R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I didn’t mind the HoT dialogue too much- it was far more take charge, let’s get this done people, far more Pact commander, than it was in the PS- but I will be honest, most of the time I barely glance at my side of the conversation during text box dialogue. Our characters feel like they were meant to be blank slate protagonists, though, so for the most part I chalk it up to the difficulty of giving blank slates things to say. Especially voice lines, where some nuance of emphasis and emotional context are unavoidable.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Forgotten are a historical race :P. They had a sizable role in GW1, about to the same scale as the mursaat if you count in Nightfall, and certainly larger than the seers. They’ve also had a bigger role in the background lore of GW2 thus far, what with founding the Exalted and Tarir, creating a way to purify dragon minions, standing with the Seers as the foremost contributor to the survival of that ancient alliance, and previously guarding the rites that create the divine fire we used in S2 to slay the Shadow of the Dragon and ward off mordrem.
I think there really is room in the story for both, though. Any of the ‘elder races’, be it mursaat, Forgotten, or even Seer or dwarf, doesn’t really count as adding on a new race, not in the same way the Exalted, nuhoch, or itzel were. It’s more building on a long-established mystery.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s another of the traits which doesn’t add up for me, in that they would even fight instead of hide, or that the entirety of their race would be stationed at these locations or in the final battle for Lions Arch. You’d imagine they would try everything to survive, even in the apolcalyptic setting for them with the titans being released.
The fact that Lazarus was desperate enough to split his own essence and hide it in humans indicates, to me, that they couldn’t simply run or hide from the titans. If they could, after all, why would he have ever gone to such lengths? That being the case, it makes perfect sense that they would line up to die at Abaddon’s Mouth (and, indeed, Thunderhead Keep), since that was their only hope of survival.
As for afterwards, I see more wiggle room there. The fact that there were mursaat left to kill in the War in Kryta obviously indicates that a small number were able to escape the titans- either they took similarly desperate measures as Lazarus, but actually succeeded, or else our intervention at Hell’s Precipice and afterwards took out the titans before they could finish the job. Assuming their tyranny of Kryta was only meant to counter the titans, I would definitely expect more to slip away than to put themselves at risk. Then again, everything we know about the mursaat suggests that they’re spiteful and vengeful, and maybe those traits are ingrained enough to overrule good sense.
All in all, my opinion? It’s conceivable that there are still mursaat around, but only a few, maybe at best a modest cabal. They won’t be coming back as an entire race.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
We had a discussion about that not too long ago here, if you’d like to give it a look through. Several names got floated, but the only real consensus was that it shouldn’t be our PC.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It doesn’t have to be something they just happened to stumble upon. The Forgotten, and Tarir, were both created by the Forgotten, who from we know are just as ancient as mursaat or Seers and even more knowledgeable where the Elder Dragons are concerned. Your countermeasure would most reasonably be something they had left behind for the Exalted to use- and, since the Forgotten had strong ties to the Crystal Desert and to Glint, it’d make more sense to bring them back for a story season dealing with those two things.
I’ll also admit, I’m as eager to have Forgotten back as Animism is to see mursaat.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The Seers stopped the corruption by hiding the uncorrupted magic within the stone. The gods didn’t store anything in it, but unsealed and split up what the Seers had already put in.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
-snip-
I actually agree with… just about all of that. The tone of the story feels discordant with the world they’ve tried to establish, and in that one regard HoT is definitely better than anything that’s come before. I don’t think it’s a matter of scale, though- after all, we’ve had the next best thing to an eldritch abomination awaken, nearly kill the godlike mother of a race, and tear down the only organization prepared to stand against it with astounding ease. No, the issue I see isn’t the scale of what’s happening, but the actions of the NPCs and the workings of the game mechanics belittling it. That’s been a problem throughout the second game, but for HoT specifically, imagine how much of that feeling of epicness we’d regain if only our character had stayed focused on the dragon instead of stumbling their way by accident into the final fight, and if that final fight had mechanically been more than a long, drawn-out grind with invulnerability phases that weren’t remotely threatening.
