draxynnic.3719
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Posts posted by draxynnic.3719
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> @Athrenn.9468 said:
> > @Dante.1763 said:
> > Obviously not much can be done to a ghost.
>
> What about all those ghosts of the Orrian royal family who were turned into Eyes of Zhaitan?
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>
That involved binding the ghosts back into a corrupted corporeal body, rather than corrupting the ghost directly. And as we see with Reza, the spirit itself is not corrupted and retains its original personality once the body is killed and the spirit released.
Risen Wraiths, on the other hand...
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Humans aren't exactly unique from that perspective. The original inhabitants of Ascalon were the grawl, for instance, who the charr conquered, and the charr were also fighting the Forgotten before humans invaded Ascalon, so it's entirely possible that the human invasion of Ascalon was, in part, engineered by Glint or the Forgotten to put the charr back in their place... albeit without driving them extinct. Broadly speaking, a bit of fighting between the races is probably something Glint accepts as inevitable. She may prefer that it didn't happen, but the price of allowing free will is that sometimes those whom you allow free will use it for purposes you'd prefer they didn't - although we don't know what she may have been doing behind the scenes to encourage cooperation instead of conflict (Edge of Destiny certainly indicates that she was in favour of the former).
Thing is, in none of that fighting did any of the races get to the point where they were so dominant that they could enslave all of the other races with no hope of freedom. The mursaat, on the other hand, were so ahead of everyone else, to the point where special requirements had to be fulfilled in order to fight them at all, that they could have. Worse, the mursaat could have conquered the world, and then left again when the dragons next arose, leaving a mass of cowed ex-slaves with no ability to defend themselves.
If you look at Glint's dialogue in Prophecies, there's a point (if you fail the bonus objective) where she indicates that the human race will end if the Prophecies are not fulfilled. Now, whether it was just humans or other races would also have gone extinct in the end is not clear.
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One thing that is worth mentioning here is that the Awakened themselves, or at least their leaders, are sapient beings that are capable of making their own decisions... including rebelling against their creator if the circumstances are right. The despotism is Joko's doing, but the whole 'living side-by-side with undead ancestors' does not necessarily need to go away just because Joko does. I believe it is indicated that Joko is the only one powerful enough to create Awakened undead, though, so Joko's removal would likely mean that no more are created.
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> @"Ildrid Ildhjertet.2489" said:
> I haven't found this in-game but OMG it is beautiful. It would also kinda make sense for the gods to look for a new place to live for humanity, as Tyria appears to be a deathtrap. Either with Elder Dragons feasting on magic and living creatures, or with the lack of Elder Dragons upsetting the balance and destroying Tyria outright. I've also been a bit curious about the progression of the story from here, as we apparantly can't kill more Elder Dragons and now that we've finished Balthazar there doesn't seem to be a whole lot more for our character to do but retire and live happily in Amnoon.
I think where it's going is that we can't kill more dragons _yet._ Once we have a means of containing the power, then dragonslaying is back on the table.
> @"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:
> Also, we cannot say that Lyssa, Dwayna, Balthazar, Melandru, and Dhuum are original gods - it's very likely that Lyssa and Balthazar had predecessors, in fact - and we know that Abaddon had a predecessor so he definitely isn't an original god.
In fact, we're told that Melandru is the eldest, which suggests that if the six domains were formed at the same time, Melandru is the only one that _could_ be the original.
Which doesn't necessarily mean that Dwayna or Abaddon were human, mind you.
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@"Konig Des Todes.2086" Yeah, that's a big part of my thinking. She could have prevented a lot of disasters, but without heroes cutting their teeth on the little disasters, would there have been anyone to deal with the big ones? She could have stopped Saul (or showed him what the mursaat were like), but we see in S3E2 that the mursaat were planning on conquering the world, and having them at least start off by doing so behind the scenes may have been a better result than having them remain hidden until they had an unstoppable army of jade constructs. She could have stopped the Vizier, but it might be that someone was destined to open the Door of Komalie sooner or later. Ultimately, Abaddon was building power in the background, and while Glint could have stopped all of his plots to use Tyria to break out, it's possible that all of his plots in Tyria could have been foiled and he still would have eventually built up enough power in the Realm of Torment to smash his way out at full strength. Allowing some of his schemes to work while he was still bound enough to be defeatable might have been better than waiting another thousand years until he had full control of the Realm of Torment.
