Showing Posts For Angel.4918:
Check my post again for my recent edit!
Ah yes, I see. Thanks for digging that up for me.
So now you can see the compounded challenge of keeping the lore straight. Not only is it vast, but it also comes from more than one mind. And we devs all have our own perspectives on the story as well—just as each fan does. I believe Matthew was alluding to the fact that we didn’t detail out any specific leaders, other than the characters you met in the weapons factory.
So, I will say this. We have been going on the premise that the groups working with Scarlet are not the main population, but splinter groups. It’s not “The Nightmare Court” who has allied with the krait, but a sub-group of them. Faolain, for example, is not allied with either the krait or Scarlet. We have not publicly detailed out who each of these groups is or who their leaders are because we didn’t think that was something the average citizen of Tyria would know. If you’re really dying to know the answer, I can look it up in the next couple days and post something about it. But, they won’t be characters you’ve met before.
And now, I really am off to bed. Ni-night!
Wow! It says a lot about how much you care about the story, the game, the fans, and the whole community. Thanks for taking the time to answer some tough questions!
You’re very welcome.
I’d like to second a previously mentioned comment about scripting some of the conversations into the game. It really improves the storyline, immersion, player interest in NPC relationships, the list goes on. Please continue to deliver in that fashion. It gives the game a “breath of life”, so to speak.
Thanks for that feedback! I’m very glad the extra effort has been noticed and is doing some benefit to the game and the story. I can’t describe how much fun it is to bring these characters I’ve lived so closely with to life all by myself and see them walking and talking because I worked some scripting magic to make the go. It’s an amazing feeling. And I absolutely agree with you that it brings life to the game. Very soon, you’re going to see some story scripting by Theo Nguyen, and he is a wiz compared to my apprentice-level efforts.
I have two simple questions, and I will bribe you with chocolate or alcoholic beverages if necessary in order to get the answers
What sort of cliffhanger can you give us regarding the relationship between Caithe and Scarlet, and the alleged “dirty laundry” that Scarlet mentions?
Caithe and Scarlet knew each other in the Grove, back in the day, when Scarlet first awakened. Caithe, being Firstborn, would have been Scarlet’s “superior”, and as we know from the web story that Scott McGough wrote, Scarlet was not very good at being submissive. Her curiosity or her mouth (or both) undoubtedly put them at odds with one another. And Scarlet never forgets a grudge.
This one’s been killing me since early access… “I was going to make a bad salad joke, but now I don’t feel like it.” Can you please find out and tell us what the joke is!? I know it seems petty, but man…
LOL. I’ll have to get back to you on that.
I sincerely appreciate your time, and I’m certain everyone that’s read your posts does as well. Keep up the great work, and thanks again!
Thanks to you all for your time and your loving attention to Tyria. It’s very much appreciated.
I’m going to sign off now. I have to get up for a 9am meeting tomorrow, and I’ll be busy all week, so I probably won’t be able to spend much more time here for awhile.
Take care, all!
And happy new year!!
… Anxious to see what’s coming, and once again, thank you for coming here and discussing these topics with us in your free time. Tell anyone from the team they can come over too, we might suffocate them with questions, as you have seen, but it’s our way of showing affection, heh. : )
I don’t get the time to do it very often, so I’m happy to be here. It’s my affection for you and all GW2 fans that brings me here.
Thanks so much for the nice things you said.
…she demonstrates a lack of familiarity/experience with the world and social tact, but all four of them fall into this across their different meet ups. I can see the plot developing towards Kasmeer proving she’s not dumb but I don’t think she has established herself as dumb (because she isn’t). The pay off won’t be there for me because the lead up doesn’t feed into it.
Hi, Shiren,
Thanks so much for the kind words. They’re very good to hear. Kas is definitely not dumb. However, we are aiming for inexperienced. She has been protected within the walls of Divinity’s Reach all her life up to this point. Her only experience with combat has been with her teachers. However, she is quite gifted with magic, and she is recognized among her peers for that.
