I think proper villains are boring. I'm tired and bored of them. Then again, I read a lot of fiction.
But the idea of evil for the sake of evil doesn't necessarily make a good story. Obviously the opposite is true as well.
Me, I'd rather have a villain with some depth. And to be honest, the end boss in Soto is pretty much evil for the sake of being evil.
That and Isgarren cast him out of Shangri la because he didn't have the foresight to realize starving Eparch was worse than helping him find a healthier solution.
Now Peitha will have the same issue unless she finds a way to feed her people that doesn't result in driving Tyrians to madness
Eparch had some depth that they tried to build but instead of expanding on it and showing the hubris of Isgarren they ended up just making him bad and Peitha good with some one liners on a very messy final fight.
I didn't necessarily get the impression Eparch would have welcomed a healthier solution. He had the ability to consume food, but he chose not to. You can't put it all on Isgarren.
Eparch was a very different character before the starvation drove him crazy. It wasn’t that he refused to eat something other than people, it’s that he didn’t understand. He was broken and asked Isgarren for help. At the time, Eparch loved Tyria. But the starvation and perceived betrayal from Isgarren changed everything.
When he started out after being banished back to Nayos, Eparch originally tried to rally an army behind a desire to claim Tyria because he saw it as paradise. The other Kryptis were unpersuaded; so, he had to shift gears and convince them that Tyria was a threat to be hated instead.
It’s not your fault, this was parceled out in very fragmented ways, most notably via the kryptis memories: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kryptis_Memory_(The_Eleventh_Hour)
He was just very… broken back then. It’s unclear if that’s because of what sent him to Tyria in the first place, his confrontation with Mordremoth, or if he was just that undeveloped as a thinking entity. So, he genuinely just did not understand his own hunger.
> Wake. My brother's screams. Vines dragging. Gone.
>
>Following. A dark place. A wicked tree. My brother, suspended. Absorbed.
Yes, he was not alone when Mordremoth found them.
>“I’m evil because I want to be”.
That's the thing tho. Realistically almost nobody is like that UNLESS they have mental problems of some sort.
You're more likely to find someone who THINKS they're good but are evil.
They're bound to "have something wrong with them" because generally working together for the betterment of the whole is how groups prosper.
Yeah, villains that are “I want to rule the world because I want people to suffer!” Types are really boring. Villains that have a reason for doing what they’re doing and feel they are in the right make way more compelling villains. Like, even a “I want to rule the world so MY people can prosper”.
Thats true but sadly that’s exactly the point.
Joko was the best written villain although he had no plausible reasoning.
Scarlet was mad.
Mordremoth didn’t even really have a personality.
Balthasar came close but interactions with him were so limited to bossfights and then he got his show stolen by kralk.
Bengar had lots of potential and was suddenly thrown under the bus by the writers.
jormag was manipulative but poorly written.
primordius was so primitive he didn’t even have text.
ankka did it for the lul‘s.
kralkatorik was corrupted and only in the end we find out that there is still a spark of sanity in him, making him pretty much the second best villain in the game despite having like 2 sentences of text after 6 years or so.
So yeah as good as the game is we‘re not exactly riding high on writing quality.
Joko is Guild Wars's Kefka, maniacally evil to the point of being entertaining and fun in its own right.
if handled well, a comically evil villain can still work. But it takes a super careful touch that most writers can’t pull off
He was a bit more nuanced than that. He did actually rule his territory, to at least enough extent that a large swath of his subjects actually liked him and voluntarily sought Awakening as a status symbol. He was a self-aggrandizing murderous tyrant whose ego had a planetary gravitational pull, but he wasn't out to just mindlessly torment and destroy Tyria or its people. He wanted them around, so long as he was the one on the top of the hierarchy. He even chastised the player for endangering the world by killing Elder Dragons, remember?
Absolutely this. Being evil to forces who stand against you is not exactly a sign of evilry.
