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Why are dragons the main villains of the game?


Sir Arigius.6294

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Guild Wars 2 is a great game. I just have a few questions as to why anet picked dragons to be the main bad guys.

Why did Anet decide with going with slaying dragons as the main antagonists for the game?

There was a previous game that was designed in 2011 on the PS3 and X-Box 360 by Bethesda that had the player go around slaying dragons and absorbing dragon souls. I'm sure you know what game I'm hinting at. I just felt the plots were too identical.

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According to the Art of Gw2

"Elder Dragons were not always the main antagonists of Guild Wars 2. According to The Making of Guild Wars 2 book, original drafts for story included demons and angelic beings descending to the world to judge it."

I am glad they went with Dragons. I don't think a biblical style Diablo plot would be as fun. I think they've over thought the Dragons too much. Instead of putting more interesting stories to the foreground and filling out existng lore, they instead went with nonsensical metaphyiscal stuff, the pushing of a "good" Elder Dragon to replace them and the humanising of the Dragons. All at the sacrifice of existing plot points. This whole balancing the magic of the World I'm not sure has really worked out that well. Sometimes, giant unfathomable monsters can just be giant, unfathomable monsters.

Having said that, I like the Dragons themselves (except that silly Kralktorrik bit at the end of LS4). They are impressively designed in looks and size. I just think they were wasted with this bizarre plotline that got itself in the way of too much else

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From game play stand point IMO final battle between commander and Balthazar feel more fun and satisfy than final battle with any dragon we have before.(I also like Mordremoth fight but his design is ridiculous) Problem is dragon fight feel more cinematic than actual play since they're so big to fight in equal ground.

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@Sir Arigius.6294 said:Guild Wars 2 is a great game. I just have a few questions as to why anet picked dragons to be the main bad guys.

Why did Anet decide with going with slaying dragons as the main antagonists for the game?

There was a previous game that was designed in 2011 on the PS3 and X-Box 360 by Bethesda that had the player go around slaying dragons and absorbing dragon souls. I'm sure you know what game I'm hinting at. I just felt the plots were too identical.

Low effort way to milk what will probably be 10 years of an MMO without needing to come up with a new villain.

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I don't know much about Gw2's development but they set up the Dragons in Gw1, at least Primordus, Kralkatorrik and Jormag anyway.The entire EoTN expansion was made to set the foundation for Gw2 while Gw2 was in development.

Tbh im not sure how happy Anet were about this decision later on as many of us long time players know Zhaitan is well known for being a disappointing finale to the personal story and Living World season 1 seemed to go off on it's own at first before all being tied up with a plan to awaken a new Elder Dragon.

After PoF and the whole story with Kralkatorrik I think it's a safe bet that Anet knows what they want to do with Elder Dragons now.Personally I am very happy with how Kralkatorrik and so far Jormag have been handled, fighting Kralkatorrik especially was a significantly better experience than fighting Zhaitan and Mordremoth and i'm very excited to see where this story goes with Jormag.. not to mention what Cantha is going to bring in the next expansion :)Exciting time to be a PvE story fan in Gw2 that's for sure.

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@Sir Arigius.6294 said:Guild Wars 2 is a great game. I just have a few questions as to why anet picked dragons to be the main bad guys.

Why did Anet decide with going with slaying dragons as the main antagonists for the game?

There was a previous game that was designed in 2011 on the PS3 and X-Box 360 by Bethesda that had the player go around slaying dragons and absorbing dragon souls. I'm sure you know what game I'm hinting at. I just felt the plots were too identical.

What Bethesda did was irrelevant, not the least because the Elder Dragon plotline was already being planned before Guild Wars Eye of the North came out in 2007, by the time Skyrim came out GW2 would have already been in alpha, or at least close to it, and it was simply too late to change anything.

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@Sir Arigius.6294 said:Guild Wars 2 is a great game. I just have a few questions as to why anet picked dragons to be the main bad guys.

Why did Anet decide with going with slaying dragons as the main antagonists for the game?

There was a previous game that was designed in 2011 on the PS3 and X-Box 360 by Bethesda that had the player go around slaying dragons and absorbing dragon souls. I'm sure you know what game I'm hinting at. I just felt the plots were too identical.Dragons are incredibly common enemies in all fantasy games and that certain other game no one has heard about ever before is as uninspired and plain as vikings with dragons (I mean you literally go to Valhalla). It has no plot to speak of. At least Anet tried to create something more interesting.

