Guild Wars 2

I notice that you love the changes, and your character uses a white glow. Since the changes force a white glow and you want a white glow, that’s great for you! For the rest of us who don’t want glow that’s white/gray/pastel, we’re pretty upset though.

Try getting a blood red glow or a rustic orange, a deep purple one or a rich jade. It’s just not possible anymore. Your choices are white or pastel, and even if it doesn’t match your color scheme, you’re stuck with it, because there’s no way to turn the glow off for those people it’s messing up.

This combined with the loss of texture detail and the change to dye channel distributions (glow color must match panel color now, it can no longer be an offsetting accent), and it’s understandable why some people are upset.

My primary concerns right now are:

- Loss of texture detail resulting in a flat or smeared look
- Glow color is overly white, washing out other colors and preventing anything rich or vibrant. All glows are now white, gray, or pastel.
- In many places the leaf and stem are now forced to be the same color, which destroys a lot of the interesting contrast available previously, including the ability to use accent colors.
- We have no control over how much our armor glows, so that even characters who have turned off their glow entirely are now stuck looking like a lightbulb at night.

And since screenshots seem obligatory, this is the same character and same dyes in day and night. Notice how the glow color doesn’t actually match the dye color. My glow stays this same color no matter how dark I go with the orange dyes, though it will turn to pastel pink instead if I go too far into the red in my efforts to find something darker.

Ideally the intensity of the armor’s glow would be set by our character’s own glow intensity, but if that’s not possible, maybe we could get a more medium glow level as a compromise until a better solution could be added later?

Konig Des Todes.2086:

There’s quite a lot of lore in the game, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that it’s less up-front than GW1. By far. And what there is, is often hidden in talking to NPCs during events when folks probably wouldn’t do so – like Protect Explorer Harlow while he finds the Dragon’s Eye – if you don’t talk to him, you won’t get the significance of the Dragon’s Eye – a fist-sized sapphire imbued with Elder Dragon power (personally, reminded me of The Heart of Ice from Prophecies).

This! In Guild Wars 1 you could miss something, hear about it (or suspect its existence later), then go back and replay the relevant story steps to search for clues. In Guild Wars 2, once you’ve done a personal story step there is no going back to it unless you start a new character and choose all the same branches along the path.

A lot of interesting tidbits can be gleaned by talking to NPCs instead of following objectives while in your personal story steps, but it’s painfully easy to miss out on that.

If the person who gets first leaves the instance after they cross the finish line, they no longer show up in the scoreboard even though they already claimed the rewards of first. I only know because I once got to watch all the higher placing people disappear and then I looked like I was first on the scoreboard when I knew I very much wasn’t.

Might this have happened to you too?

Thank you!

Niamh’s line there doesn’t come from the game itself, at least not that I’ve seen, but the metaphorical push and pull between light and shadow is a pretty common theme in fantasy, and the sylvari with their idealized view of the world seem to fit right into that (even Fear Not This Night). But one thing that’s often left out when a world is poetically boiled down to light vs shadow, is that light can’t exist without shadow unless you’re in a void. As soon as there’s an object, an actor, then light and shadow become inescapably intertwined. Learning to add that layer of complexity onto their fairy-tale world view represents, to me, a sylvari variety of maturity and wisdom.

And I felt like Laurel needed that last little push at the end. She’d come so far and through so much, but she still hadn’t really come to terms with her deepest inner conflicts. She’d beaten them into submission rather than deal with them, and I wanted to see her at least started on that path before I let her go. I like to imagine the day, a long time from now, when she sits down and really thinks about what happened with Caiomhe. I know she’s not ready for it yet, but someday she will be and it probably won’t be the most comfortable of days for her.

The complete story is now available in a single file. In this formatting, it weighs in at a cool 186 pages.

PDF version: http://www.jenniferhoffman.net/leave...and-embers.pdf
E-Reader version: http://www.jenniferhoffman.net/leave...and-embers.zip

If you’ve been waiting to put it on an e-reader, now’s your chance.

Ha ha! Computer issues conquered for the moment.

Chapter 13
(AO3) | (PDF) | (EPUB/MOBI)

Epilogue
(AO3) | (PDF) | (EPUB/MOBI)

Thanks for the kind words and reader’s insights! It’s always so nice to hear what you’re thinking as you go along.

I’m actually kind of surprised by the reaction people are having to my cut scene there. You’re not the first to ask me what might go in that blank. It’s probably one of the first places I’ll flesh in more next time I get around to writing on this piece (which will likely not be for a while, I think I need to let it rest for a bit now).

Agghi’s just a little bundle of amusement for me, and he’s got quite a bit of back story to him as well. I’ve been toying around with super short-shorts for him on tumblr. If you liked that little synopsis you might like these two short Agghi journals in particular:

- How Agghi got his name
- Agghi’s college (mis)adventures

There are also a few "research papers" for the Priory on more taboo subjects in there, because there just isn’t any research he’s afraid of.

Edit: I promise the final chapter is coming. Literally an hour before I would have posted the final chapter I had a boot drive failure. Thankfully my data harddrives are separate from my boot drive, so the fic is safe and sound and complete... I just can’t access it to post it at the moment.

