Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been wonderin’. About the world and the story, it all seems good. I want to keep this brief and all, for the sake of argument. I just like to point out that the Elder Dragons don’t feel very evil. In other words, don’t feel like they should be antagonists.

Yes, perhaps they are forces of nature, and it feels very messed up by tampering with nature’s cycles. But there should be an antagonist that’s at least relatable, someone that gives their side of the story and someone I can understand. Who’s going to understand the animistic motives of a freaking dragon? Okay, maybe a few (which, I won’t know how that’ll be done), but doesn’t make my point any less clear.

I feel the devs sacrifice the story just to have the feel-good and epic moments. I say the feels are tripled with a good story. I know they can write good, just look at Tybalt!

I share your opinion that the elder dragons whole force of nature and not really understanding their actions makes for a weak story.

I do offer you that there’s conflicting information regarding whether they have emotions. For example, kralkatorik tracked down glint once he woke and killed her because she betrayed him. The fact that he can feel betrayal goes against many the arguement a that they are just a force of nature.

Pretty sure Zhaitan knows darn well what it’s about. While we don’t talk much to it directly, Zhaitan has enough mouthpieces throughout the game that we can see that it’s an intelligent, greedy, and altogether malicious personality. We don’t relate to it as a person, because it’s meant to be on a scale like natural disasters, but, unlike natural disasters, Zhaitan is acting purposefully.

As it seems to me, the Elder Dragons being like forces of nature is a statement on the size of their (apparently evil, self-serving) personalities and the size of their power. They’re not devoid of personality, and Zhaitan at least seems fully aware of its actions.

Alternatively, if you prefer to think of each of the “mouthpieces” of Zhaitan as linked, but more independent personalities, then the dragon could be more directly comparable to a disease or natural disaster. If we could wage a war to wipe out, say, earthquakes or hurricanes, that would be a battle worth fighting, eh? Zhaitan is an obstacle for player characters (and NPCs) to overcome, and they’re the focus of the story, so I don’t mind if the dragon isn’t a well-rounded villain.

Dragons as forces of nature seems a little ‘meh,’ but the last time the devs came up with a “dynamic villain” the result was Scarlet…

Avascar.9237:

So I’ve been wonderin’. About the world and the story, it all seems good. I want to keep this brief and all, for the sake of argument. I just like to point out that the Elder Dragons don’t feel very evil. In other words, don’t feel like they should be antagonists.

Yes, perhaps they are forces of nature, and it feels very messed up by tampering with nature’s cycles. But there should be an antagonist that’s at least relatable, someone that gives their side of the story and someone I can understand. Who’s going to understand the animistic motives of a freaking dragon? Okay, maybe a few (which, I won’t know how that’ll be done), but doesn’t make my point any less clear.

I feel the devs sacrifice the story just to have the feel-good and epic moments. I say the feels are tripled with a good story. I know they can write good, just look at Tybalt!

That’s why we have dragon champions – they provide the personality (and dialog) that is missing from the dragons themselves.

From a gameplay perspective, having endless armies of irredeemably evil minions to mow down isn’t a bad thing either. It beats slaughtering boars.

jweez.7214:

I share your opinion that the elder dragons whole force of nature and not really understanding their actions makes for a weak story.

I do offer you that there’s conflicting information regarding whether they have emotions. For example, kralkatorik tracked down glint once he woke and killed her because she betrayed him. The fact that he can feel betrayal goes against many the arguement a that they are just a force of nature.

Glint was an obvious threat, and the dragons act intelligently when it comes to fighting threats. We don’t know whether it was acting from emotion, or simply acting strategically.

Avascar.9237:

So I’ve been wonderin’. About the world and the story, it all seems good. I want to keep this brief and all, for the sake of argument. I just like to point out that the Elder Dragons don’t feel very evil. In other words, don’t feel like they should be antagonists.

