I am Lost

I don't understand anymore the asuran chronology... due to all of these Rata ..... Cities !!! We have Rata Sum , Rata Novus, Rata Arcanum , Rata Primus..... Which Rata is the oldest? And what about the artwork of a certain instance, where we see an underground city attacked by Inquest Golems? I have heard about an old asuran city evacuated due to destroyers? What is recent, what is old? Are we still lacking of some asuran big cities hidden underground? I want answer. What about inquest creation? It was a good intention no?

Rata Pten would be the oldest. It's a pre-Cataclysm surface structure built by asura and, it seems, with dwarven relics within as well.

The "old asuran city evacuated due to destroyers" you heard about would likely be the Central Transfer Chamber, or Quora Sum. Those are two of six grand cathedral cities of the asura that existed underground before they were forced to the surface during the events of Eye of the North. All six were lost to the Great Destroyer then, or to Primordus 50 years later.

Rata Sum is the oldest post-surfacing city. It was founded during the events of and leading to Eye of the North in GW1.

Rata Novus was built shortly after GW1 by Zinn, who we met in GW1 and was exiled from Rata Sum. Note that Rata Novus is not one of the six aforementioned underground cities, despite being an underground city that was lost.

Rata Arcanum - less a city and more an outpost - was built by the people of Rata Novus, and expanded after Novus' fall to the chak.

Rata Primus is the most recent, not a city at all but a giant lab complex. It was built after the destruction of the city Thaumanova and the lab Crucible of Eternity, designed to further those researches and more. So it was built within the past five years even.

@hugo.4705 said:And what about the artwork of a certain instance, where we see an underground city attacked by Inquest Golems?

Are you referring to "this loading screen":https://imgur.com/SD0YsjV or something else? If that, then that's depicting the siege on Rata Primus. If something else, care to show?

I don't recall any artwork depicting an underground city under attack by golems - off the top of my head at least..

@hugo.4705 said:Are we still lacking of some asuran big cities hidden underground?

Yes, technically. We've not visited any of them in GW2.

@hugo.4705 said:I want answer. What about inquest creation? It was a good intention no?

Arguably. The Inquest's foremost goal is "the documentation of all things" with an addendum of "so we do not lose our knowledge like we did when Primordus forced us out of the Depths of Tyria". However as far as we know they've always been ranging from amoral to immoral.

Similar stance exists for the Nightmare Court - they were formed for freedom, a pretty noble intention, but their founding members all ranged from amoral to immoral people.

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@"hugo.4705" said:I want answer. What about inquest creation? It was a good intention no?

But the Inquest aren't just after knowledge for knowledge's sake. It's not enough to understand the Eternal Alchemy; understanding is just the tool they'll use to control it. What they uncover can, and has, done good things if it can be wrested away from them, but in their hands it's all for the explicit end of world domination. Good for asura, maybe, but not for anyone else.

@Aaron Ansari.1604 said:

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@"hugo.4705" said:I want answer. What about inquest creation? It was a good intention no?

@Aaron Ansari.1604 said:

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@"hugo.4705" said:I want answer. What about inquest creation? It was a good intention no?

"Where the colleges see power as a useful tool toward understanding the Eternal Alchemy—the Inquest sees power as a goal in and of itself. Inquest founders looked upon the amount of knowledge lost when Quora Sum was wiped out by the destroyers, and judged such a signal drop to be complete anathema to their purposes. Gathering information in its pure, crystalline form is their intention, and they will stop at nothing less than the sum of all knowledge. Indeed, the ultimate goal of Inquest research is to achieve control of the Eternal Alchemy, and with it, all of Tyria."

To me, that doesn't say "world domination" but rather "the ability to control the forces of the world". There's a fine line between the two, but a line all the same. The latter can very easily lead to the former, but the former is not the sole outcome of the latter.

Granted, it's pretty heavily established that many modern Inquest are out to rule the world, but we're speaking about the founders and the organization as a whole. Which is a different can of soup all together.

Ok thanks for information, here is the artwork I am talking about: At the beginning I believed it was in underground but on this one it seem to be the surface I'm kinda perturbed.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Defective_Golem_concept_art.jpgBy the way, some peoples notice that "rata sum" is an anagram of Mursatt, does all floating cube structures are from they or not?