I’ll keep you updated.

Chapter 12 is here! That moment you’ve surely been waiting for...

(AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)

Narcemus.1348:

About Canach, and the original post. The guy has definitely changed a bit between the stories. I wonder if we’ll ever go into why he went from green to black, or lost his hair…

Case in point for what Konig’s talking about. We do know that, but not from in game and likely never from in game. That bit of lore exists only outside of the game so far.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/southsun/Canach-s-Mutation-Radical-Change/first

I personally would love it if all of these “outside of the game” bits of lore could be hooked up to the random books and scrolls and random papers lying around the world. They’ve got a good number of great shorts lying around and I’d love to hunt for them and collect them in-game ala codex entires in Bioware games.

Chapter 11 is a go! We’re closing in on the home stretch now. Strap yourselves in!

(AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)

I think I can agree that the Elder Dragons don’t have character, but it’s not in the sense that they have no personality. As Konig points out, they very much do have personality. But in a writer’s sense, they do lack character. They don’t seem to have personally-relatable motives, they don’t make the kinds of mistakes we can learn from or make decisions that we can disagree with them over.

Not all enemies in story-telling need to have that, but it does somewhat shoe-horn them into external conflicts. The most engaging stories tend to have a tale of internal conflict along side the external conflict, and if that internal conflict can’t be generated by your villain, it needs to come from elsewhere.

I actually think this ties into why the execution of the mentor storyline is such a shame. That provided a very real opportunity to turn the amorphous dragon conflict into a more personal one, but it was never capitalized on by the story itself. Some players will fill in those blanks and make the rest of the story personal, but the game itself tries to ignore what you went through in that arc. It’s weak story-telling of a variety that’s pretty familiar from Prophecies.

Actually, by definition pitch is frequency.

I somewhat agree with the OP that the female player charr voice is too mid-frequency for the lore. Most of the charr female voices are too high pitched for my taste. I would have preferred something that was hardly distinguishable from the male voices, to further play off that inter-species tension.

But I’m assuming they were afraid it would make an already hard-to-relate-to race even harder to relate to, and that’s why the female charr got such different voices from their male counterparts. I might think its a bad trade-off, but with the stats showing that the charr are already the least played race, I have to wonder. (the other part of me wonders if it’s just too hard to jump with charr)

Congrats on your progress Bearzu! It’ll be cool to see this thing in print sometime.

Thank you Jeconiah! I always feel like my prose is still a bit weak, and that I’m struggling through character development. The initial plotting of my arcs is the easiest part; the rest I just have to rehash over and over until it starts to look readable. Some chapters got by with only 2 drafts, but some of them needed 4 or 5 drafts before they got to where the are.

It makes me really happy to know that you like where its at. I am indeed a reader, but with a huge stack of must-reads and not nearly as much time as I’d like to sink into them. I’ll stick The Vagrant Chronicle on my list and hope I can find you again to comment when I finally get the chance to read it.

<3 Thank you so much guys!

I love the drawing Edusd! It’s probably the first time anyone has drawn anything for me since I was a kid. That’s a great expression on her too. It fits so well!

And its funny you say that Kitcat. I love playing (and now writing too) d/d eles. In fact, I think these days Agghi is seeing more play time in game than Laurel (because of course both are based on characters I have in game). My guild was teasing me, "How can Agghi be your favorite side-character when he’s now your main?"

I actually used to hate asura. I hated their pretension, their superiority complex combined with often meaningless technobabble... My first asura character was a female thief who got rerolled around level 7 as a human (who ironically has only made it into the teens anyways). Then later I tried forcing myself again, this time with a male elementalist.

I ended up falling in love with his voice acting in the stories. It had just the right mix of childish enthusiasm and professional sincerity. There was a lot less of the sneering superiority I was used to. It felt out of place for an asura, but I liked it. And thus came to me the idea of little Agghi ...

(possible spoiler, I guess. None of this backstory is directly touched on in Leaves and Embers, though you might want to get to know him naturally first)
... too honest and humble to make it far in asuran society (not to mention he has a girl's name). Turned down by every krewe for offending the colleges on his passing through them (quit one, flunked out of another), and finally finding a place for research within the Durmand Priory. If he's a bit too eager, it's only because he wants to make a name for himself and prove everyone else wrong.

Chapter 10 is up! This and the next chapter were quite fun for me to write.

(AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)

Also, new character art has been added to the OP.

And Chapter 9! This introduces my personal favorite side character, no question.

(AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)

Thank you! <3 It really warms my heart to hear that. And while I’m sure it’ll be sad to see this story end, at least it’s good that it’ll have an end and won’t just dwindle away forever. I’m putting a lot of work into my ending, I hope it can live up to the rest of the story!

Endings are hard to write well... but I started editing the final chapter today. Chapters 11, 12, and 13 are being edited simultaneously so I can jump around and try getting all my ducks in a row.

Chapter 8 is up!

(AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)

Absolutely! I’ll put it out the same time I release the final chapter, I think.

Chapter 7 has been added! This is my favorite chapter and the first one that underwent heavy re-writes during the revisions process. I hope you enjoy it!