Yes, perhaps they are forces of nature, and it feels very messed up by tampering with nature’s cycles. But there should be an antagonist that’s at least relatable, someone that gives their side of the story and someone I can understand. Who’s going to understand the animistic motives of a freaking dragon? Okay, maybe a few (which, I won’t know how that’ll be done), but doesn’t make my point any less clear.

I feel the devs sacrifice the story just to have the feel-good and epic moments. I say the feels are tripled with a good story. I know they can write good, just look at Tybalt!

The Elder Dragons, in my opinion, are evil – but they don’t view themselves as such.

If you read Edge of Destiny and Sea of Sorrows, their champions definitely give them the “evil warlord” vibe. To quote:

“At first, for centuries, I defended my master. But I could hear his thoughts, too, and I knew that if he rose again, all good things would come to an end.” – Glint, Edge of Destiny

“This is the time of the Elder Dragons. Thus begins the time of Zhaitan and of Orr. The day of their ultimate victory is close.” – Captain Whiting, Sea of Sorrows

These lines don’t really describe “forces of nature” to me. Nor do they feel like forces “beyond our comprehension”. And those lines are just the most notable ones! Throughout the game, we see lines from risen (primarily) that show that Zhaitan is malicious, is conniving, a trickster, and downright evil (if not amoral) and seeks to dominate the races and the world, and most importantly: is not out there to just consume magic then fall asleep (as Angel McCoy hinted at when she said the Elder Dragons’ natural role is to balance magic).

The thing is that’s just how Tyrians view the Elder Dragons – as forces of nature or beings beyond comprehension – but there are hints, subtle though they may be presently, that this is not so. Even though we went and fought and defeated Zhaitan, we never saw the personality behind the invading army – but we did see the chance of one. No mere force of nature would hold thoughts, no mere force of nature would give its minions shared personality traits that are seen amongst risen, icebrood, and branded.

And it makes sense that we haven’t seen the full scope of the presence of personality in the Elder Dragons – there are still five more to go! Just the first fifth of the story related to the Elder Dragons has been told. We likely won’t get the full scope until dragon #4 goes down – at least. But with each dragon, we’ll get to see more and more of that scope, their personality, and their origins.

From what I’ve always understood, the dragons by themselves are pretty animalistic. It’s when they corrupt sentient beings and they become linked to them that they get smart, and pick up more evil traits.

Dragon minions may exhibit remnants of intelligence and express that under limited autonomy. That doesn’t mean the dragon itself feels the same way, or that the dragons feel much of anything, except hunger.

They seek to conquer, but only in the same way that a swarm of insects does, by smothering all other life. I doubt they care at all about dominating the faces of Tyria, when they could simply wipe them out.

Sadly that’s the norm for games these days, even games that major (can’t say anything about indie developers, haven’t really tried out too many indie games) developers try to sell as “art” have cliched stories with one-dimensional villains and weak character development.

The popular belief is that story doesn’t sell: cool special effects, pretty graphics, brief moments of brilliance (often poorly strung together because writers think the average gamer doesn’t have the attention span to recognize the disconnects), and copious T&A are what “sell”. It’s not always the developer’s fault, the publishers have far too much influence over content and marketing these days – and publishers are often filled with business majors who haven’t played anything more than golf when sleazing their way up the corporate ladder.

If you want well written stories that don’t follow a formula, you’ll need to look toward self-published developers who aren’t looking to make major hits.

I don’t think it’s a weak story or weak antagonists, but i feel they didn’t want the focus to be on the antagonists, rather on the Tyrians coming together to fight to survive and how they do it, how each has his/her view on things and such. Just look at some npc dialogue in the world, add to that the story missions’ characters and events, and in the end, you, the player.

It is your story, you did choose which fraction’s point of view on how to deal with the issue to support thus changing the world (if so slightly) for you. How YOU deal with it. And you are presented with choices now and then to determine how you would deal with the current situation, dragons being the blurry fog on some distant horizon while the story focuses on the characters who have to deal with the threat.

