Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons Discussion Thread: Siege Turtle

[Luke.4936]

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Edited October 10, 2021 by Luke.4936

[Dami.5046]

Psst. It's a fantasy game.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Nope.  Would you rather they were called Siege Tortoises? 

Perhaps, fins/short legs aren't conducive to jumping, or any differences between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.  🤷‍♂️

[Luke.4936]

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Edited October 10, 2021 by Luke.4936

[Astralporing.1957]

15 minutes ago, Luke.4936 said:

250 years is no where near enough time for evolution to cause meaningful changes to fundamental bone structures.

"Turtles are known to have originated around 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period" and they haven't changed all that much from then to the present day. Stop handwaiving oversights.

In Tyria, in a much shorter time we've managed to lose and gain a ton of races, including developing several generations of sentient, civilized ones. As far as we know there wasn't any triassic period here either.

Do you really think that, for example, dragons (and i am talking here about the normal ones, not even of the "elder" kind) developed according to evolution standarts we know from Earth?

It's not unrealistic to expect that the presence of magic, and the fact that it pretty much permeates all living things to a different degree, can influence the speed and direction of evolution (even to the point where it is possible for creatures to influence their own evolution vectors to some degree).

Edited October 8, 2021 by Astralporing.1957

[Dami.5046]

1 minute ago, Luke.4936 said:

there still needs to be cohesion, fantasy game or not. This is the same universe as it's prequel, so the creatures should be the same. 

I disagree. It's a game they can make a animal fat, thin ,purple with spots if they want. Did you care that we are riding dinosaurs or that huge bunnies don't exist? 

[phokus.8934]

2021 and not being able to shoot fireballs from your fingers.  Pathetic.

[Luke.4936]

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Edited October 10, 2021 by Luke.4936

[Luke.4936]

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Edited October 10, 2021 by Luke.4936

[Tyncale.1629]

Huh? I always thought a Tortoise and a Turtle were the same thing!  

[Ameepa.6793]

What if they all can just be called turtles on Tyria no matter if they are sea or land thingies? I mean even here on Earth on many languages they are all called the same and we're not even on Earth here and language isn't English. Space lizzards of Doom!

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Plenty of creatures have changed from Guild Wars to Guild Wars 2.  Just as areas/zones/maps/continents have.  Even races (see Asura). 

[Luke.4936]

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Edited October 10, 2021 by Luke.4936

[Dami.5046]

6 minutes ago, Luke.4936 said:

show me where "we were riding dinosaurs or huge bunnies" in GW1.

We didn't ride turtles in GW either, what's you point?.

Edited October 8, 2021 by Dami.5046

[Astralporing.1957]

10 minutes ago, Luke.4936 said:

I don't see how that first sentence has any relevence to changing established creatures from one game to another.

I pointed out that this is a world that is completely different than Earth, where the evolution seems to be moving at a much faster rate. And not even necesarily according to Darwinism. For all we know, in Tyria theories like Lamarckism or Michurinism may be much closer to how the evolution works there.

Hint:

Druids were humans that, through their worship of nature and Melandru managed to transform themselves into plantlike spirits (and probably into plantlike creatures first, because some of those spirits did leave their material forms behind). And that transformation took them at most several hundreds of years

Edited October 8, 2021 by Astralporing.1957

[Tyncale.1629]

6 minutes ago, Luke.4936 said:

No. Tortoises only live on land, Turtles live in the sea. Which is why the Luxons who lived on the Jade Sea used Turtles.

Ouch. 

Edited October 8, 2021 by Tyncale.1629

[Dami.5046]

• It has a miniature version: the Miniature Siege Turtle.
• In ancient Japanese mythology, there were gigantic turtles that carried heavy loads, much like the Siege Turtles.
• Siege turtles like carrots.
• The siege turtle appears to be a giant version of a Galápagos tortoise.
• Guild Wars 2 has a mounted version of the Siege Turtle based on this NPC.

from: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Siege_Turtle

 

 

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Edited October 8, 2021 by Dami.5046

[Luke.4936]

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Edited October 10, 2021 by Luke.4936

[Dami.5046]

3 minutes ago, Luke.4936 said:

My point is; we didn't ever ride dinosaurs or rabbits in GW1, so the devs had creative-freedom to design them however they wanted. But Siege Turtles are already established creatures that played a large role in GW1,  so they should have a cohesive design from one game to the next, since they share the same universe.