Chapter 7 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)

Here’s another chapter! I’ve definitely split chapter 9 into two now, bringing the total count up to 13. I’m still revising the new chapter 10 and the old chapter 10 that’s now become 11.

Chapter 6 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)

Okay, actually talking about it made whipping out a drawing too irresistible. Here’s Diriblaine from this week’s chapter 5: Among Wardens. (moved attachment to first post since I can’t get [img] tags to work)

Thanks Edusd! I am an artist, though I haven’t gotten around to drawing any of my characters yet. (I haven’t done much fan art in a while)

There are quite a few screen shots of Laurel on my tumblr blog though. Her clothing might vary in the screens from some aspects of the story, if only because she does change what she wears from time to time.

Of the other characters met so far, only Liath, Deorai, and Diriblaine are completely original. The others are all named but otherwise dialog-lacking NPCs that can be found in the world. So while I invented their personalities and embellished their appearances a bit, you can actually seek out Dierdre, Enyr, and Ethni pretty easily if you go looking for them in game.

I’d really like to do some art of all my original characters in this story. I’ve had a lot of fun thinking up their appearances. My favorite is perhaps Diriblaine, though Liath is a close second.

I keep meaning to do some art of all these guys and then running out of time. If I do get around to it, rest assured I’ll toss them up in this thread!

Woot! Another chapter is added. This is where I get to start playing with character development for the first time.

Chapter 5 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)

Thank you Kitcat! I really love hearing reader thoughts like this. It’s hard to be a good little author over here and keep my mouth shut about what will or will not happen, but I am determined. *zips mouth*

Have some Easter themed chapters! I wish I could claim that the timing of this was intentional, or even that the theme was. It wasn’t. I wrote these chapters in January and I planned their release timing for "when it was ready."

Guess I got a happy accident!

Chapter 4 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)

These are amazing Aerobotnik!

I really ought to be doing my own character paintings, since I’m an artist myself, but I can’t help posting some screens and wondering what you might come up with.

This is Laurel, the main character of my fan novel (link in the sig). She sometimes uses a bow, but more frequently an axe and a horn. She’s always accompanied by her faithful fern hound Cuain (differentiated from his kin by a distinctive blue spot on his chin and a downward crimped leaf over one ear) and is often tailed by a white raven as well.

I love it! I think you managed to cover almost every complaint I’ve heard in that dungeon.

Chapter 3 has been added! }:] Enjoy the ride folks.

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Cat’s claws, while retractable, are still akin to hooves by that definition. They are, afterall, the final digit of the finger that acts as a finger tip with regards to holding, hence why many people find de-clawing inhumane. That final digit rotates like any other joint would, but the extremely curved hook shape allows it the appearance of slipping backward into the body. Rednik’s image above is good for illustrating that, or if you need more in-motion type diagrams: http://highdarktemplar.deviantart.com/art/Cat-Paw-detail-76436220

I guess the only point of this post was to say, yes! And that interpretation isn’t mutually exclusive with the others in here.

I think most of Trahearne’s problems lie in the execution not necessarily the goals the devs probably had in mind for the character. There were just a lot of little things which probably could have been done better to, if not endear him to the player, then at least to antagonize them less.

For example, in the haste and urgency of Claw Island where most people will meet him first, why does he give me a lengthy history monologue? It doesn’t fit the mood and thus irritates the player. All the same information could have been relayed through dialog more respectful of the urgency we’re feeling, being implied by the characters rather than monologued out. Imagine if you were allowed to have your only first impression of Trahearne be as "that guy who also thought I was right about the attack, but no one would listen to us."

Then, what if he actually tended to his own business after Claw Island when your mentor is killed and you were allowed to deal with the emotional fallout of that on your own for a mission or two instead of having this silly monologue-guy being suddenly clingy.

Then, a mission or two later when you return to Claw Island, he could have shown up and revealed the other side of himself: that of the tactically minded strategist. You would remember him as "that guy who stood up for me" and now he’s putting together a plan to fix it? That right there would have been getting off on the right foot with the character.

Would it make up for the dry dialog and wooden voice acting? Maybe not, but I think it could have gone a long way towards making more people dislike him less.

I’m honestly baffled by some of the storytelling decisions that were made by the devs. They clearly understand some aspects of storytelling, because their world and lore and history is absolutely stunning... but some aspects of the personal story really do fall flat.

(for the record, I’m less vehement toward him than average on account of my first 2 characters through story being sylvari)

I agree Ryuujin. Part of what makes claws able to be retracted is their curved shape. They’re not pushing in and pulling out like wolverine’s claws so much as they’re rotating downward. They’re extremely curved, almost circular, because of this rotation.

The charr’s claws look to be both longer and straighter, almost more like the talons of a raptor. If there are still retractible, it could only be partially so. Most likely retractibility would be a vestigial sort of adaptation, deteriorated from lack of need.

Also, thanks Konig for pointing out the leg thing! A lot of people misunderstand the way leg joints work, because they see only the external joints. There’s quite a lot hidden inside a quadruped’s body or in our own feet. I really love these pictures for helping people understand:
http://i1296.photobucket.com/albums/ag8/Jenosavel/tuts/01_zpsf605fd40.jpg
http://i1296.photobucket.com/albums/ag8/Jenosavel/tuts/05_zpsd60d399c.jpg

Looking at that it should be easy to see how charr, cats, and humans all have the same basic bones and joint directions, just different proportions and places of ground-contact.

