User:An Adventurer/Blog/The Death of Lore

The Death of Lore

by An Adventurer

The quality of the lore has been on a steady decline for years. And while its hard to say exactly when this decline started, its easy to pinpoint exactly when it took a sharp nosedive: The November 2009 Letter from the Producer. With hints of Borelean's wedding and the addition of new playable races, this letter set the way for the end of story arcs as we knew them and the terrible recycling of AC2's content.

Story arcs were the structure that supported AC's once great lore. They usually had plots which were easy enough to follow - big bad thing shows up, bad thing attacks us, we kill the bad thing - but even with this simple formula they could have great depth. The Fourth Sending of Darkness, The Rise of the New Singularity, and others followed this formula, yet had very rich story. And while I hadn't been totally satisfied with the recent arcs since the War of Blood and Shadow, at least we had a clear villain and a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The T'thuun arc ended in Dec 2008, and we've been in the same directionless, hodge-podge, unsatisfying "story" since then. Sure, things have happened, and things have "ended" but nothing had has a solid conclusion.

We started the current era of lore with the Crystalline Crag and Mar'uun. The Crystalline Crag kept expanding, and eventually we found an Empyrean facility, and destroyed a big crystal, and then... nothing. Usually when we destroy a large sentient crystal, something bad happens. We destroyed the soul shards and Bael'Zharon was released. We destroyed Gaerlan's cisterns and the Harbinger was released. We destroyed a crystal under Vissidal and broke the seal that kept the Dark Isle submerged.

But this time, when we destroyed the Crystalline Essence Array nothing happened. That's not to say that if the devs ever use a large crystal, it has to be sealing something away, but that said this one felt like it really should have. We several months of build-up to reach this point. We had to open up essence locks to get the crystal to appear. The Essence Array even had minion crystals that, if I recall correctly, fought with wisps that also appeared. It really felt like this should have led into something else, rather than being the end of the quest line. But instead you looted a crystal chunk, turned it in, and got this dialog:
 * You give Tokashi Ando Crystalline Array Fragment.
 * Tokashi Ando tells you, "We have quite a bit of work ahead of us. Hopefully we'll some day be able to discern what happened here."
 * Tokashi Ando tells you, "This Ja'qu you talked about. I wish only that he could remember... we could learn so much from him."

There are so many questions left unanswered. Why did the crag appear in the first place? What was the facility for? Was it Yalaini, or did it predate them? Were the progenitor wisps supposed to explain the source of all wisps, or just the ones we had been fighting in the Crag? What happened when we destroyed the crystal, or did destroying it do nothing at all? The players don't know, Tokashi Ando doesn't know, do the devs know?

Mar'uun was somehow connected to the cyrtalline crag. They were both introduced in the same patch, and initially to enter Mar'uun you first had to use the resonant portal that took you up to the crag. And while Mar'uun had more of a conclusion (we saved it, yay) there was still so much left unexplained. What was really going on with this place? What were they researching? What ended up destroying the town? What caused the time traveling resonant portals to appear? Why is it no big deal that we discovered time travel?

I actually really enjoyed the Crystalline Crag/Mar'uun arc, until the end. It had the potential to explain some long standing mysteries in the lore (origin of wisps, more details on elements, empyreans, etc) while adding a few more mysteries to the pile, but instead it didn't explain anything. You could snip out the entire crag/mar'uun arc and not lose anything in the overall lore. It introduced the new plot device Aetherium, and that's it.

Next up were the Thugs, Gear Knights, and the Apostate Virindi. The thugs seemed absolutely pointless except as an introduction to the idea of gear knights and to tie in the apostates and aetherium more. Again, the thugs were another arc that could be snipped out and you wouldn't lose a thing. The Gear knights were interesting until they turned out to be pawns of the Apostate Virindi. And the Apostates were literally just a rehash of the Rise of the New Singularity, until...

We find out the Apostates are really the pawns of Geraine! What a twist! Oh yeah, Geraine has been awake for a while now, brooding in his citadel like some cheap knock-off of emperor Palpatine. The writing for Geraine has been utterly terrible. And while I can forgive some of it (these are game devs not professional writers) the underlying plot makes zero sense. From what I understand, Geraine can see the future and has been trying to alter the AC2 future by tampering with current events, in an attempt to stop the Isparians and allies from having their Golden Age of peace that preceded the Devastation. Now, in AC2's story, Geraine played a huge role in tampering with the battle of the kings and the first arc or two of the game. Geraine's AC2 arc ended with him defeating the undead who challenged him, entering a rift into another plain, finding and destroying an aspect of the book of Eibhil, and setting off to become an author of his own book of power.

Now, if the Geraine in AC1's current arc can see AC2's future, why the hell is he trying to interfere with the events that led to it at all if in the end he got exactly what he wanted?

The answer is because the lore is not important. the current era of 'lore' has been entirely to explain new mechanics and recycle AC2 content, probably in an attempt to get old AC2 players to subscribe. The Gear Knight plot doesn't really make much sense, especially when their war against the humans abruptly ended. They were really only there so we could get fightable and playable Gear Knights. Geraine's early Ley Line stuff was only there to explain Aetheria. The two Bael'Zharon plots (one near Samsur and the other in Tou-Tou) are purely there to exploit nostalgia and attempt to bring back old players by waving around the Hopeslayer. Geraine's tampering with Asheron's rescue of Empyreans was only there to add playable Empyreans.

Speaking of Empyreans, this was the worst handled race addition when it comes to the lore. First, their physcial appearance is entirely from AC2, where Empyreans floated around and had glowing, pupiless eyes. In AC1 they were never described or portrayed in this way. Asheron, Gaerlan, and Aerfalle never looked like this in game, and the Empyreans in concept art and the original intro video didn't either. There was no reason to make the Empyreans look different from how they have always been represented in AC1 other than to make the game seem more familiar to old AC2 players.

But more important than their appearance is their reappearance. The return of the Empyreans should have probably been the single most important thing to happen in Asheron's Call's lore. The entire game is based around this mysterious, long-vanished race and the ruins and relics they left behind. If they returned, would they be happy with these less advanced races inhabiting the only Olthoi-free area on their entire world? Would they be happy with us using their relics and their magic without actually fully understanding what we are doing? Would the Emperor or the Nali see us as equals? Would Nuhmudira start a war against them like she's been promising?

But nothing like that happened. The freed Empyreans instantly and seamlessly integrated into the Isparian society. They are permanently disabled, unable to access magic above the 8th circle and limited to 5 schools, but they don't mind. They know how to speak the common Isparian trade language despite just returning, but hey have forgot their own native languages, and have to rely on Isparian translators to translate their Yalaini and Dericost texts. They all seem to accept Asheron as their ruler, even though the Emperor and Nali are still in portalspace. Some of them even accept Elysa/Borelean as their leader and have joined the Royal Guard. And Nuhmudira hasn't even said a word about their return, even though her entire character is based on her hatred of the Empyreans.

The point where I realized the lore was dead was when the devs made a thread taking suggestions for shortening some allegiance titles of the new races. I spent a lot of time creating multiple suggestions for each race, researching lore on the wiki and real world titles on wikipedia. They didn't go with any of my suggestions, but that wasn't the part the bothered me. It was the realization that I put in more effort creating titles that fit with the lore than the devs ever would have. I knew then that lore was completely meaningless to the current dev team.

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