GW's lore sucks badly. (spoilers warning)

I've been thinking about this for a while. Even though I am much more interested in PvP than in PvE, I'm still amazed by how dumb and stupid a game lore can be.

Prophecies

The only thing I liked about GW:P's lore is the beginning. Those Charrs are pretty cool bad guys, and aren't an irritating cliche. I also was pleased that for once we won't get flooded by that fantasy books dwarves/elves/dragons/etc theme, which really started to get boring. The fact that Ascalon was also losing the war added interest.
All good ended here. The lore suddenly got flooded with cliches- The good prince that disobeys his father. Dwarves. Prince dies and becomes undead. Undead at general. You find yourself in an entire new story fighting undead and then white mantle. The Charr disappeared from the storyline. Then you go to the desert and do something that doesn't have anything to do with anything ("Wow we ascended now we can kill mursaat!") and then you find out that the good vizier is actually the bad guy (yeah, real surprize). You suddenly find yourself fighting titans and saving the world by killing the undead lich.
Now, this story is just AWFUL. I think that anet realized it themselves when they made a joke about it in NF, in that Bokka Theater scene (not that nf lore is better but we will get to that). During that story you find yourself fighting something like 5-6 antagonists that got nothing to do with each other, you start fighting charr that invaded your homeland and end fighting the lich and saving the world.

Factions

Factions lore was also bad. In the flashbacks, Shiro is viewed as a good person that was influenced by the evil fortune teller. And when you meet him during the storyline, he is the ultimate bad guy that wants to kill everyone and take over the world. Wtf?
In order to beat Shiro you meet with a ghost and get the artifacts of some dead luxon/kurzick heroes (that luxon/kurzick theme had so much more potential). And then comes that Kuunavang that had completely nothing to do with anything. And when Shiro succeeds in his evil plans and comes back to life, you just go and kill him. yay. Dissappointment. At least this time you stick to the same storyline the entire game.

Nightfall

This set a new standard for how bad a lore can get. Now the evil guy doesn't want to take over the world, he wants to destroy it! Stop the world from becoming a dark place where evil demons are walking around and nasty looking tentacles sprout from the ground!! I'm too pissed to expand here, but this storyline is just pathetic, even more than Varesh's "muwahaha"s. The only nice part here was Palawa Joko, that according to the GW2 lore release is gonna conquer all Elona, which is promising.

Eye of the North

After how the 3 previous lores ultimately failed, and when Anet said that EN's lore will be a bridge between GW to GW2, I had some expectations for that one. However, GW:EN's lore really hits the jackpot. This is probably the worst lore I ever encountered in my gaming experience. This is quoted from wiki: "The Destroyers are fiery, nearly mindless creatures who seek to clear the Depths of Tyria of all life." ok. They really put some thought into that one, didn't they?
I don't understand what those destroyers are. Where they come from. Who the hell is the Great Destroyer (and ffs why is he so laughably weak). What is the Great Dwarf. Why do the dwarves become stone. Why do you come back to the charr just for 3 minutes. Why is this lore is a bunch of childish cliches.


As I said, a good storyline is not what I look for in a game, but seeing how a good lore can really upgrade a game (i.e Max Payne) I would expect anet to spend some minimal mental effort regarding lore. Look at Blizz games like SC and WC3. Besides them being very good games, they also have nice storylines which makes them more likable (I'm not talking about TFT of course- "the bad guys wanna kill each other but they hurt the environment we gotta stop them!!111").

Just had my (long) rant. Do you agree that this game's lore is just horrible?

We first learned about the Great Destroyer in Prophecies. Weren't you paying attention to anything?

KANE

I have to agree with you about Factions and Nightfall,I love the Tyrain lore though. That why I am happy Gw2 will take place on the Tyrian continent

I always wonder how people can say a games lore sucks when they obviously paid no attention to it at all.


The first three games are linked rather well with the whole storyline up to Nightfall being one big plot by Abaddon. It explained some things like where the Titans came from,who the Fortune Teller was, how the orrian Kings advisor, the Vizier found out about and used the magic that brought about Orrs end and of course the reason behind the Charrs Invasion.


