Guild Wars 2

so i’m finally getting around sea of sorrows, and the way the characters talk about orr pre-rise made me curious about how it looked like in GW1, as i couldn’t remember it. as it turns out, despite the book characters saying there’s “no land anywhere close to orr”, the GW1 map depicts the ruined orr as something of an archipelago, with quite a huge chunk of land (definitely enough to spot with a spyglass) from the rest of the penninsula.

now i’ll blame the flooded elon river (which apparently goes as far as the desolation, if not more) and the other changes (like the apparent surplus of islands on the sea) to the rise of orr, but what i’m curious about is: what exactly happened to that archipelago? did it sink between GW1 and SoS?

the concept of “sinking land” is already iffy on its own (land isn’t floating, so it can’t sink), which is why GW1’s depiction of it being more like a huge explosion (which would explain the leftover islands) would make sense. but SoS makes it sound like those islands are not there at all, and although GW2’s map of orr matches GW1’s, the islands that never sank in GW1 are just as full of corals and oversized barnacles as the rest of the island (because orr is pretty much an island by now).

sources:

GW1 map

GW2 map

The novel “screws up” the size and distances of continental Tyria quite a bit.

I mean, it constantly – and I do mean constantly, as in every single bloody time – refers to Orr as a continent, rather than what is is: a peninsula.

It even calls the body of water between Tyria and Cantha the Sea of Sorrows – never once making mention of the Unending Ocean or Clashing Seas.

Not to discredit Ree or anything, but I wouldn’t take the novel as a very good source of distance and land size. But at the same time, I wouldn’t take the games as such either – Tyria in GW2 is larger than Tyria in GW1 and in both, they’d be about the size of Italy in comparison when one can probably expect continental Tyria to be more akin to at the very least Europe if not larger – which would mean that it may be possible to not see land when within or near Orr’s water, despite it being there.

The biggest inconsistency in GW’s lore is landscape distance and the time needed to cross said distances. SoS makes it seem extremely huge, while the game makes it seem seemingly small.

In regards to the Cataclysm, GW1 only depicts it as a pillar of blinding light occuring – the explosion was purely speculative – while GW2 depicts it during the Arah story cinematic as the ground lighting up and getting pushed down so the two depictions do kind of match up and I wouldn’t call it “sinking land” but rather “land being pushed down” – kind of like if you were to take a mound of dirt and then compact it righter and righter to the ground.

i used the explosion term mostly because if it was an explosion (or an implosion, i guess that would be more accurate here), then the outer areas of orr not having sunk (as GW1’s map implies) would make sense. i mean, even a country-sized sinkhole needs a border.

i’ve learned from years of gaming to suspend my disbelief regarding distances. i just tell myself that it feels small because my character is abnormally fast (his running animation is twice as fast as an NPC’s, even without signets or swiftness) and can sprint like a maniac without feeling tired :P

but i just found it odd that SoS (and GW2, to an extent) made it sound like there was nothing left of orr, as if it had been completely wiped from the map, but when you look at the GW1 map, even if no one could’ve survived an implosion of that magnitude, some land still remained. i can buy that the book makes the sea of sorrows much bigger than the in-game version (more like pond of sorrows, amirite? :P ), rendering the rest of the peninsula too distant to be seen, but the fact that the islands were never mentioned by anyone was off-putting. they sound like they’d make for great pirate hideouts, with dangerous sea traps, weird tides and currents, and ghost stories to scare sailors away.

Except that compared to GW2’s map of Orr and the ruins found in Straits of Devastation, a good amount of the outer edges of Orr did sink.

And for the record, the novel didn’t make it sound like there was nothing left of Orr. There was a good deal about the Malchor’s Fingers which would be – based off of the SoS description and the GW2 map, the towering tops of the Cathedral of Eternal Radiance. There’s also mentions of other buildings jutting out of the waters here and there which is what made the waters of what was Orr so dangerous. It just made it seem like there was a lot of open water before land could be seen. IIRC, there actually is mention of islands of what remains of Orr. But it was a hand-waved comment if what I’m thinking of is such.

i know the straits make it look like orr did sink, which is why i brought up in the first post.

this thread was mostly to figure out why there was this weird inconsistency between the 3 sources. i’ll just say that eventually the rest of the islands sank too, the ground below them too weakened from the cataclysm and the tides.

I know for sure that at least in the GW1 manuscripts, Orr is described as just some rocky islands full of undead, where no one dares to go.

There are few who survived that day, now known as the Cataclysm. While the Charr were never allowed to step foot in Arah, few count what the king’s advisor did on that day as a victory. The resulting explosion felled the invading army where it stood, but so too did it sink the entire peninsula, leaving only a scattering of small islands in its place. The beautiful city of Arah was consumed. What’s left above water now lies in a pile of ruins, blackened by the Cataclysm and years of neglect. All that remains in the wreckage of Orr are the wandering dead—those souls unable to rest in the shadow of this great disaster.

so orr’s history with zombies go beyond a mad lich and an oversized lizard.

i guess we just have to assume the rest of the islands eventually sank.