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Dragons are the personification of natural, untamed magic. In the western tradition, they are foes that need to be destroyed or domesticated and in eastern traditions they are to be understood and respected. In both cases though, they symbolize the power of nature and a connection to nature. In fantasy and hero journeys in general, they are often the source of deeper knowledge about how the world works. I think the studio went with dragons so they could tell a complex story about discovering deeper knowledge about the nature of Tyria. I am not sure if they started off knowing what Tyrian cosmology would look like. Some of their descriptions are hand-wavy magi-babble. I am cautiously optimistic that they have figured out a concrete model for the cosmos.

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@Stephen.6312 said:

@"Psientist.6437" said:Tyrian cosmology?

I see this getting thrown around every now and then. Can you please elaborate on what you mean by this and perhaps get into it a bit? It's terribly confusing otherwise.

Sure. It is a quick way to refer to Tyrian physics and the manifestation of Tyrian physics. The Tyrian universe seems to use gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism. When I use the term I am referring to the laws governing magic and how it manifests. I think most people are using it to refer to things such as the Mists, The All, the Elder dragon cycle, and the Eternal Alchemy; large scale phenomenon that, if the Tyrian universe were realistic, would emerge from natural laws.

A "real world" example of how the term is being used here in Tyria would be the term "Christian cosmology" that includes God, Heaven, Hell, Earth and the eternal struggle between good and evil. The cosmology of the Star Wars universe would include the Light and Dark sides of the Force.

I have some theories for Tyrian cosmology. Magic could be a form of matter that reacts to, or is given form by, will power. There would be a quantum magic field and magic particles/waves. Or, and this is my preferred cosmology, there is a Will field and it is the effects of Will that we confuse for magic. On a cosmological scale, Will would form emergent structures similar to how gravity, the weak and strong forces and electromagnetism form structures. A sufficiently powerful Will structure behaves in ways similar to a black hole. A black hole grabs hold of a virtual particle at its event horizon where sheer forces inject sufficient energy into the virtual particle making part of the virtual particle real. That's the basics of Hawkings radiation. A powerful Will structure would do something similar but with more sophisticated results. Magic is what we have been calling the manifestation of Will being used to pull matter and energy from the quantum ground state or zero point energy.

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Dude, Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim in 2011 wasn't even the first "slay the evil dragons" story in that series... (and was itself a knock-off Mega Man story, replacing the robots with dragons.)Perseus, Beowulf, Saint George, Susano-o, Sir Tristan, Bilbo Baggins, Super Mario, and thousands-to-millions of other fantasy protagonists and heroes would like a word with you.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_and_dragon

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Low effort way to milk what will probably be 10 years of an MMO without needing to come up with a new villain.

Yes. Tropes are, by definition, literary shortcuts. Good job, you're so smart and clever for noticing! Can you come up with other examples of literary shortcuts?

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@Psientist.6437 said:

@Psientist.6437 said:Tyrian cosmology?

I see this getting thrown around every now and then. Can you please elaborate on what you mean by this and perhaps get into it a bit? It's terribly confusing otherwise.

Sure. It is a quick way to refer to Tyrian physics and the manifestation of Tyrian physics. The Tyrian universe seems to use gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism. When I use the term I am referring to the laws governing magic and how it manifests. I think most people are using it to refer to things such as the Mists, The All, the Elder dragon cycle, and the Eternal Alchemy; large scale phenomenon that, if the Tyrian universe were realistic, would emerge from natural laws.

A "real world" example of how the term is being used here in Tyria would be the term "Christian cosmology" that includes God, Heaven, Hell, Earth and the eternal struggle between good and evil. The cosmology of the Star Wars universe would include the Light and Dark sides of the Force.