My my you really didnt pay attention here. The Great Destroyer was mentioned in Prophecies and was explained to be the enemy of the Great Dwarf - who was explained to be worshiped amongst the Dwarves. the game itself explains what the Destroyers are - they are Fire and Rock brought to life and controlled through the GD. Why was the Great Destroyer so weak? because it was just a minion of Primordus.

And we come back to the Charr long enough to see the effects of Prophecies on them and their search for new gods after their old ones, the Titans were destroyed. An entire campaign on them would of been overkill.

Tyrian Continent = Elona+Cantha+Battle Islands+Tyria

You have 2 Tyria's, the Prophecies one. And the one that includes just the whole world of Guild Wars.

Factions was awful, NightFall was a little better, Prophecies was decent (for GW), and GW:EN just plain sucked.

i disagree

i love the gw stories

The storylines were fine when you played them first time (as it's always lol). But tbh i want to see something more possible in gw2. Killing a god is just too much...

I thought the awakening dragons in GWEN was an awesome idea :P but yah everything else is pretty crappy. lol Though I thought the White mantle was a cool and interesting thing in proph

Not lore. GTFO of my lore forumz.

The storyline for Prophecies was done by Jess Lebow. Jess Lebow also did some parts of Factions AFAIK.
http://ww2.wizards.com/Books/Wizards...?doc=JessLebow

ANet also hired Jeff Grubb, but I do not exactly know what he did. They say Nightfall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Grubb

Jeff Grubb is known to me from Azure Bonds and stuff like that, he wrote later some Magic: The Gathering stuff, but actually I think his big time was already over long before that.

Right now, she has also written the GW2 lore hints we know so far, Ree Soesbee is writing for ANet: http://www.learsfool.com/

Coincidentally or not, she has "Dragons" as recurring theme in her scifan-listing.


Then we have http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/John_Stumme and http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Linsey_Murdock who als contribute quest dialogue and pop culture references.


The storyline of Prophecies was disjointed, but at the core I like it better than the Factions and Nightfall-Storylines. I also like the Pantheon of GW Gods and the background lore in general. I think this is mostly Lebows work. Jeff Grubb probably brought some humor into the Nightfall storyline, I am not sure if it was his fault, but killing a god just smells of cliché.

This is the problem of GW in general, often too much cliché and overloaded with references.

For GW2 they seem to form the Charr a bit like the Golden Horde. I hope they get it right, the Norn were tuned to be so extremely stereotypical norsemen with a dumb sense of humour that I found them rather boring. Then we had the Asurans, ego extreme smartasses. The Ebon Vanguard consisted of Brave Brent Poltroon style jokes and had little character. Gwen herself demonstrated the cliche route they are going to take, fanatic charr haters.

But OK, there are still worse games out there, so the story is not that bad. I also do not demand supreme storytelling from a computer game.

I think Pyre was introduced quite well.

I liked all the stories, except the NF ending, I mean, first they say 'we can't kill a god' then the gods say 'oh but you can'. Then some random guy becomes the new god instead of the one you just killed, without any special weapons or something...

It's a shame that they deleted the uncyclopedia.org artilce about Guild Wars...
You would have loved it, I am sure... here is a tasty bit from it:

Nothing is new under the sun.

All you can do is mix-and-match it differently, and package it differently. Trying to make a story unpredictable, while still going anywhere, is a lot tougher than it sounds, and most people just don't care enough. Literary snobs don't play video games much.

I have to agree with killing a God in the Nightfall scenario, after you’ve done that, how on earth can you top it?

Although I like the lore especially the background of the Gods we haven’t killed!

Prophecies, always seemed like two stories to me, maybe everything that happens before we get to Lions Arch could have been called “Prelude: Escape From Ascalon” with “Chapter 1: The Flameseeker Prophecies” beginning upon arrival at LA.

My advise, stick to your PvP and leave the PvE to those who acctual know what happend. If you did not like it, suffer in silence or get it all right.

