Lifetap Volume 1.0, Issue #043 - Guild Wars 2 and the Trouble with Zhaitan

In today’s nightmarish journey into the unknown otherwise known as Lifetap, Sardu addresses one of his primary concerns following the announcement of the first expansion for Guild Wars 2. Spoiler Alert: It ends with the question: “What’s the point of defeating an Elder Dragon when it doesn’t actually save the world from anything in the long term?”

The announcement of the Heart of Thorns expansion for Guild Wars 2 has reawakened my tendency to drill down into the lore of Tyria like a Priory scholar seeking answers locked away in an unearthed ancient artifact. Following the official announcement I’ve spent a solid block of time backpedaling through bits of the core Guild Wars 2 storyline as a result.

Volumes of notes were hastily scribbled down on any scrap of paper I could find here in my laboratory, until eventually I stumbled upon a pair of revelations. The first of these I’ll be covering in today’s issue of Lifetap, while the second requires a bit more research on my part. Given my natural tendency to forego sleep in favor of pursuing the creative process, I expect to make a breakthrough in that regard sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, today I’ll be discussing…

The Trouble with Zhaitan

When Guild Wars 2 launched 2 ½ years ago, all roads pointed to the massive threat Zhaitan posed to all life on Tyria. Even though players never once caught a glimpse of the Elder Dragon outside of its lair, its armies and corruption spread far beyond the devastated landscapes of Orr. In fact, you can still experience nearly every bit of this corruption today. And therein lies the main issue with Zhaitan, and one that ArenaNet has hopefully found ways to rectify as we journey headlong into a confrontation with a second Elder Dragon.

With Heart of Thorns, ArenaNet has carefully woven a storyline that I suspect will attempt to rectify some of the major issues with the first Elder Dragon, and there are – all things considered – quite a few at this point.

The first issue is that players have defeated Zhaitan, and this is openly acknowledged throughout Living World Season 2. However, the world is no better off for our efforts. Undead continue to infest large swaths of the map. Key dynamic events still occur that involve dialog indicating that the dragon hasn’t yet been defeated. Orr is still a giant mess of corruption stuck in a never ending nightmare loop that can’t seem to resolve itself in spite of our best efforts.

“I defeated an Elder Dragon and all I got was this t-shirt” pretty much summarizes the overall impact of anyone bothering to defeat Zhaitan as far as world states are concerned.

This creates quite the conundrum for ArenaNet heading into the first major expansion for Guild Wars 2. However brilliantly deployed Season 2 has been, its lasting brilliance will ultimately be determined by how effectively Heart of Thorns manages to rectify the defeat of another Elder Dragon.

When a creature poses such a major threat that the world’s leaders unite under a common banner to see its destruction, should that moment arrive, it needs to have a lasting impact on the world state. For all intents and purposes, Zhaitan’s defeat accomplished very little. In that case, ArenaNet painted itself into a corner because too much of the core game and storyline would need to be altered for any of it to make linear sense in the life of a max level character.

Symbolic Moments

The destruction of Lion’s Arch was a symbolic moment for ArenaNet in more ways than one. The largely stagnant world state left in the wake of Zhaitan could not continue moving forward. There are already too many instances of time overlaps and inconsistencies in the status of the first Elder Dragon, and ArenaNet must have realized that it needed to show real change in the world state moving forward.

More than a year ago, I correctly surmised that there was a direct link between the sylvari and the second Elder Dragon, Mordremoth. Whether you view Scarlet Briar’s storyline as tragic or you celebrated her defeat, what she really represented were the seeds of this connection. During a studio visit at ArenaNet back in December 2013, I even pressed the issue while talking to Chris Whiteside, but at that point was given no real confirmation beyond his comments “let me just say that you are a very astute individual and leave it at that.”

In the interim, for Scarlet’s story to have any lasting impact moving forward, permanent changes to the world were necessary. The destruction of L.A. is perhaps the largest and most obvious example, but there are plenty of others to be found in the game currently. Just look at how radically the Kessex Hills map has changed over time.

I would even argue that Kessex Hills is the model ArenaNet needs to carefully consider and iterate upon throughout Heart of Thorns. By and large, it is perhaps the best representation of story and player actions culminating in a properly changing world state, and helps shine a light that much more brightly on the comparatively pointless defeat of Zhaitan in terms of its lasting impact on the world.

Once we’ve embarked upon our journey into the Heart of Maguuma, will we as players have any hopes of directly impacting the world state for the better? While arguments could be made that Mordremoth’s corruption could take years to properly cleanse, I’m hoping that ArenaNet has learned that allowing the game world to evolve over time can be a good thing.

Where Zhaitan represented an end point for the core release of Guild Wars 2, the defeat of Mordremoth needs to fall closer to the middle. In other words, for all the time we spend fighting our way towards the dragon’s demise, we should also spend an equal amount of time ridding Tyria of its lasting influence. Otherwise, what’s the point of defeating an Elder Dragon when it doesn’t actually save the world from anything in the long term?