The events of the story are already epic- the trouble is that everything else undermines them. Assassinating Queen Jennah and invading Divinty’s Reach- or even just bringing the mursaat back- without changing that underlying problem would only provide more of the same.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Five pieces, not six, and the same story tells us that Doric went to Arah, and that all five stones were deposited in a volcano that later spewed them out. It is a nice idea, but there’s just no backing for it- it’s made of a completely different material than the bloodstones, in either game or the second, and the glowing markings people like to point to are a far cry from the inscriptions that only two of the three known bloodstones were seen with anyway.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Decoration, as far as we can tell. You may as well ask about the meaing of the pond. There’s been a conspiracy theory for a long time that it’s a bloodstone, but besides being a stone with a glowing pattern there’s no evidence. They aren’t made of even remotely similar material.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That’s what Shiren’s saying, Konig- since Arah the dungeon is an instance, there’s nothing stopping Arah the cleansed zone from occupying the same map space, since none of Arah’s content requires a persistent shard. It’d be a bit like how they’re handling Lion’s Arch in the PS now.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The argument isn’t “It can’t happen because it’s hard”, it’s “It’s too hard to be worth it.” You’re talking about a major overhaul of several core systems in exchange for a player wow factor that’ll wear off in, what, a month tops? And after that, if you’ll forgive me a slippery slope, when the players get bored again they’ll want the next one to be bigger, and then bigger, until you get spectacle creep ad absurdum. That’s not a sustainable direction for the game, and frankly, I’m already sick of areas getting wrecked for that sort of thing. (Looking at you most particularly, Greyhoof Meadows. You were great back in the day.)
I get that you want things shaken up. Really, I do, and I feel it too. But I don’t think bigger and flashier is the answer. The problem isn’t that ANet’s stories don’t have impact on the world- they absolutely do- it’s that those impacts are spaced months or years apart with essentially no plot progression in-between these days. Turning DR into a raid won’t prevent burnout after two months of running it, and then players will be on the forums complaining that nothing major has ever happened, that the biggest thing was one region got reskinned.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I already brought this up in another thread, but to restate: Canach was only with us because he was ordered into the jungle by Countess Anise, and because, being a sylvari, he had a personal stake in taking Mordremoth out. Further, as he himself remarks, the world needed to see a sylvari bring the dragon down, and by being that sylvari, he’s put a nice capstone on his personal redemption arc.
It was a good story, and I enjoyed it, and now it’s done. It reached its natural end. He no longer has any stake in working with us, and in my opinion, the best thing to do is for us to go our separate ways.
At most, Anise might reasonably shanghai him into the developing White Mantle/Shining Blade conflict, but there it’s the rest of the biconics who don’t have any stake. He’d still have no reason to be part of the group- and I’m really not a fan of groups that are built of characters sticking around because, well, why not?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
So the bitter old isolated gladium decided to teach a foreign sylvari instead of a proper charr who would use the lessons well.
That’s assuming that A.) a charr would deign to be taught by a gladium, and B.) a charr so inclined wouldn’t have already been taught those skills in the fahrar or by the old soldiers whose purpose is to train the young’ns.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t really care if they’re the best picks for their job- after all, our character’s only real qualification is being very, very good at killing things, which isn’t sufficient to earn the shot-calling position we find ourselves in. What can really get my goat is the lack of stake the biconics have. Just in HoT- Canach, Rytlock, Taimi, and when she joined, Caithe all had good reasons to be with us. No problem there. But the others were either tag-alongs (Kasmeer and Rox) or out for a revenge they showed a suspicious disinclination to pursue (Marjory and Braham). S2 was even worse, and S1… yes, it’s getting better, but they’ve still got a ways to go before it feels like a group that would believably be out doing what we do.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
We heard in an interview a long, long time back that they do have, ah, relevant external anatomy, and yes, they can ‘partner’ for pleasure. They just have no biological urge to, and don’t reproduce by it. It’s more about intimacy than horniness.
@Nero Hey, man, don’t disrespect the dark and edgy background! Canach suffered hard to earn that snide angst! :P
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Essentially, Faolain and Caithe were lovers coupled in an abusive relationship. They split, and Faolain became the obsessive stalker ex right up to the point she got herself impaled. They did have a ‘romantic’ relationship- it definitely went beyond sisterhood, although it may very well not have had any sexual component.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Not me… lessee… looks like it was Narcemus building on something Randulf suggested.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
And why is Canach not mentioned? Presumably, only reason would be because he’s still a lap dog of Anise.
While I agree that the rest of this business is being messily handled, here I think they made the right call. Canach was only with us because of Anise, and his beef was with Mordremoth in particular, not Elder Dragons in general. The natural thing for him here would be to either spin off into the White Mantle/Shining Blade arc that’s possibly being teased (hopefully not- it’ll be a problem if the most recognizable character in what should be a human arc is once again a sylvari), or to get his freedom from Anise, fulfilling his redemption quest, and then bow out for a while, perhaps indefinitely. And I, for one, would welcome a character leaving when their story is done, instead of being killed off or shoehorned into further places they have no stake in being.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
This explanation might require the charr-human contact to predate the charr-norn contact, but it could explain why the charr might associate the language with humans even if it wasn’t actually a language that originated with humans.