If you’re talking about the archive of our own links, it’s because they don’t allow for prologues on that site (at least, not as far as I can tell), so they’re counting the prologue as chapter 1. If anyone knows a way to fix that, please share!

Konig Des Todes.2086:

To your postulation about chopping off a largos’ wings and seeing nothing wrong:

What if you chopped off a seer’s second set of arms? What if you got rid of norn’s shapeshifting? What if you got rid of the mursaat’s "wings"? What if you got rid of the fish-like skin of the Margonites? Could you tell anything was missing? No. Because they’re all limbs that aren’t essential for their way of life.

But if you cut off a largos’ arm or leg? Yeah, you’re going to notice something wrong. This isn’t an issue with the largos - this is a situation with dozens of animals. Whenever you get more than four limbs, getting rid of the extra won’t seem all that weird.

What makes the seers any better? As you can’t see the place of attachment, you have no idea if those extra limbs are better or worse off than the largos, but believe it or not, I like to give ArenaNet the benefit of the doubt until its proven otherwise. Since the forgotten have the same number and general configuration of arms as the seers, I’m inclined to believe they have similar anatomy. The forgotten’s extra arm attachments are very much visible, and they’re decently done. Their webbing ties the extra limbs into the rest of its body, making them feel like part of a cohesive whole rather than separate systems. That believeability imprints itself on the seer’s similar structure.

What if you cut off the mursaat’s wings? Well, those are very stuck-on, I will admit. It doesn’t bother me though 1) because the mursaat are already sufficiently differentiated from humanity before their wings come into question, and 2) they’re not supposed to be functional in the first place. For all I know, the mursaat’s "wings" could actually be magic-sensitive antennae. They’re just decoration. If the largos’ wings were just decoration as well, maybe I wouldn’t mind them, but they’re not. They’re a central part of the creature’s anatomy, and as such they should have an impact on that anatomy. Currently they don’t.

Without the wings, there is literally nothing besides skin color and ear length to visually differentiate the largos from humans. That is a serious problem.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

We have no clue how long largos live – no indication that they live either longer or shorter than other races, at all. The largos hardly seem any more wiser than humans – in fact, they seem on par, but knowing a different field while not knowing others’, and I’d hardly say that they themselves are meant to be mysterious – their mysterious nature seems solely on the fact that they’re not very well exposed.

And besides, if that’s what you define an elf to be, you’re solely mistaken on what an elf is.

Hell, by your definition the mursaat are elves! HOLY kitten PROPHECIES HAD ELVES! Hell, seers could be considered such by those three things as well. They’re basically four-armed dark-skinned bald humans who are 1) wise, 2) long lived (the one we meet in Prophecies? It met the titans eons ago), and 3) mysterious (nothing known).

If that’s all that’s needed to get your knickers in a bunch, they shoulda been bunching since day one.

I care about the themes rather than the details when defining elves. I don’t see why that’s particularly controversial.

The forefather of all we consider “elven” currently was Tolkien. Thematically, he used them as a utopian version of humanity, used as a way to critique some aspect of humanity that’s failing. Thus my “humans but better” layman definition. Elves don’t really have anything to differentiate them from humans except that they’re better, and that differentiation is often emphasized by the elves losing some of their superiority when they allow themselves to be caught up in human affairs. What form that superiority takes is variable in each universe and largely irrelevant. It could be longer life, more beautiful bodies, higher wisdom, grace, darn near anything, really. What really matters is that outside of this superiority they are human. If you take away those superior traits the elf literally becomes a human (hi there Arwen).

By that definition, are the mursaat elves? No, not at all. Yes they’re more powerful, but they’re also evil overlords. You never get the impression that there could be some kind of back-and-forth where mursaat could fall to become human or humans could, if they only were a little bit better, rise to become mursaat. The same is true with the seers.

What about the largos? All we really have to go by is that they’re super honorable and never break their word / always pay their debts (which makes them better), they’re deadly to the point of being almost untouchable (again, making them better), and despite no anatomical sense to it, they possess extreme physical prowess both on land and in the sea (again… better than humanity). The mystery, remoteness, and implied age of their society again implies superiority, by making it out that that lowly humans aren’t worthy to know more about it or interact with it lest they muddy it (thereby tainting the utopia and bringing it down to humanity’s level).

And on top of this, there are already people saying largos may be interchangeable with humans, that Abbadon might have taken humans and upgraded them to life under the sea (making them better), or that the largos might actually be the race from which the human gods arose.

That makes them pretty classic elves.

You could break this effect by giving them sufficient flaws to bring them down to reality, but so far I’ve only seen 2 real flaws to speak of. 1) They’re ruthless hunters. This is portrayed as an improvement, though, because their killing is honor bound to their society and they’re super bad-kitten experts at it. 2)They’re smug jerks towards us lowly other races. That by itself only implies yet more superiority until we see something to prove their opinions of us wrong. And maybe that something does exist, but with our limited exposure to them we sure haven’t seen it yet.

