Guild Wars 2

..:::INCOMING 2 POST WALL OF TEXT:::..
Brace your self, harsh constructive criticism incoming

I feel Scarlet was a missed opportunity. Her portrayal felt like it had a serious lack of direction and as a result she was never really given a chance to be taken seriously as a character, much less a villain.

One of the biggest things the Scarlet story line lacked was clarity and direction both for her personally and what she was doing.

The multitude of alliances were overboard and took away from Scarlet’s story. Some of them were even bordering on some serious retconning what with the Toxic alliance and all but that is a whole other discussion.

We could have easily had more interesting stories more tightly woven around her plan and the implementation of it. Instead the way it was implemented was more of a ‘flavor of the month’ style approach.

What was presented was a messy story with no progression for almost 12 months of the story arc, then everything converges in the last few updates. That is not a good way to convey what is going on.

This runs a few major risks. First and foremost it feels aimless because there’s no narrative build up, there’s no crescendo. Instead the narrative intrigue just spikes spontaneously at the end and you’re expected to know what’s going on.

The other is, unless you were there for every relevant update and payed attention to all the little clues, and I mean little clues, you won’t know what was going on and summarization simply can’t do the story justice.

As a result Scarlet, for all intents and purposes, was a flat character with a muddled motive and no discernible end-goal. Sure she attacked Lion’s arch… but that wasn’t her goal, it was just in the way. We still don’t really know what she was doing or why!

..:::What could have been done better:::..

Lay the foundation early and lay it down FAST.

Set up the concept of these alliances and let the idea soak in a bit. Just because it’s been established that they exist doesn’t mean you have to anything huge with them right away. Show that they are active in the background and give the players small breadcrumbs along the way.

The closest we got to this approach was having the trees disappear from around the lake in kessex hills. Even so we still didn’t know what was going on or that the ‘toxic alliance’ even existed until we saw that giant tower. It’s not epic when something like that appears out of nowhere it just raises eyebrows.

Also, just because they’re doing things doesn’t mean we, the players, are going to have the ability, resources or support necessary to intervene! Our enemies’ actions can be totally out of our control and that’s good! Let the player feel a bit helpless once in a while. Let us get riled up so when we can jump in on the action it can be anticipated and fully embraced. The Lion’s Arch updates are a great example of this!

Since I already mentioned the Kessex tower, one way to adpot this would have been to cut down the trees sooner and let us see the tower being built over a longer period of time and put some sort of impenetrable storm or something in the way where we only gain access when one of the NPCs or the orders figures out a way to disable it. That doesn’t have to happen right away. It shows people that something’s going on and they can get excited for when they get to smash it!

Scarlet needed to be more relatable

It’s not enough for a villain to be all powerful and sinister. For a villain to be taken seriously we have to be able to empathize with him/her at least a bit.
This means their motivations have to be introduced and expanded upon fairly early, certainly not in the final chapter.

They also have to have struggles themselves. Internal struggles, conflicts in the ranks, troubled by a mutually detrimental event [something environmentally catastrophic for example like a storm, famine, in GW2’s case a dragon maybe] or whatever, it really doesn’t matter, just so long as we aren’t their sole problem because when we are their biggest thorn, it becomes a very clear “You vs Me” story and there is simply no way to create a sense of empathy, and by extension believability.

It became clear in the end that Scarlet DID have some internal struggles and that improved her portrayal significantly! You have no idea how many people I know eased up on Scarlet [as a character] after those tidbits came to light.

This is also why the emotionless, thoughtless, motivationless, gluttonous elder dragons aren’t very compelling villains… but that’s also a discussion for another time.

..:::What could have been done better:::..

Again, a bit of repetition here, establish the Character’s foundation early and establish it fast.

Their motivations can be revealed over time as well as their struggles but they have to be present and they have to be a clear threat from relatively early in the story.

The most compelling villains illustrate very clearly that they believe what they are doing is right and that their ends justify their means. They are filled with conviction and it is this conviction that makes them dangerous and threatening to us because we know what they want, we know they’re aiming big and we know they’re willing and capable of doing anything and everything to achieve their goal.

There also wasn’t very much cohesion to how Scarlet was presented and developed.
Her fundamental behavior had little in the way of consistency.

If the villain is going to work from the background and be a master manipulator, let that be consistent. Let us work toward discovering the identity. Don’t just have them pop out randomly and go “Here I am! I’m the evil person who’s been making your day miserable!”

If they’re going to be a general on the front lines then be consistent with that identity. Let us meet them head on as a direct adversary throughout the story.

These identities kind of contradict one another… and by kind of I mean they’re polar opposites. Scarlet managed to be each of them, and more, at different parts in the story-line and I feel this was a significant mistake.

Muddying the fundamental identity/methodology of a character or failing to portray their more relatable traits translates to a kind of narrative dissonance that prevents the audience from investing in the character. It’s jarring whether it’s a hero or a villain. Scarlet is a text book example of this.

For anyone who read all the way through… Thank you! I think I got carried away but it feels good to get it off my chest.

Yep I agree. Especially the identity part.

Had they handled her introduction in the same manner that they handled Shiro in Factions, it would have been a lot better.

I strongly agree and support you Mondo.

ARENA, please give us so more cut scenes and cinematics where we can discover the vilains and their motivations, so we can feel some empathy with them.

Why not even play a small scenario were we can be the vilains and meet Scarlet and learn how she did this. I remember so part of the personnal history where we could disguise and infiltrate the ranks of the ennemy. Why can’t we do that in the living story ?

Mondo I think you covered my thoughts. I hope they pace the next living story better since they now have a lot of interesting concepts to work with like how the sylvari relate to the new villain..