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How does WvWvW pvp fit in with the lore?
madeux
Member Posts: 1,786
in Guild Wars 2
While the idea of 3 faction pvp is a good one, I'm wondering how exactly this kind of WvWvW combat fits in the the lore of the game. Is there some kind of explanation for these "Mysts"? Is there some reason that the other "worlds" are the enemy?
People justify not being able to PvP against the Charr because now they're all united with rainbows and butterflies and everyone is holding hands now... But who are these other people we're supposedly fighting when we're all supposed to be united against the dragons?
Comments
he Mists is the oldest thing in existence and is the space between worlds and realms, where creatures from across the worlds converge. The Mists are accessed via the various portals opened by Lord Odran. It is connected to all worlds and binds the multiverse together, including the past, present, and future, and is the source of all things. In the center of the Mists lies the Rift which holds the Hall of Heroes at its center.
The Mists are the proto-reality that exists between the worlds which in turn are the building blocks of reality. It is where the various afterlives and the homes of various gods and other powerful entities reside. The Mists resonate from the worlds around them, forming bits of their own reality - islands of existence that reflect the histories of their worlds.[1]
- http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Mists
The Mists is the realm of the afterlife. They are the proto-reality that exists between the worlds which in turn are the building blocks of reality. It is where the various afterlives and the homes of various gods and other powerful entities reside. The Mists resonate from the worlds around them, forming bits of their own reality - islands of existence that reflect the histories of their worlds.1
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Mists
Here are the wiki explainations of the Mists. Pretty much what anyone will tell you will come from this knowledge. GW arena Heroes' Ascent was fought in the Mists (places such as the Hall of Heroes which is the top Arena battleground in GW).
Fair point, and I brought it up previously.
It requires some truly creative thinking to make it fit (and fit uncomfortably at that
Bottom line in my eyes is: it doesn't make a sliver of sense but the WvWvW is there for gameplay's sake.
In a purely gameplay perspective it sounds like a great concept to pitch three servers against eachother and rotate them each week.
My brand new bloggity blog.
The people fighting in the Mists are basically from alternate dimensions. The canonical GW universe is a multidimensional one.
Why are they fighting each other? Heck if I know. They're not talking yet, so we don't know the lore reasons for why they're fighting, just that we are fighting people from alternate dimensions. :T
it may have to do with the 3 factions that players align themselves with through PVE progression. maybe not. in any case, it doesnt really have to make sense because having 3 sides makes pvp so much more interesting.
This has nothing to do with the actual lore, but I've always seen at as a bit of a Valhalla thing. Everyone gets together (like Einherjar) and dukes it out to prepare for some kind of coming Ragnarok (but really, just for the sake of duking it out), all under the watchful eye of Balthazar/Odin. That's a pretty loose interpretation, granted, but it works for me. I've always been a sucker for norse mythology anyway.
Besides, PvP never really needs a reason. It just needs targets.
Hey, sounds like your normal MMO developer mindset to me. Build gameplay first, then put some lore to it as an afterthought (only to make it sound COOL).
It's hard to give a shit when it's so blatantly obvious.
Better than coming up with lore, then shoddily slapping gameplay mechanisms on to try and match it.
There's not an MMO in the world that has lore even approaching a good book. Gameplay is really, really, really important in an MMORPG. I mean, that's what you're doing. Gameplay. You don't think there's any game out there that occupies people for thousands of hours purely off of the value of the lore, do you?
That's about right.
I am a big lore junkie, but I will let it slide on this subject. As long as they provide fun pvp with lots to do I'll be happy.
What I was going to say: The gods have some vested interest in their powermongering in the mists: Our world affects them, their world affects us: In return for aiding a particular God, our world will receive a boon if we win I am guessing when the Gods call our spirits or whatever to battle the imposters of the other 2 worlds!!
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
No, but even in WoW the PvP makes "sense". There's a reason you're fighting the horde, they're your enemy. But, this magical battlefield where we're just fighting alternate versions of ourselves simply because they're there and we have nothing better to do?
