Where to study the lore?
If you don’t want to put yourself up for a series of bitter disappointments, I suggest you consider GW2 taking place in a crazy alternate dimension. That is, if I were you, I wouldn’t be looking for the roots of GW2 lore within GW1, because other than making you sad through pleasant nostalgia, you will find very little connection between the two — aside from the very big, probably inevitable events that shaped the history of Tyria in both games.
However, if you’d really like to read up on GW1 lore, the wikis are your friends.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Lore
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lore
Scarlet’s Alliance Wars (a.k.a. “Guild Wars 2”)
A fantasy of sci-fi cyborg implants grafted into the desiccated flesh of Guild Wars’ corpse.
A fantasy of sci-fi cyborg implants grafted into the desiccated flesh of Guild Wars’ corpse.
Though I wouldn’t be as harsh as Thalador with that, GW2 does tie very little into the lore of GW1. It seems that the backlash of players not liking this has got them to be going into the direction of tying in GW1 lore – but it’s still rather minimal currently. Still, overall, they’d have probably had better reception if they made GW2 to be in an entirely new continent.
As for places to read up on GW lore, aside from the two links Thalador provided (for sake of size, I’ll link hub pages when I can):
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Storyline
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Timeline
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Category:Lore
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Category:History of Tyria
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Timeline
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Lore
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Tales
I’d like to note that a lot of GW1 lore has become more and more irrelevant – not only in that it doesn’t show up, but it’s outright contradicted. This is now even going for GW2 interviews, blog posts, and the like from pre-release.
If you’re interested in good forum threads to read, well I have no compilation of official forum threads but here’s a link for Guru, Guru2, and IncGamer GW lore threads of interest:
Note: That hasn’t been updated in ages, so links may not work. Maybe I’ll go about updating it… maybe. If Anet can make me love the game’s lore again.
Dear ANet writers,
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
(edited by Konig Des Todes.2086)
GW2 is very disjointed from the GW1 story line, which is a bit understandable as “roughly 200 years” has passed. If you want to hunt down the lore yourself, just talk to any and all NPCs and one will usually drop a nugget of information about this or that.
As far as engineers go, I’d go and check out the profession page on the main (or the wiki as stated above). They don’t really talk about the origins of the professions, like they sort of did in GW1, but it’s safe to assume that because of all the tech the asura brought, and the charr’s war engines evolving, people were able to figure out how to use these things on a small scale.
One thing I want to point out:
So its been many years since i quit GW1 and i loved the story/lore but as the years passed by i dont remember much about it and because of that i didnt get a hang of the GW2 story…
You have absolutely no need to know GW1 lore for GW2 story to make sense. If it doesn’t make sense, then it may be that you experienced the switched-around and not the original version of the storyline, which changed in early September. What happened was that there was a storyline after the Claw Island arc that got cut out almost completely (only “Forging the Pact” and “The Battle for Fort Trinity” remained), and the ending (“Against the Corruption” to “The Source of Orr”) was placed after what was kept of that cut storyline. Resulting in an entirely confusion of a plot.
On top of that, you pretty much have to explore every storyline for things to make sense in the first place. You won’t know very much about the human lore unless you do all seven human personal storylines, for example. If you playthrough the game on a single character, you only get a very minimal viewpoint of the storyline.
This goes double if you skip the dungeon story modes before doing Arah story aka Victory or Death (or do them out of order, or begin them before doing “Setting the Stage” personal story step, which is now a level 40 step despite the first dungeon, which story-wise takes place after it, is level 30).
In other words, thanks to the reverse-branching design of the personal story, it’s very easy to not understand it without playing through the entire three at least three times, and partially up to 15 times.
Knowledge of GW1 lore will only be helpful in very small portions. And this only refers to knowledge of Prophecies, Eye of the North, and War in Kryta.
Dear ANet writers,
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
And is there any lore/story behind engineers as i totally fell in love with charrs/engineers. Any links to videos/sites will be appreciated.
Engineer is one of two professions that has specific lore behind it. The second is guardian. The lore of the engineer can be found here in This interview
Eric Flannum: “Engineer technology really developed with the Charr first and foremost. And its one of the specialties developed by the Charr Iron Legion. When we talk about the Engineer he is very much a Combat-Engineer and good in inventing things that are useful in a combat situation. The Iron Legion is the start of all of this, and the Engineer profession has spread to the other races from there. The People of Tyria have seen it in combat over the past few years and have seen the effectiveness of an engineer. And so you are going to see Engineers of all races although it is a little bit more common to see a Charr Engineer than anybody else. So it all started with the Charr and their technological development.”