Guild Wars 2

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PopeUrban.2578:

I want to see the dragon narrative resolved. You could have EASILY resolved it THIS season by using the silly machine to nuke two dragons, causing some genuinely interesting personal tension between DW and Braham, and leveraging Aurene as an expedient method (having absorbed a large portion of dragon energy) to help us take out Kralk, siege kralk’s power, then go offscreen to go take on bubbles herself.

Well, no. Killing two (or even 3, as you suggest) elder dragons off screen would be the worst and most insulting thing Anet could do to players at this point.
Elder Dragons were the main antagonists of GW2, and killing them off without player to witness and experience it is just lame and anticlimactic.
What we have now is rather bad either (2 dragons were put on the bus, and the players didn’t even see how they really looked). But at least they are put on the bus, not killed, and can potentially return in the future in full glory.

Ider.1276:

PopeUrban.2578:

I want to see the dragon narrative resolved. You could have EASILY resolved it THIS season by using the silly machine to nuke two dragons, causing some genuinely interesting personal tension between DW and Braham, and leveraging Aurene as an expedient method (having absorbed a large portion of dragon energy) to help us take out Kralk, siege kralk’s power, then go offscreen to go take on bubbles herself.

Well, no. Killing two (or even 3, as you suggest) elder dragons off screen would be the worst and most insulting thing Anet could do to players at this point.
Elder Dragons were the main antagonists of GW2, and killing them off without player to witness and experience it is just lame and anticlimactic.
What we have now is rather bad either (2 dragons were put on the bus, and the players didn’t even see how they really looked). But at least they are put on the bus, not killed, and can potentially return in the future in full glory.

How is it insulting? Its not as if the plot of a video game is somehow a personal attack.

Point is, dragons are boring villains. I really don’t want to have to sit through three more expansions of “Monster with similarly flavored model swaps of other mobs tried to kill world.”

It’s just a boring plot that needs to be wrapped up. It has already gone on too long. Hell have the new and less kitten villain kill them off and take their skittles powers, I don’t care.

I’m starting to think this forum is run by Omadd’s Machine

PopeUrban.2578:

How is it insulting? Its not as if the plot of a video game is somehow a personal attack.

Point is, dragons are boring villains. I really don’t want to have to sit through three more expansions of “Monster with similarly flavored model swaps of other mobs tried to kill world.”

It’s just a boring plot that needs to be wrapped up. It has already gone on too long. Hell have the new and less kitten villain kill them off and take their skittles powers, I don’t care.

Elder Dragons are bad villians, but great video game bosses. And GW2 is (surprise) a video game. Mordemoth (in both Dragon stand and personal story) is the best GW2 boss outside of raids. Zhaitan had a poor fight mechanic, but his design was great.
And building up a boss and killing him offscreen is an insult to players who wanted cool and epic boss fight. Even if GW2 was just an interactive film, killing two epic giants off screen would feel even more cheap than a movie with action scenes in complete darkness.

Ider.1276:

PopeUrban.2578:

How is it insulting? Its not as if the plot of a video game is somehow a personal attack.

Point is, dragons are boring villains. I really don’t want to have to sit through three more expansions of “Monster with similarly flavored model swaps of other mobs tried to kill world.”

It’s just a boring plot that needs to be wrapped up. It has already gone on too long. Hell have the new and less kitten villain kill them off and take their skittles powers, I don’t care.

Elder Dragons are bad villians, but great video game bosses. And GW2 is (surprise) a video game. Mordemoth (in both Dragon stand and personal story) is the best GW2 boss outside of raids. Zhaitan had a poor fight mechanic, but his design was great.
And building up a boss and killing him offscreen is an insult to players who wanted cool and epic boss fight. Even if GW2 was just an interactive film, killing two epic giants off screen would feel even more cheap than a movie with action scenes in complete darkness.

Mordremoth the open world boss is a spectacle, but at the same time, that spectacle isn’t inherantly necessary to have attached to an elder dragon. As a world boss fight, yeah, sure, its great, but its not necessarily moe mechanically impressive or tied to narrative than, say, the triple trouble wurms. The same boss could easily have been a minion of something far more interesting.

Mordremoth the instance fight required dubious narrative gymnastics just to have a mechanically interesting fight… by scaling a massive godzilla monster down in a way that completely removes any sense of scale you’d have fighting that creature.

In fact, in HoT, the boss itself WAS killed offscreen. You’re in an instance killing a mental projection (because reasons) only to be told it can’t actually die like that and then you press F to kill boss. Then it actually dies during a head explosion cutscene.

Point is there’s nothing inherantly interesting about EDs. For all the buildup and voice lines that went in to mordremoth we still got a supremely uninteresting character that amounted to little more than “MUAHAHAHA YOU WILL ALL DIE OR BE SLAVES BECAUSE I AM A DRAGON.” One boss fight that would have made more sense if the antagonist was not a giant godzilla, and another boss fight that relied so heavily on fighting adds that the enemy itself was little more than window dressing.

We’re expected to care about EDs because of the context of their place in the world, but we at no point interact with them meaningfully and they don’t possess a complexity of intent or motive that makes their “schemes” anything more than copy/pastes of the last dragon.

It was acceptable when Zhaitan did it because hey, there was some actual interesting progression and discovery in both figuring out HOW to kill it, and HOW it operated.

Mordremoth? The most interesting thing about the dragon is discovered in the LS leadup, and for the entirety of the storyline its nothing more than tracking down missing party members until a living world assault that has nothing to do with anything, and an instanced battle that just appears out of nowhere to resolve the situation despite nobody involved actually having done anything to set it up.