Maybe not, if the norn were still phasing out their own language in 1078, close to 1300 years after the first charr-human contact. Given that the norn weren’t exactly on peaceful terms with most of their neighbors either, but lacked the military interest in being able to spy on and interrogate their foes, I can see the charr picking up Tyrian before they did.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I got your questions on the list, Vanguard, but I’m going to point out again that the first couple fall pretty squarely into the ‘future potential plot points’ category we’ve already been told isn’t up for answering.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Can you blame them? Pancakes would be an empty and desolate indulgence in a world with no maple syrup.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Do you have any specific examples? It would be easier if we had something concrete to talk about.
For my part, I don’t remember any interactions that came across as insubordinate. A fair bit that was glib, but that only read like an attempt to keep spirits up.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Shortest version: Season one of the Living World.
Short version: An insane sylvari genius conned antagonistic factions from all over Tyria to attack the city while she got at the hub of ley lines under the harbor and redirected them to wake up the Elder Dragon Mordremoth. She died in the process, and her minions were eventually driven off, but the city was razed to the ground in the process and eventually rebuilt in the form you see today.
Mind you, it was the climax of a plot that ran for 15 months, so there’s some oversimplification happening there.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
- snip-
big list of questions
-snip-Thanks for your effort. You are doing great work there and I hope some of your questions also get some covering as well.
Thanks! I’ll probably sneak a few of mine in if the devs start to catch up, but right now we’re sitting on… hm… 80 questions? (Tyragon and Gnomex make for half of that between them…) Now that I’ve got a taste of the trouble it is to compile them, I’m not in any rush to add to the workload actually answering them must be, especially with the size of the answers we’ve been getting.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I put it on my list, eNeRgOo, but you should know that we’ve already been told there won’t be any answers about future stories.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Oh, Tyragon, you are making my life difficult. Anyway, a couple of your questions already have answers- yes, norn can speak while in a spirit’s form, and we see a couple NPCs doing it. Usually in prisons. No, shamans can’t enter the Mists, that’s definitely havroun-exclusive. And I’m gonna list it anyway, just out of a surfeit of caution, but in the novels we see elementalists both explicitly conjuring and explicitly ‘bending’- it just seems to depend on the spell.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I just compiled all of the questions so far in one of my earlier posts, and guys, we’re up to 60! (Looking at you, Gnomex!) Maybe leave it there until our poor dev gets a chance to respond, eh?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That first one is just concept, though. Consider how far Zhaitan varied from its concept art, or Mordremoth from what we think was its.
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R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
and I’m already pushing the envelope of how many hours per day I can devote to the forums.
I apologize in advance for not quoting the questions before each answer, but that quickly became a logistical nightmare. Instead, I have called out the questioner by name so you know to whom I’m responding:
Fantastic of you to be sticking with us! On all of this, though- would it be easier for you if we had a format? Bullet points, numbers, something that lets you quickly tell the questions apart from all the rest of the back-and-forth we’ve got going?
EDIT: Yeesh, this got flooded! Alright, for Scott’s convenience I’m going to try to keep this post updated with the short version of all the questions asked so far, weeding out the ones that get answered as we go. Italicized questions have more to them than I could sum up well. We’ve already been told he can’t answer a good few of these, but I’ll list them anyway so no one feels left out.
Page 1!
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*Buddha-Where does Roderick fit into the Krytan royal family tree?
*Konig- How do weddings work for different races, esp. Krytans, charr, and sylvari?
*Konig- How do schools work for different races, esp. humans, norn, and sylvari?
*Konig- Did each used to have their own calendar?
*Konig- How do humans worship the gods? Church services?
*Belial- What happened to Evennia?
*Belial- Will Logan ever get Magdaer?
*Ranael- What year is it in-game?
*Spyrit- Do the Inquest forcibly conscript members?
*Dimitris- Did the last Forgotten really address the Exalted after Glint’s death?
*katubug- Are sylvari teeth made of bone, and do they have skeletons?
*katubug- How long does sylvari clothes and armor take to grow? Can it be freely taken off and put back on?
*katubug- Are there sylvari ghosts?
*Soul- What’s east of Blazeridge Steppes?
*Qarandir- How often does the Order of Whispers go to Elona?
*Qarandir- Has anyone taken an airship to Cantha yet?
*diax- Why don’t asura have nipples or bellybuttons?
Page 2!
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*Celine- When do asura reach adulthood?
*Gnomex- Do golems download updates from an internet?
*Gnomex- How intelligent can golems be? Is it linked to amount of magic?
*Gnomex- What are golems usually made out of?
*Gnomex- How long does it take a wyvern to reach full size?
*Gnomex- What age are most asura during college?
*Gnomex- Are a Scrapper’s hammer skills magic or tech?
*Gnomex- When do the different races, esp. norn, reach adulthood?
*Gnomex- Can sylvari catch human diseases?
*Gnomex- What goes into growing sylvari houses?
