Veteran Casual - a GW2 sideblog

Long time player, sometime role-player and writer. Main blog @curuniel.

[spiribia]

top 20 'this string of events resulting in this outcome may as well transpire' of 2026

[grasping-earth]

New GW3 setting post dropped with some information on the Guardians of the Vael aka Vaelwardens.

Thoughts in no particular order:

The timeline ambiguity continues! If the Vaelwardens have been around for 150 years by game start (long enough to go from uniquely favoured mission to faded relevance)... the wiki has human settlement of Orr around 205 BE, which would make game start somewhere around 55 BE rather than 100+ like my last guess. That would mean after the human conquest of Ascalon!

That timeline along with the references to rising industrial exploitation of the Orrian wilds, people stealing magical items for their own use, and the gods being more distant in some ways all feel like they sketch a setting that is very much on the road to Abbadon's gift of magic and the ensuing wars and Exodus - which makes sense, that's an interesting time to explore.

The themes of respecting and protecting a natural ecosystem in accordance with an old tradition while others don't care and want to exploit it for their own benefit are very 2020s... almost too much so... but we'll see how they play out in practice, I mean, I'm not opposed, climate narratives are in more and more of our speculative fiction for a reason.

SIGNETS! This is so funny to me but also I kind of love it as a choice? Signets are a kind of skill in GW1 which are meant to represent a sort of pre-programmed spell, with a long cooldown but usable even if you didn't know magic... they're in GW2 as well but returning to the idea of one specific magical effect tied to a physical item you can carry to represent magic meted out by the gods not properly taught is a fun idea.

There is a nice confirmation in here that magic was "previously held exclusively by the gods and Tyria's elder species" - which makes sense, the gods are not hoarding all the magic in the world, peoples who used to know how to use it still do, but the new up and comings presumably started out in a world with very little magic and it's increasingly coming back where they could find it.

Also the implication that we as a player will get at least one personal spirit friend! Which is not surprising, but still neat. More to come on the Seeker another week.

[eternalalchemagical]

‘Spirit of the Legendary Bard’

Upcoming static shenanigans for our meme run on Thursday: ‘Legendary Fashion Wars.’ Each of us chose a unique weapon from the legendary armoury and had to create looks that embodied their traits. This is what I came up with for The Minstrel.

So far other static members have claimed: Nevermore, The Moot, The Flameseeker Prophecies, Xiuquatl, HMS Divinity, Kudzu, and Sharur. Gunna be a fun one 🤘

[guildwars-questions]

WEEKLY QUESTION:

If you could make a new holiday, what would it be?

Reblogs with comments highly encouraged! Putting your thoughts outside of the tags means we can all engage with each other, and find other thoughts we find provoking!

Screenshots/images/art are also encouraged!

[grasping-earth]

I'd love a sylvari cultural holiday of some kind. Really I'd like a cultural holiday for each of the playable peoples, but we don't have a festival in the Grove yet. Some commemoration of the first awakening perhaps, or a spring growth festival... or a high stakes plant-shaping competition with the potential to go off the rails as people push the boundaries of the art.

[grasping-earth]

I am now caught up on Visions of Eternity, after the GW3 announcement lured me back in for completion's sake!

I don't hate it. I still don't appreciate the ways in which the delivery of the story, especially the pacing, suffers for them trying to draw it out into something which takes longer and includes more map time (I'll do the map anyway! When I'm doing sorry I want to do story). However, I've enjoyed the Eternity's Garden content significantly more than the earlier stuff in that regard. Vloxx has been sidelined by the pacing in a way that feels a bit silly but Kuda is fun in the meantime.

I don't know if I'm deeply invested, but I have appreciated the narrative beats VoE is delivering with Isgarren and to a lesser extent Canach. I appreciate there being any meaningful narrative beats in the middle part. It's saying something, and it's building on earlier story states to some extent - the Arcane Council stuff is the kind of engagement with wider Tyria that I'm very happy to see.

And of course I'm as curious as anyone to find out what Vloxx plans to do. I liked his stuff more earlier when he wasn't having to tread water until part 3, and I worry they've set themselves up for something that will be hard to pay off within the constraints of the game we're playing... but I'm curious!

[foolinamber]

same picture

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

req'd by @urlocalllama

BOOOM! :)

text: JUST BLOW THE DAMN GATE, CANACH

[directorvloxx]

I really hope its like this next update

[apollo-cackling]

the dyke drama at the start of eod is insane

[vinetooth-prime]

🤝 🤝 🤝

[cursedjaz]

A New Gothsura Touches The Beacon

[ghostcashewart]

Marjory Delaqua and Kasmeer Meade for @angrymoss !

☕ get a ko-fi doodle here ($5 per character!) ☕

[klingonhugdungeons]

It occurred to me today that the Guild Wars franchise is named after actual in-game historical events in the same way that LaCroix is named after actual flavors. I wonder if GW3 plans to change that, or if we are just locked in to the name now lol

[grasping-earth]

The first game was set in the aftermath of recent guild wars - they didn't feature, but at least the fact that they happened was plot relevant.

Guild Wars 3 is set during the rise of guilds as a force in Tyria, but before that erupted into guild wars across the continent (foreshadowing I guess?).

... Guild Wars 2 really has no excuse though. The guilds that appear in that one are almost universally cooperative and constructive for the world, AND it doesn't have GvG gameplay!

