Time of the Sinking of Orr / the Cataclysm - why do I want to put it into the far past?

[Cyberman Mastermind.6012]

As the title says - for some reason I always thought that Orr sunk a long time ago - even from a GW1/Prophecies point of view.

Am I merely mixing/misremembering something, or was there a retcon?

All the orrian enemies in GW1 seemed pretty decayed, so I'd have guessed they've been moldering for a few years already - but according to the timeline, they can't have been dead than at most a year?

(Unless they all were previous orrians, who didn't die in the Cataclysm.)

[Aaron Ansari.1604]

Nah, there was no retcon. The Prophecies timeline did get condensed during development, and seemingly late on- there are still places that put the gap between the Searing and the main game at ten years, not two- but from release, the official timeline has always had the destruction of Orr between 1070 and 1072, pinned down at 1071 during GW2's development. It is possible that the undead were originally designed with that ten-year timeframe in mind... but I think you're also underestimating how quickly a body decomposes. I'm no expert, but a bit of google suggest that soft tissues liquefy within a month, and that a submerged corpse would typically be down to just the skeleton within 4-6 years.

 

And that's without getting into any magic nonsense. The fact that we see skeletons draped in tattered but mostly intact clothing might suggest that the rate of decay was sped up for them, while we also see many fairly intact corpses that seem to be magically preserved. And then you have the wraiths and the phantoms, whose tangible bits take on monstrous forms that have nothing to do with the natural process of decomposition.

[Randulf.7614]

There werent any gw1 orrian enemies were there?

 

Hmm, wiki says there were a couple of undead orrian bosses. Which were they? (Excl Khilbron)

[Aaron Ansari.1604]

All of the undead that Khilbron commanded- basically everything on [this page](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Undead) under "Kryta"- were supposedly Orrian. There were rumors in the Prophecies manual, they all drop Orr emblems, and the ones with more or less intact clothing dress a lot like Khilbron.

[Ayakaru.6583]

I had the same issues when playimg Prophecies for the first time. I thought the fall of Abaddon was some ancient event, and that there were several generations between the sinking of Orr and the Searing.

Turns out Orr sank the same year you start the story...

So weird....

I played for months believing there was a lot of time between the events..

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

The Fall of Abaddon **was** an ancient event, it happened in Year 0, while the game took place in 1072 AE (Nightfall was 1075 AE).