The problem is that lacking a lore distinction to break them from humans-but-better, all we have to work with is their visuals. This puts a higher pressure on their visual design, and is why the sylvari re-design was so critical to them becoming their own unique race.

The largos, unfortunately, fail there. If you chop off their wings, they’re just blue humans. They have our exact proportions (at least the norn try not to). They have fingers just like us (seriously, underwater and no webbing?). They have feet meant for standing on land, despite kicking them underwater (for all the good that would do). They have our hair, despite the fact that it could only serve to create drag underwater. Their masks heavily imply that their facial structure is human as well.

Visually they’re just blue humans with wings tapped on. I really don’t know how anyone could argue that.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I wouldn’t mind a redesign, however I don’t think a "massive" one is needed. Maybe animation changes, but again I think you’re over-exaggerating the problem.

The only animations of theirs that’s bad is their above water animations (especially the wings in _that_ situation). But underwater I think their animations are fine. Not perfect, but not causing such great issues you’re making out.

Yeah, you’re entitled to your opinion, but I still think you’re over-exaggerating things.

I’m willing to concede that my issues with their animations are probably more severe than the average user, and not all animations should be re-worked to my standards. That’s what happens when you work as an animator for 6+ years. (I still can’t use cats on my ranger main due to their horrendous run animation)

Honestly, I’d probably learn to live with it if the rest of their anatomy gave any sort of nod to their wings, or vice verse. That the two feel like separate systems with no impact on one another is what bothers me most. I almost expect at any point in time for the largos to just reach around and take their wings off.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Jenosavel.1756:

Guild Wars is a more interesting world without a race of elves tossed in.

I agree. And largos are nothing like elves. Ears and similar skin tone to Warcraft “night elves” (fun fact: original night elves from norse mythology are interchangable with dwarves) or not.

I don’t define elves by skin color or pointy ears, I define them by “Nearly inseparable from humans in form and function except for token modifications. Typically longer lived, wiser, and more mysterious.”

The skin color, ears, and wings fall into token modifications. Nothing about the rest of the largos’ visible anatomy differentiates them from humans in any way. Here’s the test I’d like them to pass: if you chopped off their wings, what in the rest of their physical structure would tell you that anything was out of place? If the first time you saw a largos, it was without its wings, what would clue you in that it wasn’t quite complete?

Currently the answer is nothing, and that’s very much a problem. You shouldn’t be able to just chop off a creature’s limbs without anyone noticing. That’s what leads me to label something as “tacked on.”

Without their wings, the largos are blue humans with long ears. If you saw them without their wings, there would be nothing to visually distinguish them from an elf. I would like to see that changed, so that if you saw a largos without its wings you would still know that this creature has probably spent quite a bit of time underwater.

For example (and again, there are probably a million ways to update them), the rest of their body could be more streamlined, angularly flowing from the shoulders where the wing attachment happens. Their arms and legs could be flatter and sharper than a human’s strictly round cross-sectioned limbs. Perhaps their faces as well could be more angular, though not losing the general human impression that lets us empathize with them. (there’s a lot of fun to be had in nearly-but-not-quite human faces, as the sylvari design exemplifies)

If you came across a creature like that with its wings chopped off you would still have some idea of where it came from. It’s that cohesiveness that I miss in the largos and why I call their design lazy. No one stopped to think about what effect those wings would have on the rest of their bodies or what effect the rest of their bodies would have on their wings.

The wings are tacked on, and even though it could be written off through lore (Abbadon gifting them wings), they would never be as compelling as if they were built into a single cohesive unit.

Unless, of course, they decided to play up the separateness in the lore and go the route of the largos not actually having wings at all, but having wing-like symbiotic/parasitic organisms which attach and feed off of them in return for enabling underwater movement. (that sounds like the sort of “gift” Abbadon might give, actually)

That would be the “whole new level of writing” which I said can make elf-like races work. We currently don’t have that level of development put into them, however.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Jenosavel.1756:

Sticking wings on and putting them underwater doesn’t make up for the fact that they’re still pretty much just elves.

And if you notice, their entire culture differs. There’s little to nothing that’s elf-like to me in largos.

Not all elves have the same culture across fantasy, so I don’t really define elves by the details of their culture as much as by the “humans but better & more mysterious” standard for their personalities. The largos fit that, being obviously mysterious and also reknowned bad-kittenassins.

To you there’s little elf-like about the largos. To me there’s little to differentiate them from a generic “magical human clone.” I think that’s where the disagreement stems from.

JohnLShannonhouse.1820:

Jenosavel.1756:

That doesn’t change the fact that the largos are one of the only species in this game that blatantly ignores the relationship between real world anatomical structures and the creature’s environment.

Among other creatures that blatantly ignore real world anatomical structures:
Griffons, harpies, bats, fireflies and other flying critters – their wingspans are far, far too small for creatures of those sizes to stay aloft. Maybe Tyria is low gravity? That would explain a lot in game, actually…

These are great examples that all reinforce rather than contradict my point. There’s a huge difference between taking an existing structure and embellishing it as opposed to tossing known rules out the window. It’s exaggeration vs contradiction. Exaggeration is great, it’s what makes fantasy worlds larger than life, but if you completely ignore and therefore (unintentionally or otherwise) contradict the rules of the real world, then that’s where you risk causing a break in immersion.