*Gnomex- Do the Spirits of the Wild treat non-norn followers the same?
*Gnomex- Are human racial skills directly from the gods or just normal magic?
*Gnomex- Do the Exalted try to keep Glint’s egg/legacy a secret?
*Gnomex- What is aetherium?
*Gnomex- Do asura have anything that function like telephones?
*Gnomex- How tech savvy can skritt top out at?
*Gnomex- Is the GW2 player character more powerful than the GW1 one was?
*Gnomex- Are all djinn as powerful and knowledgeable as Zommorros?
*Gnomex- Are the new stars in the sky a teaser for future story?
*Serezenith- Do wurms have tails?
*Konig- Will we ever find out why sylvari don’t work like other dragon minions?
*Konig- What’s the backstory on the other named Mordrem Guard commanders?
*Konig- When was the last time the dragons woke up? Can we get a concise timeline?
*Konig- Was the Seer in Zinn’s lab in GW1 dead? Was it the one we met?
*Konig- Where did Kanaxai come from?
*Thrill- Will we see Cantha or Elona again?
*TealDeer- What was the cut Nightmare Court plotline in HoT going to be about?
*wouw- Will we ever see the canceled Elonian part of GW Beyond outside the games, like a novel?
(Brace yourselves! Flood incoming!)
*Tyragon – What age do norn learn to shapeshift?
*Tyragon- How do norn learn to shapeshift?
*Tyragon- Which norn can shapeshift?
*Tyragon- How many forms can a single norn have?
*Tyragon (bit of guesswork)- Is shapeshifting a spell?
*Tyragon- Do wounds carry over between forms?
*Tyragon- How long can a norn stay transformed?
*Tyragon- Do transformed norn lose control to animal instinct?
*Tyragon- Do transformed norn get the animals abilities? Flight, better senses, etc.
*Tyragon- When do norn think it’s appropriate to transform?
*Tyragon- How connected are shamans to their spirit?
*Tyragon- Are shamans connected to the Mists?
*Tyragon- What are shamans responsible for?
*Tyragon- Can shamans leave their shrine or hunting grounds for a time?
*Tyragon- Do shamans have special powers beyond most norn?
*Tyragon- Are shapeshifted shamans more powerful?
*Tyragon- How does a norn become a shaman?
*Tyragon- How, and how frequently, do the spirits communicate with norn?
*Tyragon- How does elementalist magic work?
*Tyragon- Do they create things or use what is around them?
*Tyragon- How does water magic heal?
*Tyragon- How often do elementalists learn all four elemental magics?
*Tyragon- Is learning the other three a small or large effort after learning one?
*Tyragon- How much training does learning all four take?
*eNeRgOo- Will Malyck make a return?
*eNeRgOo- Are there male Pale Trees?
*Zekowah- Can sylvari change their hair at will?
*Shinzan- Do you often seed hints and foreshadowing far in advance of a reveal?
*Raeysa- How did the revenant profession spread so quickly?
*drax- Are the asura capable of as impressive device-less magic as other races?
*Nero- Why didn’t the charr in Prophecies speak Tyrian?
*Konig- Why is Tyrian called human in The Ecology of the Charr?
*Konig- How did Tyrian spread to current races, esp. hostile ones?
*Lyr- Is an elementalist working with one element usually more powerful in that field?
*Donari- How do the different cities handle criminals?
*Konig/Forgotten- Can any of the answers here be put into in-game books?
*Yojimaru- What profession-based organizations are there?
*Agememnon- Will Jormag make itself heat-resistant armor?
*Nero- What differentiates primordial/elemental/holy fire?
*Aidan- Are revenants limited to the five legends we have mechanically?
*Sungak- How long can a charr expect to live?
*Sungak- How old is Almorra?
*Sungak- How would a charr guardian respond to being called a paladin?
*Konig- How do waypoints in-universe compare to their game mechanics?
*Vanguard- Have you considered moving to non-dragon main antagonists?
*Vanguard- Are playable largos on the table?
*Vanguard- Are the tengu ever going to come out of the Dominion of Winds?
*Vanguard- What’s the status of Dhuum and Menzies?
*Vanguard- Will we see the same extent of cultural divisions in non-human races?
*Urban- Where’d Riot Alice go after Prosperity?
Page 3!
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*Waffle- How are vehicles classified, esp. air vehicles?
*Waffle- Will future content take account of the capabilities of different airships?
*Jaken- Was Mordremoth the voice in Scarlet’s head?
*Jaken- What would happen if the dams in Queensdale broke?
*Jaken- Is changing starter zones off-limits?
*smitske- In retrospect, was HoT’s narrow focus the best choice?
*Whilyam- What is Taimi’s disease?
*Whilyam- Is said disease unique to her?