I see similar things with Flame and Frost and the Toxic Alliance. I feel like suspension of disbelief or (god forbid) my imagination is needed to perceive these Alliances as actually threatening (to the extent that the story wants us to believe). Aside from Southsun Cove getting a few new residents and a toppled tower in Kessex, Tyria didn’t really react or change with these alliances (more so the Molten Alliance, Toxic Alliance had more oomph but didn’t quite get there imo). I find it hard to perceive them as threats when they were fairly static in the game world. Sure there were Molten Alliance NPCs standing around in maps, and in a few isolated cases they “possessed” territory like villages near the Black Citadel or Craigstead, but they never seemed very different from the usual threats of Tyria (there are Flame Legion events that can “capture” outposts right outside Black Citadel, we’re talking a three minute walk from the Black Citadel). Aside from new gameplay mechanics (jump the shock wave to avoid attack, knock out of the ring to do damage) the Molten Technology wasn’t established as truly threatening. The Toxic Alliance barely left the lake and the surrounding settlements barely recognised its existence. Events and threats of this scale should get the attention of more than the Biconics.
The story isn’t over yet.
tl:dr I think there is sometimes a break down of the story between how the writers imagine the story and how it is expressed in the game. Listening to interviews like this one and the Wartower ones is sometimes like a crutch to communicate things in a way I don’t think the game did well on its own.
We face many challenges, challenges you can’t even imagine, in bringing the story to you. We’re in the trenches every day, trying to ask ourselves all the questions we think you will ask once a release goes live. We’re trying to be mind-readers and fortune tellers, in a way. Sometimes, we get it right. And at those time, you don’t notice because…well…it works. At other times, we may have missed the mark.
I would venture to guess that every single player in GW2 has a somewhat different view of what the story is. It’s a matter of perspective, and this is a vast world. Perhaps there are bits of content that you missed but another person found. Or vice versa. I think that’s okay.
PS: If Marjory is truly of Canthan ancestry (?), can we please see more of Canthan heritage in the Living Story? Her first name could be Greek tieing in with Luxon ancestry, but her second name sounds distinctly not Canthan.
Cantha has been shut off from the rest of the world for a very long time. Marjory’s parents and grandparents were all born and raised in Kryta, not Cantha. She is of mixed heritage as well. Just as in today’s world, we find men of Chinese ancestry named Kevin or Joshua, so Tyria has also become more of a melting pot. We will get more into Marjory’s history in the future.
But I hear you and everyone else who is hungry for some Canthan story to come back into the game. You’ll have to be patient. It won’t happen for awhile, but never say never.
Oh, and yes, it really is me. I’m not sure why I don’t have the red splash. Probably something I did wrong. LOL. I’ve got a note in to Regina to see if she can fix it.
Bah! I feel the opposite:
If my theories are never proven right or wrong, I feel like you (ArenaNet) are ignoring story possibilities. On the flip side, if I’m prove right I’m ecstatic (usually – I wasn’t so ecstatic when I was proven right about Scarlet being a female sylvari interested in technology – which I theorized once we interrogated those MA prisoners) and in turn I become more motivated to theorize on other aspects I was less interested or alternatively to theorize based on the new confirmations; and when I’m proven wrong, then it allows me to rethink my theory, to take in the new information and “correct” my theory so that it is no longer wrong, and expands upon the new lore.
Proven right or wrong, it’s a boon. So long as you don’t go explaining anything, proving or disproving some of the wilder theories could prove beneficial either way. It gets us thinking and gives us more materials to work with.
Though personally, I’d rather have the proving/disproving in the game rather than forum posts.
I hear you, and I understand completely how much fun that little “conjecture game” is. It goes with the territory for imaginative people.
We attempt to get all the information you need out there in one format or another before the end of the arc. Sometimes, you just have to wait for the story to finish unfolding. But sometimes, we just won’t have time to detail it in-game as deeply as you wish we could. In those instances, we can maybe fill in the blanks with blog posts or interviews, etc.
