden. Apparently, despite being forced to face Ifrit in a party of three others, without whom she would have been flattened, my T'aemi defeated the primal single-handedly. The situation was even set up to make the presence of others in the fight make sense by having players appear in the same prison chamber together, along with other people the Amal'jaa had captured.

And honestly, it's spoiling things. The characters are undermining their own worth by not only denying their own value but by spouting outright falsehoods about my character's achievements. Not only is it undermining my ability to suspend my disbelief, it's actively forcing my character apart from the game world rather than helping me to believe they're a part of it.

I realise it's too late to make changes the current storyline, but please, could the writers try not to go quite so far in sucking up to our characters in any subsequent narrative content you might add? And if you aren't able include our party companions in cutscenes they logically should be present in, at least have the NPC's recognise we aren't just some lone superhero with everything handed to us by the whim of the writer?

We play these game to explore and travel with our friends, not to have our egos endlessly stroked and be told we need no-one but ourselves. The original storyline in v1.0 may have gone too far in the other direction, reducing our characters to mere background swords, but at least it went to great lengths to show we were supported not only by story characters, but by anyone who cared to form a party with us. Please don't make the mistake of swinging wildly in the opposite direction, and invalidating our efforts by setting our characters so far apart that you remove the believability of the people around them, and world they inhabit.