Being a hero in real life is a lot tougher than you might think, mainly because there aren’t any Ogres or Orcs running around trying to burn villages. That leaves only 1 other option, I’m not counting charities because you should be doing that anyways! I’m talking about video games. They let us don some flashy armor, equip over the top weaponry, and open up quest after quest. The Seeds of Truth gave us a taste of the other side, doing things in a more sinister manner. I must say, I kind of liked it.
Now let’s get it straight, no we didn’t turn into bad guys in Seeds of Truth. Spoiler alert by the way. We had the chance to peer into the past memories of Caithe, which allowed us to play as her in these small instances. So really we played as Caithe, and as doing so we killed Centaurs. Does that mean Caithe use to be a bad person? Kinda of, simply because she didn’t try too hard to stop Faolain. But it feels like she bit off more than she could chew hanging out with Faolain in the first place.
The act of attacking an entire village of Centaurs, at least ones that were good guys, was kind of refreshing, because we got a taste of the other side of things. Other games, such as Fable and Mass Effect, allowed us to try and accomplish our goals in a more sinister way. The same way Faolain did by manipulating Caithe into fighting off an entire village for her own goals.
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Sometimes it’s fun to be bad.
I know some people were actually put off by these events. I can understand it a bit, because up until this point, we’ve only controlled our characters to save others. Now we had to control a character to kill in cold blood. I don’t think anyone was ready for that.
I’m not saying I want to be evil, but this has opened up my eyes to an amazing possibility. Currently the game does have slight alternate paths in the personal story, but a lot of things are still out of your control. If you act with your ferocity, it just changes the words in a text box. You deciding to join the Order of Whispers didn’t have any repercussions then, or now. I feel this is something ArenaNet wanted to try and accomplish with the personal story, but the game being an MMO, was probably too big of an undertaking considering all the other things they needed to finish.
Here’s where I see the possibilities. There’s a Dragon egg that’s been snatched, and we have no idea why, all while an Elder Dragon is awake, ripping Tyria apart. Why not give us some options to be “renegades” so that our characters can act as we would like them to, instead of just having the one option of being mister goody two-shoes. Some of us are ok with doing what needs to be done, so long as we get the end result we’re looking for. In this case, killing an Elder Dragon.
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Who really wants to be this guy all of the time?
There’s a lot wrong with this little dream of mine, the biggest being it would just take way more work for the developers to get these updates completed. Every decision has to be mapped out, and planned perfectly so that the players can all have unique experiences in the middle, yet gaining a semi unique, but similar ending. That’s why I feel Seeds of Truth may have been an experiment to see how players would react to the role reversal. We may see the results of this experiment in an expansion if not future Living World updates.
If I can’t have my character make some bad decisions that result in civilian casualties while I try to save the rest of the world, then maybe it’s time we see the return of corruption events from the beta. Have the Shatterer, or Jormag fly over their map, corrupting half the players, letting us spread chaos! I love being a hero, but sometimes I just want to cause a little mischief.
What did you think of the Seeds of Truth update? Would you like to play a more chaotic role in Guild Wars 2? Let us know in the comments below.
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