Do you really think that players in WoW care about lore when fighting each other? I don't think so. Would they care if that lore wasn't there to explain PvP? I don't think so.
You know, the funniest thing is probably the fact that ArenaNet decided to spend more time on the actual the gameplay instead of lore, while Blizzard decided to spend more time on lore than actual gameplay.
I know a hardcore RPer or two who would hurl a tankard of ale (complete with lengthy description in intricate detail) at your head for that remark.
But even though they wouldn't admit it, it's the gameplay, not the trappings that keep people hooked for the long haul.
I don't necessarily agree. MMO gameplay, for the longest time, has been inferior to single player games. This isn't going to change either, because the fact is that the gameplay has to be designed for the lowest common dominator, and to get to the content that is challenging you need to go through so much shit it's just better to stick to other single or online games. Even then the gameplay usually fails in comparison, if less and less in the near future.
So, to give a crap about the game, there has to be something that you care about. If you like collecting new items and becoming stronger and that is enough for you, fine. But there are many people out there, who are not satisfied with gameplay that caters to the lowest common dominator and the major driving factor is the loot.
The game can have all these dynamic events and cutscenes, but if the lore is uninteresting, inconsistent and feels like an afterthought, its hard to give a crap about what the NPCs or the quest text says, or what is actually happening.
It doesn't have to match a good book to be interesting. It simply needs to be made with careful consideration and not as an afterthought to justify the existence of "cool" things. Even better if it is not blatantly obvious to the player and there is actually real mysteries surrounding the lore and the story that reveals it little by little.
The worst is when you fight a boss and you don't know why, or who he even is. He looks cool and does cool moves, he might be challenging... but the context is completely missing.
And that's not even because "people don't care about the lore". It's because the lore is so bland, uninteresting and inconsistent that it's not worth even trying to follow.
The post above you seemed to have decent explanations, but lets be serious, there's no way to explain some of the mechanics in current MMORPGs. I'm killing the Lich King for the 500th time, or the fact that these freaking rodents must be having sex non stop because there are thousands of people trying to kill them. I'm not sure that current technology will allow for Lore to completely explain many of the mechanics. I think it will be great for gameplay and I'm not really caring too much on the lore side of this.
As for rainbows and butterflies, I'm pretty sure that the alliance between the humans and Charr is something that has very little to do with happy thoughts, more like a desperate cease fire to fend off a greater threat.
I've written out multi-hour long knife fights before, so I'd take their challenge of a tankard of ale, and up it into an epic bar fight including everything from a bar stool to the local bar maid's cleavage.
... and I suppose in some multiplayer things, people RP that much, but I've never seen it in an MMORPG to be honest. They're usually playing the game at least a decent amount of time... or if they're the one person that is only RPing, well... most of the other people are playing the game, even the RPers, and without gameplay they'd be in a desolate ghost town wondering why they're the only people RPing in the really poorly programmed MMORPG.
(... or they'd be in Second Life, but in that case they're not really in an MMORPG...)
We just simply don't know the reason yet. The people at Arenanet aren't bad storytellers though, so maybe they'll pull out some amazing reason that'll make you go 'Oh wow, that was really amazing lore, and I feel silly for not having seen it before.'
... or maybe they'll just say 'There's no lore reason, we didn't feel like bullshitting you. Just go out and kill people and stop being such a wuss.'
Who knows? Neither of us. The only thing we know for a fact is that the battle is taking place in the space between the multiple dimensions. That can lead to some possibilities, as other people mentioned, but it doesn't prove anything.
No just no. Nothing makes sense in pvp in wow.
Example: Deathwing just came back and completly screwed up the world and is going to destroy it even further. Oh ya there is a truce that goes back quite awhile now between alliance and horde. But that's not going to stop us from killing each other for some good old pvp.
Indeed? I've always fought them because they were there. There may be some kind of rationalization for the combat, but it's still just a rationalization, which comes down to, they're not us so kill 'em.