*Whilyam- Is said disease survivable?
*Whilyam- Is said disease confined to the legs?
*wouw- Have you detailed anything about the human’s original world?
*wouw- Is Arachnia canon?
*wouw- Are the charr/human truce talks going to progress?
*wouw- Was Rotscale a risen?
*wouw- Has Rotscale been slain?
*wouw- Why were the Zaishen hanging around Fort Marriner?
*Kalavier- Why is the PC so hostile towards Caithe in HoT, especially near the end?
*Tuchanka- Do sylvari have conscious control of their glow?
*Tuchanka- Does mood affect a sylvari’s glow?
*Tuchanka- Do sylvari glow when they blush?
*Tuchanka- How do sylvari become wardens?
*Tuchanka- How are Wardens trained?
*szshou- Lore-wise, what happened to the GW1 energy mechanic?
*Justine- What was the Ashford Abbey haunting?
*Jaken- Where can one get a spatial discombobulator?
*(My inference of what Jaken was really driving at)- Is there any interest in making the Polymock Arenas in Rata Sum accessible?
Page 4!
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*Budman- Can you share any legendary weapon lore?
*Kalavier- What’s the proportion of Nightmare sylvari who aren’t part of the Court?
*Kalavier- How do other races treat the Court?
*Rhaegar- What did the symbols in The Wilds mean?
*adormtil- What was Primordus up to before Taimi declared him ‘active’?
*Vilenia- How old would a progeny be when they started at a pre-college like Splorge?
*Kalavier- At what age do norn typically get tattooed?
kitten . I had a couple of my own… but this is enough to pick from, no?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I think the difference here, though, is that the god complex is almost justified. As best we can currently tell, we’re talking about creatures that seem to be a couple dozen thousand millennia old at absolute minimum, that’re tied to the functioning of the cosmos in ways we’re only beginning to see the scale of, and that’ve wiped out all life that stood before them every previous time they felt like it. Not just wiped out, but repurposed to fit their ends. They alter the land, the climate, the environment, in their own image… basically, it’s not a god complex when you’re functionally a god.
So yeah, I’m not disappointed by it, and I don’t see it as a cliche. It would’ve been weird if they weren’t full of themselves before now. I am hopeful we’ll be moving past it, though, since all the other dragons have now been awake to see two of their number cast down. Whether they convince themselves it’s more power to go around and that the same fate could never happen to them, or start taking us seriously, we should at least have forced them to address us now, and that in turn could open up the space we need for the story to address them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Maybe a dragon who thinks what it is doing is good for everyone?
That’s kinda already what we got with Mordremoth. We weren’t dealing with anything about spitefully destroying the world- Mordremoth expressed the belief that it was the world, full stop. It was simply waking up and taking back what belonged to it to begin with.
Zhaitan’s a harder call to make, since we only get a look through the obviously warped lens of its minions’ perception of it, but their belief is that Zhaitan was a god-figure who would inevitably rule the world- again, not spiteful destruction, just overweening ego.
Kralkatorrik, from the brief look into his psyche we got through Snaff’s eyes, does seem to be about consuming the world, but it’s the only one so far.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t that they’re not diverse- it’s that ArenaNet hasn’t told any stories that allow their differences to be explored. In the Personal Story the dragons were this great mystery, with the fact that they could even be successfully fought coming as a surprise, so obviously we didn’t get a good look there. Heart of Thorns, and even the Living World all the way back to Scarlet, is all a race against time with huge stakes, with plenty to juggle and no opportunity to take a minute and figure out our opponent beyond guessing at their next objective so we can start the race again. It’s not that Zhaitan and Mordremoth were the same character, but that they were different characters forced into the same role as backdrop to the story. Or, if you prefer, characters being treated like a force of nature, like a storm or an earthquake to be weathered, and with ramifications to handle afterwards, but not to be engaged directly. Neither dragon came into focus until the very end of their arc, by which point the means to destroy them happened to be on hand and all that was left to do was waltz in and end things.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Don’t think this is the forum you wanted, mate, but best of luck!
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That one-liner is “Chances are they’ll be sent to the Blood Citadel, where they’ll be properly punished.” Nothing in there to say that the Blood Citadel has a large number of prisoners, or that they’re a prison camp dedicated to torture, or that prisoners are routinely sent there, or even that the Blood Citadel has any different way of handling prisoners than the Black one. Just that, in that particular instance, two prisoners were being sent, and that the Black Citadel’s jailor believed they would face a justified punishment there.
Also, considering that there are a grand known total of two human prisoners from the years they warred with Ebonhawke, you can’t exactly use that as proof that they take ‘many’. Just that it’s known to happen on some occasions.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Dragon minions don’t absorb magic.
