Guild Wars 2

The idea for the marionette is awesome, I’ve never seen such a creature design before and I’m seriously looking forward to it.

Introducing a new permanent world wurm boss akin to Tequatl is tantalizing, though I pity players on less populated servers.

Having the Scarlet arc end through the next 4 instalments? I say ‘amen’ to that. From what I have been reading, there are going to be big reveals coming our way and I really hope it’s not all hype and be really compelling story telling.

My biggest fear is having Scarlet end up as a presumptuous genius, trying to engineer the world with chaos…like one of those “survival of the fittest, let’s get everyone to fight each other to strengthen ourselves, I’m doing this for your own good” deals. Even if that was the case, then it would have been more believable if everyone truly fought everyone instead of having all the silly alliances.

What more chaos can a true villain bring to Tyria than one where all the races no longer trust each other and come to blows. Now that would be survival of the fittest….but also probably just give me Babylon 5-esque déjà vu.

What would you say is “not cliche”

Living Story is going to end by all of us finding out that it was all a dream and that Bobby Ewing is still alive after all!

Dakota.4591:

Living Story is going to end by all of us finding out that it was all a dream and that Bobby Ewing is still alive after all!

Screen fades to black, every character in the game wakes up as a level 1 human saying they just had a strange dream… the game starts over. All classes are replaced with things like farmer, guard, cook, etc, and everyone is locked to the human zone.

There’d be so much rage.

… then a few days later, or earlier if you happen to find the glitch, you wake up.

Your expectations are way too high. Nothing at all will change aside from the scenery and some npc dialogue.

There’s going to be ample use of cliche, that is to say, Tropes . . . it’s the shortest distance between two story points. Arenanet has rarely managed to tell a story without using or twisting Tropes to work something up.

This is, in and of itself, not bad.

The problem is, so far, the neat endings. There hasn’t been one yet where the chapter ended without things being regarded by the story as fully resolved. Southsun may be the only place where no matter what’s being done to “fix” things it only gets worse

Just hoping for an end to LS.

I can dream.

I don’t know, sometimes the most amazing ends are cliches. If they weren’t interesting, they would never have survived long enough to become cliches in the first place. Rather, every work of fiction is a cliche, as they all follow the same plot devices mechanics and genres. To create something unheard of… are there truly such frontiers left? No, the measure of a story is not whether it uses cliches or not, but how it applies these cliches, twists them, to create something new and entertaining.

I am honestly expecting a Scooby Doo ending…when Scarlet says “And i would have gotten away with destroying the world if it wasn’t for those pesky kids and their charr!”

Did anyone say “Dragon”?

so, you.. don’t? want scarlet to die like Frizz

Brutal Arts.6307:

Your expectations are way too high. Nothing at all will change aside from the scenery and some npc dialogue.

The latter is debatable. Nothing in the NPC dialogue changed when we learned about Scarlet and her past.

emikochan.8504:

What would you say is “not cliche”

You have a point there, even Shakespeare wrote…

“If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child. "

…so from the crowd-sourced knowledge of the entire playerbase, someone, somewhere would have probably read/seen something similar already.

Still, I am sure that the writers can take those general endings and concepts, mix it up a bunch with twists and create something relatively new, albeit familiar when analysed and deconstructed by iNerds.

That being said, I can’t really say offhand what wouldn’t be cliched, but a survival of the fittest scenario isn’t really believable anymore since all the races aren’t playing the Hunger Games with each other.

Neither is the idea that Scarlet is out to create chaos everywhere through conflict. If that were the case, from the very beginning, Frost and Fire would have been the forces of Jormag battling against that of Primordus. Imagine the devastation that would follow and the chaos from all the fleeing mortals, it would be a lot more than just having the dredge ally the Flame Legion.

The chaos scenario would have been better portrayed with Scarlet inciting all the dragons against each other. So would a scenario where she is just plain mad and wants to lay waste to all of Tyria.

The idea that I like so far is the one that involves the cycle of the dragons awakening and going back to slumber. If the dragons act as a reset button to reconsolidate all the magic in the world, Scarlet could be acting to either put an end to the cycle (as we all have read how she hates to be told how to live) or could be hurrying it along (which leads the dragons back to hibernation). The underlying concept here would be that all magic is dragon magic, or the dragons are the manifestations of all that magic.

Another idea that I like is the one where Scarlet is making a superweapon. By messing with magic and technology, and as Scarlet hones her knowledge/craft, her creations are getting bigger and bigger (assuming the Marionette is hers as well). It could be that she is trying to perfect them to the point where she can create a magitech dragon. Whether she wants to use it to rule the world, fight the elder dragons, achieve godhood status, those reasons would be moot.

As for Scarlet herself, I’d really want her downfall to be a matter of hubris. For all her supposed genius, there is a copious amount arrogance stemming from it, and she really needs a good smack. Here we can have the whole slew of situationally ironical endings such as Scarlet getting blown up by her own weapon, getting stepped on by her own walking creation, or refusing to be taken prisoner and jumping into a pit of lava (with her laughing all the way down).

Wait, haven’t we seen all that happen in every action movie already? Ok, scratch that. Let’s just have Final Destination starring Scarlet in every death scene…or better yet, Freddy Krueger bringing an end to her with the corny one-liner “even if you don’t wanna dream, the nightmare will get ya”.

Rebound.3409:

I am honestly expecting a Scooby Doo ending…when Scarlet says “And i would have gotten away with destroying the world if it wasn’t for those pesky kids and their charr!”

They don’t use a charr… they have a dog still.

Delvoire.8930:

Rebound.3409:

I am honestly expecting a Scooby Doo ending…when Scarlet says “And i would have gotten away with destroying the world if it wasn’t for those pesky kids and their charr!”

They don’t use a charr… they have a dog still.

That is epic.