@"Athrenn.9468" I think one distinction is that from the mursaat tablets left behind, the mursaat were planning on conquering the world - and with invisibility and the potential to build an army of devastating constructs, if given the opportunity to fully build up they would have been unstoppable. She's not sacrificing the poor innocent mursaat in order to drive her plans: the mursaat were themselves one of the enemies she was seeking to defend the people of Tyria from.
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You're assuming his brain is in that head, or that Mordremoth even has a single brain at all - what we're told seems to indicate that it's a networked system, either with multiple brains or spread throughout his body.
My understanding from what we're told towards the end of HoT is that Mordremoth's vitals are deep underground. The Mouth of Mordremoth does not contain his vitals. I think - I don't have time to go chasing it up right now - that it's even said that the Mouth is fought and defeated a few times, because Mordremoth keeps growing it back.
It's probably more akin to a tentacle that happens to have eyes and a mouth than a head per se. There may even be a brain in it, allowing it to operate autonomously without conscious effort from the central mind (similar to to the 'secondary brains' some dinosaurs had). Either way, it's clearly not so vital that killing it is enough to kill Mordremoth without also eradicating the underground part.
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> @Cristalyan.5728 said:
> 2. The decision of the Gods are not a result of consensus, but rather an unanimity. If one god disagrees with the majority he is eliminated. This can be tolerated once (in the Abadon case) - although Abadon was the less likely to make mistakes in the prediction of how the things will evolve. But the Balthazar recidive? Hm. This makes me wonder if Dhuum was indeed so bad as the history claims. Being replaced by Dwayna's son, I can suspect a conspiracy against him, conspiracy driven by personal reasons and not by the desire to protect the humans.
In each case (Dhuum being a possible exception, since we don't know the circumstances), the trigger seems to be less 'disagreement' and more 'when outvoted, throws a massive tantrum and becomes a loose cannon that needs to be restrained'.
If I'm part of a group and the group, including myself, decides that a particular course of action will do more harm than good, and someone disagrees, that's one thing. If that someone then attacks the rest of the group, then stopping them becomes a matter of self-defence. If that someone responds by trying to perform the action that everyone else agreed would cause more harm than good, the responsible thing for the rest of the group to do is to act to prevent them from performing that action.
On #3: If the gods really do have responsibilities elsewhere, than hunting them down to seize their power might cause more harm than good, even assuming the gods don't respond with "really, now they're attacking us? Fine, we'll join forces and destroy them ourselves, then!" Because, seriously, if Dwayna, Melandru, Grenth and Lyssa decide that the Black Citadel, for instance, needs to be destroyed, I know which side my money is on. We're talking beings whose power is at least comparable to the Elder Dragons here, but which unlike the Elder Dragons, normally act in concert as a group.
The gods are staying out because they're afraid that getting involved would cause so much destruction that the world is better off if they don't. Whether they're right is open to interpretation, but certainly we've seen their capacity to inflict massive destruction. I don't think provoking them as a group is a good idea.
(On 1: It does seem a bit that way, because the gods realised that killing the dragons without a backup plan would destroy Tyria. Mind you, one thing they could do, even if they won't fight directly, is _help set up a backup plan._)
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I think a large part of the answer is simply Zhaitan's death... and airships.
The main cause of the cutoff from Amnoon was probably Zhaitan, who controlled the channel through which the Elon drained into the Sea of Sorrows. Meanwhile, the route south from Ebonhawke is probably the communication line that the Order of Whispers used, but was blocked by the Brand (in fact, you can visit the tunnel that emerges from that route into the Desert Highlands. It's blocked).
Zhaitan's defeat has probably been progressively making the route down the mouth of the Elon more accessible. If we can get a ship to Siren's Landing (which... we probably should not be able to do given the low bridges across the Straits of Devastation, but perhaps they can be moved out of the way...), then the rest of the route is probably fairly straightforward.
Airships then make it even easier, since as long as the weather isn't too hostile to airships, you can just fly over most threats.
So what's probably been happening is that behind the scenes, communications lines have steadily been formed with Amnoon since the rebuilding of Lion's Arch. This is just the point where that became relevant to the PC.