That’s actually not true. We know that even mundane dragon minions can soak up magic, which they presumably then relay to their masters in some manner.
There is a question of whether all minions can do this, or if it’s something most minions are specialized for but certain others aren’t, and how much a minion can actually hold on its own, and whether a minion freed before her sprouting would know how to do it, and whether she’d even want to do so… but from what we know right now, the Pale Tree can’t be counted out as a potential replacement.
Assuming she ever wakes up.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s not that lore is taboo, per se, it’s just that A.) ArenaNet do not like talking about anything that might even potentially be woven into a future plot thread, preferring to present that lore on their own terms in the far future, and B.) they hate to commit themselves to anything they don’t have to. Any lore we players don’t know is lore they’re free to change to suit said future plots, and they understandably want to keep that pool as large as possible. Historically, we’ve been able to get the devs to bite on little topics, things like the religious beliefs of ogres and centaurs that’re almost certainly not going to matter in the future. We’ve also had some luck with clarifications on already existing things, like the current canon state of the centaur war or of Orr. If you’re questions are along those lines you might have some luck.
Now, actually getting in contact with them… I have no idea how that’s done.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Can’t help with the bandit events- not enough there to really analyze from a lore perspective- but for the dragons…
I’m not convinced that the other dragons will power up either, but there are two reasons others believe it. First off, even at the end of their hibernation they’re clearly not completely dry of magic- they still do a lot of damage and corruption right after awakening, after all. That means that every time a dragon dies, or so the theory goes, those reserves are released and the potential maximum for environmental magic, and so the potential maximum amount of magic the other dragons have to feed on, goes up. The second point is that the dragons don’t drain magic at a constant rate. They consume what’s around them, meaning that if there’s more magic surrounding them, they get more powerful more quickly. Incidentally, that’s why Mordremoth had so much to release- thanks to Scarlet it was essentially swimming in food. That entire area under where we fight the Mouth of Mordremoth? Filled to the brim with ley-line energy, and Mordremoth had had months to feast on it.
The problem with the theory, though, is that we don’t know that a dragon’s magic goes back into the world instantly upon its death- quite the opposite, actually. Mordremoth was literally filled to bursting, as described above, and was planted on a volatile nexus of energy to boot, but we never saw any explosion when Zhaitan died. Furthermore, Glint’s body, who we now believe to have been a sort of immature Elder Dragon, retained its magic; the Zephyrites fly using crystals seeded from her corpse. It’s more likely, to my mind, at least, that dead dragons usually keep the energy inside themselves for a while. The threat isn’t that killing them will make the survivors stronger, not in the short term, but that one of the survivors could get a power boost if it came and munched on the body.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
No worries! Questions are what we’re here for, no?
Honestly, the mursaat thing is one of those areas where we’re left without much detail, but as far as we can tell it’s not that they left with any magic, as in the energy. The problem is they took off with the knowledge to use certain spells, or to do certain things with magic, knowledge that they didn’t share and that might have made a difference in the fight against the dragons.
The limit was supposed to be that “the devastating power of all four types
together would never again be at the command of one single creature. Those who accepted the gift would have to cooperate if they intended to use it to its fullest.” Like I said above, though, those limits broke down over time. We don’t know how strong they were initially, but by GW1, they meant that any one person could only use a couple of the schools, or maybe only a couple of the schools at a time. Any more than that was impossible. By GW2, though, they’ve broken down entirely, meaning the schools effectively don’t exist anymore. Anyone can use any magic now, in theory. The schools only matter in that they’ve shaped the ‘styles’ of the main spellcasting professions.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Is the use of magic using magic to create energy which you in turn use to alter reality?
This is probably a pretty good way to put it, but I’ll work through your earlier questions.
But first: one of the reasons you’re having so much trouble is that no one in the game knows everything about magic. They’re still learning things about it, and we can’t know anything until they learn it. So any answer here is only our best guess right now, and might be incomplete/wrong down the road.
Okay, so, the simple version- magic is a fundamental energy, or perhaps force, in Tyria. We know it’s linked to both life and minds, but we’re not sure exactly how yet, just that they all seem to need each other to exist. In its natural state magic flows freely though the world- that’s what you’re seeing in the ley lines. All a ley line is is a flow where magic is naturally more concentrated. In the past it’s been compared to how water moves in rivers or ocean currents.
While in that natural state, magic can be drained off by the Elder Dragons. They feed off of it, so the last time they were awake, as best we understand, the races of the time decided to seal away all the magic they could to starve the Elder Dragons into hibernation- or to keep it safe until they went back to sleep on their own. That part isn’t clear. Anyway, that sealing is what the forgotten and the rest ‘giving up their magic’ meant. While it was locked away from the Elder Dragons, they couldn’t use it either.