Are the dragons a threat? I think that’s the whole point, to make that very blurry…

My only problem with the story toward the end is that they keep adding new characters that all die heroic deaths in the same mission and then all act like it’s a tragedy and that I the player should feel something… Feel what? I just met them!

What’s surprising is how well they characterised them in those few lines of dialoge you can have with them (in cutscenes and talking to them during story)…

So you see, the dragons are, while pretty threatening and not at all 2 dimensional or cartoony but actually very complex (if you read into the story deeper), not the focus of the overall story… The little people are.

Thing with forces of nature is the story itself demands ambiguity. Imagine if you’re an ant living peacefully in your ant hill when one day you see this massive giant with his huge weapon made of metal and wood. You’re there helpless watching as with one swing 1/2 your home is destroyed and hundreds of your friends are killed in an instant.

The antagonist, the human isnt going to explain his actions to you or any other ant. He’s well aware you’re there and that s/he is destroying your home but you’re nothing but insects to him/her. He doesnt care for you to understand his actions because s/he is not doing what s/he’s doing because of you. You just happen to be there between him/her and his/her plans. If you survive long enough and stick around you might find out all the destruction happened because the human wanted a pool in his garden.

Same with the dragons. The dragons have their agenda which as far as we can tell is a sort of balance mechanism to keep magic in check and prevent it from growing too much. For them we’re something that stands in the way of their plans. insects that need to be consumed and / or swept away to make room for a new beginning. Why would they explain themselves to us?

Galen Grey.4709:

Thing with forces of nature is the story itself demands ambiguity. Imagine if you’re an ant living peacefully in your ant hill when one day you see this massive giant with his huge weapon made of metal and wood. You’re there helpless watching as with one swing 1/2 your home is destroyed and hundreds of your friends are killed in an instant.

The antagonist, the human isnt going to explain his actions to you or any other ant. He’s well aware you’re there and that s/he is destroying your home but you’re nothing but insects to him/her. He doesnt care for you to understand his actions because s/he is not doing what s/he’s doing because of you. You just happen to be there between him/her and his/her plans. If you survive long enough and stick around you might find out all the destruction happened because the human wanted a pool in his garden.

Same with the dragons. The dragons have their agenda which as far as we can tell is a sort of balance mechanism to keep magic in check and prevent it from growing too much. For them we’re something that stands in the way of their plans. insects that need to be consumed and / or swept away to make room for a new beginning. Why would they explain themselves to us?

That’s the best description dragons and how dragons relate to the people of Tyria i’ve read so far!

Mass Effect had similarly set up villains, yet the reapers were elevated to the peak level of menacing villains in just one interaction with a single reaper in the first episode. It was a chance encounter, one that was not necessary to move the plot forward. The reveal of the true enemy could have been just a mention later by the deus ex machina Vigil, but the actual interaction with Sovereign itself was presented so well, and created such an awesome image of the main villain that nobody cares to this day about the convenient timing and method we communicate with it.

Though im kinda torn between wanting the EDs to be that level of awesome and not wanting to mix the two stories further.

At least some interaction with the dragons themselves should be implemented.

The biggest flaw I’ve found is that, despite all the talk about them in game and the world, they don’t have the overarching feel and dread associated with arch villains. You know they’re out there but because of the interactions between your character and the NPC’s you just don’t get the sense that they’re that serious a threat. There are no hordes of volunteers running off the join the Vigil to stand on the front line. Even though you see a lot of Vigil troops running off to fight, you don’t see them recruiting in towns and cities and that creates an odd dichotomy.

You go to maps like Frostgorge, Blazeridge, Orr and you see really quite small patrols for places that are the frontline combat zones. Worse still, they’re moving at a stroll. They’re not marching purposefully weapons in hand ready for any threat, they’re having a Sunday stroll!

When you go to Vigil Keep, you see troops roaming around but not actually doing much so it doesn’t have the sense of a fortress. What it needs are smiths prepping weapons and armour, yak convoys entering portals to reach the fronts, injured returning from the front line and being tended to by medics, Priory and Whispers personnel coming into confer with Warmasters etc etc.

