Guild Wars 2

Hi there,
sorry if the question has already been treated somewhere, but I could not find where. When writing a fanfic about Malyck in another post, I made a new sylvari to do his part of the personal story.

This is my question:
where did Malyck’s pod come from? When you follow the river in Venin Vale, and assuming the pod got carried by the waters, you end in gotala cascade that comes from Skrittsburgh. Beind a cascade as it is, and Skrittsburgh being the higher land around, the pod most surely comes from there.

I was hoping to find at least the direction of Malyck’s tree but this seems to be a dead end. How did the pod get into that river? Did the skritt find the pod elsewhere, think it was another pwetty shiny thing and took it to Skrittsburgh only to drop it later by accident into gotala cascade?

Anyone has found any hint in Skrittsburgh?

I would much appreciate if anyone had info about this.

To Konig :
Well, I went and reran the quest. Malyck indeed says his pod drifted from the river source to the west. Oh well, there goes all my searching for little details. Still, I would like to underline the lack of coherence of the map… I went to the destroyed Henge and guess what? There is a waterfall there too, falling from the south to the north into Brisban which means that the water flows north there too and no South into Thaumatova. Maybe my underground river theory is not that far fetched. But more and more I feel that the map designs were not completely accurate lore wise.

To Aaron : I would love to see that some other species have the answer to Malyck’s presence there… Who knows? Maybe the conclusion of the quest will have Malyck travellign Brisban and understanding that there is no way his pod drifted through the river into that place and investigating furthere… But I doubt it

To Gulesave :
I don’t say it is impossible, just that I don’t think so. It’s just a feeling with nothign to argument it. The pod was in a river and the quest talks about the pod drifting along the river. Air floating pod is a possibility, but I don’t feel it is the right, that is all. Future game expansions might prove I am wrong though

Well, I will put this post as an answer to my question later, thank you all… The answer for me would be that the game tells the pod comes from the river source somewhere in the west and that the map is likely to be somehow wrong. Such a pity

Malyck is one of the largely unexplained mysteries from the personal story. Lots of players want to know more but there is no information outside those personal story chapters, so you can start another character and replay it to see all the detail. I don’t remember there being any suggestion of other races being involved. I seem to remember one of the characters suggesting that the pod(s) was carried into Brisban by winds and or the river. This is no less believable than the massive pods launched by the nightmare tower that grow into the offshoots around Tyria.

The water systems of Tyria, unfortunately, are as they are primarily due to the mechanics of map boundaries, and not reflective of lore. Generally speaking, I believe that we can safely assume there is water where the game depicts water, but I am hesitant to apply the in-game end points. In Malyck’s case in particular, I think it safe to say that the river does extend into the jungle, and ANet simply was unable to depict that in the Brisban zone.

It is stated in the final story step that Malyck’s pod flowed in on the river from the west (sadly, dialogue is not on the wiki – for some reason it had the dialogue of a story step prior). While the river does have a waterfall to the north, following it south it lead into Metrica Province (connecting between Venlin Vale and Hexan Regrade) and will eventually bend west as it hits Fisher’s Beach Bend. Following the unexplorable map, you can see it continues until it ends in what was called The Falls of GW1 – traveling through what was Tangle Root.

So Malyck’s Tree is in what is now called the Magus Falls, specifically either in The Fall, Tangle Root, or somewhere in-between.

Incidentally, this is the Ullen River. Well, the Ullen River and its many forks. Where the Ullen River began and ended wasn’t exactly clear – it was originally just depicted as a river wtih a checkmark shape that ran from Henge of Denravi until Riverside Province and up into Twin Serpent Lake, while there were shallow pools/creeks running west through Tangle Root. But with Eye of the North we got the river in Riven Earth which seemed to connect to the Ullen River. Now we have a river that goes from The Falls to Ventry Bay (and thus the Sea of Sorrows) with forks leading to Skrittsburg, Henge of Denravi (passing by Thaumanova), and the old Riven Earth waterfall (no longer with faces sadly). An extra fork was added I suppose. Or what leads to Skrittsburg now is what was leading to Riverside before…

If only it were so easy; but Metrica Province is downriver from where Malyck’s pod was found, so it shouldn’t have come from that direction.

The Ullen River in GW1 didn’t make sense either – y’see, the water flowed from Henge of Denravi… but also flowed from Riverside Province. It’s a river with multiple sources.

I doubt the direction of river flow changed much in 250 years with no apparent artificial redirection.

The waterfall not far from the edge of the ocean never made much sense to me. As much as I loved the stone heads…

To Stooperdale:
Air drifting would be an explanation, but I find it somehow hard to believe.

To Aaron :
I would be really sad if because of technical limitations and map design choices they decided to get rid of any kind of realism in the water streams of the map. Right now I think they did a nice job with the water in this game. There are mountains splitting the different zones, but the waters and rivers flow from one map to the other seamlessly.
Might as well be true I am reading too much into this, but searching little details always amuses me.

