Being Saleh: A year In Tyria (Story Mode)

Being Saleh in Tyria is a year now, In this article I really want to summarize the lore content of Guild wars 2, I'll try not to be lazy and write as many information as I can, so here we go, warning: spoiler ahead

Personal Story on Guild Wars 2 takes place in a personal instance, the story revolved around how Tyria united into a force to take down Zhaitan, the undead elder dragon on his base, the Corrupted Island of Orr. On these stories players will meet Tyria's armed factions, The Destiny's Edge, and Trahearne, the hero of this story. Personal story ended with players take out Zhaitan in the level 80 dungeon Arah, after that it's the end of the real main lore in Guild Wars 2.

After a month of bug fixes Anet finally released it's first update: Shadow of the Mad King is a halloween event build around in an interesting storyline spanned on a month, new armor skins, new weapon skins, one time event where the Mad King burst the Lion Statue of Lion's Arch just to taunt us, everything was breathtaking, even the jumping puzzle (Mad King clock tower) is challenging enough to dubbed it the most interesting jumping puzzle ever created. The showdown with the Mad King is also a fun dungeon with a little of spiced jumping puzzle and emote playing.

But after that came the next update: The Lost Shores which was unfortunately the lowest of all updates, thousand of players got slaughtered in Lion's Arch not only because of the new enemy: The Karkas is extremely powerful but also because the event produces the most dreaded lag of Guild Wars' history. The final event which players encounter the Karka King (or Queen) in a new opened area: Southsun Cove is so messed up that Arenanet has to make compensation of free exotic weapons for everyone which is online and disconnected during the event. The story introduces the Consortium as the capitalist faction on Guild Wars 2 and also introduces the scaling dungeon Fractal of The Mists

The Living Story so far...

Wintersday come and go, I didn't get to enjoy much of the festivities since I returned to WoW to get my hand on Mists of Pandaria, but after that came the mixed bag of love and hate in Guild Wars 2: The Living Story, the first one (Flame and Frost) spanned four month introduces us to Braham and Rox as we sped through Ascalon and Shiverpeaks area fighting invasions of the ragtag forces of Molten forces consists of the flame legion and Shiverpeaks dredges, the Molten Front is also the most fun dungeon I've ever played, The Story of Braham and Rox ended abruptly but the content itself has a gradual "grow-on-me" factor because of it's boring start and slow pace on the first two parts, we were given the hints but no completion, not even after we blow the Molten Facility sky high.

Rox and Braham goes their own way and so are we, things have been brewing on Southsun, The Consortium settlement project didn't really work and we are thrown into chaos once more, but this time the Living Story content was so little it hardly can be called a story, it's more like a side dish in an unveiled main course and we never got the main course, The villain is now Canach, a begrudged ex-Consortium, the dungeon mechanic is also baffling that I refused to play it and instead rally my guild to lay waste on Karka's invasion on the Southsun Cove, including taking down the Karka Queen itself, while searching for hints of dragons in there, we didn't find it

After Canach it is clear that Anet tried to raise the spotlight on Ellen Kiel, a captain of the Lionguard in charge of Southsun, in the next installment: Dragon Bash which introduce hologram-grinding and Anet's two weeks living story content Kiel was in another spotlight, also enter Marjory Delaqua as a noir-character (which promptly disappear after the update ended), the festivities ended with the introduction of the Aetherblade: sky pirates of Tyria.

The Bazaar of the four winds is the most dreaded update for some people, it introduces the Zephyr Sanctum: an airship operated by the zephyrites, a bunch of people who didn't ever set foot on land, Kiel --again-- is on the story, Anet also introduces Evon Gnashblade as her rival on the election to be the next leader of Lion's Arch which will settle trading with the zephyrite. The execution of the update is revolving around jumping puzzle content (which I found is a dread). This time Anet also had player to vote for their candidate, the election tied itself into a content of Fractal where Ellen will have the Thaumanova reactor incident fractal and Evon will have the Fall of Abaddon fractal, the community is quick to respond in this, the forum has never been so vocal before, the content has become divisive point which split the community into two, Evon was considered the missing link between Guild Wars 1 and 2, while Ellen Kiel is considered the Anet's golden girl and the female Trahearne.

Ellen wins and rage ensues, the forum was flamed over and over again but quickly stopped by Anet as we moved into Queen's Jubilee which I love very very dearly: it's not only because Rox and Braham's back but it's also introduces new group PVE arena, the queen's pavilion where the enemies are the malfunctioned clockwork guards created by the human Queen Jennah. There's also the Queen's challenge: a one-on-one timed battle between a player and a queen's champion (which I sucked at), the last part introduces us to Scarlet Briar, the villain that Tyria needs beside the dragon, although the comunity split of whether she's a Wesley Crusher kind of Mary Sue or a perfectly built character -- Scarlet is a success because although one of her purpose is to re-introduce the past faction like the Molten Alliance and Aetherblades she's perfectly modeled to lead them all.

....after a year, my opinion is...

I want to say something to Anet: Stop retconned everything.

On the Flame and Frost the image on our mind is that Jormag and Primordus are finally on the move after the death of Zhaitan, and guess what: there's no hint or glimpse of them throughout the content. The mighty Karkas are to be believed as minion of the unnamed deep sea dragon and all we got now is a deserted Southsun Cove because nothing about the dragon as well although we got a piece of Lore from Ree Soesby's book: The Sea of Sorrow. The Aetherblade brings us far far away from the dragon but the sheer number of them is also a question: where the hell they're hiding all this time? It's like the Twilight Cult enigma all over again.

How about Scarlet? She's a pure evil genius, able to unite the Molten Alliance and the Aetherblades under her command, she have the perfect army to even lay waste to a city and she didn't do that, of course she's also crazy and likes to play (fatally), and after that she escapes, poof... just like that.

The Crown Pavilion was built on top of a sunken area called the great collapse where a sinkhole suddenly appears in a west area of Divinity's Reach. The sinkhole has been erased from the wiki page and redirected into the Crown Pavilion wiki page as a proof that Anet has retconned the area which in the past spawned numerous speculation that's something is beneath Divinity's Reach.

I want to tell you something, right now I'm furious that the next update is the Super Adventure Box again, an update that's been released on April, it focuses heavily on Jumping Puzzle content and definetely not for me, so I considered to actually buy Final Fantasy XIV and joined some of my friend there but they're already closed the sales. The reason of my furious-ness is not because it's another JP-oriented content but because it brings so little lore content in the update.

Anet should considered this: Sometimes it's story that made people like me stay (hell I stay on WoW just to saw Varian morphed into Super Saiya and Garrosh becomes Cell), although Wow's story content has improved greatly after the Cataclysm's third grade content they're still so slow with the patches. IMO Anet has so much potential to turn Tyria into a more living world by throwing small story content event here and there, but please STICK CLOSE TO THE DRAGONS!!! they're the main villains after all. Also on this point all the member of Destiny's edge have their cameo into the Living Story as well except Zojja and Caithe, stick close to them, develop their story and stop throwing more one-time character into that story.

The point is: I like being teased more than retconned so please stop introducing new and forgettable characters and focus on the old ones.