R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I was a bit tongue in cheek there, but what I was driving at is that there’s probably a reason they didn’t turn. We don’t know what protected them, but we know that in their individual cases at least there was something that did.
Meh, call me an idealist, but I’ll take the later. If we’ve hit the point of dumbing the fate of entire cultures down to a math problem, we’ve already lost.
I would love to have more real tragedy and gray in the story (and wiping out the Pact fleet was certainly a good first step! Now let’s see some big names die because of it!), but going for racial collective punishment is too far, I think. I’m not opposed to the idea of it, but in the implementation discussed on the forums it’d be the racial leaders driving it, people who the game has thus far left us no choice but to work with. I don’t like feeling like I’m on the wrong side of the war. Got a taste of that once with Vorpp, and once was enough.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Personally, for the Pact sylvari like Laranthir who didn’t turn, I’d be inclined to trust- they got lucky once, and at this point we’ve no reason to believe they won’t get lucky again. For untried sylvari, back at the Grove and elsewhere in Tyria, I’d be cautious about deploying them, and take reinforcements from almost any other race over them, but I wouldn’t lock them up. Imagine what what happen if even a single sylvari went corrupted and kill-happy in the middle of a crowded internment camp, especially if the camp’s guards were too afraid to enter? Imagine what would happen if most of the camp turned, and suddenly there was a ready-made Mordrem army in the heart of allied territory? Imagine what would happen if a guard started imagining these things and decided to kill them all and be done with it? There’s too much potential for tragedy there, and we know too little about the corruption’s function- for all we know, we could be setting up an entire race for extinction when a little bit of patience might bring to light new facts that could head off the threat altogether.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Well… yes. Ghosts of Ascalon even touches on what it is, in fact.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I may be wrong, but I think Nilkemia was asking for the source for sylvari functioning as magic detectors, something I too am curious about.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Xukavi’s right. I completely blanked on it earlier, but the Pale Tree did come right out and say that she believes Scarlet was being influenced by Mordremoth.
To expand on Xukavi’s point 4, as they mentioned, the working theory we developed through S2 is that being Soundless opens up sylvari to being corrupted, on the basis that we were led to believe that the two sylvari we did see turn (Scarlet and a saboteur named Aerin) were functionally Soundless. The ending cutscene, that shows sylvari turning in bulk in the fleet, casts doubt on that assumption- as things stand we don’t know if it was because the Pale Tree’s protection lessened with her injury, or if the protection just isn’t enough if you get too close to Mordremoth, or if the Soundless thing was just a coincidence, a red herring, and has nothing to do with this mess. Hopefully we’ll see the answers in the expansion.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’m… not sure I see what you’re talking about. All of the plant images I saw there are years old, and they’ve all been on the wiki for at least ten months. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Kotaki leave the company after launch?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Or it’s just as likely that it was a concept from before they added the fins. Detachable appendages would just be… blech. My guess is it’d end up like the charr tail- clips through everything, but treated as the price of playing a less conventional race.
Personally, if it weren’t for the steps ANet has taken since launch to get away from underwater content, I’d totally agree that largos are the most viable of the prospective new races. That in mind, and seeing the story and player base inclinations (not to mention reports from the Art of Guild Wars 2) I think tengu do beat them out for next up.