Don't make the mistake of thinking your personal rejection of the lore invalidates it. Azeroth's story might have interested you in some way, but it didn't for me. That doesn't negate its validity. Tyria's rationalization may be much more metaphysical than Azeroth's, but it's just as adequate for bringing a bunch of folks together to pound each other's faces in.
BAHAHAHAHA!
I log onto WOW every day, in the hopes that, by the blessings of Azeroth, I'll be able to stop the evil Horde from capturing our flag for the bazillionth time, so that I can prove my.............................................
I mean really after the 5th time, it's not about the freaking lore it's about the competition.
Actually, I would say that GW2 is doing a LOT better job with the lore than most MMORPGs. You might not be familiar with it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. They've done all kinds of interesting things with the lore too, like putting secret references to GW1, hiding information and secret events, and even writing signs all over the game using different alphabets that are actually translatable.
In fact, just offhand, I can't think of anything that actually is inconsistent. Just because nobody knows why people are fighting in the Mists yet doesn't mean it's inconsistent, it just means we have insufficient information to judge one way or the other.
This is also a major issue.
WoW had lots of foundation to build its lore on, and for some time they did well at actually fleshing it out in-game. But as soon as they start doing things that simply make no sense just for the sake of gameplay, it's increasingly hard to give a crap about it.
I won't say their proper use of the lore in place is one of the reasons why the game became a success, but it certainly made it more than a generic MMO among everything else.
And while LOTRO takes a lot of features from WoW, it, too, managed to make decent use of the rich lore.. which in turn gave me at least a reason to care about what was happening.
While its hard to build an interesting setting and lore from the ground-up, it's no excuse to ignore it. It makes the game less interesting regardless of it's quality.
Is there any place I can read about it? Also, is there some kind of driving force for the game? Like, some progression?
I can't help but think that all these things were thought as "something cool we could do", and then the lore was implemented for them afterwards to justify their existence.
... but GW2 does have its own setting and lore from the ground-up, built upon the foundations of GW1, which was 3 whole campaigns and an expansion (Along with various content added on top of that). There's a TON of lore in GW2. In fact, their blog entries have gone into quite a lot of detail on all sorts of lore, from minor races to political parties.
In fact, the only argument I've seen is 'I'm not personally familiar with how they're going to justify the PvP, so obviously they can't possibly have a justification, and must be ignoring the lore'.
Which is a poor argument. Your ignorance doesn't equal another company's incompetence, it just means you're ignorant.
Don't feel bad though, we all are on this particular subject.
Well, you could play all the Guild Wars games. There's enough lore in there to fill a decent sized book alone. There's also two GW2 books that have been released. The Arenanet blog has lore entries as well. You could try wiki.guildwars2.com which has quite a lot of lore.
In fact, most of the lore setting for the game was from GW1, before GW2 was even a twinkle in their eyes... and when they first announced 'Hey, we're deciding to do an MMORPG', back what... 4 years ago? ... they already had a lot of the details explained. In fact, the last expansion they released for GW1 is FULL of foreshadowing and hints for GW2.
So. Yeah. Lore apparently came before the gameplay.
Sorry.
Actually the lore for most features of the game was ready before they started developing the game, the Mists for example (in regards to WvWvW-PvP) were already present in and explained by GW1. That's one of the benefits of making a sequel.
I dunno, one of darkponies thorns in the side is the fact that there is not open world PVP. It has been centuries since Guildwars and there is a common enemy, but I do think there was more Lore being manipulated to justify their *everyone loves each other* PVE worlds, then gameplay reflecting the reality they're trying to push on us.
While I see the above, I also don't see them doing something just for it's coolness factor. They have done a lot of work on the story side, and I don't see them being the kind of people that would do that very often.
@Hyanmen To each there own. You're looking for lore to give reason to pvp in a game that has no factions to pit the players againsts each other and I can understand that. As for me I just want some pvp that is actually fun and keeps me coming back for more, nevermind the reason for it all.