So to the example of the winged folk, they still have wings, and wings that at least generally mimic the proper structure. Yes they’re too small, and probably more importantly they all seem to have severe deformations in their secondaries (or they’re just lacking them, many of the wings appear to cut off at the secondary coverlets). That’s quibbly though. It’s a modification of an existing rule of nature rather than a direct contradiction to it.

The real contradiction with griffins would be the presence of 6 limbs rather than 4, and while that does break a rule of nature (creatures within a single evolutionary chain share the same limb counts), it breaks it in such a consistent way within the world that you can suspend your disbelief over it. Dragons have 6 limbs too, afterall, so we just sort of have to assume that there are two separate evolutionary chains going on in Tyria, with dragons and griffins stemming from an entirely different branch than almost everything else.

JohnLShannonhouse.1820:

Norn, Ogres – the legs would have to be thicker or made of something Humans don’t have to support a running, jumping biped of that size (about 80% thicker than Human legs, or 30% thicker in proportion to their bodies, assuming they are a 50% scaled up Human anatomy).

Giants – Like Norn and Ogres, but more so.

As with wings, this is just an exaggeration of proportions. The underlying structures and shapes are all still sound. The right muscle groups still exist, and even in the right places.

Notice that I’m not arguing for strict adherence to real world anatomy, just a basic respect for it. If we were going to complain that the leg muscles on orgres and norn weren’t big enough, then we should really be arguing first that no creature the size of the giants or elder dragons could exist due to lack of oxygen in the air (the relative oxygenation of the air can be evidenced by the smaller body sizes of pretty much every major race).

This is not what I’m doing. That would be silly to complain about in a fantasy world, because without these sorts of exaggerations, it wouldn’t be fantasy anymore.

JohnLShannonhouse.1820:

Jellyfish – not sure how they are achieving that rapid forward motion. Their umbrella membranes clearly don’t expel any more water than a normal large Cnidarian, but they move much, much faster. I am not sure how they eat enough, either. Their body structures resemble small Cnidarians, but larger ones need much longer stalks and more epidermal structures to catch and digest enough food and distribute nutrients.

This is true, and again a matter of exaggeration. They still make the same general movements as a real jellyfish and have the same general structure. That they move faster than a real jellyfish is no different than the fact that the charr run far slower than they should on all fours or that pretty much everyone and everything jumps way higher than they should.

Again, larger than life exaggerations like this are great for fantasy.

Thank you very much Kitcat! I really appreciate pointing out the awkward sentence, I’ll note it down for my next pass through the story. I’m very much an active editor, and its great to smooth out any wrinkles the readers come across.

Also thank you for your comments about the dog. I’d be curious to hear your opinions on future chapters (if you come back to comment again later), as my writing style towards the animal companions will intentionally change. I over-do them a bit up front on purpose, and I’d be curious to find out if you still think its to much after you’ve read another chapter or two. One of the biggest things in my mind when I do revisions is toning back the obviousness and ham-handedness of previous versions. In the first draft everything was overdone. I said each thing I wanted to say in a dozen different ways. The trick later, then, is to go back and delete all the ones that don’t say it as well. In fact, I can think of a candidate or two for doggy-overdoneness-deletions right off the top of my head. But I purposely won’t come back and edit it until the current pass of my story is done. It helps me be a little more objective if I remove myself in time from the writing.

Heh, I think I put that lore-warning up there precisely so I can stop worrying about if people will latch onto some lore detail they disagree with. I’ve already got a response I can point to, and I just know that if I didn’t have that pre-made response waiting, I’d get caught up in a lengthy debate each time. I’m a lore-lover myself; I know how those debates can get! The XKCD comic comes to mind... "Just one minute, someone is wrong on the internet."

I’d love to see your own novel if you ever post it! I love the GW2 universe. It’s a rich breeding ground for creativity.

The explanation Korsbaek mentions is the only one you can really believe with things as they are. The largos are a land race, pure and simple, that for some unexplained reason decided to live in the depths. They’re ill-adapted and can’t even breath underwater (or at least, that seems the logical explanation for their masks), yet somehow they have developed these "fins" I’m supposed to believe work underwater? No, I don’t buy it. Their wings, like everything else about them, are ill-adapted to a life at the bottom. It seems inevitable to me that they had to flee back to the surface, yet they persist in and near water despite their awkwardness.

And you know, guys, I’m really trying to keep this from becoming personal. I understand that some people love the largos. I understand that some people actually want them as playable characters someday. I knew this before my first post, and I’m trying not to belittle anyone who actually likes them. You’re entitled to your opinion, and should probably be happy that you’re in the majority here. But I’m also entitled to my opinion, and while in the minority, I’m not the only person who finds the largos design to be lacking.

