The Sons of Svanir and the Flame Legion are possibly the only two factions that players can safely antagonize, as they're both guided by other entities, but that does not negate the fact that the game missed a great opportunity in all of them to explore the gray area that exists in most of them. As a disclaimer here I must point out that there is one instance where the game almost successfully questioned the predefined morality of its world, in the Sylvari personal story.
Early on we meet Gavin , a high ranking member of the Nightmare Court who masquerades as a follower of the Pale Tree and befriends the player. After revealing his true identity we see that unlike the other members of his faction, he's actually honorable and an idealist.
Eventually we kill him in an honorable duel and we never hear about him again. The problem with Gavin is that he doesn't represent a side of his faction that isn't a stereotype. He actually reinforces the stereotype by being the only exception. From the wiki,. He is an exception to his faction's overall "evil" nature, and as all exceptions, his existence story-wise is to reinforce the rule - the Nightmare Court is evil.
Again, no room for gray areas. But we see this issue even in entire races. Take the Dredge for instance. When encountered in the wild they're "yellow", semi-aggressive, and usually red or aggressive. They are given to us by the game as monsters to kill, even though they're an intelligent race adept in technology with a clear hierarchical community.
They parody the Soviet Union by having territory names such as the Molengrad possible inference that Communism is evil by the game designers? I'd rather take it as a sense of humor instead :P. Also as another jab against the Soviet Union, they have a corrupt government that oppresses its lower ranking members conveniently called the Moletariate parodying the Proletariate. There is only one instance where the Dredge make an official appearance in the personal story, and we're given some in-game background for them, which is when they plan on attacking the Priory Headquarters to kill the last living Dwarf, Magister Ogden Stonehealer.
And at that point we're given a very insightful piece of exposition regarding their backstory source : wiki :. Vyacheslav: You cannot stop us! The revolution will have its vengeance! Vyacheslav: Why do you protect the oppressors who enslaved us? Vyacheslav: No! I can't die while the oppressor dwarf still lives! According to the lore, the entire Dredge race was enslaved by the Stone Summit and forced to work for them for centuries. When the dwarves sacrificed themselves in the events of Guildwars 1, the Dredge freed itself from its slavery and as an act of vengeance it hunted down most of the remaining dwarves.
Their actions although cruel were justifiable, and certainly not easily labeled as evil. In fact, when at one point a faction of the Dredge under the leadership of War Minister Shukov attempted to assault and conquer all other races, a civil war erupted that caused Shukov's plans to fail. According to the wiki,. This in turn led to a civil war within the dredge leadership, resulting in Shukov and his generals' deaths. Clearly the Dredge is not a race of stereotypical evil single minded creatures, and when such members gain power, the race is able to police itself, much like any of Tyria's other civilized races.
But the player is never given the chance to explore this side of the race. To my knowledge, in the entirety of Guildwars 2 so far, there isn't a single Dredge NPC with a green name, let alone a section of in-game lore exploring other facets of their culture. So how does this simplistic approach to morality affect Guildwars as a game? Here's my main point. It's clear to me that the development strategy of Guildwars is to focus heavily on its storyline, and attempt to create lasting and iconic characters.
They clearly put a lot of effort in the voice acting, cut scenes and overall aesthetics of the storytelling aspect of the game. Their end goal, I assume, must have been the creation of characters that can stand alone as franchises, much like we have characters of other games doing that Illidan, Arthas, Kerrigan, Zeratul, Tassadar, etc. And they've gone far in reaching this end. The size of the game's lore is very respectable, with novels published to add more flavor to it, with expansions whose primary focus is expanding the story and only close second expanding the gameplay.
From experience, I can estimate millions of dollars spent on only this aspect of the game, but it's being held back. Logan will never be Arthas. Caithe will never be Kerrigan.
Rytlok will never be Illidan. Because no matter how much background these characters get, and how many voice acting lines they speak, they'll never have a soul and will never become icons until ArenaNet stops playing it safe with their morality.