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There's a lot of potential for disaster in the events of Guild Wars 1. Even if we don't consider the events of Nightfall and that Prophecies set it up for it to be possible for Abaddon to lose, the story of Prophecies itself gives two outcomes that could be considered likely without Glint's manipulation:
Outcome 1: Khilbron (or some other champion of Abaddon) opens the Door of Komalie, with nobody to stop him before he brings the full strength of the titans into Tyria, and Khilbron conquers the world in Abaddon's name. This could be either because the mursaat wouldn't have bothered to defend the Door without the Prophecies allowing Khilbron to just waltz in, or because Khilbron found some other way to defeat the mursaat.
Outcome 2: The mursaat are able to hold the Door closed, maintaining a stranglehold on Kryta (or whichever nation they choose to target first), and steadily taking over the world as there is nothing that can stop the mursaat armies.
Between these two options, the Flameseeker Prophecies outcome is a 'third option' that still leaves a lot of people dead, but which is better than the most likely alternatives.
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> @Thalador.4218 said:
> I don't think Istan is actually part of Joko's empire - or at least I hope it isn't. Istan should have the strongest navy of all the Elonan nations; strong enough to be able to enforce the island nation's independence by deterring an invasion from the mainland. Sure, with Joko's enormous supply of bodies - both living and undead - to throw into a war, Istan would probably lose in the long run, but the King himself is probably a lot smarter than to wage a needless war - and thus weaken his armies and ferment opposition against his rule in Vabbi and Kourna - against something he doesn't need to conquer. I think they drafted a treaty in which the Istani Council of Elders retain their sovereign governance over Istan but they pay some tribute to King Joko and have an embassy/consulate in Kamadan for Joko's ambassadors or a permanent Mordant Crescent representative.
Considering the state the Sunspears are in, I think Joko has at least enough of a presence in Istan to make sure that the Sunspears (and members of the Ossa clan) aren't able to use it as a base. What we're shown seems to indicate that the Sunspears were militarily defeated in Vabbi (which, again, our GW1 PCs apparently didn't take part in, despite being younger than Dunkoro...), but if Istan was holding out... well, that's where the Sunspear headquarters were, and the fact that there are still some even now suggests that they could have rebuilt if they still had their headquarters. Whatever Istan's status is, they surrendered sufficiently that the Sunspear headquarters on Istan is no more.
Another consideration is that Joko seems to be basing his claim on Elona through being the last of the Primeval Kings (although the PKs themselves are claiming that's not the case). On that basis, it'd be a point of pride to make sure that Istan is part of his empire. Heck, he might even have resettled Fahrunar.
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Good point. They probably forgot about that when they back-wrote the prophecy (because I'm willing to bet that the original team never wrote out the prophecy in that detail).
> @Athrenn.9468 said:
> For that reason, I think that Glint is a much shadier character than history paints her. She watched from afar as Khilbron opened the gates of Hell and even helped us get there. She foresaw what would happen and used her influence to make it so. In the end, I believe that all she cared about was her legacy and despite it being a noble goal, she wasn't above morally questionable actions to achieve it.
My interpretation is that she foresaw the alternatives as well, and the alternatives were worse. If most of your options result in the destruction of the world and there's one path that can result in saving the world but requires sacrificing millions to get there, and you know _for sure_ that there's no third option that allows you to prevent those millions of deaths... then you go for the route in which _somebody_ survives.
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> @"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:
> > @draxynnic.3719 said:
> > My theory there is that he needed a separate mind that he didn't already control to hide behind. Whatever we were doing to his mind, it was spread out all across the hive mind that he'd established across his minions and corruption - in order to hide from it, he needed to implant a portion of his mind into a mind that he had contact with and enough influence that he could control it, but not enough control that it was already part of his hive mind.
> >
> > It may even have required physical contact, explaining why he couldn't simply download himself into a random Mordrem Guard.
>
> If that were the case, then simply killing his body would have sufficed. We wouldn't have needed to go into the Dream.
>
Except the Mouth of Mordremoth wasn't his whole body, or even a critical part of it. The parts you'd need to kill to physically kill Mordremoth were buried so deep and spread so far they would be basically impossible to reach while Mordremoth was fighting back and able to regrow parts that were destroyed somewhere else. It would have been like fighting a hydra when all the heads were a kilometer down and could be hundreds of kilometers apart.
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@"drkn.3429" While I get what you're trying to say - the writers want to move on to tell their own stories without being held back by sticking to stuff other people wrote - I don't think that really excuses the issues here.