This left Tyria in a kind of low-magic state. It was still there, but not enough of it to cast spells like we do in-game. The levels slowly went up as the Elder Dragons leaked what what they’d drained, but a good chunk of it was still locked away where the races left it, in what was later called the Bloodstone.
Enter the human gods.
They came to Tyria, and found the bloodstone, and unsealed it. Since their actions brought magic in Tyira back to the levels needed to cast spells, the humans believed for a long time that the gods created magic. Letting all the magic out like this caused chaos as the races abused their news power, so the gods put it back into the bloodstone and tampered with it so that no one could use all the different kinds of spells by themselves. That’s where the four ‘schools’ of magic came from, which roughly correspond to the elementalist, mesmer, necromancer, and guardian professions.
Over time, though, more and more magic ended up outside of the bloodstones, so that the limitations broke down. The schools of magic where in force in GW1, but not in GW2.
The humans didn’t understand a lot of what I just went over in GW1, so the wiki for that game records their beliefs at the time. They’ve since been proven inaccurate. The GW2 wiki should generally be considered the more ‘true’ version, at least where they differ.
Oh, and the types of energy- that’s basically just the sort of forms a spellcaster can convert magic into, or generate from magic. Like a lightbulb turning electricity into light and heat, only with darkness and chaos and all the rest.
There’s more that could be said, and I’m sure the wikis do say some of it, but mostly it’s pointing out the ways what we think we know could be wrong, or filling in blanks with good but not certain guesses. I’ll spare you that for now.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
She’s upset that the lobster design for the dock was picked over hers. You need to stalk her in Lion’s Arch to catch the conversation.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Does this mean that the mursaat have the means – which requires divine magic apparently, according to A Study in Gold – to do this?
I don’t know that the two are close enough to say they need the same process. By context, the Forgotten is talking about doing what the Seers did last rise, whisking away all the free magic in the world into their rock. What the Mantle are doing are sacrificing captives and draining magic from their- souls? deaths?- one person’s worth at a time. They’re using the same medium, yes, but in radically different ways.
And where the Seer’s bloodstone process seemed to contain the magikittenil the gods played with it, the Mantle’s shards are leaking enough power straight back out to change the weather and invent the Red Templars.
@Agemnon Nah, that’s never happened. Don’t think ANet’s heard of the trope.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
That being said. Have you seen a golem jump who isn’t a player?
I actually agree with most of your points, but for this one…
Have you ever seen a norn jump who isn’t a player?
An asura?
A human?
It’s not a golem thing. It’s that, mechanically, NPCs are incapable of jumping.
As for the bigger question of whether golems can jump, I see no reason why not. I know they look heavy, but they’re already set up so that everything but their feet is suspended in midair, and they can move that floating bulk at high velocities (Remember the spin attacks?) If there’s any reason they shouldn’t be able to, it’s because their legs aren’t built for it, but Scruffy is more human-like in that regard.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Unless I’m very much mistaken, we’ve all mostly come to agreement. Having Taimi along is right for her character arc, despite the risk to her health, but wrong for the mission. The only point of disagreement is which one of those things the writers should prioritize, and seeing as that is a matter of preference neither side is going to win the other over. Immersion and narrative both have solid points in their favor, and nobody’s right, or wrong, for thinking one of those is more important than the other in this case. If you want to voice your opinion on the matter, by all means, do so, but the arguing with each other’s points is already just going around in circles.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
She runs away, gets attacked by the risen, gets saved by you, and goes back to her job. I guess that job brought her to the Maguuma in the end.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t believe that the prospects are as gloomy as Konig paints them- in particular, the ritual is never indicated to require any particular resources at all, let alone expensive ones, and since ANet treats any given player character as one-of-a-kind I don’t believe the lore would need to justify more than a handful of risen undergoing the ritual. My objection is that the way Guild Wars 2 handles races would make the risen not worth doing. You talk about great racial interplay and digging into dragon corruption, but those just aren’t the sort of thing ANet does with their races. For better or worse, they’ve proven repeatedly unwilling to tell stories tied to the player’s race. Add to that that risen would just be palate swaps on existing races, given the aforementioned work load for the animation and art teams handling the more monstrous models, and the pre-release interviews that told us that the devs are uneasy with including unattractive races (and that was in the context of sylvari faces options!). Having playable zombies just doesn’t seem to add anything to the game, certainly nothing that a more hyped race like the tengu wouldn’t do better.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
The canon is, essentially, that Mordremoth doesn’t have a set appearance. They’ve made it clear by the end of the expansion that the dragon’s a creature of mind, with any given body only being ‘the dragon itself’ insofar as the dragon needs one to physically exist. What that body actually is, though, doesn’t seem to matter particularly much.
