Guild Wars 2

I recently took a hiatus and I feel one of the reasons I did it was because after the easy SM there was no real impending threat to face. I mean Im no longer a wow player but one thing that always hooked be was the big baddie trailer and the work to get to them. back in Wrath of the Lich King you where personalized with your villian, you interacted with him on several plots until the final raid, and it drove you to the grind to get good enough for your Raid group to face him and the feeling you got was fantastic once you put him down! Zhaitan made only one appearance and the battle was kinda weak.

Another problem is the overt focus on comedy. I was very dissapointed with the tone of the game after reading Ghosts of Ascalon, it was so well done and had a visceral and yet wonderous feeling to it. This games plot points all seem to fall onto comedy relief.

SPOILER: For exsample, I was walking through Kessix in an unexplored area and I came across a massive giant cyclops, I conversed with this mythical being expressing interest over its backstory and next thing I know im bored because its going on about how its afraid of bunny rabbits. I seriously face palmed.

The thing is there is real potential here aside from these comedy villians, Trahern was a fantastic character wich I loved (( Sorry, I dont like Destinys edge, They feel very flat compared to Dougals group wich was alot more interesting and I feel get too much credit when Dougals group did the real work to stop a war)) And Some of the plotlines such as the College of Dynamics plot on responsibility on technology hooked me from square one.

All I want to see is abit less emphasis on comedy and rediculiousness and a greater sense of wonder and motivation by an impending threat wich personalizes itself and isnt rediculous like Tixx.

Also, in addition I failed to hook one of my friends because when he played Charr the overt focus on comedy and the sheer stupidity of alot of the characters put him off. (( wich is sad because I know the Charr have a very interesting story)) He played Female Charr, Ash Legion.

Yeah, I agree with you, the story is kinda weak. In the end I decided to just ignore it altogether, even though it means I don’t get to bring Zhaitan down. Not that you get much out of it anyway, them elder dragons sure don’t pack much of a hoard.

But I feel the personal story could have been used to a much better effect if it helped you get a real sense of the world your character is in, their relationships with other people out there, their culture and so on… the first few chapters do a great job with this, but after you join an order it all goes downhill.

The elder dragons aren’t classical villians and Anet never claimed they would be. They are more like forces of nature or Lovecrafts old ones. They have no motives you can understand, they just live to consume and once almost everything is conusumed they go back to sleep until there is something to feed on again.
That said, I would have liked to see Zhaitan before the “epic” battle, for example with him directly attacking Claw Island, but that would have been a plot hole again. If he flies around attacking the races personally why didn’t he just destroy LA and so on.
No Zhaitan has no interest in dealing with the races of Tyria personally. He has his minions which gather food and troops for him and that is enough.
There are enough villians with more understandable motives, like all the racial enemies. I myself, like the fact that we have both classical villians and lovecraftian ones.

At least since Nightfall, GW has a stronger focus on comedic elements. That’s another thing I really like, since in my opinion it keeps the story fresh and the attention of the average audience. When I write longer stories, I always put in comedic elements, for me it just has to be part of a good narrative.
This also seems to be Jeff Grubb’s style since, as I said it most obvious since Nightfall, the first part he worked on. So you can expect those comedic elements to reappear in future storylines. If that puts you off, well than I’m sorry, but I don’t think they’ll change it.

Btw GoA had comedy elements too, pretty much all the interaction between Kranxx and Gullik for example (“don’t touch that!”).

BuddhaKeks.4857:

The elder dragons aren’t classical villians and Anet never claimed they would be. They are more like forces of nature or Lovecrafts old ones.

So tell me, how did Cthulhu die? Does whipping a stormy sea produce any results? :p

Personally I don’t mind the comic relief sprinkled in the world. Its good to occasionally break things up a bit. There are also quite somber moments, if you know where to look for them.
But man oh man did they mess it up with Zhaitan. One can only hope the other dragons will be less disappointing.

Gaudrath.6725:

BuddhaKeks.4857:

The elder dragons aren’t classical villians and Anet never claimed they would be. They are more like forces of nature or Lovecrafts old ones.