I do not play World of Warcraft. I only played Warcraft 3 briefly when it came out. I'm not very familiar with its characters and story. But the following cut scene from a character I don't know in a situation I don't know gave me more goosebumps than any cut scene or story arc I've witnessed in both Guildwars games.
And it just so happens to deal exactly with the issue of morality. I hope I'm not breaching terms of conduct by posting it here. Don't be afraid to explore the gray area between Good and Evil. That's where true heroes are born. So long as they are picking one canonical path, they need clear good and evil. If things are so fuzzy as to be open to interpretation, people might interpret their character's actions as evil, and be rightly angry about being forced into it.
We undermine King Adelbern on several occasions, the closest thing to a main plot Prophecies has is attempting to overthrow the White Mantle by working hand-in-hand with the franchise's most visible rebels, and while Joko isn't human, the Elonian dictator we overthrow in Nightfall certainly is. If you accept the Ministry of Purity as a legitimate arm of the Canthan government, the game's lifespan even ended on an anti-authority note.
If you have to have a black-and-white story, I don't mind that the second game at least mixed things up by reversing the script. They aren't common, by any stretch, but they are around. The broader point about not exploring their lore stands, though. Thank you Aaron for pointing out the Guildwars 1 storyline about usurping power.
To be fair, even though I mention it throughout my original post, I mostly keep it as a background in order to comment the dualism of morality in Guildwars 2. In fact, I haven't even finished Prophecies campaign on the first Guildwars and therefore I'm unaware on the specifics of the Canthan storyline but even from what I see in the campaign I have played so far, I can agree with your point.
My points about the simplistic moral duality of Guildwars 2 do not necessarily apply to Guildwars 1. Different writers and different games, so I shouldn't generalize. My points were mainly about Guildwars 2 structure. Also nice find about the friendly Dredge, I hadn't noticed any of them :. I don't think what you say is absolute.
For starters I'm not necessarily saying the Commander should be morally gray. In fact I would point that the player character role should be morally neutral as a way for the player to be able to more easily fit his own personality in the context of the storyline. They even attempted to do that by giving players the choice of a primitive "alignment" system on character creation persnonality traits such as intimidation, leadership and seduction which is very slightly touched in the storyline and generally doesn't affect the main personality of the Commander.
I do agree with you that if the story tried to force morality down the player's throat by forcing his actions one way or the other, it would become frustrating, but that's not only limitted to said choices being "evil". In the thread I'm quoting on my original post, the author is equally frustrated at the game for guiding his character's morality towards what the game perceives as being good.
For player characters a more neutral moral path would be much more engaging. My entire original post though as I said focuses on the NPCs, and in its conclusion I was saying how they wouldn't become as iconic as NPCs of other franchises unless they stopped getting written morally safe. I do see the authors of Guildwars 2 storyline trying to create some complex interactions in the Commander's group by creating conflict, but that conflict is not generated by actually different moral views between the characters.
In the case of the broken down Destiny's Edge for example, the conflict is created by shared grief over the loss of Snaff. There's no question at any point whether the members of Destiny's Edge share the same moral values. They are undeniably all the good guys. They simply can't handle loss effectively.
And as for the conflict created with the Commander himself, it's all based on misunderstanding. Caithe for example, despite how much her writers try to pass her off as morally ambiguous is anything but. She is a purely "good" character throughout the entire storyline. The artificial conflict with her in Heart of Thorns is based on a misunderstanding she thought that taking the egg was part of her Wild Hunt , and as for the flashbacks we get from her, her only "fault" is keeping company to Faolain more than she should have.
If anything, on the raid to the Inquest lab, the "achievement" way to complete that story instance is by not killing any Asura, despite Faolain explicitly stating that it's her favorite way of doing things. Caithe is as morally good as any of the other members of Destiny's Edge.
