GW2 – Story Over Time

Guild Wars 2 posts do fairly well for some weird reason (but not as well as Dark Tower posts, go figure), so here’s another one. If you aren’t caught up with GW2 there might be some accidental spoilers below.

I mentioned before that I’ve been re-playing the Living World Season 2. Eventually I’ll be uploading them to my YouTube channel, because hey, why not. “Pivot to video” and all that. I actually got six whole views on one of my Path of Fire videos!

Anyway, playing these episodes now, with the benefit of knowing what I know about the future story, is an eye-opening experience. Suddenly a lot of things make sense. Not everything-but some things.

For example, in Echoes of the Past, when I went into Glint’s lair. (Before all the anger over the last boss.) I actually know who Glint is now! And the exposition between Marjory and Kasmeer talking about Destiny’s Edge, Glint, and Kralkatorrik actually made sense! Kind of. In a high-level way. At least I know who and what a “Kralkatorrik” is, which I’m quite sure I didn’t when I first played that episode. And when I ran into Ogden Stonefacewhatever in the library, I knew him from the prologue in Path of Fire! (At which time I was quite sure it was the first whole dwarf I had ever seen in GW2.) The exposition between Kas and Jory went over the highlights of what dwarves are and why they’re stone and why they’re all dead, which put the mysterious Elder Scrolls-style dwarves in better context.

I think the mistake I keep making is assuming that each new game release of GW2 will have a self-contained story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But that’s not the case at all. Every new release contains another “middle.” It’s as if the story of Guild Wars 2 is unfolding at an incredibly slow-motion pace, over the course of five years. You would think after five years of the game being out, there would be a lot of stories told. But when I look back at Season 2, compare it with Heart of Thorns, Season 3, and Path of Fire, which you’d think would all be separate and distinct stories, it’s as if they are all small chapters of one large story that somebody wrote a long time ago. (Perhaps that book that Bhagpuss keeps recommending, which I don’t want to get because it’s more fun to keep reminding ArenaNet where backstory is entirely missing from their game. :)

As one example: In Living World Season 3, Braham basically told us (the Commander) to go take a flying leap off a short pier somewhere around the middle of the season. There was never any resolution for that, and from what I remember, we never heard from Braham again after he got that scroll in those caves. We went through the entire Path of Fire story with barely a word about Braham. So that’s still hanging out there somewhere, waiting for a resolution. Is he going to re-join the fold in Living World Season 4, one, two, or three years from now? Is he going to be the new Big Bad, a bitter and broken Norn because he didn’t get to die fighting Jormag? Will there be an epic guild fight between Destiny’s Edge 2.0 and Dragon’s Watch 1.0? Who knows? But it sure seems like the kind of thing that should have some sort of resolution during the course of the past, let’s see, roughly two years of game updates.

ArenaNet seems to be counting on us to hold a whole lot of story in our memories over a very long period of time. Maybe people who play every release 20 times on 20 different characters can do that, but l’il ol’ me who only plays them once (if that hehe) is left out in the cold.

P. S. I am back up to 30 gold from dailies! I’m rich again!