Lore Question: Why Karui people and Tukohama are aggressive to Marauder in Act 6?

They should have stopped with the Eldritch Horror shit at Beyond. It was great for a league, but a completely uninspired move for the game itself. Hands up who has seen a map of the game world. GGG actually gave them away back during beta to supporters of a certain tier. I am sure you can google it.

It's pretty big. The game itself only directly uses...maybe a quarter of it. We skirt up the southeastern coast, veer into a forest, explore the central city of Sarn, do some questing a little northeast of that...and then teleport to Oriath. And then we do all of that again.

And then, because the developers desperately wanted to cling to the Mapping mechanic but felt the need to 'ground' that which was otherwise perfectly abstract and otherworldly, actually made "Mapping" a visualised space via the Atlas.

So what about all those other places in Wraeclast/the PoE world? Why not give them their moment? I thought it was all pretty rich with lore and legends, ripe for expansions and exploration. Ah, but that takes *new assets*. Mapping? Mostly recycled assets. Eldritch Gods style storyline? Eh, wow. So original. Yeah. Gosh.

To their credit they have used a few leagues to sort of explore Wræclast itself: Delve goes down, Incursion goes back, Harbinger looked forward. Perandus and Ritual tapped historical figures. These all felt like preludes to much more interesting additions to the game to me, but eh, guess not.

I HEAR that later on in the Atlas, there's actually a plotline where some uberbigbad threatens Wræclast, which just makes me laugh. Eh, just looked it up. Yep, that sounds as silly as I thought. The scale of power at that point is far beyond Wræclast, the Exile themselves so far removed from mere human, that threatening Wræclast just seems petty.

And that's the biggest problem with this Lovecraftian veer in a game that wasn't originally designed for it: it removes any real need or desire to care about the original game world.

I am willing to bet that the early plan was to expand PoE through Wræclast the way Diablo expands through Sanctuary, but that proved far too ambitious and taxing. So what you're left with is a game that doesn't really make much sense: a whole continent, right there on the official map, which the game abandons in favour of a cosmic netherspace almost purely for the devs' convenience.

I do love me some Lovecraftian eldritch shit but only when that's the premise from the start. As a creative crutch I think it's derivative and lazy.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

They should have stopped with the Eldritch Horror shit at Beyond. It was great for a league, but a completely uninspired move for the game itself. Hands up who has seen a map of the game world. GGG actually gave them away back during beta to supporters of a certain tier. I am sure you can google it.

I get what you mean, but its a problem that sort of always happens if the story dont conclude at some point. Its prevalent among all forms of media enough that tvtropes has a page for it called "sequel escalation". Every time you introduce a sequel of some form, the audience kinda expects for the new villian to be more menacing or just the stakes to be higher in general(hard to make smaller and the audience not feel "the hero already solved worse than this", wich sucks tension and makes the sequel villians feel like poor wannabes compared to previous ones). If the show runs long enough, this has the side effect of making the original conflict insignificant and almost comical at how little was at stake when you rewatch the whole thing

In this games defense, they still have the card that the gods might be weakened or were not the real deal, and its still possible to make actual gods at the top of their game being able to stand on the same ground as the likes of Elder or the Mavens pops and not result in a plot hole(heck, maybe godly presence on other parts of the world was why we dont hear about eldrich horrors outside oriath, maybe they just dont dare step in a place with real gods lording over and picked wraeclast because the gods are weakened. Maybe its not they were not aware of us, but the Elder was the only that noticed this places divines were weakened and the Maven came not just because the Elder vanished, but was curious why it took so long for he to be booted. Its possible -likely even- that poe2 makes that this contnent where the game takes place is no big deal and the vaal were just enourmous by this continent standards, but normal fish in a tiny pound worldwide), so there still is narrative space to make wraeclast or the general "mundane" world to not feel outclassed by the overworld of the atlas

As for each arc, Shaper and Elder i think were quite good, Sirus did had some sort of connection to the original setting and the elderslayers were pretty good inserts for player characters of previous leagues, a touch i find was pretty cool(tho they could have made 5 conquerors, and each more reflective of each starting class with sirus being the last and zana being the scion, that would be even cooler). I kinda liked the original idea of the maven as a villian that is more infantile and generally naive with just a touch of cruelty, its not a original arquetype of villian, but it was still an arquetype that was absent on this game, and was executed well enough wile also set the hook for the next big bad guy. The more recent duo of eater and exarch i agree that do feel uninspired tho...