The way the world feels is that the Dragon minions are a bit of a pesky problem but not so major that a handful of troops can’t deal with them.

Azrael.4960:

You go to maps like Frostgorge, Blazeridge, Orr and you see really quite small patrols for places that are the frontline combat zones. Worse still, they’re moving at a stroll. They’re not marching purposefully weapons in hand ready for any threat, they’re having a Sunday stroll!

That’s what players are there for! :P

But at least npc’s in GW2 do battle, have character and you have a sense that a war is going on. And when there’s a grand scale like story mission, there’s tons of them sometimes.

Unlike other games, in GW2 battles do feel grander when npc’s join the fray.

Veprovina.4876:

Azrael.4960:

You go to maps like Frostgorge, Blazeridge, Orr and you see really quite small patrols for places that are the frontline combat zones. Worse still, they’re moving at a stroll. They’re not marching purposefully weapons in hand ready for any threat, they’re having a Sunday stroll!

That’s what players are there for! :P

But at least npc’s in GW2 do battle, have character and you have a sense that a war is going on. And when there’s a grand scale like story mission, there’s tons of them sometimes.

Unlike other games, in GW2 battles do feel grander when npc’s join the fray.

Don’t get me wrong, when push comes to shove the NPCs are right in the thick of it. However, on average the world doesn’t have the sense of urgency that it should have

I think that we have yet to learn the story of the dragons.

Hopefully LS season 2 won’t focus on creating new stories about new characters that could have been better written.

Palador.2170:

From what I’ve always understood, the dragons by themselves are pretty animalistic. It’s when they corrupt sentient beings and they become linked to them that they get smart, and pick up more evil traits.

There’s actually hints of an intelligent ancient draconic civilization (Glint is said to have been a corrupted being, and was a dragon, then we have the Bone Dragons from GW1, and Cantha’s many dragons and dragon-like beings that are unrelated to the Elder Dragons).

But even if what you said were true, they’d have lost that animalistic nature with their first rising, as there’s no indication that they lose any intelligence of their own – or memories – with minion deaths. And each Elder Dragon has shown to have surviving minions from the previous (or perhaps older) rises, though most are dead now: the Great Destroyer, Glint, Drakkar, and the Risen Giganticus Lupicus.

Wanderer.3248:

Dragon minions may exhibit remnants of intelligence and express that under limited autonomy. That doesn’t mean the dragon itself feels the same way, or that the dragons feel much of anything, except hunger.

They seek to conquer, but only in the same way that a swarm of insects does, by smothering all other life. I doubt they care at all about dominating the faces of Tyria, when they could simply wipe them out.

We see Jormag feeling hatred in Edge of Destiny. We see Zhaitan feel fear and anger in the personal story. We see Kralkatorrik use strategies in Edge of Destiny, and in Edge of Destiny we also see – from Kralkatorrik’s own mind – him wanting things, and being angered and hating those which he cannot obtain (aka greed).

The Elder Dragons certainly feel more than just hunger. They hold emotions (even if only negative thus far), and they think and strategize personally. It isn’t all their minions doing.

The lack of “simply wiping them out” comes from them being millenia old – why rush, and put yourself at risk, when you can grow armies over time and annihilate the enemy via attrition with no risk to your self?

Veprovina.4876:

My only problem with the story toward the end is that they keep adding new characters that all die heroic deaths in the same mission and then all act like it’s a tragedy and that I the player should feel something… Feel what? I just met them!

What’s surprising is how well they characterised them in those few lines of dialoge you can have with them (in cutscenes and talking to them during story)…

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When Tybalt died like that, it really had an impact, but as the story nears completion, everyone dies heroicly and it looses all meaning. The have character, but they lack the character arc Tybalt had.

So you see, the dragons are, while pretty threatening and not at all 2 dimensional or cartoony but actually very complex (if you read into the story deeper), not the focus of the overall story… The little people are.