Since I’m here already, to address the nastier debate brewing, I do think that the separation between race and gameplay is overall a positive thing, and it is regrettable that that’s led to the stance of treating new races as a low priority. The choice of race, for us story folks, never really stops being relevant- even if it doesn’t affect which stories we encounter after a while, it certainly does continue to flavor them, and for roleplayers or anyone who’s inclined to play with their character’s backstory in mind race is, in those regards, at least as important as profession. I do get, at the end of the day, that we’re a niche community, but if I were any less psyched for the revenant I probably would regret that ANet made the trade-off that they did.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Had their own thoughts. What I’m saying is that part of the corruption may have removed some of that capacity to think. We don’t know enough about the process yet.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The fix is confirmed, and it’ll apply to anyone who hasn’t completed A Light In The Darkness (in the middle of the level 60 chapter), but we don’t have a date yet. That said, it’s ArenaNet policy not to talk about something until it’s almost ready for release, so I’m optimistic that it’ll come soon enough to not impact your schedule too badly.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s an interesting thought, but it’s important to note that it didn’t make the Dragonspawn less hostile. It’d depend, I think, on what Mordremoth is doing to the sylvari- is he just overriding their will, or is he erasing or rewriting parts of their minds? If it’s the latter, just breaking the connection wouldn’t suffice to stop them from fighting for the dragon, and returning them truly to what they had been may well be impossible. The avenue of the link might matter as well- I don’t think Caithe would’ve consented to be tattooed if it cut her off from the Dream, so if that is in fact how Mordremoth is getting to sylvari, the powerstones would probably be useless.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
^definitely agree with that, although you should be able to play at least through the level 50 personal story stuff without a problem. Going to start watching now, but I think the idea is a very cool one.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Yes. You’re going to find those in this game, including two prominent lesbian relationships among the main NPC cast. I happen to enjoy that inclusivity, but I suppose it’s not for everyone.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
We know that Scarlet was hearing a voice in her head, and that it seemed to twist her behavior. Beyond that, it’s really only inferences piecing things together, but we think she was being influenced by Mordremoth, to send him breakfast in bed.
Actually, the Shadow of the Dragon attacked a summit being held in the Grove- racial leaders meeting to be convinced to send forces to support the Pact. It and the Mordrem did a number on the Pale Tree.
It led us to the egg, but here it is in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNHy65Fo3sI
Not yet, just a lot of guesses and speculation.
That is the assumption, but it was only a teaser. We can’t know for sure yet.
If you played Guild Wars 1, it was the blessing that let us access the final trial of Ascension. We got it in this game as a work around to get into the forgotten-sealed cave, since we didn’t have the key, and in the process we found it had a negative effect on the Mordrem- it scared a group off, and later it helped constrain and kill the Shadow of the Dragon.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I’m sure someone else will come along with the long version, but… short version? Scarlet Briar- the much hated antagonist of Season 1- brought all her forces to bear and wiped out Lion’s Arch so she could mess with a ley line beneath the city. We killed her, but her tampering still sufficed to awaken a sixth Elder Dragon, the jungle dragon Mordremoth. Season 2 started with us heading into the Wastes and discovering Mordremoth’s minions (and the crashed Zephyrites) then rallying the races to face them, with the mid-season finale seeing the Pale Tree grievously wounded and left slipping in and out of consciousness, a state of affairs that’s ongoing. The second half of the season had us leapfrogging between helping the Pact with their push west and investigating a vision the Tree gave us before she succumbed. Two major revelations resulted: that the Zephyrites were carrying one of Glint’s eggs, which Caithe made off with for reasons unknown, and that the sylvari were meant to be Mordremoth’s minions- Caithe’s secret, presumably the one that Scarlet discovered. The latter, and the fact that nightmare husks, hounds, and the Shadow of the Dragon have been seen in the Mordrem ranks has stirred much speculation (and controversy) but facts are still pretty thin on the ground. The season ended with a teaser, showing the assembled Pact fleet taking the fight to Mordremoth’s home ground without us and facing absolute disaster there when many of the sylvari (but not Trahearne) turned on them, and the announcement that the story will pick up in a boxed expansion coming sometime more or less soon. We also found a cave sealed by the Forgotten, as well as in the teaser beings popularly believed to be the mursaat coming to GW2. Nothing’s confirmed yet, but this suggests that if nothing else the elder races and the last dragonrise will be important to some degree or another.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I think a big part of it is probably that they’ve served their purpose. After all, they were brought in as a primer on new characters, and the ones that didn’t serve that function tended to be pretty forgettable, imo. In retrospect I wouldn’t have minded a Taimi story but other than that there’s been no further use for them in S2.
… maybe for Belinda, but what she really needed was to be made a character inside of the game, not just Marjory’s Sister #1.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I can’t be sure, but I think in that sequence that the Priory member, and the Vigil crusader that gets cut down, are both sylvari. The one has pointy ears, and the other’s eyes glow white.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Well, the event does also point out that the sarcophagus is empty.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t think you’ve given any concrete facts Aaron. From what you’ve just said, it still sounds like Saul could very well be alive.