[grasping-earth]

I've had cause to think about my commander Rhudain again lately, so here's a question for the crowds: if you have a sylvari character, what was their experience of the rise of Mordremoth?

If they were part of the Maguuma campaign, how'd that go for them? If they weren't awakened yet, do those events have an impact on their life in other ways?

[grasping-earth]

Rhudain is Pact Commander during this time - having risen from being one of the prominent commanders in the Orr campaign to being the Pact Commander that people know through the whole Scarlet debacle. The Mordremoth campaign really does change things for him, because it's not just horrifying (it is horrifying), it's very personal. Before he goes into the jungle he has a falling out with the Pale Tree which is very difficult for him, but he's also very angry about it. Then, while he doesn't succumb, he is very much having to fight Mordremoth the whole way... and having risen to be this Big Damn Hero who thought he'd learned to deal with loss and grief, it's very hard for him to deal with people suddenly not trusting him, and even harder once he starts to doubt himself.

I've only written isolated scenes for Rhudain's story, but one I have written on this topic includes this:

“From where I was standing, it was that… everything we are, everything we identified in ourselves that made us sylvari, was really him. Our bodies, grown from a tree - the Dream, and the sharing of our memories - our connection and sense of each other, even. All of that came from Mordremoth, and was intended to serve his spread. It was all of us, and it all turned out to be him. So - what does that leave us?” Rhudain realised too late that he was getting choked up, emotion wringing out his voice as he tried to express the feeling. “What is there even to defend? It was like there never was a me. I was just deluded into thinking Rhudain existed because I was alone, until…” That was as far as he could get. Until the dragon came and claimed the limb waiting for it when it woke up was too horrible a thought to say aloud.

Anyway, it was rough, and rough in a whole new way compared to the previous campaigns Rhudain had been on. AND on top of that, it upended two of his close personal relationships. One is canon - what happens with Trahearne is just the icing on an awful cake by the time he gets there, but it still cut deep and will leave him with nightmares. And then there's Morvhann. His first and best friend, and his first experience of loss and betrayal when she joined the Nightmare Court and walked out of his life forever... except then he runs into her in Maguuma. And it's not going well for her. There's a whole other story there, but the poor boy is extremely mixed up over this campaign and very little in the later story will really match the horror of it for him personally.

[grasping-earth]

I've had cause to think about my commander Rhudain again lately, so here's a question for the crowds: if you have a sylvari character, what was their experience of the rise of Mordremoth?

If they were part of the Maguuma campaign, how'd that go for them? If they weren't awakened yet, do those events have an impact on their life in other ways?

[ratasum]

I kinda want it to come out that the human gods had no say over the other races of Tyria HAVING magic initially (as in before humans had it), but they DID take it away from everybody and unreliable narration fucks with the narrative over time.

[grasping-earth]

I'm certainly not ruling out this approach in GW3 at this stage. I'm also not ruling out the idea that there are peoples in GW3-era Tyria who have access to the same magic they always did, they just don't live among the humans so the human belief goes unchallenged (and anyway a human who met, say, a Seer or a Forgotten would probably be like "well they're different, they're magical creatures").

But the lore of GW2 opens up some new potential to me, in that we now know that the elder dragons exist, and that part of their cycle is wake up - consume all the magic they can get - go to sleep when there's nothing more to eat - slowly leech magic back into the world from their bodies until they wake up. So I'm also not ruling out that GW3-era Tyria is just a very low-magic world, as part of a natural cycle, and no one's keeping it from anyone so much as there's just very little ambiently around post-dragonrise.

And if the human gods gift some of their followers with access to magic, well, that might be a god thing, but it might also have to do with them having traveled to make their home in Arah... which we now know is built atop a dormant elder dragon...

[ratasum]

Commander forced vacation arc is here. VoE ends and Rytlock chases us to a deserted island to nap for a couple years.

[grasping-earth]

The Commander is coerced into writing a memoir for posterity; the revamped content is filling in the details of how something really happened (or exaggerating something to make a better story).

[grasping-earth]

There's a weird feeling to contemplating the question of how human-focused GW3 may or may not be. Because yeah, if you're coming from GW2 where there are five playable peoples that are ostensibly equally important and prevalent in the narrative, 'focusing just on humans' is restrictive and leaves some players out. And Orr is a human society where the humans' patron gods are very influential, so even if you can play as non-humans it's going to be in a human-dominated context.

But at the same time, GW1 was also human-focused, and all player characters were humans from specific origins. So in some ways it would be coming back around, and GW2 becomes specifically the future game set after the heyday of the humans, when peoples other than one's own are a much bigger and more unavoidable part of everyone's life. That diversity of playable perspectives is a GW2 thing specifically. Whereas if they are going for a very situated story of ongoing relationships in GW3 rather than a globe-trotting adventure, that will be much easier to do if all player characters come from a common origin (the Order of the Vael, Orr, human society) rather than being hugely diverse and needing the story to account for that.

Of course, if your enjoyment of the game(s) hinges on making diverse OCs, you're going to feel limits on character creation - that's fair. I'm definitely in a wait and see kind of mindset. But I dunno, I'm just starting to get a picture of how and why GW3 might be a different game to GW2 (or GW1 for that matter), rather than just a new take on the same thing.