There are two ways in which you can not deal with plot elements that you don't want to deal with right now. You can put them "on a bus", so that you or someone else can come back to them if they so choose. Or you can kill them off hurriedly (literally or figuratively) so that it doesn't take focus from the story you want to tell, making it so that nobody can do justice to them later.
The gods were already on a bus. They could have left them on the bus. Heck, they could have used the PoF plot with Menzies instead (would have been entirely in character). Instead, they chose to drag him off the bus so they could kill him (or, rather, make us kill him). It feels like they're just pulling the WoW trick of taking any character with shades of grey and turning them into a villain because they didn't have an idea for a proper villain. If the current writers don't want to write the gods, it would be better to _not write them_ - and keep them intact for future writers that might be inspired to go in that direction in the future - then to cut one out in a haphazard way because of _course_ all gods of war are Always Chaotic Evil.
In Vlast's case... Vlast IS part of the story they're telling. Now, it's perfectly reasonable to say that Vlast's death is equally part of that story - Glint's plan involved Vlast, and not having Vlast is going to make it harder to make that plan work. However, criticisms that Vlast's death was poorly handled are entirely independent of the argument that the writers want to focus on their own stories.
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Pretty much. My prediction as soon as I heard that Balthazar was after Vlast is that Balthazar would kill Vlast before we could have any meaningful interaction. Sure enough...
Now, if we'd had a chance to get to know him before he was summarily fridged, that might have been another matter.
(Also, it just struck me... it didn't seem as if he grew much since EotN...)
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Probably because Kourna was the most powerful of the provinces.
Istan was willing to back an attack on Gandara in GW1 mostly because there was the hope that a quick, decisive strike could knock Varesh out before she'd gathered too much power. However, there would have been no hope of achieving that against Joko, and once Kourna capitulated, the leaders of Istan probably decided that they just didn't have the ability to resist.
Whether they were right is another matter, but I could see why they'd throw in the towel under the circumstances.
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> @"Aaron Ansari.1604" said:
> > @draxynnic.3719 said:
> > > @Ayakaru.6583 said:
> > > I think the realm in question is not true 'death' but unacceptence thereof. As a result, your soul doesn't return (or go to) the native realm of the dead. Every soul thats lost ends up here, regardless of race, and only if they can come to terms with themselves, realize who they are, and accept they are dead, they can leave this realm and go on their own race's afterlife. As for why Grenth has such a long arm to this realm, I don't know. but similarly, Asura, Charr, and even Norn end up there, while normally Norn spirits are guided by the wild spirits after death
> >
> > Now that you mention it... I should try to have a close look at the memory bird next time I play through that instance. Raven was supposed to be the shepherd of the dead for norn, so it would be a nice touch if the memory spirit was a raven.
>
> As it happens, it is. First use of the white raven model outside of the pet, afaik.
Ah, there it is. Nice touch for people who've paid attention to the norn lore, then.
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Interesting... and it seems pretty specific as prophecies go. I would have expected it to be a bit more vague - if that (apart from the final verse) was common knowledge, it's surprising that the heroes followed Khilbron so blindly.
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> @"Gorgaan Peaudesang.8324" said:
> > @draxynnic.3719 said:
> > Might be a response he does regardless of tone - I remember him saying that while I was giving the 'vague' speech.
>
> I was 'vague' all the way and only Canach responded.
>
> Might be linked with whoever you talk to first. In my case, it was Canach.
That could explain it - I did speak to Rytlock first. Or I might have misremembered.
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> @Rognik.2579 said:
> > @ScottBroChill.3254 said:
> > Just because a god made a kid with a human, doesn't make the god a human or previously was human. In greek mythology, zeus had half breeds with humans like hercules and perseus. So there is a distinction between god and human. In guild wars it might just be passing down and inheriting magic that makes them half-gods but who knows. Was grenth more powerful than a normal human before he ascended to god-hood? or was he in fact a different breed/species of humanoid?
> Now, in most universes, you'd be right. Interbreeding between intelligent species is actually pretty common in most fictions. Except the devs have stated many times that none of the sentient races that we know of are capable of it. A human and a charr can copulate as much as they want (if that is physically possible) and yet no offspring will result, no matter the frequency or combination. And just try to imagine what that abomination would look like. So the fact that Dwayna can have a child with a mortal race, one that is human no less, strongly implies that they are at least closely related to humans if not originally human themselves. Whether or not this fact will be brought up again by characters is unclear, but I'll be eager to see what becomes of it.
