All The Burning Bridges: GW2

Jeromai has a deeply disturbing speculative post concerning the upcoming Big Announcement that ArenaNet have planned for Pax South at the end of the month. The gist is this: what if the whole of the first three years of GW2 were just the bait for the biggest bait&switch in the history of MMOs?

It all comes out of the recent video teaser entitled "Point of No Return", an apparently innocuous little squib that I watched when it came out and then immediately forgot. Others, however, saw more in it than I did. Some found their thoughts drifting back to Tyrias's past; to The Searing.

The Searing was - I guess is, since you can go and experience it right now by logging into the original Guild Wars and playing through the Origins campaign from the beginning - the previous holder of the oscar for "Biggest Bait&Switch In An MMORPG". I remember it vividly from my original playthrough back in 2005. It remains one of the most impressive and disturbing uses of the MMO form for what you could loosely call an artistic purpose.

Steering clear of the lore and avoiding detailed spoilers (although even knowing 'something happens' is itself a spoiler), Guild Wars begins by allowing you to make a character and letting you believe you're playing a particular kind of MMO in a particular kind of setting before smashing the whole thing up with a big hammer and making you start over again from scratch. This video catches the tone quite nicely although you can only get the emotional impact by playing through the game itself.

At the time it happened I hated it. I really hated it. I loved pre-Searing Ascalon from the moment I stepped out onto those golden, autumnal grasslands. I loved the petty problems and the little quests. I was ready for weeks, months of the same. Then I got to about level five and all of that was snatched away. I was hopping mad.

Still, I'd only been playing for a few hours and my character was only level five. I got over it pretty quickly, especially when what came next turned out to be quite compelling. By the time I'd reached the conclusion of the Origins storyline and was able to look back from the dizzy heights of level 20, over the month or so the journey had lasted, I was already taking a much more sanguine view of the whole approach. Yes, it was shocking but it was a real coup of storytelling and a highly impressive use of the limited narrative tools available to an MMO designer at the time. +1 ANet.

Now here we are all these years later. There's a dragon stirring and we know from the examples of Orr and The Far Shiverpeaks that, when dragons wake, everything changes. Orr is a wasteland, drowned and razed, filled with undead following Zhaitan's rise. The formidable, if inscrutable, Kodan, supposedly immortal, creators of city-sized ships hewn from ice, live as refugees, driven south by the awakening of Jormag. No-one knows what's happening down in The Crystal Desert, where Kralkatorrik fell after the abortive battle with Destiny's Edge because no-one has been able to go there or return ever since.

Mordremoth, the latest dragon to stir from its slumber, turns out to have been sleeping right below us. Given the examples of recent history how can we expect to carry on as normal now Scarlet has woken him up? Here we have motive, we have opportunity and we have form. Hence the speculation.

 ArenaNet have done this before, after all, and it worked. It's almost becoming their Modus Operandi: there's not only The Searing to consider but the long, slow death of Lion's Arch. A region; a city; why not the whole known world?

That's the in-game logic with a salting of house style. There's more to it though. ArenaNet have been adamant since launch that GW2 will not have boxed expansions. They leave the tiniest wriggle room but emotionally the tone has always been "Not on our watch". Instead we've been served the thrashings and churnings of The Living Story plus intermittent Feature Packs that purport to offer (yet evidently do not), the free equivalent of a standalone, purchased add-on.

NCSoft reports show earnings declining, while trade reports confidently outline the expected action to remedy that problem - the release of planned expansions. Meanwhile ANet was spared in NCSoft's latest round of cost-cutting and there's known to be a large development team working on...something.

For a while I've been wondering how ANet might find a way to square the circle of having to release an expansion for financial reasons while still being able to claim, for reasons of personal prestige, that no expansion was released. This could be the answer. Instead of adding a whole new region or continent replace an existing one. That way Tyria hasn't been "expanded"; it's been "changed".

Well, it would be a bold move, that's for sure. A hubristic, arrogant, "Look at me Mummy!" attention-seeking move, yes, but undeniably a bold one. What it wouldn't be, of course, is original. Wasn't there another MMO that tried something really quite similar not so long ago? Stap me if there wasn't a dragon behind that one, too.

Dominant though WoW has been in the genre, this particular piece of Blizzard wisdom would be an odd model to emulate. I don't think Cataclysm is generally reckoned to be WoW's finest hour. Wasn't that the period when the game really began to bleed subscriptions? Why, yes it was.

After nearly three years observing the outcomes of whatever passes for decision-making at ANet Towers, though, I really wouldn't put anything past the current regime. The tastes or interests of players seem to bear little or no relevance in the lurches in direction the game spasmodically suffers. Neither does anyone seem especially interested in maximizing revenue streams.

Rather, they seem to revel in making changes a lot of players don't like while attempting to sell them things they don't want. It's true that MMO players are a notoriously curmudgeonly audience, willing to ascribe the worst motives to everyone but themselves, but even in that light GW2's relationship with its audience has been...difficult. For me, most everything that happens seems to be best understood as a series of internal power-plays and positionings, which, to be fair, is probably how companies with hundreds of career-minded individuals all focused on a single product usually tend to operate.