For me, Guild Wars is a more interesting world without a race of elves tossed in. This was true when the sylvari re-design happened, and it would be true if the largos were ever re-designed as well. Going to elf designs is a lazy fallback these days, and I’m really quite bored with it. Sticking wings on and putting them underwater doesn’t make up for the fact that they’re still pretty much just elves. And if you’ll notice, elves are conspicuously missing from the rest of the game, and I think there’s a reason for that. In fact, I think my opinion was probably shared by the someone(s) behind the sylvari re-design.

(fun trivia fact for you reaaaaaally old school GW people, did you know that originally the charr were going to be just some orcs? ANet’s amazing art team said no to orcs for the same reason they said no to elves. Orcs & elves is over-done. New ideas can be far more interesting and release the writers/artists’ creativity.)

I think the elf thing is a central point I should probably have made sooner. Some people will go crazy for elves no matter where they find them. Elves are "humans but better" so not only are they relateable, they’re ripe for hero worship. You pretty much can not make an elf race without flocks of fan worship. It’s normal.

And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in those hordes plenty of times myself. But I’ve long since lost my fascination with an over-done idea. For elves to be interesting these days, they have to rise to a whole different level of good writing, which the largos haven’t. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t in the future, but if they’re ever to move beyond a peripheral near-forgotten race, they’re going to need some serious updating. I suspect that the reason people who dislike largos aren’t more vocal about it is because (for now) they’re easy to ignore. If you pushed them into the spotlight as is, threads like this would become a lot more common.

tdlr: Right now the largos are underwater elves. I know I’m not the only one who finds that boring.

Chapter 2 has been added!

Konig Des Todes.2086:

How, exactly, do they qualify for other games but not Guild Wars? What makes this so?

Not all games have the same cut-off for believably. Many up front say "it’s magic, and we really don’t care about whether this would actually work anywhere." The largos would fit well in those games. They’re sort of pretty, if you go for that thing, and in many games that’s enough. They’d work great in any number of Final Fantasy games, or in WoW, or in Aion even, but Guild Wars has a different aesthetic. Its creature designs are made with a high degree of respect for structural homologies and creature-environment synergies. It’s easier to just ignore this, and many successful fantasy games do. But it’s that element which makes the world feel more alive to me than other fantasy games. I love that. I really can’t put into words how much I love that, and the largos go and break it on me.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I think there’s exactly 9 - including the one who was in game for only a weekend during The Lost Shores.

As to remodeling - I still don’t think its necessary. I think people just need to _see more of them_ so that their good points stand out more. Most folks I’ve seen complain about the largos look at them at face value (or I suppose mask value for them). Though I do think they’ll receive more details, like a better face should the masks ever come off, as well as an explanation behind the masks and voice tones, but I don’t think an in-depth remodel would be needed.

Just don’t go giving them flippers...

See, I don’t think they need flippers (again more of a glide mechanic). They do need streamlining though, and more attention paid to real-life creatures with fins that could be worked into their existing design. Like a lionfish, for example.

I mean, how cool would it be if the largos had a little more lionfish in their wing/fin design, and instead of sticking out straight off the back they angled down and wrapped the body instead? You could get both a proper angle of motion to match their anatomy as well as a cool "my fins are clothing" look outside of water. Of you could leave their wings facing the direction they do now, but instead of flying like superman, they have to curl into a more aerodynamic ball/wedge/arrowhead shape as they’re pushed forward rather than up.

Really, there are a ton of different design approaches which would address their anatomy-for-environment issues, and almost all of them would be less cliche and boring than what we have now. Because we really ought to face the music here. The largos designs, as is, are little more than butterfly-winged dark elves. In the same way that I’m glad the sylvari were moved away from a generic elf look, I would like to see some more creativity applied to the largos.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Krait are also from the deep sea. But they build structures that go from these ocean depths to the water’s surface. Is it really impossible to believe the largos can’t do the same? Is it impossible to believe that while the largos may now live in the ocean depths, they didn’t before? That they could have been frequenting land before being pushed out of the Unending Ocean? Or that they lived in/near underwater air pockets?

It’s got nothing to do with suspension of disbelief. It’s got to do with there being so many reasonable and realistic possibilities.

I mean, they come from the same places at quaggans. Why do quaggans have legs and not fins? Does this break your immersion too?

The krait are believable because they’re at least relatively streamlined and their land-capable limbs are secondary to everything else. Quaggans for the same reason, especially if you watch the relative grace/clumsiness of their water/land animations. The krait also have very naturalistic motion (which is easy, since they’re essentially just snakes).

The krait’s limbs are proportionally small and unobtrusive, the quaggans’ get tucked up neatly when they swim around. This makes sense.

Largos are unbelievable because their water limbs are very much secondary to their land limbs. Unlike the krait or quaggan the largos have no sensible primary thrust creator. Their wings ripple a little and they kick with land-made feet. They would be sitting ducks ripe for every predator’s pleasure in the depths. This does not make me inclined to believe they’re such great assassins.

Worse yet, they move nearly identically in or out of water with very little respect to either environment. In fact, they move more like they’re always suspended in a gravity-free vacuum, like they’re super-humans with stiff bits of cloth taped to their backs.

This gets to the crux of the problem. It’s written off as a “magic” with no naturalistic explanation.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Seeing them swim convinced me. When I saw them on land and saw how the “wings” were connected, I shared your view. It made little sense for the wings to be attached to the bottom of the neck (where the neck and shoulders meet, but above the shoulder bone). But watching the animation, it was actually made believable.