Unless, as I think Konig hinted at, it's part of Dwayna's powers that she can have a child with whoever she pleases. Genetics, shemetics, she's a _god_.
Regardless, to harken back to the main topic: The human-like appearance of the gods has been established back in the beginning of the franchise. Balthazar appearing human-like should come as no surprise.
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Hidden Room?
in Lore
> @Ayakaru.6583 said:
> Most likely am old scrapped event.
> Wouldn't pay too much heed to it.
> But nice find
Some of that stuff has been coming back, though, like Caudecus' room of faces...
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> @Gomes.5643 said:
> Well maybe because the understanding of what a god is is different in tyria then in our world. They have by no means the believe that their gods are allmighty or all-benevolent. On contrary killing off a god happend in the past twice. The first time was also by a group of mortals ( grenth and his seven buddies).
>
> So in Tyria Gods are treated like really powerful spirits. You do some rituals to get on their good site and ask them for help if needed. But thats it.
>
> Or compare it to the gods in ancient times. Like the greek or romans one. I think that is a good aproximation
Pretty much this. People tend to think of 'god' as the omniscient, omnipotent being that Yahweh is in Judaism and derived religions, but that's actually a bit of an exception among world religions (albeit an exception that's come to dominate the religious landscape in most of the world). Polytheistic religions often have primordial monsters with the capacity to threaten the gods: the Titans of Greek myth, Jotun of the Norse, Apep and its allies in Egyptian mythology, and so on. What distinguishes gods from powerful monsters isn't power. It's that they're powerful _enough,_ while actually maintaining an interest in the worshipers as something other than lunch.
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I made a similar observation myself - in fact, I thought it would have been nice to have Kasmeer (knowingly) or the PC (unknowingly) echo Kormir's words: "You leave us a few words of encouragement and expect us to fight a god?"
Which could have been an opportunity for Kormir to point out that this did work out in the end...
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> @Ayakaru.6583 said:
> I think the realm in question is not true 'death' but unacceptence thereof. As a result, your soul doesn't return (or go to) the native realm of the dead. Every soul thats lost ends up here, regardless of race, and only if they can come to terms with themselves, realize who they are, and accept they are dead, they can leave this realm and go on their own race's afterlife. As for why Grenth has such a long arm to this realm, I don't know. but similarly, Asura, Charr, and even Norn end up there, while normally Norn spirits are guided by the wild spirits after death
Now that you mention it... I should try to have a close look at the memory bird next time I play through that instance. Raven was supposed to be the shepherd of the dead for norn, so it would be a nice touch if the memory spirit was a raven.
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> @Jaken.6801 said:
> He could reignited it, but not to full potential to claim it later and be safe.
> However it seems like he didn't as he was clearly vulnerable to it.
> At that point he should have been wary of everything
> I don't believe Balthazar would be that thoughless.
It's possible that he needed it to be that powered up to break his chains in the first place, and after doing so he wasn't feeling confident about being able to beat Rytlock when Rytlock had Sohothin.
Some people also raised the question of how a depowered Balthazar could have ignited the sword, to which I raise the question: Why was the sword doused in the first place? A likely explanation could be that when the sword landed near Balthazar, he drained it, either simply to see how much power he could get out of it, or actively thinking of using the ability to reignite the sword as a bargaining chip to get someone to use the sword to cut him out. So he was merely returning what he took from it in the first place.
> @SpeedFiend.4521 said:
> > @etsubmariner.4690 said:
> > The reason we didn't see Rytlock using the sword's super power all that often was because of one simple reason--the overlong recharge time. lol
> >
> > I really could have used that skill to be a lot more often. At the end, I was naked fighting a God. Showed him.
> >
> > I don't quite understand why the sword did what it did in our hands and not Rytlock, but maybe the sword was made for human hands and not charr?
>
> As others have pointed out, that logic wouldn't work if the PC is a Charr, Asura, Norn or Cabbage, so we need a better explanation than "just works for humans". Now if I had to put my best guess forward, it'd be to do with unbound magic we've absorbed. We were there first-hand at the death of Zhaitan and Mordremoth and (somewhat) the explosion of the bloodstone, not to mention all the unbound magic we've collected in the new maps from various sources. The player character is basically doing the same thing as Balthazar, just on a smaller scale and this powers up the sword's abilities.