It never occurred to me that TVTropes would have a page on it but that makes complete sense. It's a mix of 'sequel escalation' and the game's inevitable soap operatic structure as a Service game.

But still, it is possible to do arcs within that structure that make sense and augment the game world. I think Warframe did it quite well, for as long as I played it. XIV is the fucking master of it, but obviously Yoshi-P and Squeenix have a lot more to work with (in every sense of the word).

It doesn't help that the writer/narrative designer who worked on the original Wræclast moved on long ago -- although he did come back to work on Fall of Oriath, which I think you can see given how much that expansion genuinely cared about Wræclast and the effect of the Beast's death on various familiar environments.

I read the writer's breakdown of Siege of the Atlas a few hours ago, but since I have no real investment in any of it it just looked like filler, busywork to justify bigger, badder bad guys. I'd hate to write for a game that has no true ending, and no real interest in engaging story arcs. Still, a job's a job.

Comments/responses praised the Siege of the Atlas set-up as 'great lore' though so I guess I just missed something.

But getting back to the escalation situation, let's consider a Beyond boss that perfectly illustrates where GGG simply couldn't keep it in their design pants: Abaxoth, The End Of All That Is.

Firstly, with a name like that, it doesn't seem like there's much wiggle room to go bigger or badder. A clear homage/rip-off of the Lovecraftian Azathoth in terms of name and function (Azathoth has a bunch of titles, but one of my favourites is 'nuclear chaos'), Abaxoth, The End Of All That Is sounds like the big bad to end all big bads. But then you see it in-game and it's just this roughly human-sized little demon dual-wielding then-pretty impressive two handed swords. It wasn't the end of all that is so much as the end of the level run. Whoopdedoo.

This was 'telling, not showing' on a cosmically bad scale.

We have myriad examples of GGG losing control of their own IP, of their own game design systems, and to me this sort of title mismatch encapsulates it neatly. They tell you one thing, they deliver something far, far less impressive. They say 'this is melee', but so many people are like 'are you gaslighting us? THAT is NOT MELEE' -- equally, 'The End Of All That Is' is blatant hyperbole with almost no teeth, no substance. I remember hearing that name and thinking, wow, that's a great bit of writing. No fucking clue how they're going to represent something that absolute in its obliteration in-game. Surprise: very poorly.

And that was back during Beyond, mind you. A lot of people running Atlas now probably weren't even around then, which is also part of how GGG get away with this recycling and pointless escalation: the same way soap operas can go for decades running the same handful of core plots, updated and polished (or just updated). The audience comes and goes, comes and goes. And as long as the experience feels 'new' to someone, it might as well be 'new' and anyone who thinks it's old or derivative or repetitive is clearly just trying to ruin it for everyone else. Fuck off already if you're not enjoying it.

Anyway, they tapped Azathoth way too early because they did EVERYTHING with this game way too early. Why do you think Act 4 has enough content to be several acts? Because they didn't know at the time they'd be doing six more acts, or that at least a few of those would feel pretty damn sparse in comparison. If you take a really good look at the pacing of PoE, you can see where it 'ended' multiple times in terms of design. There's almost no narrative cohesion to the main campaign, which is why when you piss off into the void of dreamworlds it feels less like a true elevation and more like a 'finally figured a way out of this pointless world, and it was going to sleep'.

I do admire how well they retconned Mapping into the earlier acts -- I think the whole reverie machine and lucid dreaming concept was on their minds very early -- but to then make the dreamscape an actual setting...meh. Better off keeping it grounded: Malachai discovered a way to enter dream worlds lucidly, to craft them even, and ultimately to then bring things back from them. It's that last part that I think GGG squandered the most -- the Exile is, from almost the start, a petty power-hungry nothing-to-lose vagrant eager to use Wræclast to gather more power. Mapping should have represented the pinnacle of that power gathering, not some rug-pull of what power itself means. But I figure GGG were afraid that their players wouldn't be able to grasp the idea of dream worlds as unbound by narrative and essentially defiant of the usual notions of time and space (even though we've sort of grown up with it through decades of pop cultural representations of multiverses and dreamscapes) so they went and nailed it to a tree of not even three dimensions but only two.

The Atlas of Worlds as a flat representation of dream space is profoundly banal.