So tell me, how did Cthulhu die? Does whipping a stormy sea produce any results? :p

Personally I don’t mind the comic relief sprinkled in the world. Its good to occasionally break things up a bit. There are also quite somber moments, if you know where to look for them.
But man oh man did they mess it up with Zhaitan. One can only hope the other dragons will be less disappointing.

Agreed! Jormag should be next all things considering and I would think a darker tone of a Doomed journey to the Far Northern shiverpeaks would be awesome. Perhaps the Triad is against it because they arent prepared and the Norn people go forward anyway, let us feel it too. Remove several non essential NPC’s in Hoelbrak to make it feel more empty so it feels like many left. Perhaps some Charr Warbands who sympathize with them because they too recently reclaimed their homeland join them.

Also give us a villian, a face. Its very easy to personalize a villian without anthropomorphizing them. The Elder Dragons are completely different life forms who think differently from the sentient races of Tyria, make their will think that they are doing good and arent “Typical evil” bad guys.

Gaudrath.6725:

BuddhaKeks.4857:

The elder dragons aren’t classical villians and Anet never claimed they would be. They are more like forces of nature or Lovecrafts old ones.

So tell me, how did Cthulhu die? Does whipping a stormy sea produce any results? :p

He didn’t die, but he was knocked out by a boat ramming into his head.

@Grmilore:

“The Elder Dragons are completely different life forms who think differently from the sentient races of Tyria, make their will think that they are doing good and arent “Typical evil” bad guys.”

I presume you haven’t played the full story yet, because the way most of Zhaitans higher ranking minions talk you get the impression that they actually do think that they are doing good and the races of Tyria are evil and want to stop their mission for greater good.

I agree that there’s too many comedic elements. But I disagree with a poor story. In regards to Zhaitan, I’d have to go with Buddhakeks that you seem to have been expecting something more of a classic fantasy villain.

There were bad parts – plenty of them in fact. But these were not due to story fallpoints, but rather due to game design.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

Gaudrath.6725:

BuddhaKeks.4857:

The elder dragons aren’t classical villians and Anet never claimed they would be. They are more like forces of nature or Lovecrafts old ones.

So tell me, how did Cthulhu die? Does whipping a stormy sea produce any results? :p

He didn’t die, but he was knocked out by a boat ramming into his head.

Exactly my point.

The problem with the weak story with Zhatian is pretty much seen in most beginning MMO’s.

Generally these games haven’t had enough time to elaborate and establish themselves, so multiplots and characterization of the world around your character is more focuses on then the big bad. It was the same thing with WoW, and they didn’t truly have a well done big bad until the third expansion due to totally messing up the villainy/anti-heroism of Illidan(Who despite promotion was barley a threat in the expansion) and not having a truly established villain in Vanilla WoW.

A-net did something impressive by trying to flush out a game to go to greater lengths then others in it’s beginning, a difficult feat. By comparison to the beginning of other games, this is impressive. So you can’t expect them to have such an excellent grasp on Themeing and plot progression so early on, especially when they have no idea how the gamers will react to it (players forget that their power of hindsight does not to apply to the artists in work, who have very little idea whether or not their work may be seen as bad). Once the waters have been tested and they understand exactly what players want, the story and plot line should improve.(Unless the writers and artists have an ego issue, such as the issue in WoW in which they originally wouldn’t allow armor transmutation because obviously their Armor designer was offended)

Basically let the game grow a bit, and maybe one day you’ll get your Lichking like villian

Gaudrath.6725:

BuddhaKeks.4857:

He didn’t die, but he was knocked out by a boat ramming into his head.

Exactly my point.

To be honest, I don’t think you understood what I ment. Yes, Cthulhu did not die, but the point of my post was the second part. He was knocked out by a freakin’ boat rammed into his head.
Meaning, no matter how terrifying Cthulhu is described, how it’s mentioned that he could devourer the souls of every last human on earth, he is still not undefeatable. One guy with ba… courage could take him out. And it’s not like Cthulhu woke up 2 hous later being slightly enraged, no he was send back into a deep slumber!