We move on to the “reveal” that “all dragons have a weakness” and then discover that ‘weakness’ is ultimately pointless while rotating in and out more interesting villains as side stories so we have filler to chew on during LS episodes.

Dragons might make good bosses, but thusfar those boss fights have been less interesting and enjoyable than the various minions they employ in the first place.

Teq is a better boss fight than Zhaitan. The LS2 aspect of Mordremoth is a better boss fight than either of the mordremoth fights. There’s no rational reason for us to be directly confronting enemies that the lore has already set up as things we literally do not have the ability to directly confront due to the massive mismatch in scales between us and them.

The most interesting fights in relation to all of the dragons thusfar have been had with their minions, and those minions could easily be serving much more interesting characters.

By your own admission the raid bosses are already better boss fights, and those are, by design, minor throwaway characters so that raids are necessary to follow the main story thread.

We need to resolve the narrative, sure, but my point is we don’t need to personally kill every remaining dragon because we could easily be fighting more interesting villains in support of that goal. The dragons work best as plot levers rather than characters, as things OTHER character’s motivation revolve around.

Mordremoth wasn’t the most memorable villain in HoT. That honor goes to Faolain who had better dialogue, a more interesting plot thread, and more sensible interactions with the protagonists throughout the expansion.

PopeUrban.2578:

Mordremoth wasn’t the most memorable villain in HoT. That honor goes to Faolain who had better dialogue, a more interesting plot thread, and more sensible interactions with the protagonists throughout the expansion.

I don’t really remember any good villains in GW2. Scarlet was obnoxious discount Harley Queen. Faolin’s whole personality is “was Caith’s girlfriend who turned evil”. Lazarus had a great potential but was ruined by Balthazar. Caudecus was okeyish, but not cunning enough.
So I prefer a good boss fight (or even a good boss design) over mediocre villain.

I’d like to add another post.

Personal Story and Season 2 were easily the best parts of the story. They were done right. Personal story had your story and introduction to the world. Eventually you were woven into the conflict with Zhaitan. The Zhaitan campaign ended with a bang. Fireworks, cutscenes, credits. “Fear not this night” to this day almost brings me to tears. I’ll take Trahearne ANY day over “you know who” who I’m about to bring up next paragraph.

And on the other side, you have Season 1 and HoT. They were easily the worst, imo. What I notice about season 1 and HoT is that they both force the plot. They try too hard to build hype for the sake of shock value. You’re forced to accept certain characters and plot elements. It was done with Scarlet in season 1 and it was done with Faolain in HoT. Scarlet was pretty much shoved down our throats, let’s not sugarcoat it. Eir’s death was wasted trying to hype up Faolain and it just backfired miserably. There’s no conflict or anything of interest there. They literally have zero history of interaction together. The ‘shocking’ revelation in Rata Novus, “The dragons have a weakness.” made me “—facepalm—Nooooo! You don’t say!” To top it off, HoT had a weak, weak ending. “Modremoth is dead…well…see ya!”

Season 3 had promise until chapter 5 and the Balthazar reveal. They should’ve ran with Lazarus. Instead, again, the plot was forced. Done for the sake of shock value.

I personally see no issue with how the story has been unfolding and where it could go. Going dragon after dragon until they all were dead would have gotten stale and predictable. Including one of the gods was probably one of the better moves that they could have done in this situation as they can pull from previous lore to buffer future story content.

There’s a number of directions that they can go with this. What if the gods are not exactly what we (not the game characters) think of gods? They could be like the Morrowind Tribunal who acquired ‘god-like’ power. Kormir was human and she acquired Abbadon’s power making her a ‘god’. What’s to say that this didn’t happen to any of the others?

They could also focus on the origins of the gods. They could bring in the bloodstones. There’s so many more options available with this route than had they stuck with the direction some people here seem to have wanted.

We should all remember that we haven’t seen the full story yet and where they are going. It’s easy to look back at previous stories, whether it be LS1, LS2, personal story, or even GW1, with rose-colored glasses and criticize the current one with very limited information because we don’t like a specific thing.

JTGuevara.9018:

Personal Story and Season 2 were easily the best parts of the story. They were done right. Personal story had your story and introduction to the world. Eventually you were woven into the conflict with Zhaitan. The Zhaitan campaign ended with a bang. Fireworks, cutscenes, credits. “Fear not this night” to this day almost brings me to tears. I’ll take Trahearne ANY day over “you know who” who I’m about to bring up next paragraph.

And on the other side, you have Season 1 and HoT. They were easily the worst, imo. What I notice about season 1 and HoT is that they both force the plot. They try too hard to build hype for the sake of shock value. You’re forced to accept certain characters and plot elements. It was done with Scarlet in season 1 and it was done with Faolain in HoT. Scarlet was pretty much shoved down our throats, let’s not sugarcoat it. Eir’s death was wasted trying to hype up Faolain and it just backfired miserably. There’s no conflict or anything of interest there. They literally have zero history of interaction together. The ‘shocking’ revelation in Rata Novus, “The dragons have a weakness.” made me “—facepalm—Nooooo! You don’t say!” To top it off, HoT had a weak, weak ending. “Modremoth is dead…well…see ya!”

Season 3 had promise until chapter 5 and the Balthazar reveal. They should’ve ran with Lazarus. Instead, again, the plot was forced. Done for the sake of shock value.

I can’t say much about the experience of playing S1, as I didn’t participate during the time, but apart from such a boring villain as Scarlet, the story seemed to have quite interesting elements (investigative ones, festivities, fights, funny dialogue, interesting new characters etc.).

But everything else you wrote I can only second. +1