The real issue is that all the characters who die – except for the fear arc – are all from the earlier personal story. So you not only have a 1 in 15 chance (or 1 in 5 in one case) of meeting them the first time, but an additional 1 in 3 chance of meeting them later on. That’s a 1 in 45 chance of the player knowing the NPC long enough to try to care. And even then, the first time we met some of them… we don’t meet them long enough to care. For example, Beirne – you meet him in the tutorial for humans, and only then – and even then he has about 3 lines (spoken and box combined). But on the other hand, Tegwen and Carys you have an even higher chance to care for – if you did Act with Wisdom as a sylvari, you met them early on; if you did Priory and chose to recruit them for Retribution, you met them in the middle of the story; if you decided to lure the Eye out, you met them again – you have 3 chances to met those two and players who meet them each time will have a strong connection to them (but that’s literally a 1 in 540 chance! 1 in 15 for first, 1 in 6 for second, 1 in 2 for third, and 1 in 3 for last).

Zott was, imo, another well done one because the story made it feel like he’d be the survivor and Elli would be the one who died. If also met Zott no matter what during Retribution – though if you played a Dynamics asura, or a sylvari who went with the Order of Whispers when retrieving Caladbolg, you could meet Elli once before too.

But the rest? Tonn, Apatia, Beirne, Grechen, Ferghen, Kekt, and Arda? They weren’t done so well. Apatia was probably the best of them, just because in the end, you had to kill her. Each of the others (sans Tonn, Kekt, and Arda) had a 1 in 45 chance to have been met before (Tonn and Arda you never met before, and Kekt you meet during Forging the Pact, but could meet earlier if you were Priory, and Beirne was 1 in 5 technically, but he got 3 lines as I mentioned).

Honestly, that was probably my biggest issue. It would have been so much better if the NPCs who accompany you is determined by your biography options rather than your path choices in Orr – then you’d care a bit more.

Wanderer.3248:

That’s why we have dragon champions – they provide the personality (and dialog) that is missing from the dragons themselves.

Yeah, but looking at the personal story they get introduced and killed so quickly we never really get a chance to know them. The longest surviving champ was probably the mouth and that was only a handful of missions in which he only really became active around the end.

Azrael.4960:

Veprovina.4876:

Azrael.4960:

You go to maps like Frostgorge, Blazeridge, Orr and you see really quite small patrols for places that are the frontline combat zones. Worse still, they’re moving at a stroll. They’re not marching purposefully weapons in hand ready for any threat, they’re having a Sunday stroll!

That’s what players are there for! :P

But at least npc’s in GW2 do battle, have character and you have a sense that a war is going on. And when there’s a grand scale like story mission, there’s tons of them sometimes.

Unlike other games, in GW2 battles do feel grander when npc’s join the fray.

Don’t get me wrong, when push comes to shove the NPCs are right in the thick of it. However, on average the world doesn’t have the sense of urgency that it should have

Well i can’t argue with that. There is the lack of urgency… I mean, currently there’s a fun little festival for everyone to enjoy! War? Death? Meh, the dragons can wait, the next one shows up in 3 hours or so… :p

But not just in the world, in the story too…

I like the festival and all the game has to offer, but i get what you’re saying.

To take the “insect vs human” thing just a tiny bit farther – what would we do if a particular species of insects swarmed together and started attacking people? Humans who have incomprehensible purpose from an insect point of view, now have a common identified threat. The humans would suddenly shift from incidentally killing off insects, to wiping them off the face of the earth.

What are all the other Elder Dragons going to do if they now know the Pact is capable of taking down another Dragon?

I’ve never played Gw1, so not really into the lore.

