The Echovald Wilds GW2 Era

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

6 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

I think there is a distinction there that the Movement of the World was an in-universe document at the Durmand Priory which was recent enough to have mentioned the Sylvari. So information on central Tyria - which has certainly changed a lot since Zhaitan's rise - is fairly up-to-date. Elonian information was fairly lacking, but the land route from Ebonhawke to Amnoon seems to have been intact until relatively recently, and at the very least they seemed to know that Joko was still in control.

 

Information on Cantha, on the other hand, seems to be a pretty solid "We have no frelling idea what's been happening there since Zhaitan rose, if it wasn't for the occasional dead sailor washing ashore it could have sunk beneath the waves for all we know". So it's not surprising that things have changed since the last the authors of the Movement had received from Cantha, around 1219AE. As long as the indications are there that the isolationist policies were a thing, I don't think it's exactly a betrayal of expectations that the status quo didn't hold for another hundred years.😛

Well, most information on Elona was non-existing since Joko began his reign, which began 60 years after GW1. That'd be 190 years. Though I guess the few groups of refugees escaping would tell us more, the last being 50 years before the game, but they didn't actually give us lore and The Movement only details Elona up until Joko's conquest of Elona 190 years prior and one brief line about Elona's reaction to Zhaitan's rise (which in the context of the Movement, was 150 years prior, which is when the last context of Cantha is too).

 

From a watsonian perspective, yes the changes make sense.

From a doylist perspective, we were told "these are the plothooks for when GW2 finally gets to Cantha" and then when GW2 does finally gets to Cantha we get told "these plothooks were all resolved before the game". The other plothooks for other locations remained and continued as expected. These didn't.

That's the issue causing disappointment. 

And what's worse is that for the first half of GW2's current lifecycle, plothooks remained stagnant and unchanging while the plot didn't focus specifically on it. Only since Season 4 have plots - some being those which people were looking forward to experiencing firsthand - are getting solved off-screen. Though very few of them overall, certainly not every single one like the case with Cantha apparently is.

[draxynnic.3719]

The impression I had from the Movement was that while there wasn't much information coming from inside Elona, people from central Tyria certainly knew that Joko was still in charge. It makes sense, for a number of reasons, that agents from Tyria - both of national intelligence services like the Ash Legion and Shining Blade as well as order agents - would be keeping an eye on the borders, since the terrain is reasonably traversable and Joko is a potential threat to be watched.

 

Cantha, though, was literally 'the last we heard of them was over a century ago'.

 

I don't think there was any assumption that Cantha would remain stagnant over all that time. Canthan emperors aren't immortal liches, and there was an established tendency for new emperors overturning the policies of their predecessor(s). So I don't think that the Movement was intended to be a promise that when we got to Cantha the MoP would still be in charge. What it does do, though, is provide a reason for the Dominion of Winds to exist, and provide some setup for the situation in Cantha when we get to it.

 

It's not the only case of a plot thread being resolved over the centuries of history. Look at the charr-human war, for instance - Ascalon City fell, the anti-shaman rebellion succeeded, and eventually a ceasefire was agreed on, all recorded in a history book without PC involvement. If we'd reversed things and we'd been playing from the Canthan perspective all this time and this was the 'return to Tyria' expansion, we'd likely be expecting the charr to be major antagonists...or at least hostile.

 

ArenaNet has always used an element of unreliable narrator, and in the case of the Movement, the unreliability comes from its information being a century out of date.

 

In the case of Cantha, there's what, ONE plot hook that was resolved offscreen - the MoP control over the nation. It's a big one, to be sure, but evidently ArenaNet didn't want to do a third 'despotic ruler' plot right away. The scars from Usoku's reign, however, are still there, and we may still have to deal with some of that fallout.