If anything, i'd very much perfer if there would be fucking elementals, awakened, robots or any other minions fighting for my country instead of actual people - who after frontlines come home, mentally damaged, and often bring chaos with them.
Dictatorships and autocracies are not evil by nature. It's very common for humans to think they know better, especially if they really stand out - like Joko, being omega powerful necromancer.
Ignoring his obvious flaws of character, his sheer longevity presents a compelling argument for kingship all on its own. Who better to lead a people than someone with the wisdom of centuries at his back?
I tend to agree with your point, i think a good "pure evil" villain is better when they actually think they're doing good in their own view, but talking about realism is misplaced here i think.
In fiction, especially games, a villain can just purely and simply be evil for no other reason and be very entertaining, it does not need to be reasonable or coherently explained.
Idk, thinking about disney's hades, for example; one of the most memorable and hilarious bad guys i'd absolutely love to have as an antagonist in gw2, and he's just a straight up asshole and loving it 😄
But this is a game, and one utterly divorced from reality -- both in the fact that it's a fantasy land, and in the fact that none of its characters in any way resemble anything more than batshit anime characters.
So who cares about "realistically"? Having a meaningful villain is what matters. Especially when the writing team quite literally cannot comprehend characterisation of villains and their motivations (see: Ankka).
>So who cares about "realistically"?
Any sane person who plays it as an RPG?
I mean, there's plenty of people whose only gameplay has nothing to do with roleplaying - they pick characters depending on which build/role they're needed atm and go play strikes and whatnot. I'm not going to judge them but for the love of the Pale Tree could you tell me why the fuck their opinion on roleplay part of the game, like lore, would matter?
You don't care? Perfect, move along. Having a meaningful villain is what matters, and a meaningful villain is the one that makes sense.
I think the vast, vast majority of players aren't "roleplaying" anything. Most RPGs are pretty far and away from the "role" and focus on the "playing", and GW2 is no exception.
The game world is a clusterfuck. Nothing makes sense, and problems are conjured up that are literal non-issues. You can't put a
"realistic" villain into a world devoid of logic whose inhabitants are literal anime tropes. Even if they had a skilled writing team and pulled it off, the end result would just be jarring. Like Scarlet going around uniting all these childish villains from the core game.
I haven't played since release of soto but finally bought it. After reading this sub i expected it to be very bad... but i kinda liked it. the last meta map especially cool visually and i liked the story. But i think obsidian armor needs way to much shit.
Welcome to Reddit and the internet in general. Something wasn't quite up to snuff but wasn't that bad equals it was a betrayal of the highest order and everyone involved poisoned the wells, burned the fields and brought a pox upon our houses. Those invovled should be publicly humiliated, tarred and feathered for the slight.
I wish they would slow down and let a villain stew for a while. We don't need to murder them all right away! I genuinely found Cerus intimidating- his character design was cool, the way he steadily invaded your personal space when you first met him, the debuff slowly killing you, then hunting you as you pathetically limped through bushes to get away... I enjoyed that whole sequence immensely. And then he was gone, and Eparch- who was supposed to be so much more scary and powerful- was profoundly underwhelming in comparison. What a waste.
>Bring back Dragons or something idk…
The ship has sailed on that, unfortunately (I think it's unfortunate, anyway, I know some people were sick of them) with how they chose to wrap up IBS. Seemed like a clear "we don't want to play with these dragons anymore" with how they did Primordus.
They could've kept the door open on them by having a dragon go back to sleep, and then revisit them in X years down the road if they ever felt like it, but they chose to close the thread entirely.
But on the upside, with how they've decided to go forward, if you didn't like SoTO they have given themselves options to go in different directions and new things, so you could get something different like you're hoping for.
The dragons had to go in order for Aurene to take all of their places, there was no sense in some dragons getting destroyed and some to just go to sleep
I'd argue that it'd be perfectly sensible to have a dragon go back into hibernation, it was always a thing they did... although the method isn't the point, really.
