A little continuation of my Guess that Last Gen Destroyer thread, and inspired by BrotherBelial’s Is the Shatterer one of Glints Baby’s thread and Tamias’ Crazy theory corner: tengu and Orr thread – I’d like to postulate the potential races not mimicked by Primordus.
Now, there’s the obvious eight races already confirmed:
- Jotun (survived)
- Dwarves (survived)
- Seers (barely survived)
- Forgotten (survived)
- Mursaat (fled into the Mists)
- Giganticus Lupicus (extinct)
- Karka (survived)
- Djinn (survived)
But there’s a bit more to it, and this takes three forms.
- There are more than one kind of Giganticus Lupicus. It is a term akin to Dinosaur, not for a singular specific species but many giant ones.
- There are races that are hinted, or hint themselves, at having been around during the previous dragon rise.
- Glint’s dialogue in Edge of Destiny.
Number One: Giganticus Lupicus
[spoiler]GuildMag (Draxynnic): Back in Guild Wars 1, we had that mention of the last appearance of the Giganticus Lupicus ten thousand years ago. And then the first people to get to the explorable dungeons in Arah were probably rather surprised to find the Giganticus Lupicus corpse sitting there waiting for them. Is there a story behind how one got to be there?
Jeff Grubb: How one got to be there… I think brought from its original resting place by Zhaitans minions for that big arena, central cathedral area as a watchdog, as a guardian. The whole… In many ways, the whole tale of the Elder Dragons begins with that one line – that was the first line of the timeline. During the Cantha project I said ‘what does this mean’ – well, we have some big skulls out in the wilderness and we didn’t know what they were so that’s what they are. But when we started telling the story of the Elder Dragons it just fit in so neatly that well, if they’ve come before, when did they come? Hey, we have the Giganticus Lupicus being wiped out in this era! Oh, okay, THAT must have been the last time the Elder Dragons showed up, and the story evolved from there. It’s one thing we’re very good at moving forwards – we leave a lot of hooks so future designers, future storytellers, ourselves in the future have a lot of potential that we can build off.
GM (Thalador): I was personally wondering that in the Crystal Desert back in Guild Wars 1 we saw lots of skeletons lying around and we considered them to be the skeletons of the Giganticus Lupicus.
JGrubb: Some of them are, yes.
GM (Thalador) : When we see him – the recent specimen in the centre of Arah, he’s sort of a jackal-like, Anubis sort of thing, and yet the skeletons back in Guild Wars 1 were sort of draconic or with large tusks or larger…
GM (Draxynnic) : Sea monsters.
JGrubb: I think the look of the Giganticus Lupicus evolved over time – in the fact that we started off with “okay, here’s the skull, build us a creature that looks like this.” Giganticus Lupicus also – Lupicus has a wolf origin to it, so we were thinking in terms of wolves at the time, and from there we basically got to that jackal-headed, Anubis type of figure. So they basically… I could see the older, larger versions of the Giganticus giganticus would be the huge skulls, because of course, with limitations within the game we could only put the figure so large and still have you be able to fight it in any reasonable sense.
Ree Soesbee: And I think that much like the centaurs, you’re gonna have this ancient creature that has some distinction according to territory, according to how it has evolved. So you can have a couple of different skulls that have similarities but aren’t.[/spoiler]http://www.guildmag.com/magazine/issue9/interview.htm
Here we have confirmation that some but not all Crystal Desert giant skeletons were Giganticus Lupicus. They appear unlike our jackal-like friend in Arah because they evolved differently, like different breeds of a species, as well as having been larger.
This hints at a possible two or three ancient gigantic(us) species. Beyond the Great Giant jackals, there’s this tusked creature, and another more serpentine one – I’m guessing that the latter would have been our jackal friends because the tusked ones had more herbivore-like teeth (they were flat and large, appearing to be adapted to chewing rather than tearing) and dogs are carnivores. Though it looks, as mentioned, more serpentine or draconic than canine.
-Continued in next post-
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
(edited by Konig Des Todes.2086)