Guild Wars 2

I was just thinking dragons are a bad end game boss. They don’t communicate with you they just fly around seeing us as ants. There is no real engagement with the player.

I prefer some nasty lich, demon, demi-god, etc that mocks the player, laughs while he kills innocents, share dialogue with the players, turns up now and again to thawt your progression.

I guess my question is ‘what type of end game boss do you prefer?’

I kinda agree with you, but it’s a dragon, it doesn’t need a personality. Instead of personality, ANet could make those dragons more challenging, a bit more random with some new skills, with phases (and I don’t mean Claw-like phases, they are just too long and tedious for me at least).

zaitan was the bigest disapointement ever

I agree. Dragons are cool as some big bad’s pet or something but as final bosses, their lack of direct interaction with the characters kinda kills the buzz around the hype. I like the idea of the angels raining divine judgment on tyria as was once planned.

Dragons were not always the main antagonists of Guild Wars 2. According to The Making of Guild Wars 2 book, original drafts for story included demons and angelic beings descending to the world to judge it.

I could be wrong but… isn’t Zaitan communicating via his minions? It’s just like Sauron in Lord of the Rings, he doesn’t say that much… He is just an eye on a tower.

In many fantasy stories Dragons are intelligent and can speak through your mind and if I am not wrong Dragons in GW does so too… I remember speaking to the Dragon Glint in GW1.

I guess Zaitan just choose to not speak and waste time to speak with infierial creatures.

Why can’t dragon’s morph into a humanoid form and can actually talk?
Man i hope we see Zhaitan again, maybe in a humanoid form, and have
a whole story crafted around him, maybe even sympathetic to him.

A good villian deserves sympathy at times, not just flying around for us to pew pew him.

Your perspective is a bit misguided here.

Strictly speaking, the dragons are not villains. They don’t have any of the characteristics to qualify as proper villains. The dragons are described more as acts of god in the lore. After all, the dragons lack personality and a proper agenda.

Of course, that could all be changed if the lore changed to each dragon having some motivation behind their actions. As an example, Final Fantasy X had Sin, which was very similar to the dragons at the beginning of the game, but completely changed towards the end.

And honestly, the whole “hero slays a dragon” thing is a very, very old form of epic.

And besides, villains with personalities come with their issues. Pretty much all villains who aim for the destruction of the world are insane. And that gets really boring really quickly.

Killing Zaitan ends a quest chain that started in Guild Wars 1 EOTN.

Jormag was pretty well designed, but tbh I think its pretty boring compared to fighting some of the bosses in Orr. I quite like Arah, Grenth and Melandru. I really think Anet is limited with what they can do with dragons and what we end up seeing is everyone spraying damage for a quick chest and ignoring the mechanics. Subject Alpha I really liked and it certainly gave me some faith that Anet is playing around with combat mechanics in boss fights. Oh and I really like the Molten Forge Bosses too, possibly one of my favorite.

Only 1 of the 3 dragons in the game is in a level 80 zone. If you want a bit more challange do the temples in orr. Those are a bit more of a challange and more what I consider end game content.

The way they are now, the dragons are oversized pinata’s.

Evon Skyfyre.9673:

Killing Zaitan ends a quest chain that started in Guild Wars 1 EOTN.

Not sure this is true. I’m thinking that the dragon at the end of EotN was Primodus, not Zhaitan.

Basically, in the lore, the Elder Dragons pretty much wakes up to feast on Tyria, killing much of the life and magic, and then goes back to sleep.

Vayne.8563:

Evon Skyfyre.9673:

Killing Zaitan ends a quest chain that started in Guild Wars 1 EOTN.

Not sure this is true. I’m thinking that the dragon at the end of EotN was Primodus, not Zhaitan.

It was Primordius, yes, you delayed his wakening by killing the Great Destroyer. What I think he says though is that all this Elder Dragon stuff started in Eye of the North expansion, now leading up to Zhaitan’s death(?) but it’s still ongoing.

Olba.5376:

And besides, villains with personalities come with their issues. Pretty much all villains who aim for the destruction of the world are insane. And that gets really boring really quickly.

world domination or destruction. But if you look at some of the reasons they can be multiple and their techniques many. I’ve played many computer games over the years and had to deal with many end game villains.

Sephiroth (wants revenge) from Final fantasy was a a goody
Kefka (totally insane wanting world destruction and to become a god.)
Lich King in WoW(misguided, possessed), good story a hero so dedicated to protecting his homeland he uses dark power which unfortunately he can’t control and eventually awakens or frees the dead lich.
Liquid Snake / ocelot (insane perhaps)

These were great villains and had different motives albeit the same outcome. I had no connection with Zhaitan at all and to talk ‘through’ your minions makes the connection even worse.