And as a side note, Mrmango, this is lore related, so please shut up.

i have to agree with u all on your comments....

if u want a good story Go to LOTR online man ...they had a good storie and popularized by movies...what did GW have E3 film cliip


STORY
GW<LOTR

/signed

There is no such thing as an original idea. Guild ars is not the first to use the basic concpets shown in all the expansions, and they will not be the last. they did a good job of using them however and I give them props for this.

What you have a problem with is the story of the game not the game lore.
The lore of the game is all the back storey, the history of the world etc which gw goes into quite alot of detail ablout compared to most games.

The story gives emphasis on the lore by showing you there isn't one,shallow problem in the world but infact many. Every region has its own problems to deal with the culmination of which prevents them from tackling any other threat that turns up (i.e. the titans).

The role of the hero in the prophecies story is to ultimatlry defeat the lich, everything else you encounter are merely other problems you get dragged into while helping your people escape to safety before you discover your true purpose.

The core storyline and especially the lore in guild wars happens to be very strong, its just not very well presented in the mission by mission format. EotN's format was more fluid but unfortunatly was rushed.

Keep in mind most of the game lore is actually presented in the form of quests rather than missions, Quests that very few people bother to complete.

Guild Wars has great lore if you actually bother to read your quest dialogue and do the out of the way quests...

The storylines are meh...but the lore is good.

killing a god in 1 min is to much other then that I welcome those fights. the only problem with the end game bosses is they are so much easier to kill then say a lvl 1 char . which is what kills the story line to me, everything else is good but the fact the each boss died in a matter of mins to seconds(factions) the lich took a little while to get to but still died way way to fast.

duh they had books you know that J.R.R tolken wrote so the story was easy as well as the back story (the hobit) if a book is made into a game of course it will have more lore.

It's the same everywhere. Once you have accomplished something great next time it is just standart and you need a bigger foe.
After killing a god you won't feel that good after having beaten some smelly bandit.

Do you know Dragon Ball?
"wow he has fighting power 200 !!! he's invincible"
10 issues later
"lol fighting power 5million what a weakling!"
it's really ridiculous if you think about it.

PS: Shiro get's killed by the luxom and kurzick champions so he just destroys whole cantha while getting defeated...
Shiro is back in the world of the living no we can just slay him...
Factions has some strange story elements.

which is where big players like MARVEL and DC had a massive brainfart and invented the "Universal Reset Plot Device".

ah the Multiverse, now we can work up from the bandit and kill a god only to do it all over again but different without endlessly increasing power.

Lazy but....effective.

It sort of reminds me of Titan Quest; after I killed the gods-bane titan on mt. Olympus summit, I proceeded forth to the Temple of Apollo where I got owned by a stupid giant crab.

As lyra song said, Do the quests not just the missions and OH HEY WTF IS THAT DOES THE GAME MAKE SENSE NOW?

Dont be pissy about a bad plot if you didn't actually read any of it at all.

Btw, lots of idiots PVE and don't know any of the lore. =p

Also, the lore I'm referring to is actually the lore, not a critique of Anet's lore story.

But as it is in referance to the lore, it falls under the lore category, anything to do with lore falls into this thread.

I actually liked nightfall the best.. It may have been overly cheesed-out in some parts, but as a whole its not a bad storyline for a game. It really expanded and explained some of the mysterious chp1 lore i thought..

What you got totally wrong is to assume because you liked the story in the book, it must also rock in the LOTR game. Which is not the case, they just made parts of the world look like the movie or descriptions in the book. Everything else is plain standard vanilla MMO cake, sorry to say. It is hardly integrated into the world and they really did not take too great pains to get inspiration from the Lord of the Rings or the Silmarillion, i.e. they copied even less parts of the lore and world than was present in the movie.

In terms of fantasy literature the Lord of the Rings was indeed made even more popular by the movies, but the genre has developed over the many years. The Black/White painting of characters and the nowadays rather pathetic language of Tolkien are for sure not the modern style, I recommend G.R.R. Martin and Guy Gavriel Kay if you want to read modern fantasy with strong "grey" characters and shifting focalization.