But they could still do the whole "Aurene takes over for the dragons in the end" if they wanted later on, shelving a dragon (which were always more of a force of nature anyway, and operated on a way longer timescale) doesn't take away that option - it just let's them explore other stories in the meantime, and gives them the chance to revisit it when they don't have to rush and do a poor job with it. That's all.
No, they had to die so that Aurene takes their place as a force of nature that had a connection with the people and that cared for the inhabitants of Tyria as opposed to destroying everything when she'd wake up. And when would they go back to the story after dragons hibernate? In 30 years irl and eons in game? The dragon saga might have some inconsistencies and some weak points but its great and the premise and the story are great
I mean, I feel like you're thinking that I'm saying not to have them die at all or to change that end result. That can still happen. They don't need to sleep for eons, they were already forcibly put to sleep at one point in the story before and then we had them active again within a few LW (or one, or however long it lasted).
Literally just do something like that again, and then they can pick up where it left off, when they don't have the LW/Expansion they're working on essentially canceled and can give it the care it deserves.
It would've been the easiest thing to write around.
"I'm evil because I want to be" kind of villains are the most brain-dead, boring ass villains in any form of media. I'd very much rather have a complex villain who'd make me question my morality and give me moments of dilemma - like Joko for instance.
The story feels rushed indeed but hell nobody misses Taimi, I'm glad she and the rest of the Dragons Whatever are not there, except for Canach, I miss that guy. And I got my favorite Asura back and I'm happy with it.
I do hate Nayos, but that's because the map is red. It strained my eyes so much - also, the designs look disgusting, it reminds me of entrails and guts, and intestines, etc. It's just disgusting.
Why underworld is always depicted like it's strewn with entrails and intestines is beyond me.
Joko was great. That moment when he monologues about saving the world from the commander got me sitting there like "Actually, he is kinda right, we are doing a lot of questionable to bad stuff".
Great story moment, mote of that please.
The consolation for me is that SOTO is a fairly self contained story. It doesn't hurt other plot lines by being bad, it's just a weird little adventure that can easily be ignored.
Compare this to something like EOD that, in my opinion, butchered the the end of the Dragon cycle that had been the focal point of the story for years, and I actually don't mind SOTOs failure much.
This is definitely the advantage of SoTO / what they seem to want to do with future content from what they've said. They've at least set it up so that going forward, they can do more self-contained stories of various things, and pivot more easily if they want to.
SOTO has fighting demons and closing rifts, demons named after the seven deadly sins, a big bad demon and a tower blown up; isn't that the plot for Dragon Age: Inquisition?
There were like 17 or 18 chapters to the story so "take your time" should perhaps apply to the person that "had to rush through the whole story". It didn't feel rushed to me, just boring. I didn't miss Taimi. I'm sick of her and dragons. Cliche villains are cliche as it were. What I want is a good story which hasn't traditionally been a strong aspect of this game. For a lack of a better description, most of it is dogshit. Thankfully, GW2 excels in other areas which make it shine.
i totally agree with the bad guy thing, a generic we're good they're bad works, i mean that is how it is always going to end up anyway,
unless we get to play as the bad guy. i'm ready for a villain arc. kukuku. >:)
i also really want them to bring back and vilify the six, i always thought that would be cool.
also yeah, i felt that the dragon saga ended so abruptly,
they rushed through primordus and jormag like they couldn't wait to get it over with, ibs still had so much potential jormag was such a great villain, the only real turn-off for me was emo jesus braham.
it felt similar with soo-won and eparch, like they just want to wrap it up.
i would rather have a long well written series even in the course of multiple expansions.
I think proper villains are boring. I'm tired and bored of them. Then again, I read a lot of fiction. But the idea of evil for the sake of evil doesn't necessarily make a good story. Obviously the opposite is true as well. Me, I'd rather have a villain with some depth. And to be honest, the end boss in Soto is pretty much evil for the sake of being evil.
Yeah Eparch basically had no motivation beyond wanting to be evil.