@"hugo.4705" said:Ok thanks for information, here is the artwork I am talking about: At the beginning I believed it was in underground but on this one it seem to be the surface I'm kinda perturbed.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Defective_Golem_concept_art.jpgBy the way, some peoples notice that "rata sum" is an anagram of Mursatt, does all floating cube structures are from they or not?

If memory serves, that bit of art plays during the asura opening cutscene to represent those rampaging golems in Metrica that you tackle during the prologue.

None of the floating cube structures have anything to do with the mursaat. The anagram has lead some to theorize that the abandoned ruins that the asura built Rata Sum over might have been mursaat (although that is hotly contested), but those ruins are long gone now. The floating cube cities are entirely the work of modern asura.

Rata Sum is also latin for "I have calculated" and "I am certain". So far, there's been no relation between the mursaat and the ruins - the ruins match Rata Pten and the Central Transfer Chamber as well, both of which are asuran origin. There's some very subtle and hidden lore suggesting the asura had a presence around Orr (but not within) in the distant past but this presence for some reason disappeared - which would basically mean the asura settled in asuran ruins.

The other main contender is the Seers, due to an old dev comment along the lines of the ruins belonging to a failed race, and the Seers being the only known prominent race who we have no confirmed architectural samples from.

Granted, stairs would be a very odd choice for a race that seem to float, but on the other hand, mursaat ruins have stairs too. Maybe they liked to try out walking like normal beings when no one else was watching.

I don't recall any comment about it being to a "failed race". The only comment I recall was about them belonging to a "highly magical race". Which asura would count as.

The ruins belonging to any non-asura, however, presents a very confusing question of why the Central Transfer Chamber used the same models in GW1, and why Rata Pten - an asura outpost stated to be pre-Cataclysm - as well as the ruins in Lightfoot Passage - use the same ruin models as the ones found in the Tarnished Coast (be they for first surface generation structures, or the actual ruins inhabited). There were similar enough yet different enough models in both games that an exact duplicate would not be needed.

I could quite possibly be misremembering. Going digging, the only quote I found was "Who that preexisting architecture belonged to? We don't yet know. It could have been Orrian, the Seers or even the Mursaat. That is yet to be discovered, but one thing is for sure, there was once a civilization situated in the Tarnished Coast before the Asura arrived there."

It could very well be that Asuran architecture and style is derived from the ruins they found of an ancient race. So, before they became full civilized culture they came upon underground ruins of a seer city or something and built their civilization around that. Then it just so happens that they found a second ruin of the same type when they came to the surface.

That seems awfully contrived. Especially given that Rata Pten's existence proves that the asura had surfaced before the time of Eye of the North, it seems far more likely that the mix of above and just-underground ruins seen in Eye of the North as well as in Lightfoot Passage were originally asuran, and not "some ancient civilization that happened to be both above and underground that the asura happened to stumble upon and copy before going both above and below ground."

Not saying it isn't contrived, but there is evidence of at least one of the elder races having an existence spread wide across Tyria (should the evidence of dwarven architecture in Cantha hold true) and having structures and cities both above and below ground.

I permit to respond on this thread after a kinda disturbing discovery about Inquest, I've made a map of their outposts and It seems they aren't very present in charrs/norn lands and on Joko/Balthazar ones (every maps from PoF don't have Inquest, HoT too btw), so can we admit that asuran don't colonize these areas, and so no chance to find their architecture there? I've joined the map if someone is interested! :) https://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2018/11/1/1520890119-inquest-map.png

I'm going to counter that that map is only a list of known Inquest bases. Before this last chapter, we didn't know there was an Inquest lab in the Desert Highlands, but now there is. Out of curiosity, I actually tested walking under that waterfall and it was solid, so it seems they have hard light holograms (or ArenaNet only added the lab afterwards, but this is a more fun theory), and the trigger to pass through is the golem. The Inquest primarily operate out of asuran labs because that's where it's easiest to get it back to HQ, but there are labs scattered all over the place, isolated to prevent most people from interfering with the research.