The lore of guild wars is some of the best video game lore I've seen since Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem(witch admittedly took a lot from H.P. Lovecraft's work). The storylines aren't very good though. Prophecies should of been centered around the charr, factions should of been centered around the luxon/kurzick war, and nightfall was actually pretty good for an online rpg.... and then varesh dies, you kill a god in less time then it took you to kill your first charr and your left cursing kormir for stealing your rightful place as the sixth gw god lol.

Often the time and difficulty of defeating a self-proclaimed nasty villain in RPGs is the journey it takes to obtain, unravel, and eventually solve the events leading up to it.

The epic battle begins when you take your first step into the chapter, not the minute you find the 8 skills to defeat the actual final antagonist.

Let's just remember said god was chained for many millenia and severly weakened.

He was soo weakened he controlled half the living world and the entire torment world too.
He was so weakened that the Lich and Shiro paid homage to him and served as his generals and such awesome entities as Dhuum and Menzies sought alliance with him.
Consistency for the win.

Owned.

Guild Wars lore is pretty neat, actually.... but the story lines of the campaigns are just complete and utter fail.

Why would anyone conceivably even attempt to kill my character anymore? I've slain countless lesser foes, saved the world on multiple occasions, make a hobby of easily dispatching titans, demons, and the undead, and have killed the Lich, Shiro, the Great Destroyer, and Abaddon himself. I'm sorry, but how do level 24 Dwarfs even do damage to me anymore? Charr? Are you serious?

That has nothing to do with his power, the reason he got so far was due to his way of manipulating major events such as the destruction of Arah and Shiros betrayel. He had been planning his breakout for years and was succeeding until the heroes begin to tackle them unknowingly. Dhuum is broken and Menzies cant even take control of the Fissure Of Woe. Why wouldnt they team up with the winning god?

Putting a foe that is as powerful as Mallyx in the last mission is obviously gonna cause rage amongst players.

Some of my favorite quotes :

Notice how the writers write more than one thing? I wonder why some stories look alike...


That one explains a lot. By the way, I dont think it is confirmed if the jade wind was shiro's death-spell(D2 reference), the emperor's spell (probably not), a mix-match of the 2 spells, or a "backfire" of shiro's latent magic power.

Lazy, but prebably the best way to allow the reuse of old bad guys, allow a reset in the power meter, and a classy (albeit classic by now'S standarts) to "finish" a storyline while not really finishing the story.


OP: Your point is... GW is full of cliché? So what? (sorry but i really can't see a problem with that)

I just want to clarify two things-

- As some of you might have guessed, I am not a native English speaker and probably I misused the word "lore", when I should have used the word "storyline". I am deeply sorry if any of you were offended by me polluting the English language with my poor use of it. I understand how much it affects the validity of my point. That being said, keep your post-for-the-sole-reason-of-boosting-my-posts-per-day for other threads please.

- Some of you got the impression that I don't read any quest logs and don't do any side quests, which is wrong. Maybe my post was poorly sentenced but when I said "wtf are those destroyers" I didn't ask for a description of destroyers (actually I think that I said clearly enough that those can be found in wiki, and I even quoted that wiki description to emphasize my point). What I meant is "what the hell is that stupid and bad idea".

Please, I would appreciate if you keep your comments to the point. You disagree with me? "consider reading quest logs and not skipping cinematics" or "stick to your pvp" will fail to convince me, and won't contribute anything to this discussion.

Lore/storyline SUX =/= discussion .

The only bad part of the prophecies lore is the lich. The charr thing is clever, the dwarves aren't really involved, the white matle shinning blade twist is good and then the fact that the mursaat were sacrificing the chosen to stop titans comming is clever and it's is all the shinning blades fault. The only problem is that it is all done by the stupid lich, who happens to be undead, cliche, but the pro about the undead is that they come from orr which was destroyed by the searing/catalyst.
Personally i feel that they should of kept orr destoyed and kept that level of mystery for GW2 (but of course they din'y know that they were going to make it then)

Faction lore = shit (no one can argue)

Nightfall = semi good (the whole idea of stopping a 'evil' god is stupid but it does clear loose ends well in prophs and factions)

P.S the dragon lore for GW2" will be O.K but cliche it is the, 'battle for land between the races', lore and other known lores about GW2 apart from the dragons, is what will be interesting.