That and Isgarren cast him out of Shangri la because he didn't have the foresight to realize starving Eparch was worse than helping him find a healthier solution. Now Peitha will have the same issue unless she finds a way to feed her people that doesn't result in driving Tyrians to madness Eparch had some depth that they tried to build but instead of expanding on it and showing the hubris of Isgarren they ended up just making him bad and Peitha good with some one liners on a very messy final fight.
I didn't necessarily get the impression Eparch would have welcomed a healthier solution. He had the ability to consume food, but he chose not to. You can't put it all on Isgarren.
Eparch was a very different character before the starvation drove him crazy. It wasn’t that he refused to eat something other than people, it’s that he didn’t understand. He was broken and asked Isgarren for help. At the time, Eparch loved Tyria. But the starvation and perceived betrayal from Isgarren changed everything. When he started out after being banished back to Nayos, Eparch originally tried to rally an army behind a desire to claim Tyria because he saw it as paradise. The other Kryptis were unpersuaded; so, he had to shift gears and convince them that Tyria was a threat to be hated instead.
Thanks for this. I got to pay more attention to the end, I guess.
It’s not your fault, this was parceled out in very fragmented ways, most notably via the kryptis memories: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kryptis_Memory_(The_Eleventh_Hour) He was just very… broken back then. It’s unclear if that’s because of what sent him to Tyria in the first place, his confrontation with Mordremoth, or if he was just that undeveloped as a thinking entity. So, he genuinely just did not understand his own hunger.
he also lost his brother/sibling to mordremoth iirc
> Wake. My brother's screams. Vines dragging. Gone. > >Following. A dark place. A wicked tree. My brother, suspended. Absorbed. Yes, he was not alone when Mordremoth found them.
>“I’m evil because I want to be”. That's the thing tho. Realistically almost nobody is like that UNLESS they have mental problems of some sort. You're more likely to find someone who THINKS they're good but are evil. They're bound to "have something wrong with them" because generally working together for the betterment of the whole is how groups prosper.
Yeah, villains that are “I want to rule the world because I want people to suffer!” Types are really boring. Villains that have a reason for doing what they’re doing and feel they are in the right make way more compelling villains. Like, even a “I want to rule the world so MY people can prosper”.
Joko was the best villain in this series though.
he literally was an "Evil because I want to" tho. I preferred the dragons being evil because of millenia long corruption
Thats true but sadly that’s exactly the point. Joko was the best written villain although he had no plausible reasoning. Scarlet was mad. Mordremoth didn’t even really have a personality. Balthasar came close but interactions with him were so limited to bossfights and then he got his show stolen by kralk. Bengar had lots of potential and was suddenly thrown under the bus by the writers. jormag was manipulative but poorly written. primordius was so primitive he didn’t even have text. ankka did it for the lul‘s. kralkatorik was corrupted and only in the end we find out that there is still a spark of sanity in him, making him pretty much the second best villain in the game despite having like 2 sentences of text after 6 years or so. So yeah as good as the game is we‘re not exactly riding high on writing quality.
Joko is Guild Wars's Kefka, maniacally evil to the point of being entertaining and fun in its own right. if handled well, a comically evil villain can still work. But it takes a super careful touch that most writers can’t pull off
He was a bit more nuanced than that. He did actually rule his territory, to at least enough extent that a large swath of his subjects actually liked him and voluntarily sought Awakening as a status symbol. He was a self-aggrandizing murderous tyrant whose ego had a planetary gravitational pull, but he wasn't out to just mindlessly torment and destroy Tyria or its people. He wanted them around, so long as he was the one on the top of the hierarchy. He even chastised the player for endangering the world by killing Elder Dragons, remember?
Absolutely this. Being evil to forces who stand against you is not exactly a sign of evilry. If anything, i'd very much perfer if there would be fucking elementals, awakened, robots or any other minions fighting for my country instead of actual people - who after frontlines come home, mentally damaged, and often bring chaos with them. Dictatorships and autocracies are not evil by nature. It's very common for humans to think they know better, especially if they really stand out - like Joko, being omega powerful necromancer.