Imagine what a nuke could have done to him! Okay, if I remember correctly, the story is set in the 20’s but still some concentrated fire power and the old one could be gone for good. Really most people forget that part entirely. They think old ones can not be defeated, but yes they can. The prophecies of them being the harbingers of the apocalypse were made in times when people did not have superior fire power.

You want something truely unkillable? Then look at Azathoth, the Demon Sultan. Compared to him Cthulhu is a catholic schoolgirl. But the Elder Dragons of GW2 are nothing like him and I never likened them to him.

Cthulhu wasn’t “Defeated” by the boat, they were just lucky that the stars came out of alignment while his head was reforming. The boat popping his head open was like someone blowing air in your face, it was of no consequence

Understand that Cthulhu and the other old ones are composed of something like matter but isn’t truly our universal standard of matter. It’s suggested that every piece of an old one is and always will be under any physical change.. the old one. Meaning every tendril you slice of Cthulhu is still a part of him and will simply just merge back, exerting physical change such as cutting or blowing him up is of no consequence less of temporarily stalling his pseudo-physical body from crushing you, which isn’t necessary sense he could simply make your head pop like a cork.

Also Azathoth is only scary if he wakes up (Reality disappears), the old ones are a bit more menacing then the Outergods since they’re a bit more personal.

It’s a while ago since I read the story, so I misremembered the ending a bit it seems. I know the old ones follow some really bizarre alien biology, but I can’t recall they were ever be made out to be truely indestructable, besides the prophecies by people who soon lost their minds afterwards.
In other words, the sources on them aren’t the most trustworthy, so we can only go by the things we know, that is a boat to the head can wound a old one. In conclusion, you can concetrate your fire power on one until he’s a pile of dust. Sure, maybe he will reform, but that could be enough time for the stars to align differently (seriously why did he even bother to wake up, if his time window was so ridiculously small?) That is of course if you can keep your sanity that long, which seems to be depended on the individuals willpower.

To be honest, I hardly see much difference between them and EDs. We could only kill Zhaitan because, we weakened him and had superior fire power. I think you could possible do the same to an old one.

That said, I think old ones are great villians, and I love that the EDs are very lovecraftian, but they are not entirely the same. Meaning rules that apply to old ones, don’t have to apply to EDs.

The prophesies and craziness in lovecraft works are supposed to be taken as true, It’s not supposed to be taken as “They’re just big aliens who want you to believe their deathless space gods”, that’s truly what they are. You’ve gotta remember that reality in the lovecraft universe is just a dream by Azathoth and that the Old ones are kind of alien to the dream (I need to go back to confirm this). We have no physical means of destroying them, we can"only make ripples in the water that is them" if you get my metaphor.

the only thing your actions do is temporary change their physical structure(blow them up), you can’t stop it from returning to it’s standard with anything in the physical realm.

You also have no way of knowing the star position required for his body to sustain activity.

The elder dragons are similar in a sort of supremely powered elemental force way but they aren’t really bound to the same set of rules as the old ones, they can be dismembered and destroyed.

To clarify, my point was, as Bard elaborated, that you could not kill Cthulhu, only slow him down for a short while.
I think a big part of the draw the lovecraftian monsters have is this quality of unstoppable menace. It does give them a truly otherwordly, mystical air. Just killing one of course dispells all that.
So that’s why I think they should have made the elder dragons something like Cthulhu – you can slow them down, even subdue them for a while, but not end them. No more than you can end an ocean by shooting it.

I think it’s debatable if Cthulhu is killable or not, Lovecraft never wrote a story about someone actually trying, since it was not his style. I hold it like Arnold Schwarzenegger, “If it’s bleeds, we can kill it.”

If a boat can hurt Cthulhu, missiles can too. Compare him to Godzilla, does that guy even feel missiles? Certainly not, but he is not invincible.
Now I want to see a Cthulhu vs Godzilla match, what wins, the aura of madness and despair or a atomic breath to the face. I don’t think Cthuhlu had to consider wearing hats for a while after getting hit by one.