The living story is heading in the direction I like “a fast talking city folk from lions arch” – this sounds interesting. i hope to be tricked, mislead, deceived, betrayal… then I’ll really want to finish this person off.

The personal story constantly hinted the dragons were actually intelligent.

What I think would make them baddass is if they were given personalities and insidious motives, seeking a higher goal beyond the comprehension of Tyrians.

Even if the dragons are hellbent on destruction, they need quirks to make them recognized and unique. Kralkatorik for example has an obsession with perfection, but we never actually see him express his obsession.

Kefka for example was a great villain because he acted so utterly comical and absurd. Yet he poisoned a kingdom, destroyed the chance of peace between espers and humans, kills the emperor himself, becomes a god, then destroys the world.

And even when he achieved godhood, Square still gave him character by making him the ultimate sadist rather than simply being a force of destruction. He seeks to destroy everyone’s hope, yet he lets them live so that they may suffer.

Compare Kefka and Zhaitan, and you will see a huge difference.

Gele.2048:

zaitan was the bigest disapointement ever

More of a let down than the ending to Fable 2? Eh. . .

Kain Francois.4328:

The personal story constantly hinted the dragons were actually intelligent.

What I think would make them baddass is if they were given personalities and insidious motives, seeking a higher goal beyond the comprehension of Tyrians.

Even if the dragons are hellbent on destruction, they need quirks to make them recognized and unique. Kralkatorik for example has an obsession with perfection, but we never actually see him express his obsession.

Kefka for example was a great villain because he acted so utterly comical and absurd. Yet he poisoned a kingdom, destroyed the chance of peace between espers and humans, kills the emperor himself, becomes a god, then destroys the world.

And even when he achieved godhood, Square still gave him character by making him the ultimate sadist rather than simply being a force of destruction. He seeks to destroy everyone’s hope, yet he lets them live so that they may suffer.

Compare Kefka and Zhaitan, and you will see a huge difference.

Ah, good old Kefka. I miss him. He was, by far, the best Final Fantasy villain in my opinion. That beats Sephiroth as well. Him and his constant “mommy issues”.

Back onto the subject as hand, I wouldn’t might seeing something like a “Voice” of an Elder Dragon, to go along with the “Mouth” and “Eye” theme. It would be the servant that the Elder Dragon uses to literally speak to, and possibly manipulate, the lesser races.

As for the “end boss” fight, the first stage of the event could be against the Voice. The Elder Dragon would try and make you question your motives or even your allies. It has thousands of eyes though its servants, and has spied on you and your forces for a very long while, memorizing every single action you and your cohorts have undertaken.

And it will try and use every single thing to demoralize you.

Eh, I’d agree that a Dragon was a bad end-boss for this game, but I’d say they could have still been a great ‘primary antagonist’ of sorts.

Basically, I’d like to have seen the threat of the dragons set the climate for the entire game, encompass a major portion of the threats we faced, but not necessarily end up being addressed to any sort of conclusion here and now. Well… I mean it’s not ‘concluded’ in the sense there are still more of them out there, but you know what I mean; Zhaitan should have been something we hit after long-term build-up, IMO.

Kain Francois.4328:

The personal story constantly hinted the dragons were actually intelligent.

Which was one of the major disappointments for me.

The idea that these things were truly ancient and were more akin to a force of nature than an actual entity that could be readily-understood made them seem like a huge threat that we could never imagine winning against, and that sets an amazing tone.
From how they were initially presented, I expected the Risen to be like a plague that constantly spreads, mindless and relentless. Something that behaved nothing like a normal army, with no sense of strategy or order, and which normal tactics would be useless against. Instead, we got faux-zombies that like to vocalize their positive feelings about death, zombie anti-aircraft guns, the whole stupid Eye and Mouth of Zhaitan bit, and all the rest of the dreck that followed. Oh, and then we killed one of them in fairly-short-order.

The dragons and their minions went from being this unknowable force to ‘just another army’, IMO. Rather than Orr being this horrific sea of brainless corpses, we may as well have been fighting the Kournans again.

And honestly, my disappointment with how the dragons were handled seems to tie together with some of the other big disappointments I felt; most notably the direction they went with the orders. I really liked the idea that each would take a different approach to how to handle the dragons, but they ended up being fairly shallow and pointless in the end, especially once they were rolled into ‘the Pact’. Had the Durmand Priory story moved in the direction it initially sounded like it would (and had they not just ended up being lolgadgets weirdos rather than genuine scholar-monks), that could have been something really compelling.

But I’m kind of veering off course there… Basically though, it’s the idea that the dragons had to be a directly-confrontable threat and that we had to take out Zhaitan by the end of the personal story (forcing everyone to converge at this point, at that) which seems to have mucked up their potential the most for me. Honestly, I’d prefer the dragons to just be something of a fixed part of the world at this point, rather than just a gauntlet for the races to slog through. Something we have to work around while slowly devising methods to survive, and ultimately counter them.