 

 

The game shares the same universe correct, however apart from a few names GW2 is a different game to GW in alot of ways.

 

[Luke.4936]

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Edited October 10, 2021 by Luke.4936

[kharmin.7683]

So, to answer the OP's topic, it doesn't seem that there are too many people disappointed if any at all.

[Dami.5046]

13 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

So, to answer the OP's topic, it doesn't seem that there are too many people disappointed if any at all.

Can't be disappointed if you haven't actually seen much of it to start with.🤷‍♂️ 

[Danikat.8537]

1 hour ago, Luke.4936 said:

250 years is no where near enough time for evolution to cause meaningful changes to fundamental bone structures.

"Turtles are known to have originated around 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period" and they haven't changed all that much from then to the present day. Stop handwaiving oversights.

You're missing two important points. Firstly most real turtles and tortoises faced very little evolutionary pressure in that time, they found a niche they could live in and it's stayed roughly the same since then, so they did too. Plenty of other species have changed dramatically, even splitting into entirely new species, in the same time. For example all whale and dolphin species evolved from an animal a bit like a hippo which exists 56 million years ago, and it 'only' took about 10 million years for them to go from mostly terrestrial to entirely aquatic.

Unlike real turtles and tortoises siege turtles faced tremendous evolutionary pressure when their entire environment changed from mostly aquatic to entirely terrestrial when the Jade Wind turned all the water into Jade. They must have been partially terrestrial before then to have survived at all (all the aquatic animals died out, most of them trapped in the jade) but since then they've had to adapt to living entirely on land. Even in GW1 they clearly had feet like real-life tortoises rather than flippers. Yes there's concept art of siege turtles with flippers but that never made it into the game so it's not representative of what they actually look like, just one of several possibilities an artist drew when asked to imagine a siege turtle.

Secondly and probably more importantly as @Astralporing.1957 pointed out siege turtles are domesticated and therefore subject to selective breeding which can produce dramatic changes much more quickly than evolution even though it's the same underlying process. Just look at how quickly new breeds of domestic animals appear. For example toy poodles didn't exist before the early 20th century and Bengal cats (domestic cats with wild markings) were first 'created' in the mid-70's and by the late 80's were established enough to be considered a unique breed and not simply a variant on an existing one.

I don't find it at all hard to believe that the Luxons would selectively breed their siege turtles for better mobility on land, or that in 250  years that could produce relatively minor changes like a more upright stance with the legs under the body instead of splayed out to the sides.

[Luke.4936]

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Edited October 10, 2021 by Luke.4936

[Astralporing.1957]

36 minutes ago, Luke.4936 said:

but that transformation was through the worship of the Gods, not from Tyrian evolution.

Sure, but it clearly shows that there are ways to influence the "natural" evolution (whatever it actually in Tyria is). How do you know something like that did not happen in case of Siege Turtles? Especially seeing as they are a domesticated species, so, definitely a subject to targeted breeding, as well as any other methods a magic-knowing society could potentially use to shape a creature's evolution. Not to mention the Jade Sea itself seems to be highly magically charged, which can have its own influence as well.

 

9 minutes ago, Luke.4936 said:

I find that very hard to believe actually. Especially when the Jade Sea is supposed to be melting. Why go to all that trouble, when the current Siege Turtles worked perfectly fine too.

Dogs worked perfectly fine too, you know. And yet a lot of effort was put into creating new races that look nothing like the original breeds. And as for melting parts of the Jade Sea - Luxons (and whoever came after them) did not need Siege Turtles for overwater travel. They originally started with perfectly fine boats, remember? What they wanted was "land boats" that could help them haul stuff over the Jade Sea crystallized plateaus.