You’re right that the name of the Mouth would, by itself, be insufficient to declare it as what passes for Mordremoth’s main body. The much more persuasive reasons are: A.) it shares Mordremoth’s voice actor, literally speaking with the dragon’s voice; B.) It talks of itself as Mordremoth does, and never mentions any claptrap about ‘the dragon’ in third person or a master of any sort (unlike the Mouths of Zhaitan, and any dragon minion, really); C.) Other NPCs, particularly Laranthir, speak of it as Mordremoth, or at least Mordremoth’s body; and D.) A shadow in its form seems to be the closest thing to a true form that the mind of Mordremoth, the real dragon, has- it shows up behind the mob named Mordremoth that you face in the final battle, and around Trahearne’s body in the final sequence. That said, the Mouth is essentially only the thing, or the core of the thing, that Mordremoth happens to inhabit. It’s been noted already that many, maybe most or all, of the tendrils are tied to the same contiguous form, and apparently the dragon could’ve regrown itself from any of them, or from Trahearne once we broke its mental hold on that continent-spanning body.
(Unfortunately, the wiki is appallingly incomplete regarding the dialogue around Dragon’s Stand, but it’s not hard to find if you have the time- the Mouth’s lines are impossible to miss, and will be recorded in your dialogue box is peruse later. Laranthir is just before the Mouth fight at the end of center lane, and has different dialogue before and after the battle, as well as before and after the first time you finish the story instance. I believe other Pact NPCs in the other lanes have the same dialogue, but I’m not certain.)
As for the other ‘form’ Mordremoth has, the aforementioned mob we fight- well, it’s not to clear what that is, but it doesn’t seem to be Mordremoth’s ‘actual’ self either. The shadow-Mouth hovers around it like a possessing spirit, and even exists in multiple copies during the massive AoE attack, and I’m told that there’s an actual brain beneath the arena, which I would guess is a much more likely candidate for how Mordremoth exists within the Dream. Killing it also didn’t seem to kill Mordremoth as much as it broke Mordremoth’s connection to its big body, or maybe broke the version of its mind that existed within that body. I think our obese lizard friend was just a manifestation Mordremoth made to fight us on the terms we’d set, no different, and no more the dragon’s true self, than any of the lesser bosses it’d imagined up to fight us first.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
And I’m pretty sure there is some form of regulation that forbids showing the death of children in video games.
I think people are misunderstanding this issue. There are plenty of children dying in scripted scenarios. As an example, the daughter of the protagonist in “The Last of Us” died in the prologue.
What game publishers are not doing is allow children in games to be affected by player actions. Scripted is fine, because the publishers know the limits and the game rating they have to adhere to. Letting players do whatever they want to children in games is risky, so they avoid it.
Interesting. So the question, then, is rather it’s allowed within Guild Wars 2’s teen rating?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
So the Asura have been living in vast and verdant jungles now for over 1000 years.. I’d say Taimi is used to Jungles then.
*200 years. Actually, 251, if you want to be precise.
The thing is, though, while they may live in a jungle environment, the asura have taken pains to separate themselves from it. Their main city literally floats above it all, and their settlements clear back the trees. The average asura is as adept at surviving jungles as any cloistered scientist- that is to say, they’re walking bait unless they have all their specialized tools with them.
Fortunately, Taimi’s not short on those tools, and she’s shown the smarts to figure things out on the fly. While I don’t approve of ditching her alone in Rata Novus, for the most part I think she’s been a valuable contribution to the team. Besides, you might note that we’ve always conveniently left her behind when we’re taking on the climactic battles. The devs seem to recognize her plot armor (which I feel has nothing to do with her condition, and everything to do with the taboo on depicting minors dying in video games), and so write her out of the story for a time whenever they want the stakes to be high.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
True.. so true… I just thought Trehearne would have been more strict about the composition of his attack force. Or.. maybe that was the plan all along. Weaken the force by allowing all the nobles in rather than the soldiers that could have taken their place.
I figure he didn’t have much choice. If the people funding your efforts demand to be present at their culmination, you can’t very well tell them no. By the name of airship- Faren’s Flier, I think?- they might not have even been part of the Pact force, just tagalongs in their own ship.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
No problem!
I get what you’re saying there, but I think it all depends on how the swords are used. By the time the Seraph were founded, the centaurs had long ago been driven out of Kryta, so any use against them has been defensive in the face of their recent rampages, and as far as we know non-humans have never been enslaved in Tyria. (Mind you, the traditional approach of the Tyrian kingdoms of slaughtering them like beasts can hardly be considered better… but, again, those days were largely past by the time the Seraph were founded.) To the best of our knowledge, the only war in which the Seraph have been the aggressors is the on-again, off-again involvement in the Siege of Ebonhawke, and even that is easily framed as defending their fellow humans.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.