Guild Wars 2

Personally, I just feel that the game does a poor job presenting the dragons. I feel the lore surrounding them could be done in a much better way.

Who are the dragons?
Where do they come from?
What do they want?
They have a cycle of rebirth and hibernation, why haven’t we heard of them before?
How does The Great Dwarf and his fight against The Great Destroyer fit into this?
What is the connection between the gods and the dragons? They built Arah on top of Zhaitan – how could they not know? How come NO ONE in the game asks this very obvious question?
What is the connection between Sylvari and the dragons?

It just seems rather poor to me. I mean, let’s contrast GW Nightfall story to this game. In Nightfall, we learnt who Abbadon was, his motivations, his history, the history of his minions, his power levels (being able to defeat 2 other fellow gods by himself), his connections and relationships with other gods (there was an amazing dialogue between lieutenants of Abaddon & Menzies showcasing their mutual distaste of one another but willingness to work together to achieve their separate goals), and his endgame.

In GW2, what do we know about these dragons? They’re big, they’re bad….so what? They might eat magic? Yeah…ok…so, what? We know next to nothing about their backstory, their motivations, their connections to previously established characters, nothing. This creates a lack of focus, cohesion and interest in the world going on around you.

While I personally feel that the Elder Dragons was a mistake, I personally would have preferred fighting Dhuum or Menzies. Hopefully in the next upcoming expansion, they really work to make lore a forefront priority in their design.

Ummm, how ‘bout cause the game is only a month old and we only just beat one dragon? I’m sure you’ll get these answers soon enough once some more content is released. It’s called suspense. Also, play Arah explorable mode that might shed at least a little light.

We already have answers to your third, fourth, and fifth questions.

What do they want?
They want to make everything like themselves and destroy the rest. That is to say, corrupt everything. This is fairly obvious in the game and it’s quite interesting to see how they influence the mind of those they corrupt. We can see from the personal story missions as well as certain bosses in events that Zhaitan fills them with the idea that he’s the only means to attain immortality and that the Six Gods and the Mists are lies, unimportant, and should be dismissed. Jormag’s said to promise power before corrupting, whereas others corrupt to enslave. From Edge of Destiny we see that Kralkatorrik creates an immense fanaticism in his minions – they wish to serve him and think of nothing else, and from his own mind we can glimpse at him wanting to obtain everything (I take this as wanting to become perfect), similarly from EoD we see that Jormag has an intense hatred for, seemingly, everything.

They have a cycle of rebirth and hibernation, why haven’t we heard of them before?
Stated throughout the Durmand Priory area if you actually look, the reason for this is because it was so long ago (about 11,320 years ago) and only five sentient races survived that time (with knowledge of the ED) – the mursaat, who had fled until shortly prior to GW1 it seems, the forgotten, who had left ~800 years prior to GW1, the seers, who are mostly extinct by GW1, jotun, who have fallen from civilization and lost their knowlege, and the dwarves. The dwarves and jotun are the most cited sources for all knowledge on the Elder Dragons, but the latter was lost and the former had the knowledge told and retold into becoming myths and it’s hard to differentiate the difference between fact and fiction – especially with the dwarves now mostly gone.

In short, all the races that had knowledge about the Elder Dragons are now gone and those who were around recently either had other matters (mursaat trying to save their hides from titans, forgotten trying to keep Abaddon imprisoned, and dwarves dealing with the Stone Summit) that they couldn’t spread the knowledge prior to their awakening (and the one race to last until their re-awakening with knowledge “in tact” – dwarves – had, as I said, the knowledge left in legends and myths).

How does The Great Dwarf and his fight against The Great Destroyer fit into this?
This is answered in Guild Wars Eye of the North. The Great Dwarf is the collective consciousness of the dwarves who had fought the destroyers – including, according to a book in Divinity’s Reach, a multitude of Great Destroyers, though the Tome of Rubicon only explicitly talked about one. Basically, the Great Dwarf was one of the forces fighting the Elder Dragons during their last rise.

As to why no one asks about a relation between the gods and dragons – well, what’s the relation between the dragons and asura. The Six Gods built the place where they arrived on the world, apparently, which they knew for being magically concentrated (there’s implications that the Artesian Waters – the place where they arrived at Orr – is magical in its own rights, not outright due to the Elder Dragons). It’s very likely that the Six Gods were much like the asura in that they found a magical place and situated themselves on it while studying it. They also brought various magical contraptions from across Tyria to Arah as well. I haven’t done the explorable dungeon in full yet but it may be possible that going through all four paths answers the question of the connection between the gods and dragons, since the things they brought that’s the focus of the explorable mode of Arah are all dragon-focused magic (bloodstone, jotun telescope, mursaat runes, and forgotten magic).

Eclipses.7152:

It just seems rather poor to me. I mean, let’s contrast GW Nightfall story to this game.

That’s a very poor contrast. It’s like comparing apples to oranges – to use a common phrase. They’re both fruits, they have similarities which make them both fruits, but they’re still very different. Similarly, Nightfall is the third of a series. In Prophecies and Factions we didn’t learn much about Menzies or Dhuum or the dark forces behind Shiro, or where the titans came from, who the Margonites were, who Joko or Turai was, or why the gods created the Crystal Desert and so forth. Those were all answered in Nightfall, but the questions were brought up in Prophecies and Factions.

Anet in the past originally wanted to do GW1 in sets of 3 releases. This may or may not be returning in GW2 – and we may be able to claim Eye of the North as the first of the three.