There aren’t any concrete facts. He has as much a chance as anyone held hostage by a malicious power to see his 270th birthday, which is to say, perishingly little.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s also right behind what seems to be the thickest pocket of Mordrem corruption in the reason. That said, besides for a large stoneroot tree, there wasn’t anything remarkable about the place. Ventari had long since abandoned it for the Grove-to-be by the time he died, and the only ones who’d really have reason to be interested now are sylvari pilgrims- not for any magical or useful reasons but more along the lines of why we still give tours in famous peoples’ homes. I doubt we’ll be seeing the Druid’s Overlook area- everything we’ve seen has us going west, to the remaining jungle and Mordremoth, not north, into the heart of the wastes.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The Prophecies manual was the “official” story- the survivors, now the leaders, propagated it to cover the fact that Saul was abducted against his will. As for his return… I find it highly doubtful. It would require his lifespan to have been magically extended, which A.) makes practically no sense, given we have no reason to believe the mursaat thought him at all valuable beyond the role they had just forced him to vacate, and B.) is practically out of his reach- consider that we’ve only ever heard of two humans, in the course of the entire series (3 if you want to argue for Doric) managing such, and have no reason to believe the power is at the mursaat’s disposal either.
Saul’s return isn’t technically impossible, and as always it depends first and foremost on whether ANet wants to go that route, but it’d take the stars aligning to actually happen.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
http://thatshaman.blogspot.com/p/historical-guide.html
Camp Resolve falls between Aurora Glade and the Sage Lands.
Restoration Refuge (that is the primary centaur camp, right?) falls on the zone border between AG and Ettin’s Back.
Uplands Oasis corresponds with southeasternmost Silverwood.
The ley line hub makes a line through eastern EB into northwestern Dry Top.
The cavern is about the northern zone boundery of Silverwood.
Quarrel Falls was southwestern corner of the Silverwastes, roughly where the jump puzzle ends, I believe.
Ventari’s Refuge was just beyond the western border of the new Dry Top.
Druid’s Overlook was in the northern zone boundary of Brisban Wildlands.
The Bloodstone was about half a zone west of northern Silverwastes.
Rotmouth was west of southern Queensdale.
Rata Sum in GW1 was where Soren Draa is.
All credit to that_shaman for making the overlay and keeping it updated!
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s an interesting thought, but ultimately, the dragon heads we see on Zhaitan look nothing at all like his lesser dragons do. It feels like wishful thinking for an exciting idea that missed its chance.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
There are the Eyes, Titus, and in the PS a risen norn is identified as a champion as well (Herboza the Wretched, for reference.) As for Teq… the fact that he is composed of flesh means he can’t be purely constructed, unless Zhaitan is capable of producing flesh and bone without any actual creature. Otherwise, whether just one big dragon or pieced together from a bunch of little things, whatever makes up Teq had to have been alive and by extension uncorrupted at one point.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
One wonders: was Tequatl anyone’s champion when he was still alive?
Well, we’ve seen the corruption of Kralkatorrik, Primordus, Mordremoth, and Jormag, and Tequatl quite clearly was never one of those things.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Logically, yes. Emotionally, I’m not so sure the connection is broken- during TA, she’s determined to find some sort of resolution but is vague as to what form it’ll take, and proves very vulnerable to Faolain’s emotional manipulations. In A Light In the Darkness, too, (by the level=time elapsed model, fairly shortly after TA) we see in the Dream that in her despair about other things she’s entertaining the notion of going to Nightmare herself to be together again. Rational Caithe knows it’s too late for Faolain, but Impulsive Caithe doesn’t seem to care.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Tarnished Coast was the unofficial roleplay server (for NA; Piken Square was the EU one, but I don’t know if any of my information applies to it). Unfortunately, the implementation of megaservers a year ago scattered an already very loosely knit community.
Maybe someone more up-to-date can correct me with current information, but it is my understanding that your best bet to find them in-game is to search the Divinity’s Reach taverns while associated with the Tarnished Coast server (not sure what times are best, but probably evening hours in the United States), and the best place to find them out of game is this site.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Tonic.