If Guild Wars was a horror game, then not being able to kill Zhaitan might work. But as a science fantasy game as it is, that just leaves disappointment in a lot of players. You’re clearly not the kind who would be disappointed – tbh, neither would I be, but you can’t please everyone and it’s clear that ArenaNet wanted an actual victory in the end.

Then again, while we’re told Zhaitan is dead, who’s to say that he isn’t just inactive while his body reforms and he just simply won’t be seen in this lifetime again because of such?

As for whether Cthulhu can actually die… well, even if cut off pieces will just reform it, if you destroy those pieces then would it not thus be unable to reform? E.g., vaporization? Besides this, if you ask me, a seemingly all-powerful being who’s limited by the alignment of stars sounds pretty kitten pathetic to me, devourment of souls aside.

Gee, thanks Konig, finally someone who understands my point.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

If Guild Wars was a horror game, then not being able to kill Zhaitan might work. But as a science fantasy game as it is, that just leaves disappointment in a lot of players. You’re clearly not the kind who would be disappointed – tbh, neither would I be, but you can’t please everyone and it’s clear that ArenaNet wanted an actual victory in the end.

Then again, while we’re told Zhaitan is dead, who’s to say that he isn’t just inactive while his body reforms and he just simply won’t be seen in this lifetime again because of such?

As for whether Cthulhu can actually die… well, even if cut off pieces will just reform it, if you destroy those pieces then would it not thus be unable to reform? E.g., vaporization? Besides this, if you ask me, a seemingly all-powerful being who’s limited by the alignment of stars sounds pretty kitten pathetic to me, devourment of souls aside.

You can’t really vaporize something that’s immune to chemical change, He’s not made of actual matter, remember. I’d theorize that even if you ground Cthulhu up into the smallest particles (Assuming he even is composed of small individual particles like matter) that they would still reform into his base form. Lovecraft made it pretty clear that his eldrich horrors were beyond such notions of death or obliteration.

Do we even know if Zhaitan is really dead? He fell into the ocean, right? Does the Pact go scuba dive to teabag his corpse or something?

Zhaitan fell onto the ground – crashed pretty hard, with a tower landing on top of him too. I’m sure the Pact went straight down to check, though I suppose you never know.

Bard.7215:

You can’t really vaporize something that’s immune to chemical change, He’s not made of actual matter, remember. I’d theorize that even if you ground Cthulhu up into the smallest particles (Assuming he even is composed of small individual particles like matter) that they would still reform into his base form. Lovecraft made it pretty clear that his eldrich horrors were beyond such notions of death or obliteration.

There’s only three types of things in existence when you get down to the nitty gritty bits.

Matter, anti-matter, and imagination.

If it’s matter, you can do kitten to it, even if it takes a full blown star, or exploding a star, to do it. If it’s anti-matter, the second it touches you, or anything that’s matter, it “blows up” (as does what it touches). If it’s imagination, it can’t do kitten to you.

Welp, guess Cthulhu’s imagination. :P

But to be a bit more serious: that’s actually what I dislike about the Cthulhu mythos – I like horror and I hate when the “victim” in a horror story is able to fight back (that’s not true horror – true horror is what invokes fear in the audience/victim, and the second you get a chance of survival, that fear is pretty much gone), but I dilike the Cthulhu mythos because of how silly the old gods sound to me – not the whole “ancient and powerful beings beyond our comprehension” but rather how they’re basically godmoding everything.

Yeah, I probably contradicted myself. I like horror that brings the feeling of helplessness, but I hate a kind of horror that invokes such by having unkillable hostile beings. Heh.

Actually, we are just beginning to discover the properties of the physical universe. It could be entirely possible to create entities whose physical manifestations are not so much defined by their material composition as some more elusive properties, perhaps as permanent data imprints in the quantum structure of the universe – so that you could destroy them temporarily, but as long as there is available matter in the universe they will reform again.
We don’t know. It might be bullkitten, it might be possible.