I have some theories for Tyrian cosmology. Magic could be a form of matter that reacts to, or is given form by, will power. There would be a quantum magic field and magic particles/waves. Or, and this is my preferred cosmology, there is a Will field and it is the effects of Will that we confuse for magic. On a cosmological scale, Will would form emergent structures similar to how gravity, the weak and strong forces and electromagnetism form structures. A sufficiently powerful Will structure behaves in ways similar to a black hole. A black hole grabs hold of a virtual particle at its event horizon where sheer forces inject sufficient energy into the virtual particle making part of the virtual particle real. That's the basics of Hawkings radiation. A powerful Will structure would do something similar but with more sophisticated results. Magic is what we have been calling the manifestation of Will being used to pull matter and energy from the quantum ground state or zero point energy.

Thanks for sharing that.

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Dragons are used because they are powerful, have a real body and still mystical.

Even the european dragons were not ALL evil. There are, in some parts of Europe even legends of gift bearing dragons (bringing milk or gold into deserving homes). So dragons are versatile. They can be the embodiment of all that is evil, with powers off every chart, they can be benevolent elders, the power behind the throne, they can be nifty manipulators, they can be neither good nor evil, creatures of change.

That is why dragons are so popular. They can be everything. But they are never weak.

(on a side note, because mystical creatures: dwarfs and elves are either basically the same OR elves are actually undead evil forest spirits OR are earth elementals. Until Tolkien showed up and everyone copied from him. Everyone but Pratchett. The 'good elf' is a very, very recent invention. Also on a side note: sylvari are neither traditional 'elves', nor are they Tolkien 'elves' because they are not an elder race on the brink of extinction and beloved and pampered by the gods. The gw2 humans are Tolkien elves. In fact, the asura are the closest to traditional elves and dwarfs we can get in modern times. Sylvari are more related to Dryads and Elementals. ).

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@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:traditional 'elves'This is strongly offtopic, but:what even are traditional elves?The oldest mention of elves I know of comes in the 'form' of the Dökkálfar (Dark Elves) and Ljósálfar (Light Elves).And the only description I found of them is that one race of them lives in dark place (hence being called Dark Elves) deep below the surface, while the other lives in Alfheimr, the "first heaven". Neither of these races' descriptions hints at them being undead spirits or elementals.There have been scholarly debates on whether a third type of Elves called Svartálfar (black elves) or Myrkálfar (dusky/murky elves) are related to dwarves (who themselves were just a kind of maggot festering in the flesh of the giant Ymir before the gods bestowed reason onto them) or not.So, elves don't have a singular point of origin, but three.So, what are traditional Elves to you?

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@Psientist.6437 said:Sure. It is a quick way to refer to Tyrian physics and the manifestation of Tyrian physics. The Tyrian universe seems to use gravity...

Until you start trying to reach vistas or do jumping puzzles. Then you learn the hard way that jumping in Tyria is arse backwards from the real world. Instead of jumping with a running start like reality -- or the vast majority of other games ever -- GW2 instead requires you to jump UP first and THEN try to go forward. You also sometimes have to steer in midair, jump around corners, and other physical impossibilities. One of the most infuriating points of the GW2 game world IMHO.

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  • 1 month later...

@Sir Arigius.6294 said:Guild Wars 2 is a great game. I just have a few questions as to why anet picked dragons to be the main bad guys.

Why did Anet decide with going with slaying dragons as the main antagonists for the game?

There was a previous game that was designed in 2011 on the PS3 and X-Box 360 by Bethesda that had the player go around slaying dragons and absorbing dragon souls. I'm sure you know what game I'm hinting at. I just felt the plots were too identical.

Play GW1 and you will know.

It’s a hype that has been built for years.Gw1 bossesCore Magical Mursat loreCore Boss necromancerFaction Boss assassin warriorNightfall Boss god AbaddonEye of the north Boss destroyers and hinting to the rise of elder dragons

Their problem, the hype has already ended as soon as core gw2 hit. They should’ve showed all the dragons

Let’s just hope we will beat Jormag this LS season and not the expansion. I hope we will fight another shiro alike this Cantha expansion

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@Sir Arigius.6294 said:Why are dragons the main villains of the game?

I completely agree that it was a lazy decision and is a very boring idea in general. GW1's stories were much more compelling.

@Roche.7491 said:Eye of the north Boss destroyers and hinting to the rise of elder dragons

One single dragon story arc would have sufficed. Making every story arc about a dragon is just lame writing, sorry.