This does make for an interesting potential explanation.
The Path of Failure in Story & Lore [PoF Spoilers]
in Lore
Posted
> @Pax.3548 said:
> > @Thalador.4218 said:
> > > @TriEdge.5149 said:
> > > When u buy the expac u are technically buying all the living world content also, so try to see what living world brings us and then comment. That is how I look at things :bleep_bloop:
> >
> > True, and as I said, I'll still go through all the episodes of Season 4 as it's free. However, just adding one more thought to what Farzo already perfectly explained; in your view, we shouldn't criticize anything that's part of a series (an episode in a TV series, a book or movie in a trilogy, a game/expansion in a franchise), because we haven't seen the whole product. That is wrong. They released a solid expansion with a beginning, middle and end that is great and immersive in its aesthetics, mechanics, music, combat and side-content, but the story and lore-handling failed miserably once again. You have to provide feedback and call out these problems so that they may change direction and fix these issues for future installments. Similarly, their storytelling has been criticized since the vanilla release, which wasn't even that bad to begin with, and instead of getting better, it has slowly but steadily gotten worse and worse with a few rare moments of improvement. It has been brought to their attention many times, during previous releases, yet they continue to pursue this direction blindly.
> >
> > > @"Sir Vincent III.1286" said:
> > > Whew, that's a long post. However I disagree with the idea that Balthazar is the god of war. According to Kormir, there is still Six gods not counting Balthazar.
> > >
> > > Seeing that Rytlock found Balthazar chained meaning he had lost his powers as the god of war, thus he seeks to draw the Dragon's powers, for which Kormir confirmed that this power is greater than the powers of the gods. Balthazar is no longer the same god the humans worshipped in GW1. The fact of the matter is, the humans worshipped the god of war and called him Balthazar because they only know of Balthazar. Just imagine how misinformed and confused the humans are who worshipped Ares not knowing that Kratos already killed him and become the current god of war. This Path of Fire plot closely resembles the God of War game than a rehash of Nightfall. It seems that ArenaNet has created their own "Kratos" who kicked out Balthazar and left him in chains.
> >
> > I'm genuinely interested; where does she say that there are still Six Gods and not only five? Because there's absolutely 0 evidence for what you're claiming: first off, it seems they can now strip divinity from one of their own without consequences as if it was a simple demotion (a huge retcon in and of itself). Second off, Balthazar's forces in the Fissure of Woe (Devona, his Eternal generals, officers and soldiers who volunteer to be cast into Forged bodies) are still insanely loyal to him. One would think the gods would send out the memo to his forces staging in FoW that there is a new god of war in town taking over regular business after the PoF "Balthazar" disgraced himself with pride, wrath and insanity.
> >
> > > @"Sir Vincent III.1286" said:
> > >The problem I see here is that the OP seems to have elevated the GW1 storyline to a higher standard not realizing that the GW2 writing is on par with GW1 as it always has been -- not that great. In other words, the GW1 story paths and timeline were also messed up and immersion breaking. I still don't buy a lot of the plot lines and stories in Gw1, for example, the Charr attacking Orr (lol what? logistically not possible), the survival of Gwen without sympathy from other Charr, and many other. What I'm saying is, I think the OP is forgetting how bad the GW1 storytelling was that the player community has to come up with the lore explanation in an attempt to make sense of it all. In GW2, nothing really has changed, in some cases, they even improved.
> >
> > Because the stories told in Guild Wars campaigns and expansions were coherent, sensible, meaningful with journeys that were logically built-up and respected the lore established in previous installment and made sense in their connecting of dots from previous games. There were flaws, there was room for improvement, but they actually formed an enjoyable whole that made sense and didn't require to switch your suspension of disbelief into overdrive.
> >
> > If the examples you brought up showcases the caliber in general of issues you had with the plot and the lore of Guild Wars, then I imagine you're playing GW2 with some very powerful, rose-tinted glasses that screen out all the nonsensical, immersion-breaking solutions, retcons, as well as character and lore butchery that goes on in there.
> >
> > > @Roxhemar.6039 said:
> > > I don't know about that wall of text rant. But personally, I freaking loved Path of Fire. That scene where Balthazar launches his god-sword of death at your face and your screen goes full doom style, I loved every second of it. Even if I knew that my character would probably be ok, it was a chance to visit something new and see someplace new - Grenth's domain.
