Tyria and It's Creamy Nougat Center.

Now this question has been sitting at the back of my mind and has recently jumped up into the forefront but what can we expect in reference under the surface of Tyria? I have heard before that the world was hollow but that leaves a lot to wonder. Is there just the surface with a couple of miles of ground to make up an underground but there is absolutely nothing in the center? Physics would be off...especially when science is still a big thing in the world. Or is it still predominantly rock that has vast amounts of open areas but the very center is the molten core (that would satisfy the demands of physics and such)? What really makes me wonder is three things I have run across. In Divinity's Reach, you go to the celebratory area (where you first encounter Scarlet) and you see the big hole in the ground. How deep does that go? What's the story behind it? Rata Sum, you go to the very bottom level of the cube city and you can see that there is more deeper and deeper. Again, what is the story? And the last example is when I recently ran across S.S. Topsy (Tipsy?) Turny (Turvy?). Just that area alone hints at a time that people had lived there. Ran across houses built into the walls of the caverns and of course the depths that are there (but you die if you go to deep). Is there any lore to define this? Or is this one of those things that we may have to wait on ArenaNet to explain in a new LS or expansion?

I heard a story around a campfire somewhere that the big hole in DR used to be the Canthan district but it incurred the wrath of some vocal minority who felt it resembled an Earth culture too much and their nagging sank the district into the bowels of the Earth. Or something like that.

@"Zoltar MacRoth.7146" said:I heard a story around a campfire somewhere that the big hole in DR used to be the Canthan district but it incurred the wrath of some vocal minority who felt it resembled an Earth culture too much and their nagging sank the district into the bowels of the Earth. Or something like that.

Yup, that's exactly what happened. Have to give ArenaNet credit for having style, though. "You don't like our designs because heaven forbid it might offend somebody? Okay! Everything in the district collapses and almost everyone in it dies. Happy now? :innocent:"

It's like sending the old god of Death itself to permaban trolls in GW1.

Given we have volcanoes, we can assume some kind of core similar to our own. We know from GW1 great Asuran cities existed in the depths and that Primordus has cleared great tracts from underground and is now of monstrous size compared to any other ED.

I would love a subterranean expansion exploring the Depths. I'm pretty sure that wont happen as I can't see them adding in an entirely new map layer separate to the existing one, but it would still be cool (unless Primordus has destroyed too much, which given his size is entirely possible)

I think it's likely that Tyria has a molten core, abiding by physics much like we know it. This is evident by such features as mountain ranges, which are formed through shifting plates, and volcanic activity, which suggests there is lots of pressure from magma.

The sink hole in Divinity's Reach was filled in by the Crown Pavilion, which was open as a holiday for a couple of years. As for the story behind it, that part of the city collapsed in what in a sink hole, but fortunately they had warning about it before hand and, I believe, there were no casualties. Rata Sum is actually floating quite high in the air, so the bottom of the city is actually still above ground level. The city itself is over a large lake. I don't know about the history of the Silverwastes, or the people who lived there so I can't really comment on that, however I can let you know that I'm very confident there is living story content in which you go deeper than any of the previous mentioned locations.

@kapri.5918 said:I have heard before that the world was hollow but that leaves a lot to wonder.

I think you're mistaking the existence of the Depths of Tyria for it being hollow, because there's nothing in the lore to suggest it being hollow, and the Depths are just a series of gargantuan caverns underground; we don't know how deep the Depths go, but they likely remain in the crust of the world, or at best the upper mantle. Take Earth for example - the continental crust can be up to 30 miles thick, well large enough to house a series of tunnels that are wide enough to house a few citadel city the size of upper-cube Rata Sum.

As others have said, given the existence of volcanos, and mentions of continental drifts, Tyria likely has a molten core and a tectonic plate system as Earth does.

@kapri.5918 said:In Divinity's Reach, you go to the celebratory area (where you first encounter Scarlet) and you see the big hole in the ground. How deep does that go? What's the story behind it?

The lore for it is that it's basically a giant sinkhole. There's suggestions that it was artifically made but it never got delved into and any time it would have, would have been the White Mantle plot - a lot of loose threads created surrounding the White Mantle, bandits, and Shining Blade were left forgotten and ignored sadly.

The development for it, however, was that it was designed as a Canthan district (in lore, Canthan and arts district), but the asian audience apparently hated the meshing of cultures it had (as it took from Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and others combined). Anet didn't have the time to fully rework it, so they turned it into a giant hole. This hole later got changed into the Crown Pavilion we now see.

Given the depth we see when the Crown Pavilion is open, it's probably only about a few hundred feet deep.

@kapri.5918 said:Rata Sum, you go to the very bottom level of the cube city and you can see that there is more deeper and deeper. Again, what is the story?

There was a comment from Jeff Grubb about that. Basically, Rata Sum is a city that's still under construction. It only uses up roughly the top half of the cube on its corner, and golems are down below digging out more of it to build more rooms.

@kapri.5918 said:And the last example is when I recently ran across S.S. Topsy (Tipsy?) Turny (Turvy?). Just that area alone hints at a time that people had lived there. Ran across houses built into the walls of the caverns and of course the depths that are there (but you die if you go to deep). Is there any lore to define this? Or is this one of those things that we may have to wait on ArenaNet to explain in a new LS or expansion?

Well the Depths of Tyria has ancient civilizations' structures underground far deeper than that area, and it's not uncommon for ancient structures of a thousand or so years to get buried (or with ArenaNet's super-skewed frame of timespan reference, a couple decades).