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I think all we've known of them is what we've seen. With Zhaitan we just saw this Conquerer of Death. We didn't really know what motives he had, if any. With Mordremoth, he seemed like a villain, but he even foreshadows during his speech of the meta fight about what we're doing. We didn't really learn about our impact until the next living season, and then with Kralk we started to learn more about the elder dragons. That they have other motives or forces, like Kralk did with the torment that drove him to behave the way he did.

While most of the time it seems like it's kind of made up on the fly, there could have been a long-term plan in regards to the elder dragons that they're still building up. We're learning more about them, and I think as we move further with Jormag we'll learn that they're not just "villains" for the sake of being villains. The story is still evolving.

As far as why they chose them to spotlight in the franchise, it's because they're monstrous powerful beings capable of building an entire franchise around. They're unknown, exciting, hard to understand. If you had to write a story and build a game around something, would you rather try to rewrite a story over and over again about the same politically motivated villain-type, or would you rather evolve a story around something completely unknown that gives you a broader scope? Sure, they could have made an entire expansion around, Joko, and in the end went with Balthazar, but between an undead lich and one of the six deities that sparked the rise of human civilization and a sideplot of an elder dragon, which do you think gives them more breathing room? They could have wrote a story about a leader of the Nightmare Court corrupting the dream instead of an elder dragon, but would that be as interesting?

While I do think the plot is a bit rushed or hamfisted at times, or drawn out meaninglessly in others, you need a strong almost ethereal villain to make for a compelling story line in a story delivery like this. In nightfall, you had Abaddon, one of the six gods. In Factions, you had shiro who was empowered by another one of the six gods. In Eye of the North you had the destroyers.

I mean, what would we have in their place at this point? Civil wars between humans? Civil wars between Charr or races warring against each other? Tyrannical rulers as the primary villains? It feels like they would just have to keep rewriting the same story over and over again? And yes, people will complain that the same thing is happening with the elder dragons because we keep killing them but in the grand scheme of things:

We have Zhaitan, who we kill because we know little about the elder dragons and they just seem straight up evil. We continue on to Mordremoth, because we don't know any better. We then have a human god, and wind up having to save an elder dragon from said god, but then have to kill the elder dragon because it's consuming reality. Not because it's straight up evil and bent on conquering, but it seems like this natural force. We learn they're interwoven to the planet's balance. Now, we have one friendly elder dragon, and are still trying to discover the motives of another.

It's a cumulative progressive plot that feels similar when examined individually, but collectively show a larger picture and tell a different story, one that's still progressing. Sure, you could supplement those elder dragons with something more familiar, like an evil leader or a war, but would it be as compelling or would you just find yourself asking the same question? If World of Warcraft hadn't introduced villains like the Lich King, Illidan, Deathwing, Sargeras, would they have been able to build an entire franchise around Orcs and Humans and had it become what it is today?

It gives them a fresh take and something unique to this franchise, otherwise how is it any different from dungeons and dragons or any of the other cornucopia of other fantasy genre games.

And to reiterate what someone else said previously, dragons have always been represented to be a varying in different stories. Good, evil, neutral. They're a mystical creature that can be molded into whatever they need it to be with ease. You can make a "god," sure, but how many times can you do that and make the plot feel different? An evil unicorn is pretty laughable. I suppose there are always Djinn and random elemental beings, but then you have to factor in and build on already existing lore. So there wasn't really a whole lot of places they could have taken the franchise outside of war between the races. Perhaps they could have invented something else, like more Mursaat, some evil Jotun faction, some larger baddie that to add that touch of mysticism and given a sense of unknown. I think it was just an opportunity for them to portray dragons in a different way. They're not gold-hoarding and greedy, or benevolent, they're forces of nature that are directly tied to the balance of the planet.

On a sidenote, I believe some of the founders actually came over from Blizzard didn't they? I remember looking at a wow cosmology chart and thinking about how similar it felt to the eternal alchemy. Wow has their dragon aspects, which are each empowered by the titans and hold domain over certain aspects of magic. It feels like this is kind of a spin on a similar story, and while at times many may feel that the payoff is lame, but if you've followed World of Warcraft story development I feel like Arenanet has handled things a little bit better.

Sure, we have Zhaitan getting blown to bits by an airship, and it was pretty unsatisfying, but we starved him and blinded him first.We had to find specific weaknesses for them that made sense for what they were.