(And as another aside, if we were going to take one out head-on, I’d have gone with Primordus… I think each dragon would have worked better as specifically embodying a different form of ‘corruption’ with his being the most suited for a direct conflict;
Zhaitan – Plague-like corruption: completely mindless, it just aims to spread, consume, and grow
Jormag – Intoxication, manipulation, and madness: Draws individuals into his service willingly by granting them corruptive, addictive power that turns them into zealots.
Kralkatorrik – Assimilation, somewhat like the Borg: Forcibly takes control of specific creatures and turns them into drones.
Primordus – Destruction: Unlike the others, he doesn’t corrupt beings into his service; he just makes his own minions and has no use for living creatures, aiming simply to slaughter anything and everything.

So, basically the notion of combining all our skills and tech could work when we end up in direct conflict with Primordus somewhere down the line (after longterm planning), but for the others we would need more subtle ways to take them out, ideally in stages. Hell, for Zhaitan, it could have opened up the perfect chance to revisit the Dhuum storyline again… But I dunno…)

Err… So, to break it down, I don’t think it’s so much an issue that the dragons don’t have such distinct personalities or dialogue. I think the real issue is that they didn’t succeed in making them ominous and alien enough for them to be accepted without those things.

Dragons make great end bosses…Anet just needs to learn how to make end boss fights better, rather than pushing 2…2….2….2…2…

Erukk.1408:

As for the “end boss” fight, the first stage of the event could be against the Voice.

You know that jumping puzzle with the ghost pirate, what would of been good is when you move through Arah you can hear his voice like the ghost pirate, although not as clear, slightly difficult to pick up the works at first, maybe something like the sound of multiple voices talking (since he’s made up of multiple dragons) he could taunt you as you moved closer to his location.

Having the eye and mouth of Zhaitan never really worked for me, They seemed small at first (in scale, Zhaitan is enormous and the eye was barely taller than a human) and not necessary, they didn’t really provide much to Zhaitans development.

I don’t think dragons are inherently handicapped at being villains-they just need a bit of character; pretty much all zhaitan had was looks as it wasn’t developed at all during the story…and his demise as far from inspiring. I think if they treated dragons a bit like the reapers from Mass Effect (ME1 and ME2…ME3 did not happen) it would be more interesting. As someone mentioned, dragons rise, kill all the things then go back to sleep <-reapers (again, ME3 did not happen so we’re working under the premise that we still don’t know what reapers are), however, unlike the reapers, we get no reason or even a sense of mystery as to why this behaviour exist. The Reapers, despite being absolutely enormous had personality, intelligence, interacted with the players through minions (indoctrination) and gave a feeling of a larger scheme-the destruction they cause was not the goal but rather the means to an end; based on what you said that’s what you feel is lacking. As a matter of fact one could argue that the size of the reapers added to their character as it gave a feeling of omnipotence-this huge mysterious being that itself has massive amounts of power but yet still able to infect/interact at the individual level all over the galaxy. The development of the dragons in contrast, begins and ends with ‘dragons are waking up and killing all the things’…done, that’s it-oh and ‘this one dragon create zombies’. Changing the aesthetics of the final boss/threat won’t help in that regard-it’s the story and character development that is lacking here.

I really want to see Kralkatorik have personality. His obsession with perfection opens up a lot of doors as a character.

Dark Saviour.9410:

Err… So, to break it down, I don’t think it’s so much an issue that the dragons don’t have such distinct personalities or dialogue. I think the real issue is that they didn’t succeed in making them ominous and alien enough for them to be accepted without those things.

I absolutely agree with this.

There are several ways you can handle a villain or antagonist, with one of the more popular ones having the story focus on the relationship between the protagonist (here, that would be us) and the antagonist. You see this with the Sephiroth or Kefka type villains – they have interesting personalities and motivations that are still ultimately “human” at heart. Because they exist as entities that are similar enough to the protagonist (i.e. being human with human, albeit evil, motivations), you can focus energy on developing interactions between that antagonist and the protagonist that showcase the good guy versus bad guy relationship.

That was the kind of approach they seem to use with Zhaitan, when he really needed a different approach – a kind of “Elder God” or Cthulhu entity that is beyond our understanding, a creature that is alien to us. Telling a story with that kind of villain needs to both reinforce the just how unlike us the creature is and focus on the relationships and interactions of those standing against it. There’s hints of this within the personal story, but they didn’t take it far enough…and as such I agree that Zhaitan simply wasn’t alien and ominous enough as they showed him to exist without having to rely on the other approach that shows motivations and such, and that particular aspect of him was not handled well.