To Konig:
:) I am sorry. I really tried to look to the river you talked about, but I am not used to GW1 maps and the only references I found online had too little detail to picture the Ullen River as you described it. Without knowing the GW1 maps it is a bit hard to follow your description.
The only reference I have is the current GW2 maps.
I went again to explore the zone and took care in looking at the water flows and the different waterfalls. In the image joined I pictured in pink the two waterfalls that are at each extremety of the river and in green the spot of Malyck’s pod. In the current map it is a single stream with no branches that runs from north to south. The waterfall at Skrittsburgh and the one between metrica and brisban made it really hard to imagine the pod coming from Metrica and Fisher’s beach bend.
So either :
- GW2 team got rid of any attempt to respect lore and that river should have run towards the north and the waterfall between Metrica and Brisban is lore breaking
- There are subterranean rivers not depicted in the map (as for example, the different visible water ponds might indicate that there is a river running along the blue dotted path I depicted in the map)
- There was another river stream visible but something dried it or deviated it (Thaumanova explosion maybe?) But the only image from GW1 that I found depicting fort Koga shows no water in that region (this is troubling though… where did all those water ponds come from?)

I don’t know. Lore in GW1 might prove you right, but as a GW2 player, the current map shows no indication that the pod could have drifted from the west to its current place… I am lost here since I was not aware of that indication in game that the pod came from the west. Will rerun the quest once again and pay attention. At least I would have an idea of where the tree is from your info ( too bad… in my fanfic I wrote Malyck going west and north and it should have been south instead… oh well…)

PS: indulge me in another wild hypothesis though:
Malyck says that he awoke next to the river, looking up to a bridge and he was hurt. If you look the map, the pod is too far from the nearest bridge. If Malyck was looking up to a bridge it means he was not next to his pod (yes, I know this is far fetched). Near his pod we can find the Ogotl Hyleck. They are known from another Sylvari Personal Quest to be obsessed with creating poison (just like all the hyleck). And what if hte Ogotl found the pod somewhere, brought it to Gotala to see if they could extract somethign from that strange plant and in seeing the sylvari inside looking like dead they threw him and the pod downstream. Malyck awoke later a bit farther that his pod.

He! Please, my imagination is running wild and I have nothing to prove this… Just wild guesses…

Still, if the developpers or the game said the pod came from the west downstream I guess all my looking for little details is useless and that the map in brisban is completely wrong Would be sad.
Worst case scenario would be that they put the pod in Brisban to be in a zone with the correct level for the Quest and they did not notice that their map was making it impossible for the pod to be there.

For the GW1 map: http://wiki.guildwars.com/images/3/3d/Ullen_River_map.jpg

The Ullen River is the blue river clearly defined in the unexplored portion, and where it reaches Tangled Root it heads up, on the edge of the explored area, to Henge of Denravi. There’s also a series of shallow pools and creeks heading west from the same position it diverts north (bending to the north around Maguuma Stade).

As for your observations – it’s possible there’s an underground passage in the river that’s blocked off by players but I find it doubtful. I can say with certainty that the water at Henge of Denravi goes south into Thaumanova and once more towarsd Fisher’s Beach Bend though.

I would say that a combination of mechanical limitations and the apparent implication that the personal story was written after the maps were made (or at least by two non-fully-communicating teams) created this discrepancy. I can imagine that they placed it where it was placed for level purposes. I know that they moved one in the norn storyline to a lower-level area because where they originally wanted was too high (I believe this was in the lost heirloom storyline when meeting the kodan).

Nonetheless, it is stated that the river flows west and that’s where Malyck’s pod comes from during the final story instance with Malyc (Snuffing the Embers). I guess you’d have to look for a youtube video or something since the dialogue isn’t up on the wiki though.

I’ve got all the dialogue for that arc screenied and stored away, and will eventually get it to the wiki- it’s just a matter of motivation >.< Anyway, the line Konig refers to is "Somewhere to the west, at the source of that river, there’s another tree. Maybe even another city, with more sylvari like me. My family. " That would mean, though, that the river in fact flows east, and comes from the west- something the waterfall at the Brisban-Metrica border also bears out.

And for the hylek- “Now that you mention it, I recall large red frogs after I awoke. They kept their distance, and they weren’t happy to see me.” It sounds to me like the Ogotl were deliberately not interfering with him, despite not wanting him around, but that’s just my interpretation.

Why should drifting on the air be unlikely? Consider the pod-like “elevators” in the Grove with a little magic. It’s quite possible that Malyck’s tree is as large and powerful as the Pale Tree, so why couldn’t it launch airborne pods into an updraft and let the wind carry them where it may?

If his tree is far enough away, Malyck’s pod could have caught a particularly good draft and been carried far enough to hit our explorable land and roll down some hill into the river.

(Or, you know: Scarlet.)

It would be from Thaumanova, not to. Though it was reversed in GW1, they likely realized that it didn’t make sense (or alternatively completely forgot about it like the previous mention of there being only two passable passages into the Shiverpeaks from the eastern side – the northern one connecting to the Blood Legion Homelands, not at where we get Frostgorge-Fireheart connection).

Konig Des Todes.2086:

It would be from Thaumanova, not to. Though it was reversed in GW1, they likely realized that it didn’t make sense (or alternatively completely forgot about it like the previous mention of there being only two passable passages into the Shiverpeaks from the eastern side – the northern one connecting to the Blood Legion Homelands, not at where we get Frostgorge-Fireheart connection).

I see.
Well, if the devs see this thread and decide to correct their lore in GW2 map by ‘creating’ an underground river that comes from the Henge towards where Malyck’s pod is they are free to give it my name

Still, this thread for me is closed. Thanks to you all for your time.