But for our purposes, which is creating fantasy monsters, we can just say anything is possible, so there is no need or sense to argue practicalities. Old Ones cannot be truly destroyed. Should have made Elder Dragons like that. It would be neat, actually. You get this truly lovecraftian horror which needs to be kept at bay, but is always, always knocking on your front gate.
Then the long-term goal of the game lore could be in finding a more esoteric means of getting rid of the elder dragons. Maybe an ancient race was close to finding a way to make them go back to sleep? Maybe there is a way to “unform” them? And so when ANet finally decides to change the game entirely, years from now, they do the real “dragon slaying” event.

Apparently the :P and “But to be a bit more serious” wasn’t enough to indicate the entire first half of my post was a joke.

What I’m wondering is how such a high budget RPG could have such a horribly organized storyline?

I guarantee you, if an English teacher would have taken a look at it, then it would have been a failed school project.

We saw Zhaitan only once, an annoying lack of continuity between the story arcs, so many plot devices forgotten, and of course, saladhead!

So why is a bad story suddenly ok just because it’s high budget? A bad story is a bad story. The amazing backstory is pointless if we’re given a bad script.

I fail to see why seeing Zhaitan only once is such a negative aspect to the game’s story. Because to me it isn’t.

The lack of continuity – if you’re referring to what I think you are, where NPCs you met get re-introduced or never denote knowing you – seems to be oversights and bugs, many of which were fixed a couple weeks after release, but some still existing.

And Trahearne isn’t bad storytelling, it’s bad voice acting. Though that’s an imo case.

Kain Francois.4328:

I guarantee you, if an English teacher would have taken a look at it, then it would have been a failed school project.

We saw Zhaitan only once, an annoying lack of continuity between the story arcs, so many plot devices forgotten, and of course, saladhead!

Many English teachers would not appreciate the constraints of storytelling in the medium of an MMO. I think the continuity between story arcs is pretty decent considering they are clearly separate arcs being pieced together to allow variant stories, for example. Seeing the for only once at the end isn’t that much of a problem – we see evidence of it plenty beforehand, in increasing intensity, but there’s no reason for Zhaitan to turn up and personally destroy something in front of us just for foreshadowing. Does anyone complain that you never get to ‘see’ Sauron in The Lord of the Rings? No, why would you, he’s in Mordor and most of the time we’re not!

I will agree that the background lore of GW2 is, in my opinion, far superior to the actual in-game storytelling, and I’d like to see the two come closer together in quality. But MMO writers work under a lot of unusual constraints.

To return to the OP, I really don’t think it’s fair to say that there’s too much of a focus on ‘comedic elements’ in GW2. Sure, there are events and local plots which are comedic or light-hearted – plenty of them in fact. But it’s a big world, and people spend a lot of time in it. If it was full-on, heavy epic fantasy all the time, I think it would be too much. By contrast, the occasional humorous event can be a fun surprise. I don’t think anyone would claim WoW had no humorous quests!

In general I would say that main story is serious and not comedic. There are exceptions, but mostly within the first two arcs (the stuff based on your biography choices at character creation) – and in those cases each race tends to have a story choice which is significantly more light-hearted than the others, although you don’t always know that before going it. Once you join an order the jokes thin out rather quickly.

I think it would have raised more questions if we had seen Zhaitan earlier. I mean, where would we see him? Flying overhead, wandering around? He wouldn’t be able to attack, because that would mean instant death. And if we saw him blowing something up in the distance, we’d question why he doesn’t just blow up Divinity’s Reach.

Though something that would have been cool? Looking up at a tower of Orr or something, and seeing it move, and realizing he’s up there, like Chernabog on the mountain.

The only places I could see seeing Zhaitan before hand making sense are the following:

Battle of Fort Trinity (you know that dragon champion? Why don’t we fight that thing? Always bugged me), overhead in any Orr explorable zone (and only overhead, possibly taking out some airships), or in Claw Island (makes the least sense, but that’s as far as I’d argue).

But in each case, there’s the question of why doesn’t he just wipe everyone out – every case it’s when the Pact are either not fortified, or when Zhaitan hasn’t been weakened yet by being partially blinded, partially starved, lessened in army power, lessened in magical resources, and having his corruption removed.

Of course that question still exists, but at least without seeing him you have an explanation: he’s not there to wipe you all out when he’s still powerful.