Guild Wars 2

We are now 2 episodes into season 3 and then I realised that we still have no clue why scarlet did what she did. Was she trying to fight FOR or AGAINST the dragons? (Probably the latter). It’s never been cleared up.

I hope this detail hasnt already fallen through the crack.

Her interest in the Eternal Alchemy lead her to meeting Mordremoth (breaking the barrier the Pale Tree had erected that separated the Sylvari from his influence) which then scared the crap out of her to the point where she became indoctrinated. This was, for the most part, concluded in Season 2.

In a way she was fighting against Mordremoth but also helping him all the same. With her quest to stop him, she had to wake him up which then backfired as the player slays her (Season 1 finale) before she could go any further. She would have ended up just like Foalain though, or so I belief. The whole tragic-villain cliche.

Ronin.7381:

Her interest in the Eternal Alchemy lead her to meeting Mordremoth (breaking the barrier the Pale Tree had erected that separated the Sylvari from his influence) which then scared the crap out of her to the point where she became indoctrinated. This was, for the most part, concluded in Season 2.

In a way she was fighting against Mordremoth but also helping him all the same. With her quest to stop him, she had to wake him up which then backfired as the player slays her (Season 1 finale) before she could go any further. She would have ended up just like Foalain though, or so I belief. The whole tragic-villain cliche.

That’s partially speculation though.

The more obvious explanation for her actions is that she woke Modremoth up not to stop him but to help him.

I will agree that it is very unclear if she was trying to stop Mord and did it badly or if she was controlled by Mord and was trying to wake him up.

Better question: does it even matter now? Both Scarlet and Mordremoth are dead, and I doubt either one have any lingering plans that will come back to haunt us. Scarlet’s plan was to wake Mordremoth, and it succeeded, but then she didn’t have a chance to kill him or lead the battle for him. Unless there’s one more safehouse of hers out there, Ceara’s story is over.

So, Scarlet doesn’t have a dream. She enters the machine and learns the truth of the world, and thus of mordremoth. Much like all the other elder dragons, she is a catalyst for awakening (remember the dragons have a tough hibernation since the seers made the bloodstones).

She drills into the greatest leyline node she could find which causes a flood in the leylines. hence, mordremoth awakes. nothing ambivilent about scarlet’s actions. Everything she did since she left omadd’s machine was to awaken mordremoth.

Scarlet’s motives were quite obvious, although she could have been either tragic villain or puppet villain.

Rognik.2579:

Better question: does it even matter now? Both Scarlet and Mordremoth are dead, and I doubt either one have any lingering plans that will come back to haunt us. Scarlet’s plan was to wake Mordremoth, and it succeeded, but then she didn’t have a chance to kill him or lead the battle for him. Unless there’s one more safehouse of hers out there, Ceara’s story is over.

It matters because it was a huge story that changed the world. People are interested in why. Just like in the real world people still wonder why certain depraved country leaders behaved as they did.

Now that Mordremoth is dead, we will probably never get a definitive answer. It would have been nice to put something into HoT but I suppose the devs prefer it to be somewhat mysterious.

Lots of ArenaNet’s stories either have no ending, have a cliffhanger that may never get a resolution, or have a bad ending.

The endings they did the best were the ones in GW1 for all the stand alone games. I thought the ending to Eye of the North was awesome but that is because I thought we were going to see the resolution of that cliffhanger in short order. They didn’t have the track record for poor or unfinished endings that they do now.

I have harped on it a ton in the past but I really wish they would do an expansion that has a beginning, middle, and end for the story and use the subsequent season to comb through all the stories that are unfinished and complete them. A Bonus Mission Pack style season that finally puts all this stuff to rest.

I really want to come back to this game, but one of the reasons I stopped playing besides daily logins is because the stories don’t get a classic ending payoff.

I hope that the stories going forward can have proper payoffs and proper endings, but I’ve been waiting to see what Livia did with the Scepter of Orr now for 8 years or so. That’s way too long.

This a, make up your own mind kind of thing. Even though if LW2 they say that going in to the device drove her mad. She talked to her self alot too, I believe she was in conflict with mordramoth. She was the first to hear “the call”. That’s why she said she knew Caiths secret, and that tyria would need her. She probably thought she was going to stop mordramoth, but was probably under his sway more that she realised.

That’s how I see it from playing LW1/2.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Ayrilana.1396:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Ayrilana.1396:

It takes about two hours to do. Not exactly fun but you’ll eventually “zone out” after a dozen or so when it becomes automated.

Like doing a 2 hour race in gran turismo. If zoning out if part of it, then I feel it’s kind of a failed achievement, as your not really achieving anything. Other than becoming a zombie.

Well the achievement is completely optional. You don’t need it to complete the meta.

