Guild Wars 2

What was the impetus behind the dragons waking up in the order they are waking up in? We fought Zhaitan who was one of the dragons introduced to us when this game was being marketed and that makes sense. Why have one dragon fight(Zhaitan)and then move on to Scarlet for a season with no dragon fight and then move on to a dragon that wasn’t one of the dragons in the teaser trailer for GW2?

Don’t get me wrong, I really like the Mordrem, and I bet Mordremoth will look crazy cool, but it strikes me as odd that we were shown this amazing trailer with these dragons that were set up to be what we were after and then we get two straight villains that have nothing to do with that. Teasing something that isn’t going to be a part of the journey strikes me as odd is all.

So the real questions are; Did this stuff change over time? Was there a story before that ended up changing a hundred times before we arrived where we are now? I would love a glimpse at what this story was going to be when the first trailer was shown to us. I would find that fascinating. Any light you can shed on this(devs in the know)would be great even if it’s only a crumb or two.

Mordremoth have been planned since before the game was released (seeing as the name was available in the skill at launch).

I would assume they simply wanted to actually have us witness a Dragon (possibly) waking up in-game and not just hear about it in books/interviews.

Trahearnne also explains it briefly when you speak with him in this patch. When all the known dragons first woke up, they all created some kind of cataclysmic event or went on the offensive. Zhaitan created tons of Risen and the tidal wave. Jormag rampaged through the far north and drove the Norn south. Kralk created the dragonbrand, although he is likely a special case since he was immediately attacked by DE. They all built up a power base of some sort and then became relatively docile, just slowly devouring magic if Zhaitans behavior during the Personal Story is any indication.

The Pact is going after Mordremoth first since he is in that first stage, likely to aggressively push, but at the same time he is probably at his most vulnerable, before he can truly establish his own territory. The Pact wants to get him down before he can create his own version of the tidal wave.

At release, there were a lot of hints that Jormag would be the second dragon fought.

But either things changed, or they had no real plan.

During season 1, Scott McGough told us that each storyline (season?) will go back and forth between a dragon plot and a ‘break from dragons.’

@Asgar: that’s not what the OP is asking. The OP is asking from a design standpoint, not lore/story. Or so it seems to me, at least.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

At release, there were a lot of hints that Jormag would be the second dragon fought.

But either things changed, or they had no real plan.

During season 1, Scott McGough told us that each storyline (season?) will go back and forth between a dragon plot and a ‘break from dragons.’

@Asgar: that’s not what the OP is asking. The OP is asking from a design standpoint, not lore/story. Or so it seems to me, at least.

Yeah that’s correct about the design standpoint. I feel like it was definitely going to happen a different way when the initial trailer was released. Really just wanted insight as to why it changed and why it changed so drastically. I also have a feeling that Scarlet and the LS were never intended way back then. It would be really interesting to see how drastic things have been altered since back then.

Anet claims that they were thinking of the Living World concept during development of the initial game, but they also said around Secret of Southsun Cove that they created the base of Season 1’s plot in 2 days – which, given that they’re now calling The Lost Shores a “special event”, I don’t think they planned for her until sometime between release to December. Flame and Frost and Secret of Southsun were all clearly done on-the-spot, given how little content F&F had, and in another livestream a dev who was on the Secret of Southsun team said that making that was very rushed content (iirc, Secret of Southsun was the first release of their “four teams to make 1 month’s content every four months” set up they had for Season 1, meaning they had less than four months to make the content).

Such a thing wouldn’t surprise me anyways, given that not only were Jeff Grubb and Ree Soesbee were the narrative designers, instead of Scott and Angel, at the time of the development of the initial release content, but the lead writer was not Bobby Stein until around release – basically, all the bigwigs of the writing team changed around during the release timeframe.