And there I very much have to disagree with you. There just aren’t any structures in nature that work remotely like the largos moves. If their wings were in fact fins, then they should push the creature forward towards its chest rather than upwards towards its head. That’s how narrowly attached, wide-ended fins with a high degree of mobility work. Draw a line from the point of attachment to the opposite end of the fin. That’s the direction the creature should move. The largos do not. They attempt to mimic a gliding swim, but for a creature to do that, they need to have fins which are highly respectful to aerodynamics and largely rigid. Mantas, sharks, etc all have a lot in common with airplanes when you get right down to studying their mobility. The largos are the opposite of that. They’re about as opposite of aerodynamic as you can get, including their wing shape.

So to recap, there are fins that push a creature through the water, and there are fins that work like airplane wings to allow the creature to glide through the water. The largos have one and then try to move like the other, leaving them in a nowhere land of unbelievability. I can only conclude that they’re pulled through the water by magic, and it’s that “blame magic” with no naturalistic parallels that separates them from other creatures designs in the game and makes them stick out like a sore thumb.

The largos were never seen in GW1, and we’re told they’re deep sea creatures. That’s enough for me to assume that they’re meant for the deep sea and not land. If its not enough for you, then fine, you’ve got a better suspension of disbelief than I do.

As to their precise anatomy, you’ll have a very hard time convincing me that their wings are actually functional fins. I’m a naturalist with regards to anatomy, and quite a student of it. That means that again I have a lower disbelief threshold than many others, and I’m perfectly willing to admit that my opinions there aren’t shared by everyone. In fact, I know I’m in the minority. A lot of people love the largos.

That doesn’t change the fact that the largos are one of the only species in this game that blatantly ignores the relationship between real world anatomical structures and the creature’s environment. Heck, even the cities pay more attention to the living relationship between a character (building, in this case) and its environment than the largos do. Its ridiculous. They’re just at a lower quality threshold overall than the rest of the game, and that makes them obnoxious to me.

Now, keep in mind this: the Largos probably would pass the quality test for half a hundred other games. Good games, even great games. They’re just not right for Guild Wars.

There are plenty of ways the largos here could have been well done. They simply weren’t.

Since the skritt came up with the asura, or possibly a little later (we didn’t see them in GW1, iirc), then my guess is that they wouldn’t have interacted with the charr until the charr stopped eating sentients. Lucky for the skritt, I say. The charr used to call humans mice all the time when they were considered snackables, so I can only imagine what they would have done to actual mice.

Eh, I watch all the cutscenes and I still complain about the suddenness of the largos. Explained or not, they still feel tacked on and not a part of the world. Where everything else in the world was crafted with such care, the largos are lazy. Why in the name of Dwayna would a deep sea creature which almost never rises to the surface have limbs made for walking on land, a completely non-streamlined body, and no fins (those wings are not fins, they’re weakly attached and would rip off at the first current)?

Lazy. Lazy. Lazy. And totally uncharacteristic of everything else ArenaNet has done. How did this come from the same company that gave the charr females 6 nondescript breasts and kept the sylvari from becoming (visually) another emo-elf race?

I really believe the game would be better if Largos were removed. Otherwise they either need a serious lore retcon to make sense or a complete visual re-design on the scale of Dragon Age 1 vs 2.

I think Trahearne was just executed poorly. In theory there’s nothing wrong with the role he has to play. If, for example, it was Tybalt that was stealing the show from you in the final arc of the story, I doubt many people would be complaining.

But bland lines combined with wooden voice acting and an abrupt/forced introduction? That does not make for an emotional connection with the player.

So even if the lore and explanations behind Trahearne’s character, motivations, and eventual undertakings all make logical sense, that still is not enough for a good story.

Glad to hear you like it Edusd! I can’t wait to put up the next chapter (expect it Tuesday).

My revisions process is currently on chapter 7. It’s a really important chapter to the story and is already on its 3rd draft... but I think it’s finally getting where I want it to be.

A young Valiant sets off on her Wyld Hunt with only a vision of colors to guide her. But in her haste to follow what sparse clues she has, she finds herself on a very different journey.

Complete collection! (186 pages) Now available in a single file!
(pdf) | (mobi/epub)

Chapters
---------------------------------------------------
Prologue (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/pub)
Chapter 1 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 2 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 3 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 4 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 5 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 6 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 7 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 8 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 9 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 10 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 11 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 12 (AO3) | (pdf) | (mobi/epub)
Chapter 13 (AO3) | (PDF) | (EPUB/MOBI)
Epilogue (AO3) | (PDF) | (EPUB/MOBI)

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Welcome to my little corner of Tyria!

When I originally had the idea for this story, I thought it would be a quick 5 chapters. Two months and 12 chapters later I finished the first draft. It was 44k words. Now that I’m half-way through revisions it has grown to 47k words. By the time I complete revisions it may grow to near 50k. So apparently I’ve managed to write a Guild Wars 2 novel without particularly intending to.

I’m so excited to be finally sharing this!

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Characters art!