Guild Wars 2 Personal Story Overview

Guild Wars 2 lore and continuity designer Ree Soesbee has paid a visit to the game's official website to discuss the team's philosophy on storytelling and how your character's personal storyline will affect the game as a whole.  A bit of what to expect: 
One of the challenges of a massively-multiplayer game is that in being inclusive to a vast number of people, it loses a lot of the personal interaction that makes single-player RPGs so much fun. When you're looking at the games on the store shelf, it seems you have only two options - a game that you can play with your friends, or a game that has a satisfying personal story. The Guild Wars 2 design team believes that a game should have both.

We believe that telling a story begins with creating a deep, realistic world. Player characters should be the focus as much as possible, and be offered choices and decisions that meaningfully impact the world around them. NPCs should have understandable motivations, real character flaws, and believable relationships with the player and with each other. Cities should feel like centers of activity. The world's history should make sense. The original Guild Wars had already done a great deal of work in that direction - Tyria is an amazingly detailed fantasy setting, a rich and vibrant world. We wanted to live up to what we had done in the past, and carry it forward into our new game.