I get board games having to limit Other World layouts to two dimensions but a computer game? Really?

And to be fair, when you run gates in games like Arkham Horror and Eldritch Horror, it's mostly done in an abstract way: your character enters a gate at a physical location in 'our' world, and then instead of seeing some sort of map of the Other realms, is guided through fairly vague descriptive moments. You have no real idea where one Other Realm is in relation to another. Early Mapping in PoE followed this model and, I thought, worked very well indeed as a flexible, fluid endgame loop.

What baffled me most was most Exiles admit they don't even really read the lore or have much clue what is going on half the time. So why did GGG feel the need to turn their proper dreamscape endgame into a boring, two-dimensional layout with arbitrary storylines that wouldn't support most pulp fantasy novels? Why not just introduce new maps with new big bads, maybe connecting them narratively but not geographically? Surely that model would even easier to recycle than actual storylines about which apparently no one really cares.

Most cynically? Solidified storylines allow for easier visualisation of themes, themes that...oh look, there's a tie-in with our latest supporter pack block. I mean, that is VERY cynical and I am not, by nature, a cynical man.

I cared about Wræclast. I spent a long time there, waiting for GGG to slowly and confidently reveal more and more of it. I cannot see a single reason to care about The Atlas of Worlds. It's like an epic blaring of horns and choir, a Pavlovian prompt that, if one hasn't been conditioned to respond with awe, just seems vapid and kind of desperate.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Comments/responses praised the Siege of the Atlas set-up as 'great lore' though so I guess I just missed something.

Im going to point out exactly what you missed: You didnt actually lived trough it

You see, videogames have a VERY important upper hand compared to almost every other media: Its actually active enterteinment from a story-telling point of view. Unlike books and tv, videogames and rpgs in particular allows us to literally become the mais character. It creates a level of self-insert that movies simply dont have, and only long-running series can compare

To make a clear example, Final Fantasy 7: it was praised as one of the best stories ever and pretty much reinvented the standards for jrpgs. The movie they made of it on the other hand was basically a disaster, with critics calling the story "shallow", "simplistic" and Sephiroth "generic". And heres the thing: The movie was actually quite faithful to the game, the story of that game IS shallow, simplistic and sephiroth IS rather generic. So why the game was so praised?

Because the players lived trough it in a way you cant recreate in a movie with just a few hours. We played as Cloud for a good 15 hours before Aeris death, we made the grind they had to go tro before taking Sephiroth, we actively interacted with the Clouds village and its npcs before it was burn down. That level of active interaction is what allows you to create an epic experience even if the plot is rather thin if you just put on paper and read it

The siege of the atlas was no different, nor the buildup from the atlas. If you ask me, theres a DAMN GOOD reason for GGG to focus the lore on the atlas: Its simply the content players are more invested at. Past a certain point, players were simply interacting with maps more than with the campaign, and its kinda inevitable: ARPGs are late-game focused almost by nature and its near impossible to make campaign stay late-game relevant in a game that keeps updating regularly, torchlight had that genious catch that you could make the game have a near infinite lifespam with a map system that really uses the rng-map generation, so its COMPLETELY NATURAL that they would want to focus the lore expands on the atlas, its where players ate putting more time on

Is the lore shallow? Yeah, it is, BUT it was executed well enough for players who played tro the maps, fought the shaper when he was the top dog, saw the previous top boss being brought to his knees by the new top boss, interacted with the daughter of said previous top boss, for people who did all that, the story was pretty cool

But if you just read a resume from a detached point of view, sure, it was rather paper thin

Eh that's fair enough. It was sort of implicit that's what I missed, but sure. On the other hand, maybe I wouldn't have 'missed it' if it hadn't been boring and pointless to begin with. If they hadn't tucked narrative into their end/post-game, which until the creation of Zana 2.0 was mostly there 'if you wanted to do it'. I maintain that anchoring Maps with narrative was needless but eh, if y'all like it, so be it. Not convinced all that many players got super invested in the story but maybe they osmosed some of it or something. *shrug*

And yeah, I know all about Advent Children. I remember fansubbing it back in the day. It was completely impenetrable and remains so if you're not familiar with the broad events of VII (and even a little DoC, which is ridiculous). I rewatched it recently actually, having acquired it hella cheap on 4k...it doesn't really hold up. Lasted longer than Spirits Within, but so did your average orgasm. And it's important to note that Advent Children Complete wasn't trying to 'recreate' VII in a movie -- it was trying to, and succeeded at, continuing the story a little bit in a different medium. I still haven't played VIIR, although I figure I will at some point. I don't think it's the best example of a 'you had to be there' beyond the Huge Twist -- the story was always a little overrated for all sorts of reasons. What the game did on the Ps1/psx graphically. The first 'orchestral' soundtrack. And so on. So critique of VII was warranted but of course anyone saying it was 'shallow', 'simplistic' or 'generic' is forgetting it set the mould.