What happened to the short stories!?!?
They were enjoyable – though yes, I wouldn’t have had the What Scarlet Saw story up there (at least not in such little details – I probably would have had it expanded and split into two or three, with us finally realize “omg Ceara is Scarlet!” in the final story), and though people complained about them the complaint was more that the info never got into the game like it should, somehow (not the story themselves but the bits and pieces) which has since been getting fixed. So… why stop the stories!?!? BRING THEM BACK! OR I’LL CRY! YOU DON’T WANT A CRYING CHARR DO YOU!?
That’s so nice of you to say. I’m glad you liked the stories. Sometimes we hear so much of what people don’t like that we act on that without realizing that there are plenty of people who do like it. I think there’s a lesson in there somewhere for both fans and for us devs.
I will relay this to Bobby Stein (my boss) and we’ll see. I know I loved writing them, and others did as well. We’ll have to see. But thanks for letting us know you like them.
I’ll take Konig’s a piece at a time.
In the Livestream you said that neither the dredge nor the FLame Legion had a leadership decision for joining the MA – within the MA there was no “Flame Leader” and no “dredge leader”. I find this hard to believe, personally, because neither race really seems open to full consensus. In fact, both groups are under civil war last we heard prior to the Living Story (in Frostgorge Sound and in Sorrow’s Embrace explorable, the interaction with the dredge is about rebellion against the moletariate; while in Citadel of Flame explorable it’s explained that the Tribunes are at each other throats for how to proceed with Gaheron’s death). Given this, a consensus amongst the whole dredge or Flame Legion seems impossible. And on top of that, both groups have a leadership (moletariate and Gaheron/Tribunes) so it would seem unlikely that the grunts would oppose in such huge numbers, unless they all agreed “let’s get power to overthrow our monarchy! Mwuahaha!” – which still seems unlikely.
Can you give me a time reference so I don’t have to go back and rewatch the whole video to see what I said? LOL. I hate watching myself.
Regarding Sylvari and their defense mechanism to elder dragon corruption, we don’t really know much about the biological or magical basis for this. I find it hard to imagine that when this basis for this ‘immunity’ is finally revealed that some villain won’t find a way around it.
Will we get some details as to how this property of Sylvari works in the future? And, does the lore team consider this immunity a hard fact of the Sylvari, or is there room to budge (even one unique case of corruptibility)?
Hi! Thank you for the question, but you’re right that I can’t answer it. In the future, we plan to go deeper into the first awakening and the story surrounding the Firstborn, the Pale Tree, and the unusual elements of sylvari biology and psychology. We’ve purposefully kept much of this a mystery so we can unfold the sylvari story with due diligence and allow you to experience it fully. In-game, sylvari themselves do not currently know the answers to these questions. If you stick around, you’ll eventually find the answers when they do.
…that was a great way to implement the backstory and create a more compelling story to the updates.
Thanks for that feedback! I’m very glad to hear you say that. One of our biggest challenges has been too much to do and not enough time. So recently some of the writers, myself included, have started learning how to script scenes. I’ll be immodest and confess that I did both of those. I wasn’t sure how they would received, and I’m still green at scripting (though I’m loving it!).
Based on feedback from the forums, we are actively trying to tell most backstories in the game now instead of via the stories. Although, there are still going to be stories from time to time, like the recent Hobotron one. Initially we started those in order to add some dimension early on to the main characters (Rox, Braham, Marjory, and Kas). We wanted to test out whether people would respond well to seeing their characters written up in a more flowing fictional medium. Some of you liked it. Some didn’t.
Again, thanks for the kind words.
Angel – how awesome to see you here. Hope you stick around. It’s always great getting some answers, though it’s always fun to speculate, too.
Y’all do some amazing speculating. Even if I don’t come by here often, I do read what you write—usually on my lunch break. And I love nothing more than to see imaginations flying all over the place!
One of the risks we devs take when we answer lore questions is that our answer will either contradict what you imagined (and then you’ll feel bad) or it will put an end to the speculation. And, as you say, it’s always fun to speculate.