/15charr
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
@Shiren I admit I haven’t seen it for myself, but it’s been reported to me that charr get a letter from Rytlock claiming the Pact went into CoF to retrieve a weapon-and if you look at the Pact presence in the region, it is close to the Jormag campaign. The staging ground for the CoF assault is practically a stone’s throw away from Earthshake Basin, so they could be doing the same thing they did with the Inquest at CoE and simply want to clear the neighborhood of hostile belligerents that are compromising their anti-dragon efforts. There’s also a clear motive in CoE considering that Kudu was essentially sitting on a giant pocket of dragon corruption. The Pact has never engaged the Nightmare Court- if you are referring to the ones in Maelstrom, they only attack the Wyld Hunt, and I don’t think the NC so much as shares a map with the Pact anywhere else.
@Rhaegar Surely not mercenaries- what makes the Vigil the Vigil is that they are committed to protecting the innocent, and at least a couple of the recruiters are open about that being a wider goal than just handling the dragons. You also assume correctly- my reasoning is A.) the Vigil contains many humans and norn, and no centaurs or dredge, and B.) we don’t see any centaur or dredge war orphans. It’s a bit too black-and-white, and maybe given the opportunity the human government would try to extinguish the centaurs, but for the time being helpless human civilians and probably helpless norn children are in the line of fire, while centaur or dredge innocents remain at best a hypothetical that exists beyond the war zone… and at worst simply non-existent.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The only help the player character needed at this point was just the Divine Fire which – were it in their possession and not Rox’s when the champion attacked – they would have been able to finish the fight completely on their own.
Personally, I took away a couple of points for the use of the Divine Fire. The PC was able to solo the SotD, which is a huge achievement in and of itself, but the Divine Fire was an outside magically element, since it came from neither the PC or the dragon originally, that’s super effective against the Mordrem. Without it, the PC would have easily been killed without some way to contain/trap the dragon to damage it.
That said, it didn’t seem to damage it. We used the fire to pin it down for brief periods of time, but we did all the damage that slew it, and in between those windows we survived it while it was free to move and attack as it pleased.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Necromancy doesn’t corrupt. It isn’t evil or some dark force. Necromancers aren’t people wielding dark forces in hopes of doing good with it.
I wouldn’t jump to an evil nature to the magic, but it is not inconceivable that the only* form of magic we know that supernaturally alters the body, be it in the form of blood and health sacrifice to power spells or introducing diseases and all other manner of conditions, could change one’s appearance. If nothing else, running around with slit pupils before the invention of contact lenses would require magic of some sort. Maybe it’s something deliberately done to unnerve others, or maybe it was a long-term side effect of the way necromancy was used in GW1 times, or yes, maybe we’re reading too much into it, but I wouldn’t say it’s a possibility that we can write off altogether.
*Healing magic, obviously, has physical effects, but I discount it here because it only seems to restore a being to proper health. It’s a return to the status quo, not an upset of it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The dragons are the Vigil’s focus, but they are not their goal- the point of the Vigil is to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and that’s the sort of thing that never stops being necessary. Should the dragons be defeated, the crusaders would just be moved to conflicts like the Centaur War or the dredge attacks in the Shiverpeaks, I think, places with victims in need of assistance.
The Pact, on the other hand, does exist to combat the dragons, no more and no less. Given that almost every nation has given them quite a bit of troops and probably material on that premise, they should disband after the last dragon falls- provided, of course, they survive to see the day.
Orr is… unclear. Fairly heated threads in the past have gone to prove that just about any of the orders or races technically could lay a claim to it, if they were so inclined. But my personal opinion, bearing in mind that it’s every bit as much guesswork as anyone else’s? I think it’ll be picked over by looters and scavengers, both those representing legitimate groups and those out for a quick payday, and then left alone to sit ruined.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Regarding Malyck’s appearance: What does a mursaat look like beneath the mask?
Mursaat have wings don’t they? Functional, real wings?