Her moral "ambiguity" is basically just her secretive nature. And as for Braham and his beef against the Commander, it's simply just another case of a Guildwars 2 NPC not being able to handle loss properly, in this case the loss of his mother. Braham isn't evil or even gray for antagonizing us. He's just being a big manchild and needs to grow up. Now if Braham's inability to cope with loss and grief led him to commit morally gray acts or get consumed by vengeance?
Maybe becoming an anti hero in the process? Too bad the most diplomatic charr spazzed out in a diplomatic meeting, resulting in full blown warfare and making the story feel a bit too forced. It wouldn't be humanly possible to create anything less interesting than politics. Ridonculous right? I agree. Fighting a huge pile of gunk and rocks is really, really boring. It feels extremely artificial. I suppose they just wanted to Netflix the relations between different groups which left them with pretty much nothing.
But as you move to expansions it is just a game with maps feeling dead inside with little going on apart from mobs and combat. RPGs from like s can do better job in this regard. Well written politics can be more interesting certainly, but i dont think anet could pull it off well.
The few times they tried werent the best. Id love to see them pull off a well written story though. I don't think it's a fantasy problem.. I'd say it's just a poor writing one. Personally I really enjoyed Game of Thrones up until the final season as did a lot of people. Really didn't help that they had no source material to work with at that point since the books the show is based on only go so far.
Gw2 has suffered some poor writing over time, be that just lacking inspiration, writers block or more to do with rushing and deadlines etc. Ice Brood Saga is definitely one of the worst displays of this in Gw2, us fans have made no attempts to hide this. Hell even Jormag building up to this point was really awesome and everyone who's been around since the GW1 days was hyped as hell to see Primordus again. It was literally one of those..
We can blame the writers.. What matters is that this disappointment is forever in the game until someone at Anet manages to convince someone else that it's worth going back to fix.. The way I see it is this.. There can be NO!! In GW2, each map is frozen in a point in time -- has to be. Otherwise, there would be no Orr to be cleansed, since the first person to do so in would have changed the map forever.
I think Anet's original vision for the game was for permanent changes to keep happening, but unfortunately that didn't work out. It's bad enough that Season 1 is forever gone, imagine if that had been the case for everything that has released since. You would start the game and see all the relics of previous map changes LA, Kessex, etc but those would just be the maps, no story for you until the next episode is released, only "this is what happened" kind of lore.
Maybe the next expansion story should be about how Kryta want to leave Pact because they dont feel sovereign enough and keep getting Quaggan immigrants in Divinitys Reach and they force through a vote to leave despite all Krytan territories except DR voting to stay but then it takes the living story 4 years to complete and when they have the withdrawal agreement in place they still dont like it and blaim everything on the Charr?
All rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Prev 1 2 Next Page 2 of 2. Recommended Posts. Kain Francois. Posted November 23, Link to post Share on other sites.
Posted November 25, Evil Necromancers are just a trope. Magic related to death and unlife is not an inherently evil concept. As a roleplayer, I loathe tropes that demand something must be good or must be evil. It removes agency away from the user. Medling with dead and decay to gain personal powers in general makes people atleast frown uppon you.. Necromancy is a selfish thing.
And while the actions of a necromencer will not allways be evil.. Remember that little poppy you had? That's really important to us. Every micro-transaction that we do in the game, we have everyone in the company look at it and say Is it Evil? Is it really something we should be selling? Guild Wars 1 famously carried no monthly subscription at a time when they were rife. Money was recouped through sales of the game and its expansions and, later, through the micro-transaction cash shop.
But Guild Wars 1 was a far smaller project made by far less people. Guild Wars 2 has the salaries of hundreds to pay, as development approaches a fifth year. Recouping the costs associated with Guild Wars 2 will be harder. The Guild Wars 1 store worked for us, it's been there the whole time, but it didn't have a ton of stuff in it. The Guild Wars 2 store we're working on having more stuff for you to pick from to buy.
And it's totally up to them. Sometimes we include links to online retail stores. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission.
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