What actually is the atlas of worlds?

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Sorry, I had no idea. Are those quotes made irrelevant by my using that particular wiki?

Nope, not at all.
But using that wiki has been unpleasant ever since fandom graced it with their "design".

The Atlas represents alternative versions of the campaign, partially also alternative timelines similar as Last Epoch. Aka different worlds if we could call it that way.

It's not a dream as entering the atlas through the portals moves your body to something tangible, including the environment and the flora/fauna there.

Which means the player avatars can die in the same way as in the campaign which is also tangible.

But what i personally think is that even GGG does not know the lore reason why maps exist and present it in a way to make sense in regards of the campaign.

Last Epoch interweaves its endgame systems into the campaign where it makes more sense.

"Actually". I don't think we have the same meaning of the term. It's actually just part of a game that I play. Players wanted something to do after they finished the campaign, and they came up with maps and organized them into an atlas because organization makes the game more engaging. Just having random maps of different difficulties wasn't. So, they've come up with a few different ways to organize them into a somewhat meaningful arrangement.

I find it really interesting when people take games and fiction in general as being "real". I know some that do. People who answer the phone in Elizabethan accent because they really really think that Ren Faire is reality. Stuff like that. Fascinating that we can replace reality with whatever we feel like.

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Mikrotherion wrote:

It has the "Official Wiki" badge, which they only use when they have an agreement with the game's developers/ IP holder.

"The Official Community-Maintained
Path of Exile Wiki" which has not been maintained for months and months. Right, it must be official then.

"Official Wiki" my arse.

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Mikrotherion wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Sorry, I had no idea. Are those quotes made irrelevant by my using that particular wiki?

Nope, not at all.
But using that wiki has been unpleasant ever since fandom graced it with their "design".

I see. So the issue is when I googled these specific terms (Reverie device, Maligaro's Map) those were the first hits, so if people have an issue, they can take it up with the SEO or some such shit. ^_^

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gandhar0 wrote:

It's not a dream as entering the atlas through the portals moves your body to something tangible, including the environment and the flora/fauna there.

Which means the player avatars can die in the same way as in the campaign which is also tangible.

That is all explained pretty well by the lore I quoted/linked to. The word 'reverie' in PoE seems to mean a dream into which one can translocate in a corporeal sense, bring things back, 'die' and all that. Dreams made real, put simply. And yeah, it's all very shaky and no GGG probably didn't fully think it through, but did they have to? Not when you have people to whom 'it's just a game' seems sufficient an answer for half-baked lore and game elements that don't stand up under scrutiny.

I'm a weirdo -- I like internal logic and consistency when it comes to world building and narrative construction. Hand-waving is fine if it's necessary to have fun (and the work in question has no interest in making sense) but it's so much better when things make sense upon scrutiny. Something I would expect, say, a pedagogue to understand...then again, I've been known to expect too much in the past. One might even call it a trait of mine.

On the other hand, I truly do envy those who seem incapable of or at least disinclined to more nuanced takes and just go straight to 'ahahaha you can't reality from game if you think about this, you must be like one of those deluded Ren Faire freaks who stay in character all the time!'. Classy stuff all the way.

Anyway, I reckon my first response suffices and have no desire to duke it out with a very local legend, so ja na. ^_^

What the Atlas is... if any, it is the starting point on stopping holding the game lore as an absolute, because it is an aspect as significant as the campaign, and yet retconned at each major content release.

As Charan stated before, the very original concept of the Atlas was a dreamscaped accessed via self-sacrifice, an item discovered by Malachai, who in turn taught this art to Maligaro. There may or may not be some ties back then with the Vaal lore, specifically the Harvest event, in which both Doryani and Atziri left the realm of reality in order to "ascend", thus ending the Vaal era as we know it. We know that, ultimately, both of them went in communion with the "God of Corruption", as in Sin's Beast, the same one that Malachai ultimately reached out and tried to exploit. Still, it is also true that Atziri still lives in the realm of dreams, since Map Fragments allow access to her "Fortress" (Alva's Atziri could have been a good idea to have a pre-Harvest Atziri, but GGG chose to just recycle the one we all know and tag along).