They really don’t. We call them ‘wings’ because of where they’re placed on the body and because they look very vaguely feathery, but ‘tendrils’ would be more accurate. They don’t flap, and the way mursaat hover wouldn’t be achievable with wing-based propulsion anyway (not without the wings moving too fast to be seen). If a sylvari were to have an imitation of them, I think the sort of mushrooms that grow out of Malyck’s face is what I’d expect to see- and for all we know, he may have those coming out of his back.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Not necessarily. We don’t know what all differentiates a lich from other undead, but we do know of the existence of both free-willed undead and spellcasting undead who are not liches.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
There’s no official explanation, if that’s what you’re looking for. Maybe they were undead, maybe the dark magic makes you look creepy trope is in play, maybe they used to deliberately alter their appearance to project a certain image of the profession. Personally, I’d lean towards the last, because it accounts for why both GW2 necromancers and most non-human necromancers in the first game looked normal.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Fibharr also puts in a brief appearance in the charr gladium sire storyline, as a friend of your father, and puts the lie to my previous statement by hanging around Ashford forum (albeit never doing anything).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Wow, Konig! That puts any list I may have made to shame. Really puts in perspective how much a person can miss in the story.
My humble contribution- Hekja, originally a Lionguard who takes part in the assault of Covington’s base, and helps to clean up the risen who move in afterwards. She later ends up in the Priory as an explorer, and is part of Kekt’s team when you rescue him, assists in the tragic attempt to rescue Apatia, and finally gets in over her head when she attempts to scout the Mouth of Zhaitan’s lair on her own. I think she’s particularly interesting, because she’s the only recurring PS character I can think of who exists in the non-instanced world.
Speaking of Kekt’s team, there’s also Octavian Inkblood and his pet drake Amphebe, who assist extensively with the plan to hijack the Orrian fleet, help to cover your back in the assault on the Sovereign Eye, and move into your home instance.
And then there’s Zrii (Konig used the name but meant Zott- an understandable mistake), a skilled Whispers infiltrator, and Afanen, a Vigil Crusader who joins the Pale Reavers. They’re both, like Octavian, late additions starting from Forging the Pact, but they show up extensively thereafter- Zrii helps take down the Mouth and scouts the lighthouse, Afanen with the Reavers escorting tanks, and both in the attempt to rescue Apatia, the attack on the Source of Orr, and, most impressively, the after party celebrating Zhaitan’s demise.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Well, seeing as the third Guild War began three years before Glaive was driven from Elona, she definitely wasn’t around for the first two, but I think I get what you’re driving at. You’re saying she might have been with Kryta before the White Mantle formed, right?
I guess my next question would be when you think Glaive became immortal (more or less.) The theory is that Livia’s lifespan is due to the Scepter of Orr, which she didn’t possess until after EotN. For Livia to be Glaive, she’d have to be at least 77 years old by the time we met her, before she got her hands on what we think keeps her from aging. Yet she looks, to me, to be no older than 30.
EDIT: Didn’t see Konig’s post or your response. Although now that he mentions it, I think there is a champion female pirate captain who hangs out in the chapel…
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
What Ogden says was “But your people’s concept of nightmare and Dream is simple. Too black and white, too unsophisticated to explain the changes affecting some of you.” That doesn’t really say what’s actually right, just that the sylvari’s current belief is wrong.
While we’re on the topic of personal speculation, mine is this: that there are two Nightmares, the philosophical concept opposed to Ventari’s Tablet and embracing what it means to be ‘true sylvari’, and the corrupting force that twists minds and perverts past loyalties. The former, I believe, is just an abstract concept founded on Cadeyrn’s mistaken worldview. He took the Ventari tablet at surface value as just words written down by a centaur, and didn’t consider that there might be larger repercussions to reaching for the sylvari’s true roots to counter it- now that we have a vague idea of what those roots actually are, it’s easy to picture how his pursuit of the first Nightmare led him to the second, the one that acts like, and I believe is, dragon corruption. I don’t know why Mordremoth wasn’t working through the Court initially, but it could be that something about Scarlet’s circumstances, or that the Court is still connected to the Dream, or a combination thereof prevented them from filling Scarlet’s role. As for why they aren’t like Aerin, I suspect that they are. We haven’t seen much of the Court recently, remember- all we know for sure is that the main Court hosted one of Scarlet’s bases, an offshoot group worked directly for her, and their creatures were fighting alongside Aerin and the first Mordrem tendrils in Dry Top. This is baseless beyond the fact that we know they’ll fight the Pact alongside Mordrem in the near future, but I think the Court has succumbed and been called off into the jungle.