> >
> > Correction: that wasn't his sword, just a glob of fiery energies he hurled at you.
> >
> > It's good that you enjoyed it, I'm glad. Sure it is indeed enjoyable when you shut everything out and focus on the plot without bringing in established lore from previous releases.
> >
> > > @Pax.3548 said:
> > > You guys sure love to rant, but I'm pretty sure if any of you worked on this game, the story wouldn't be as near as good as you think you would make it.
> >
> > I'd gladly accept the challenge; believe me, if the possibility presented itself, I'd join the writing team in a heartbeat. And let the Scourge of the Prideful be my judge, but I'm confident I could have done a better job in making the plot of PoF coherent and more believable without having to resort to the use of retcons.
> >
> > Still, it would be greatly appreciated if you were to put the effort into countering the criticism and the arguments raised by many who didn't enjoy the plot as you did, instead of just berating them as rants.
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> Yeah, I'm sure the tech and resources would be good enough to fully make that plot you have on your head reality (sarcasm) you can write a story, but it isn't you go make that story into a game, is the team that creates the game itself, the textures, animations, etc. (and that is NOT easy to do). And I won't bother discuss this thread, you can like a story or not its up to you, but most of them are just rants honestly, to straightfoward say it is awful (like it is a fact rather than an opinion) well, I won't discuss with ppl that closed minded, it'll be a waste of time.
Ever come across the concept of jumping the shark?
As soon as we saw Balthazar, my immediate thought was "They'd better have a good motivation for this or it's just going to be Abaddon 2.0". What did we get? Balthaddon having a spat with the other gods that lead to them casting him down, just like the backstory to Nightfall. At least Abaddon actually had a reasonably justified motivation, from a certain point of view (while we joke about him throwing a massive temper tantrum, what actually happened was a series of events: Abaddon's followers started defacing holy sites of the other gods in protest at the weakening of Abaddon's gift, the Forgotten started wiping out the Margonites, and it was his followers being massacred that triggered Abaddon to rebel. Balthaddon, on the other hand, was Flanderised into a glory hound that just wanted a big fight despite knowing how much damage such a battle would do.
The first half of Path of Fire was one predictable disappointment after another. Vlast gets mentioned, then we learn that Balthaddon is after him, and I immediately predicted that our only direct interaction with Vlast would be helplessly watching Balthaddon kill him. I wasn't far wrong (the detail being that I was expecting it to be a 'we arrived too late' rather than a 'Vlast sacrifices himself to save us'. We go to talk to the gods, and I go in expecting exposition and a pep talk rather than them doing anything useful, because heaven forbid that human lore ever be used for anything other than spawning antagonists. Sure enough...
The first actual surprise was that Balthaddon used the Exalted as a template for the Forged... but that was essentially an answer to a question no one asked. The Forgotten were servants to the gods, so it would make sense that the gods likely knew how to make Enchanted at least, and in fact, in Factions we saw a rebelling ex-servant of Grenth create an army of constructs empowered by imprisoned souls. So Balthaddon doing that isn't really a surprise. Balthaddon kidnapping Aurene... also very predictable.
Things improved a little after that, but it does feel a bit like they've run out of good ideas and Flanderised Balthaddon just to make a controversial villain, and then failed to deliver on any meaningful twist after that, instead relying purely on the 'Balthazar is a bad guy now?' to deliver what was possibly the most predictable Guild Wars storyline yet. It's not great when you can predict what's going to happen by asking the question "What is the most disappointing direction they can take this?" Now, it's up to everyone to decide where the shark-jumping moment for them is, and I'm not yet committed to saying for sure that it is now, but, well... let's just say that it's a little unfortunate that this also happens to be an expansion where it's not an uncommon event to literally jump over a (sand) shark when going from one place to another.
As for what else could have been done... just off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of possibilities. One is having the twist being that Lazarus is actually Lazarus (there was precedent that he didn't actually need all of the aspects in order to resurrect). Another is using Menzies instead of Balthaddon. Both of these could have followed pretty close to the story we had, without the effect of relying on Flanderisation to turn a character that some PCs would have chosen as their patron god into a villain. Sure, it wouldn't have had the pathos of being betrayed by one of the gods, but they did so little with that in the end after the initial shock that I don't think it makes up for the "Oh, we needed a villain, so we just took a powerful entity that had some shades of grey and flanderised them into a puppy-kicker" effect.