… I personally think that being unable to see this side of her has lead to some of the disbelief of how she has been able to accomplish what she has done, even if you have well thought out explanations for it. I guess us players always like to see to believe, which isn’t always a bad thing.
I get it. We have learned a lot over the past year. When we first started this story, we had to choose where to begin, and we chose to begin with the refugees coming down from the Shiverpeaks because we had limited time to build it and we wanted to begin at a compelling dramatic moment. This relegated Scarlet’s backstory to being just that: backstory. Over the course of the arc, we’ve tried to give you that backstory to the best of our abilities (within our limitations), but I understand that it’s not the same as seeing it for yourselves.
Fortunately, now that we’re in the midst of the story, we won’t have to start things in mid-stream anymore, and we’ll be mindful of creating potential blindspots.
(edited by Angel.4918)
If you look closely at Scarlet’s story (without assuming that we screwed her up, as some have expressed), you will see a trend in her personality. She doesn’t stay the same throughout, but she definitely moves in a specific direction personality wise. Scarlet will never again be as clear-thinking and clever as she was when this all started. And that’s all the hint I’m going to give you on that.
The FL is misogynist, yes. But even among their own kind, they don’t kill all female charr on sight or at birth. Rather, they use them. They believe them to be secondary citizens, unworthy of bearing arms or learning fire magic. But, they need females in order to keep their farms, cook their food, and bear their offspring. They do not view Scarlet as a partner. They view her as an opportunity. And what great opportunities she has afforded them. They nearly made it to the Black Citadel with their new weaponry before you, the Vigil, Rox and Braham stopped them. They were able to do a great deal of damage to human- and charr-loving areas. They’re riding the wave of destruction because they believe they’ll come out on top at the end. For now, Scarlet has proven useful. One teeny, squeaky little sylvari female isn’t going to get in the way of their plans—now you, on the other hand, just might.
<3 back atcha, Ravious! I wish I could show it to you.
Konig!
The interest in “why” and “when” that happened has caught me by surprise. One of the things I’ve learned over the past year is that GW2 fans take an interest in every little detail. And I love that. It means you’re invested and you care—as much as we at ArenaNet do.
Speaking for myself, I not only have to remember the details of the lore from the past (three novels, two games, and almost 9 years worth of added content), but I also have to continue creating lore for future story, make story sense of the gameplay differences between the two games, write dialogue to character voice, script content, maintain style, and do a zillion other things. That adds up to a lot of lore road that I’ve traveled. All I can say is thank goodness for wikis. No single human being could keep all that in their head.
So, I’m not perfect. And yes, from time to time, you will find me or someone else on the team making a mistake.
If we get too afraid to make mistakes in front of you, then we stop saying anything at all, and you get either silence or non-committal mush from us. So, I stick my neck out every time I give a lore talk live or answer an interview without my reference material at hand. It’s a risk I take in order to, hopefully, give you all some answers to your questions. And it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done in my life.
And, I’m gonna get it wrong sometimes. I’ll beg a bit of forgiveness in advance.
Besides, if the worst I do is get mixed up who was the first Scarlet contacted: Flame Legion or Dredge, then I’m doing better than I thought I was.
I do appreciate that you have my back so that when I say the wrong thing, you set the record straight for folks.
Given that, here’s the true, secret reason the Flame Legion agreed to work with Scarlet. Scarlet duped them. She lied and said that she already had the dredge signed up. She did the same to the dredge, saying she already had the Flame Legion signed on. In this way, she promised them each whatever the other could give, even though she didn’t already have it. They both believed her. Until, of course, they got together and started talking. They learned then that she was a silver-tongued, snake-nosed trickster. By then, however, they WERE both invested, so it would have been foolish to back out just because they’d been duped into working together. By then, they were experiencing the benefits of the alliance.
Wishing you a very happy New Year, my fellow GW2 Lorehound!!
And so glad you all enjoyed the livestream!