The only large hole in my guess is the knowledge bit. The exact mechanism isn’t clear, but Zhaitan, and debatably Kralkatorrik, did seem to feed that information into their minions. Maybe Mordremoth works differently, maybe dragons don’t do that while they’re asleep, maybe being still plugged into the Dream is interfering with the upload, or maybe I’m just wrong. We’ll see.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
The thought process here is that the Nightmare itself, the concept the Court embraces, has long been known to have a supernatural corrupting effect well beyond some mere dissident philosophy. It twists a sylvari’s mindset dramatically, it’s irreversible, and it can be forced upon unwilling victims. All of these things are parallels to dragon corruption, and taken together, we don’t know of anything else like it but that. Even the Inquest thought so- Nightmare Court creatures are mixed in with more usual minions in their main dragon energy lab.
So, TL;DR: The thought isn’t that the Nightmare Court would be more vulnerable to Mordremoth, but that they are already pre-corrupted. There’s still room for them to schism, but it’d be along the lines of those who’ve embraced Nightmare, and the theoretical group that is just along for Caderyn’s founding philosophies (Gavin being the only evidence that such a thing might exist).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I’m not convinced. There are common elements, yes, but that’s because it’s the same story- nothing you’ve listed or cited above could account for Glaive abruptly becoming a fanatic Krytan patriot. Even if she did somehow know of Abaddon’s connection to her maybe-betrayer, that vendetta would’ve been finished three years at the point we meet Livia. And how would she know that Abaddon is behind all those things, anyway? We didn’t until we met all the witnesses he left cluttering up his home.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The biggest problem with the idea, I think, is that the gods were gods before they ever came to Tyria- in fact, some of their greatest acts seem to have been done shortly, perhaps immediately, after they arrived. The arrival itself, traversing the Mists from one planet to another and bringing an entire race with them, is beyond the scope of any mortal power we know of, save perhaps the mursaat.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That’s a fair concern. To extend it one step further- the Pale Tree seems to play an active role in the protection, and the speculation is that her current infirmity is at the very least a contributing factor to the sudden turning of sylvari. If (and we don’t know this for a fact) Glint worked on the same principles… well, Glint’s dead now. That’d leave the baby dragons completely vulnerable. Maybe that’s why it’s imperative something special be done with the egg?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
To clarify, I acknowledge that all the Schrodinger’s charr from your warband, or Quinn, or Tiachren, or whoever else need be included can’t appear in the open world. What I was suggesting was that they can, and should, ideally, appear in the instances. That is, admittedly, assuming HoT uses instances, but as ANet veered hard back toward them and haven’t changed their approach since I consider that a fairly safe bet.
Our characters being subsumed in the biconics isn’t really for this thread, but for the short version- I think that was just a product of S2’s focuses, and will be left behind at least for the duration of HoT.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Mainly because we don’t use the Inquest’s methods- we broadly condemn them, in fact, and us adventurers are often seen doing our utmost to stomp them out. Whatever barbarism the Inquest endorses absolutely does not reflect on any of us beings outside the Inquest.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Or it could just as easily mean characters who aren’t as important anymore, or characters we recognize from GW1. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I don’t think we have enough information to know either way.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
ANet seems to be consistent in saying that the revenant calls upon legends-not quite the same thing as spirits. What that actually means is open to interpretation, but we can’t take it as proof positive that Jalis or any of the other chosen beings are actually dead.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The best we can hope for personalization, I think, is that they’ll dredge the early PS the way we’ve lately seen them approach GW1 and then give us more nods to that. Someone mentioned that Dinky can’t be put in the open world? Then for Abaddon’s sake, put him in the instances! You’re Commander of the Pact, and the Iron Legion if nothing else has thrown their support firmly behind them. Wave your hand and say that the other forces operating in IL territory got dragged along for the ride if you have to. What about the formerly missing sister who joined the Vigil? Why shouldn’t she be with the fleet? That could even be open world, though I would expect a radically different dialogue instead of just having brother/sister tossed onto the end of one of the lines. Malyck has been on the tips of everyone’s fingers lately- would it be too much to ask that he approaches a character he knows and who has earned his trust differently than a complete stranger? Even if we don’t get any future choices, it’s not too late to make the decisions of the past feel like they matter, and all it’d take is writing two different dialogues for returning characters, or maybe if we’re lucky some events that only trigger in proximity to players who’ve gone down certain roads. Since none of our past choices really translate directly into present options, they don’t have to worry about actually having things play out different, but who knows? Maybe the creator of the ghostbore musket or someone who’s had contact with the White Stag will get a shortcut or an easy mode in some event, or even better, maybe the White Stag’s lingering influence could lure in additional Mordrem or cause them to target your character as higher priority. ToN, I think, was a good first try at this, and well-received for trying, but it didn’t go far enough. In the first expansion I’d really like to never find myself feeling like the story is failing to take me into account where appropriate.