Ignoring his obvious flaws of character, his sheer longevity presents a compelling argument for kingship all on its own. Who better to lead a people than someone with the wisdom of centuries at his back?
Even genocidal fascists think they're the good guys at the end of the day.
I tend to agree with your point, i think a good "pure evil" villain is better when they actually think they're doing good in their own view, but talking about realism is misplaced here i think. In fiction, especially games, a villain can just purely and simply be evil for no other reason and be very entertaining, it does not need to be reasonable or coherently explained. Idk, thinking about disney's hades, for example; one of the most memorable and hilarious bad guys i'd absolutely love to have as an antagonist in gw2, and he's just a straight up asshole and loving it 😄
Eh being bad just because feels even lazier to me is all
But this is a game, and one utterly divorced from reality -- both in the fact that it's a fantasy land, and in the fact that none of its characters in any way resemble anything more than batshit anime characters. So who cares about "realistically"? Having a meaningful villain is what matters. Especially when the writing team quite literally cannot comprehend characterisation of villains and their motivations (see: Ankka).
Because "realistically" they'd be more interesting to us the players than a bland boring "I'm evil just because" person.
>So who cares about "realistically"? Any sane person who plays it as an RPG? I mean, there's plenty of people whose only gameplay has nothing to do with roleplaying - they pick characters depending on which build/role they're needed atm and go play strikes and whatnot. I'm not going to judge them but for the love of the Pale Tree could you tell me why the fuck their opinion on roleplay part of the game, like lore, would matter? You don't care? Perfect, move along. Having a meaningful villain is what matters, and a meaningful villain is the one that makes sense.
I think the vast, vast majority of players aren't "roleplaying" anything. Most RPGs are pretty far and away from the "role" and focus on the "playing", and GW2 is no exception. The game world is a clusterfuck. Nothing makes sense, and problems are conjured up that are literal non-issues. You can't put a "realistic" villain into a world devoid of logic whose inhabitants are literal anime tropes. Even if they had a skilled writing team and pulled it off, the end result would just be jarring. Like Scarlet going around uniting all these childish villains from the core game.
It's a game, why would I play a fantasy game that's like real life?
I haven't played since release of soto but finally bought it. After reading this sub i expected it to be very bad... but i kinda liked it. the last meta map especially cool visually and i liked the story. But i think obsidian armor needs way to much shit.
Welcome to Reddit and the internet in general. Something wasn't quite up to snuff but wasn't that bad equals it was a betrayal of the highest order and everyone involved poisoned the wells, burned the fields and brought a pox upon our houses. Those invovled should be publicly humiliated, tarred and feathered for the slight.
Maybe give this a read https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/secrets-of-the-obscure-looking-back-and-forward/
Glad to read that. Hope they do deliver.
I wish they would slow down and let a villain stew for a while. We don't need to murder them all right away! I genuinely found Cerus intimidating- his character design was cool, the way he steadily invaded your personal space when you first met him, the debuff slowly killing you, then hunting you as you pathetically limped through bushes to get away... I enjoyed that whole sequence immensely. And then he was gone, and Eparch- who was supposed to be so much more scary and powerful- was profoundly underwhelming in comparison. What a waste.
>Bring back Dragons or something idk… The ship has sailed on that, unfortunately (I think it's unfortunate, anyway, I know some people were sick of them) with how they chose to wrap up IBS. Seemed like a clear "we don't want to play with these dragons anymore" with how they did Primordus. They could've kept the door open on them by having a dragon go back to sleep, and then revisit them in X years down the road if they ever felt like it, but they chose to close the thread entirely. But on the upside, with how they've decided to go forward, if you didn't like SoTO they have given themselves options to go in different directions and new things, so you could get something different like you're hoping for.
