I think some people are confusing story elements and gameplay elements. I realize that enemies respawn and thus there are an “infinite” amount of them, or that dungeons are repeatable so we blew up thousands of molten facilities, but those are gameplay elements.
Story elements are things like, we destroyed scarlets reason for the krait helping her, why are they still helping her? we blew up the factories that make the airships and the molten weapons, why are they still being used in later stories?
The story is supposed to progress in a logical fashion. Sure there are gameplay elements to consider, but the story itself should still be logical.
Is it really that hard to find logic?
The Molten Weapon Facilities were destroyed, yes, but not until they’d been in operation for several months. We’ve already determined from the dialogue with Marjory and Kasmeer that real time and game time are equivalent for the living story, as they mentioned the Molten Alliance being formed ‘a year ago’. There were several months between the first appearance of the Molten Alliance and the time we finally got into their facility to destroy it. That’s a decent-sized weapons stockpile.
We attacked the airship factory in Twilight’s Arbour, yes. But there’s two points about that. First, how long was it in operation before we found it and shut it down? And two, the likely more important point, there were Aetherblade airships before that factory. Whether they’re simply stealing more from the Pact, or they’ve got another factory somewhere else producing them, we don’t know. Shutting down the one factory in TA would hurt Scarlet, but that doesn’t mean it cripples her.
And for the Krait, yeah, we foiled Scarlet’s plans at the Tower of Nightmares and killed their prophet. So why are they still following her? Well, she delivered them their prophet, the Toxic Hybrid, and.. we went and killed it. Don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, they want revenge now? I’m not sure what kind of world you’re living in where you’d think that the Krait would just shrug off the death of their prophet and give up, going back to what they were doing before. Scarlet provided them with something very important to their culture, and we took it away from them. If anything they should be even more fanatical as followers now. It’s a far cry from the complaining Dredge and Flame Legion captives from Flame and Frost, the Krait society would be going all-in for bloody vengeance against the heretics.
There’s logic to be had. The only question is, how much effort are you actually putting in looking for it? Do you have a vested interest in perceiving things to be illogical, for some reason?
If people’s viewpoints on these stories is going to be “when the players win, the enemies need to get weaker”, then that implies that either there can never be a strong, world-threatening enemy to face in the living story, or that weeks and months of events have to be skewed so that players winning becomes physically impossible. “Well, here’s the Molten Facility dungeon, but since Scarlet is going to need more Molten weapons later on, the Berserker and Firestorm at the end will fully heal themselves whenever they reach 50% health” “It’s time to raid Twilight Arbour to shut down the airship factory, but when the Clockheart is reduced to 0 HP it will explode in an undodgeable blast that instantly kills the players, ending the dungeon without any rewards”
Personally, I’d rather have the option for a short-term victory and accept that the enemy’s strength may still increase for the sake of a good story.
(cue complaints that this isn’t a good story)