You can do the meta with out doing that one, only need 23 out of the 26, but it is a valid complaint. Spending 2 hours doing one thing that gives you nothing but a title is a little in my book.

I have no intention of do any thing in any game that is that.mind numbing.

I hope ANet sees this as feed back, not a well they don’t have to do it.

But if you want to ride to there defence when its not needed, carry on.

It’s actually 23 out of 31 for the Meta. And, it’s not just a Title, but a Mastery Point, as well.

Regardless, I think there’s a place for this kind of thing because some players enjoy repetitive tasks like farming. Perhaps, they don’t do it all at once, so it’s not as ‘mind-numbing’ or ‘boring’. Who knew?

We’ve been given hints and some statements of what Scarlet was after. While some of it only showed up in-game via her journal entries etc, a more in-depth look is offered in the short story What Scarlet Saw:

Disappointment soured Ceara’s fascination. Was this it, then? Were the lives of all sylvari so easily encapsulated? Birth, travel, experience, death, all played out under the dictates and philosophies of the godlike entity that created them?

She refused to accept that. Everything she had learned said that no system, no matter how complex, can perpetuate itself indefinitely. Those that did not evolve inevitably failed.

[…]

“So much makes sense now. The Pale Tree, the Nightmare Court, Caithe and Faolain…it’s all part of a grand design.

“But I see the flaws in that design. My people don’t have to take what we’re given, or be what we were “born to be.” No people do. We can change the rules…well, I can. And I’m going to.”

[…]

“Now I have to put that knowledge to use. An insurmountable challenge is rising, and my people have been called to meet it. We are compelled by our creator to do so.

“But I reject that call. I reject the notion that that I must choose the Dream or be lost to Nightmare. The forces that push us this way or that can be redirected. They can be set against one another to the detriment of both, and now I know how.”

“I have a great deal of work ahead of me. I don’t know what the world will be when I’m through, but I will very much enjoy finding out. Empires will fall, continents will burn, and when the conflagration is over, I’ll be there to put my stamp on whatever new world this one becomes.” [my emphases]

We were told during Season 1 that Scarlet’s tone change by the time of the Twisted Marionette release had story significance. Given the information we learned later on, what happened was that Scarlet initially intended to set Mordremoth and the Pale Tree against one another to free herself from both of their yoke as well as shape the world to her liking, hence all the alliances to combine techs and magic and inventing/stealing/building all those different things to achieve this goal.

However, Mordremoth was subtly manipulating Scarlet to awaken it. Although Scarlet fought against Mordy’s whispers at first with varying levels of success, she ultimately succumbed to its siren song shortly after the Tower of Nightmares (we hear her tonal change in the cinematic that played there) which helped spread Mordy’s influence. Her more sinister tone in later chapters was her having succumbed to the dragon, hence her final lines aboard the Breachmaker about Tyria bowing to a new master.

That doesn’t mean Scarlet’s story was fully resolved, however:

1) We’ve yet to learn what happened to her Brisban batch of steam creatures (as the only steam creatures we ever meet in Brisban come from an asura gate linked to the Shiverpeaks during a dynamic event and from a fractal version of an “alternate” Tyria where the asura PC had become evil and tried to invade the real Tyria with his/her steam creature army in one of the asura Personal Story missions).

2) We don’t truly know the full extent of Mai Trin’s mission to the Mists at the behest of Scarlet, and Mai has yet to make an appearance since we last saw her in Edge of the Mists.

3) Scarlet left an enigmatic message to Caithe on the back of the Spinal Blade Back Blueprint: “Caithe, someday you’ll see, Tyria needs me.” Was this her roundabout, twisted way of referring to Mordremoth who did view itself as the ideal world of harmony (as we learned in HoT), or was this message written before Scarlet fully fell to Mordremoth and might have referenced her original plan to rid Tyria of both Mordy and the Pale Tree for the sylvari race’s supposed benefit?

Whether any of these three points will be explored in the future is anyone’s guess; if anything, I’d expect Mai Trin to be the most likely of the bunch if even that. Other than those points, it seems Scarlet’s story is finished now that Mordremoth’s threat is gone unless Mai’s mission to the Mists will come into play later and reveal whether Scarlet had some bigger contingency plan than we’ve been aware of and if that plan might help us in our battle against the remaining Elder Dragons. I’d love it if we encountered a “good/neutral” steam creature colony north of Brisban led by a Steam Brain which has some of Scarlet’s hidden knowledge stored in its databanks, and we could convince these steam creatures to fight with us against the dragons (as they, due to the way they’ve been built, would be resistant to dragon corruption and are also quite intelligent due to their evolving programming), thus fulfilling Scarlet’s prophetic words to Caithe in a roundabout way.