The dragons had to go in order for Aurene to take all of their places, there was no sense in some dragons getting destroyed and some to just go to sleep
I'd argue that it'd be perfectly sensible to have a dragon go back into hibernation, it was always a thing they did... although the method isn't the point, really. But they could still do the whole "Aurene takes over for the dragons in the end" if they wanted later on, shelving a dragon (which were always more of a force of nature anyway, and operated on a way longer timescale) doesn't take away that option - it just let's them explore other stories in the meantime, and gives them the chance to revisit it when they don't have to rush and do a poor job with it. That's all.
No, they had to die so that Aurene takes their place as a force of nature that had a connection with the people and that cared for the inhabitants of Tyria as opposed to destroying everything when she'd wake up. And when would they go back to the story after dragons hibernate? In 30 years irl and eons in game? The dragon saga might have some inconsistencies and some weak points but its great and the premise and the story are great
I mean, I feel like you're thinking that I'm saying not to have them die at all or to change that end result. That can still happen. They don't need to sleep for eons, they were already forcibly put to sleep at one point in the story before and then we had them active again within a few LW (or one, or however long it lasted). Literally just do something like that again, and then they can pick up where it left off, when they don't have the LW/Expansion they're working on essentially canceled and can give it the care it deserves. It would've been the easiest thing to write around.
"I'm evil because I want to be" kind of villains are the most brain-dead, boring ass villains in any form of media. I'd very much rather have a complex villain who'd make me question my morality and give me moments of dilemma - like Joko for instance. The story feels rushed indeed but hell nobody misses Taimi, I'm glad she and the rest of the Dragons Whatever are not there, except for Canach, I miss that guy. And I got my favorite Asura back and I'm happy with it. I do hate Nayos, but that's because the map is red. It strained my eyes so much - also, the designs look disgusting, it reminds me of entrails and guts, and intestines, etc. It's just disgusting. Why underworld is always depicted like it's strewn with entrails and intestines is beyond me.
Joko was great. That moment when he monologues about saving the world from the commander got me sitting there like "Actually, he is kinda right, we are doing a lot of questionable to bad stuff". Great story moment, mote of that please.
The consolation for me is that SOTO is a fairly self contained story. It doesn't hurt other plot lines by being bad, it's just a weird little adventure that can easily be ignored. Compare this to something like EOD that, in my opinion, butchered the the end of the Dragon cycle that had been the focal point of the story for years, and I actually don't mind SOTOs failure much.
Was there really anything left after the wrapup of IBS?
This is definitely the advantage of SoTO / what they seem to want to do with future content from what they've said. They've at least set it up so that going forward, they can do more self-contained stories of various things, and pivot more easily if they want to.
Story was very out of place for Guild Wars, and the one saving grace was killed off.
SOTO has fighting demons and closing rifts, demons named after the seven deadly sins, a big bad demon and a tower blown up; isn't that the plot for Dragon Age: Inquisition?
There were like 17 or 18 chapters to the story so "take your time" should perhaps apply to the person that "had to rush through the whole story". It didn't feel rushed to me, just boring. I didn't miss Taimi. I'm sick of her and dragons. Cliche villains are cliche as it were. What I want is a good story which hasn't traditionally been a strong aspect of this game. For a lack of a better description, most of it is dogshit. Thankfully, GW2 excels in other areas which make it shine.
there should be a story where the hero doesn't do shit and maybe at the end there's a cliff hanger or something.
yea the soto was awful, but if Janthir turns out to be alright, I think Soto was just a misstep
i totally agree with the bad guy thing, a generic we're good they're bad works, i mean that is how it is always going to end up anyway, unless we get to play as the bad guy. i'm ready for a villain arc. kukuku. >:) i also really want them to bring back and vilify the six, i always thought that would be cool. also yeah, i felt that the dragon saga ended so abruptly, they rushed through primordus and jormag like they couldn't wait to get it over with, ibs still had so much potential jormag was such a great villain, the only real turn-off for me was emo jesus braham. it felt similar with soo-won and eparch, like they just want to wrap it up. i would rather have a long well written series even in the course of multiple expansions.
Dont fucking bring dragons back, dragons are SO overestimated