I get the feeling that Guild Wars 2’s story tends to avoid painting others as a bad guy. Everyone has their motives or is a force of nature, and we must all sit together at a campfire and sing kumbaya or something. And then when we get actual villains, we get nonsense like Scarlet. The only real schemers with personality were the occasional bad guys in the human storyline (though I’ve only picked humans) but they were similarly one note. As for the rest of the stuff, well pirates gonna pirate, inquest gonna inquest, flame legion is going to kill, and bandits are going to steal stuff. I guess the Nightmare Court seems interesting enough given Anet’s penchant for evil salads. It’s no surprise that characters like Evon who isn’t a bad guy seem but more like a being of his own mind as opposed to the boring Kiel seem more interesting.

The good guys are similar. They’re just goody goody and stuff, and may occasional crack an inappropriate witticism and initally argued (which didn’t really matter anyways since Mr. Tree was so charismatic and brought them together) but they could really fit into any random children’s cartoon. Which is mostly why people think the writing can be a kittenildish. When Goku from Dragon Ball has more depth than your PC, we have a problem.

I don’t know really. I think it’d be nice to blur the story a little. Let us heroes engage in a little bit of moral ambiguity or even outright evil, and maybe even work together with an antagonist. It would make choice a lot more meaningful, if you choose to work with a shady figure or kick them out of the window. You really want to feel like you’re interacting with something rather than just a mindless NPC.

I mean, who wouldn’t pay gems just to beat up Traherne?

There are dragons in this game? Besides zhaitan the others seem to do nothing. Think Scarlet has done more than they have. The Centaurs seem to be a more bigger threat than these imaginary dragons.

After completing your personal story up to level 30 ish, if you run around the undead enough, you can hear them scream after you “You should have died with Forgal!” or, “We’re sending you to shake hands with Tybalt!”. Since these lesser undeads are mindless drones, and are all controlled by their master Zhaitan, Zhaitan is sending this message down the chain to make sure it gets to you to mess with your head. The elder dragons know what’s up.

This very question is brought up by one of the Zepherite children on the back end of the flying ship.

The child asks a teacher why the dragons want to kill everyone. She tells him that the dragons are just a force of nature. They no more want to kill us then a flood or an earthquake wants to kill anyone. They just do. Simply put, the dragons are just doing what they must do, which is consume all the magic they can and sort of “reset” the world.

So, are the dragons evil? Depends on your perspective. They appear evil to us because they are destroying our world and homes. The dragons know full well that we are here, and know what they are doing, and they don’t care. They have no reason to care, unless we try to stop them, then they fight back.

I can understand why you might dislike the reality of the situation, as we have all basically been trained to see a clear cut “good vs bad”, but that is not always the case. The movie, Watchmen, is a great example of this.

Sunshine.4680:

There are dragons in this game? Besides zhaitan the others seem to do nothing. Think Scarlet has done more than they have. The Centaurs seem to be a more bigger threat than these imaginary dragons.

The Elder Dragons are meant to be a “distant threat” – they’re there, but they’re so far away it’d be like there was a rebellion going off in New York City while you’re living in San Fransisco.

WatchTheShow.7203:

After completing your personal story up to level 30 ish, if you run around the undead enough, you can hear them scream after you “You should have died with Forgal!” or, “We’re sending you to shake hands with Tybalt!”. Since these lesser undeads are mindless drones, and are all controlled by their master Zhaitan, Zhaitan is sending this message down the chain to make sure it gets to you to mess with your head. The elder dragons know what’s up.

That’s actually not a mindless drone but a higher one. In mechanics, it’s a veteran, but lore-wise it’d be on par to quite a few semi-sentient entities who remember their past life and can speak on their own accord.

Lazarus.3970:

This very question is brought up by one of the Zepherite children on the back end of the flying ship.

The child asks a teacher why the dragons want to kill everyone. She tells him that the dragons are just a force of nature. They no more want to kill us then a flood or an earthquake wants to kill anyone. They just do. Simply put, the dragons are just doing what they must do, which is consume all the magic they can and sort of “reset” the world.

Which goes back to the whole perspective of the Tyrians, who view the Elder Dragons as mere forces of nature or beings beyond comprehension. But this isn’t what the minions show.