What I don’t want to see- a move towards other entities driving the plot. I don’t think ANet’s done this yet, but it’d be easy of them to fall into the trap of illusion of choice, letting us direct our characters to make certain choices or voice certain opinions only to have it snatched from our grasp before anything actually comes of it. If a Pact officer asks me what we should do next, I don’t want to see him assassinated before he can relay the orders. If a head of state pursues the Pact’s perspective on a matter, I don’t want Trahearne to come striding through a door to overshadow whatever it was I thought. I know I’ll take it better if they’re honest about offering no choice than if they leave us feeling cheated out of our decisions.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
To address the OP- I guess I’ll get out of the way that I don’t think dungeons are included in that statement. The rationale was that they didn’t like players not experiencing content they made, and everyone I know of who played through at least one exp mode tried to play them all. The real question there, I think, is whether dungeons will return at all, but that’s for another thread and likely another sub-forum.
I like the idea of branching stories in general, but I feel the way the concept was applied to the Personal Story severely weakened it. Things like the clunkiness of the transitions between story arcs, shallowness of the impact of your choices even within future instances, and sometimes wildly varying quality between different chapters has already been touched on, but there’s another more central issue I’d like to point out: the decision to invert the typical branching formula. Instead of starting at the same place and working outward, the PS’s most significant differences were at the start, after which it bent inward. This did have a few notable benefits- enabling real identification with your race and lowering the barrier of entry to the content you missed out on cross the top of my mind- it also, imo, is the root cause of how tortured and convoluted the mid and late story feel. One of the main reason the racial arcs are great is that they can draw from the depth of an entire in-game culture, but instead of those roots continuing to nourish the story they’re torn up and you’re cast adrift as soon as you set foot in Lion’s Arch. They throw away their strongest story telling tool offhand, and for what? After that, it’s a crapshoot each time they decide to write a callback to earlier experiences whether you actually get the one that applies to you or not, with one notable exception. Trahearne’s character has been discussed enough in the past, so here I’ll simply say that reception of his character depends primarily on if the player in question rolled a sylvari, when the story would have been much better served moving the parts that make him likable to a point everyone experiences them. The result is what you’d expect from something cobbled together from several different wellsprings- disjointed, often jarring, riddled with holes, and leaves one with the feeling that it sunk.
The bottom line is, what ANet made wasn’t a true branching story, but instead one that started branching and tried to transition to linear halfway through. It was an experiment, which was the point of most of the things in the game, but this one failed, and we can see in the LS ANet swinging hard back into more tried and safe waters. It’s been a jarring experience, and I would have preferred leaning further into embracing the branches, but if the writers and developers aren’t confident in their ability to do that right, I have no choice but to reluctantly concede that they should give up the ghost. The important thing here is that they do linear right, and the biggest problem I’ve seen for that is the idiot ball plot crutch. If at any point the player is left feeling like he could’ve solved a problem better than the character did, the linear writer has failed in their task.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
@Bruno and Koviko at risk of derailing the thread, I went through the game a while back to see where all the major armed forces fall in professions. All the Seraph use warrior skills, the Wardens all use ranger or elementalist skills, the Peacemakers are useless but do use a warrior animation, Iron Legion uses warrior, guardian, and engineer skills, Ash Legion uses necromancer and thief skills, and Blood Legion uses warrior skills (never did get around to Lionguard or Ebon Vanguard, though). They aren’t advertised as such the way GW1 did, Koviko, but if you compare them to players it’s easy to see.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.