Then Atlas of the Worlds kicks in. Turns out it was Valdo Caesirus, A.K.A. the Shaper, A.K.A. Zana's father, that discovered the Atlas first, albeit clumsily, when fixing an "ancient artifact from Wraeclast". Now, the whole "Malachai was first" still holds, but we have to account for both Voll and Venarius, respectively High Templars during Malachai and during Valdo's eras, their belonging to the "purity High Templar" faction (opposed to the "corruption High Templars", like Dominus) and their penchant for erasing any trace of "corruption" from history, as an attempt to destroy corruption forever (What is something, when deprived of its history and origins?). Valdo turns into the Shaper after entering into a Vaal Temple map, being horrified by it (honestly, who wouldn't nowadays) and attempts to create a new utopic world for her and Zana to live, away from the corruption. The Shaper guardians are here, and kidnap Zana in order to force Valdo to show them what he was working on - in return, he trap them into the Atlas.

Don't hold onto those feelings yet - War for the Atlas is here to retcon all you've learnt so far. Here we find that:
* The Atlas is not just ANY dreamscape, but the Elder's Hunting Grounds, an eldritch being from outside our reality plan that feeds on human fears, expecially children's (Yugul much?)
* The Shaper actually learnt the power of Shaping items (allowing for those dream-made items to be sent back to reality) from the Elder
* The Map device may not have been Vaal. It was used by the Watchers of the Decay (which are post-Vaal) in order to access the Elder's realm and seal it into it
* The Map Device reached Valdo's laboratory not just for academic curiosity, but for the specific aim to be rebuilt and "armed if possible" by Venarius himself
* The whole "Kidnap Zana to discover what daddy Valdo is doing" subplot is there, but this time is Venarius doing the kidnap, not the 4 Shaper Guardians
* About the Shaper Guardians, they are now four Templars that kept Valdo in prison after Venarius was dissatistied by Valdo's slow progress
* And much more changes on Valdo's Memories - from 6 to 16, and they tell a story slightly different from before!

Conquerors of the Atlas keeps the lore from War for the Atlas pretty much in check. Only difference is that it was not you that killed the Uber Elder, but rather Zana, Sirus, Drox, Al-Hezmin, Baran and Veritania (look, a party of 6!). You can still somehow access memories for both Shaper and Elder's battle, as well as Venarius in his Cortex - even if technically speaking Venarius hasn't set foot on the Atlas after the Elder munched away his own mind when he chose to free it from Starforge, and he tried to develop an "Atlas Replica", only bound to people's memories rather than dreams.

Echoes and Siege, luckily, kept this lore for the time being. Zana has been retconned (now she is, as Kirac states, "somebody he used to know") and we don't know where she is, we have many other alternatives to the Elder and looks like we will end in PoE2 with, probabily, a whole Pantheon of them.

^Nice! (And totally confirms my lazy take that it's all a bit of a soap opera now.)

Okay outies fer real.

I just thought it would be cool if we were travelling to other planets/worlds/timelines to kill random stuff. It certainly would make sense with a name like "atlas of worlds". I want to be a cosmic badass, dammit.

Yeah. It in fact ,at this time being, is travelling to different worlds.

At least since they introduced these Eldritch entities at 3.1 and after (Elder and his kin).

Early maps ,3.0 before Elder, may be considered as dreams (thanks to Maligaro campaign quest, pre 3.0 environmental lore pieces) but it was quickly retconned soon after making the Atlas a battle ground ,in different worlds, which seems to be only a small part of a much bigger place/zone ("small island in a giant stone forest" to quote the Envoy).

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gandhar0 wrote:

Yeah. It in fact ,at this time being, is travelling to different worlds.

At least since they introduced these Eldritch entities at 3.1 and after (Elder and his kin).

Early maps ,3.0 before Elder, may be considered as dreams (thanks to Maligaro campaign quest, pre 3.0 environmental lore pieces) but it was quickly retconned soon after making the Atlas a battle ground ,in different worlds, which seems to be only a small part of a much bigger place/zone ("small island in a giant stone forest" to quote the Envoy).

The lore is very messy

Zana refer the Shaper's Realm as

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I think I understand it now... This Atlas, these maps... they aren't so much worlds as they are like the performance stage in the Theopolis Amphitheatre. These worlds are merely disguises for what truly lies behind the curtain.
This place... this is the nexus of the Elder's worlds, the place from which all its hunting grounds are formed... We are close to the void from which it was birthed, yet my Father has chosen this as his home. Curious indeed. Hiding in plain sight perhaps? Though, what captain regularly frequents the bowels of his ship? Maybe the Elder rarely visits this place. It is busy, I suppose, hunting and feasting elsewhere in the maps...

Exile, I will ready my Father's memories. You go on ahead, scout this place, find my Father, but be wary of what horrors might lurk down here in the belly of this evil machine.