In World of Warcraft we had the dragon soul, a beam of light shot out of a golden disk that killed Deathwing.Then, we have a beam of light shot by the pantheon to imprison Sargeras.Then, we have a beam of light to kill N'zoth, one of the old gods.It's like all they know how to do to conclude a major villain is to just shoot a beam of light at it.

In this game we have mystical beings with unique weaknesses and underlying plots. Even Balthazar we needed the help of Aurene and his own weapon to defeat him.

This has gotten way off track, but the point is that I don't think the franchise would have made it this far without them, because it would have just felt like the same plot over and over again. A lot of you may already feel that way with the Elder Dragons, but I think you're looking at the larger picture with a magnifying glass instead of thinking about the progression and considering the possibilities with an open mind.

I also whole heartedly believe that the current plot will be as simple as us killing Jormag and Aurene becoming more powerful. I'm not even convinced we'll kill Jormag, nor that we will befriend Jormag.

The story isn't finished yet, and it's not just black and white/good vs evil. It's not conquerors or tyrants, it's an ecosystem. It's not just revenge or lust for power and domination, it's chaos and unknown.

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@"Dustfinger.9510" said:Normally I would have defended A-bets descision with "The ED's are more primordial elementals than most traditional fantasy dragons." but that seems to have diminished with the humanising of them.

Being capable of communication isn't really humanizing. Nor is having a family - even Cthulhu has a daughter in the Lovecraftian mythos.

I wouldn't say the Elder Dragons have been humanized at all. Being given a personality isn't being humanized, and I don't think they really delved deep enough into the motivations and opinions of Mordremoth or Kralkatorrik to truly humanize them, meanwhile Jormag is being presented as being incapable of understanding things from a mortal perspective with it "trying to save the world" but at the intentional cost of life, which is the opposite of humanizing while providing actual interaction.

Zhaitan wasn't humanized, but he just... wasn't. The way it was presented was, well, no presentation ultimately. We got the presentation of its minions more than Zhaitan.

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@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@"Dustfinger.9510" said:Normally I would have defended A-bets descision with "The ED's are more primordial elementals than most traditional fantasy dragons." but that seems to have diminished with the humanising of them.

Being capable of communication isn't really humanizing. Nor is having a family - even Cthulhu has a daughter in the Lovecraftian mythos.

Haumanizing someone or something means to make them more relatable. Cthulhu having a family doesn't make him more relatable than the blind idiot god Azathoth is after we know that Yog-Sothoth is it's grandson. They are both very unrelatable.

I wouldn't say the Elder Dragons have been humanized at all. Being given a personality isn't being humanized, and I don't think they really delved deep enough into the motivations and opinions of Mordremoth or Kralkatorrik to truly humanize them, meanwhile Jormag is being presented as being incapable of understanding things from a mortal perspective with it "trying to save the world" but at the intentional cost of life, which is the
opposite
of humanizing while providing actual interaction.

A relatable personality is automatically humanizing. It's the very definition of humanizing something. Having expressed relatable motivations further humanizes the ED's while having extremely relatable offspring even more-so. Kralk's expressed fear of a utopia without him to experience it is a very human and relatable fear. Expressing his fears to his children s very human. The very act of trying to save the world with "acceptable losses" is a classic trope that Jormag shares with human villains throughout various media. It's not the opposite of it, it's a classic trope example of humanizing a villain.

Zhaitan wasn't humanized, but he just... wasn't. The way it was presented was, well, no presentation ultimately. We got the presentation of its minions more than Zhaitan.

Agreed. Zaitan was very elemental in his portrayal. He's the reason I would have initially defended A-nest descisions.

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@Fueki.4753 said:

@Dustfinger.9510 said:Zaitan was very elemental in his portrayal.I wish they had stayed the forces of nature Arenanet originally depicted them as.

Me too. They were a rare take on dragons that only D&D got close to. But even D&D dragons are more reptilian than elemental. D&D dragons seem more element aligned than elemental. ED's aren't reptilian at all. Before they had relatable personalities, they just seemed like raw primeval forces of nature. More like unknowlable elder gods than traditional dragons. Now, they seem like you could transfer their consciousness into a playable race with no issues.

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