Even so, even with the most self-obsessed, solipsistic of world-views, sealed in the hermetic bubble of management meetings and focus groups, surely tearing down the world and starting again from scratch couldn't seem like a good idea to anyone.

Could it?

This Land Is Our Land: GW2

Way back in April when we picked Yak's Bend as our server for the first Guild Wars 2 beta weekend, we didn't just pull a name out of a hat. Yak's Bend is where the world begins to open out in the original game, the point at which, after days of desperate struggle, hard-fought every yard through Charr hordes that never stop coming, at last you find a moment to catch your breath.

See this bend? This bend is mine.

Two abiding memories from the first run through the original Guild Wars are my complete shock on the fall of Ascalon and my immense sense of relief on reaching Yak's Bend. I played GW1 from launch but buying it was a late and somewhat spontaneous decision. I'd read little about it and had no foreknowledge of the plot. I loved pre-Searing Ascalon from the moment I arrived there and had no idea it would be snatched away from me so soon.

Come Guild Wars 2, I was always going to play a Charr. From the moment I realized, years after wading hip-deep through Charr blood with Prince Rurik, they were cats not demons as I'd thought, I was forced to re-evaluate and from that moment on there was no choice. Still, I didn't imagine I'd get what I'd always wanted; Ascalon back.

The orange is nice but I preferred it how you had it before

There are people, crazy people, who stay in pre-Searing Ascalon until they're fully grown. These are the Iron Men and Women of Guild Wars, ennobled with a title: Legendary Defender of Ascalon. Here's what they went through to earn that name. When players unfamiliar with the elder game question the design ethos behind GW2's Legendary Weapons, behavior like this is a factor they may not have taken into account.

Read it and weep, human.

I tried it once. I got to level 12 before I came to my senses. Life is quite literally too short. I gave up any hope of living in the eternal summer of pre-searing Ascalon. How ironic, then, that the door to that lost past should be re-opened by the same Charr who slammed it shut in my face all those years ago.

Go North-East from Lion's Arch and there, between the Shiverpeak and Blazeridge mountain ranges lies Ascalon. From Black Citadel, the great Charr capital built on the ruins of the human city of Rin, east through the Plains of Ashford to Blazeridge Steppes and north across the Diessa Plateau through the Iron Marches to Fireheart Rise, the Charr hold it all.

Being a cow doesn't give you a pass on training

Um, over here?

Every step is filled with wonder. The high summer idyll of the pre-Searing has ripened into an eternal Autumn, the fall after The Fall. The colors burnish with copper and gold, red poppies flag against the sunburned grasslands, white clouds mass the bluing sky. Ascalon is a land patched by farms, ribboned with ruins, haunted by ghosts figurative and literal. Its lakes are blue and deep, its caves dark and beckoning. There's treasure everywhere.

Out of these golden lands rise the cobalt holdings of the Charr. With all the dwarves gone Charr engineering stands unchallenged (quiet now, that Asura at the back...). Rather than scars or blisters, these massive edifices fit the land like giant puffballs, muted bluetones melding into the umber, soft curves blending into rolling hills, jagged edges natural as thornbriar.

This beautiful country has its dangers. Ghosts and devourers rise from the ground, bandits and revolutionaries bar the paths, ogres and harpies cleave to their own wild ways and may the gods that don't exist have mercy if you cross them. The Dredge, the Grawl, the Skritt pursue their own oblique agendas. Still, these are lands that can be explored with pleasure, if with care.

You can laugh now but in fifty years they'll be listed

Some must fight so all can live, as they say, but maybe not right now. Unlike Orr and the south, across Ascalon there is time to stop and take a look around between battles, to lie down in the long grass once in a while and rest.

Even the dragon, The Shatterer, had the good sense to set the mark of his Lordship on these lands with a scar instead, like Zhaitan, of flinging all to chaos. The Brand runs livid in the purples of a bruise across the back of Ascalon, but the Branded, unlike the Risen, keep to their rut.

Could have sworn I heard an Asura...

At the southern limit of the Charr's influence, Ascalon's, maybe Tyria's, loveliest city waits. Ebonhawke, thick-walled fortress with its wide streets going down to grass feels old as its honey stone. Saved the brash assertion of Rata Sum or the wild imagining of Lion's Arch, Ebonhawke stands more solid, evokes more empathy than either.

Does no-one in Ebonhawke own a scythe?

To the far North autumn gives way to winter as it must. Despite thick fur, Charr are cats and do not like the cold. The Norn may have the snow and welcome. As for the Baelfire, let the Flame Legion skulk among the cinders there, planning their plans. Few would envy them. No, the Charr fought for the heart of Ascalon, and now they have it, revel in it and will hold it long.

Had Guild Wars 2 been only Ascalon and only Charr I would have been more than satisfied. I am more than satisfied.