Another example might be if you took someone who didn't know Shakespeare to a play by Shakespeare and all they heard was quotations from other movies, books, etc. Obviously they'd find it derivative and unoriginal, and wonder why it's quoting so many other works.

I think you're conflating 'caring about the gameplay' with 'caring about the story' a bit at the end there. Plenty of games with similar (if much simpler) endgame loops do not try to invest the gameplay with much story, and they do just fine. I don't think you can sufficiently argue that Exiles who run Maps constantly are as invested in whatever the hell's going on with so-and-so and such-and-such and whatever bigbad is now in play and why...as they are in their drops, acquiring new gear, chasing certain items, and dealing fucktonnes of deeps. Recent example: Vampire Survivors, and its whole subgenre. I couldn't tell you what any of them are really about -- but that doesn't stop me and a bunch of other people getting stuck in that gameplay loop for hours on end.

And from the other direction: played a very old Japanese shmup last weekend on a friend's mega CD mini. It had both the Japanese and the English versions of this shmup. In Japanese, it had this crazy intricate backstory about the Japanese Warring States period (late 1500s), and how each of the various factions got their hands on a giant mecha, and how this affected the flow of the war, and all sorts of crazy depth. And then the game was just this tate-mode (vertical screen) shooter just like 1942 or Ikaruga. And in the English version? Same gameplay, pretty much none of that backstory beyond a simplified intro. Didn't change the feel of the game at all.

So I suppose if you can prove that Exiles wouldn't Map as hard and as incessantly as they do had GGG not gone tits-deep on the Atlas narrative, then I'd have to cede the point. But I just haven't seen much evidence of it. I don't think you'll be seeing a CG movie of anything GGG has written in a hurry, or a remake decades later. Of course, that's no indicator of quality (I have lost count of how many truly bad books have had lovely reprints and reissues), but it does sort of raise an eyebrow why FFVII was your go-to comparison. VII was never niche. It was always carried by its story, soundtrack, graphics. The only thing PoE has in common with VII is the materia system, and that's less 'in common' and more 'just outright fucking copied'. ^_^

edit: as a sort of QED, it's important to note that this very thread isn't asking about the lore of the Atlas, but the lore of Act 6. Of the core campaign that so many Exiles dismiss as 'a tutorial'. And in my not inconsiderable experience with this forum, and elsewhere PoE lore-wise, the vast majority of discussions about PoE lore regard the core campaign, not the Atlas. You could argue that's because the Atlas is better written and therefore doesn't need discussion, but also in my experience, people tend not to discuss shit they just don't care about.

True facts: The ff7 story is also "boring and pointless", the big twist they introduced was having a character that was supposed to have plot armor die, but even having a player character dia mid-game is not something new(the very ff series did before just in the previous ff6, in fact...)-and im comparing strictly stories here, i didnt touched gameplay, and FF7 IS marked as a cliche-breaker

Advent is not terribly impenetrable if you just pay attention tbh... its nowhere near as the likes of matrix. The thing here that i meant is that there was not a whole lot of story to tell if you cut the tiny scenes, and videogames stories are build on those tiny bits. The atlas story is no diff, you just read it on text, it does sound a bunch of old ideas that were used a ton before in other "cosmic hopeless" stories. It does not feel that way for people who actually played the game
It wasnt anything super original, you can certainly say that, and ill agree completely. But then... originality is overrated tbh, cliches becomes cliches because they work, even a super cliche story can work if its done properly. FF7 is just a game about a main character with memory issues(has been done a thousand times before) finding out his past and making peace with it(101 development with this kind of character) while surpassing his idol that turned villian(another super tired cliche) and said villian basically wants to attain immense powers(the game dont quite mention godhood, but damn, you can just read it in between the lines Sephiroth is dying to say hell become a god) by a way that will screw everyone(as far as world-treatening villians go, it literally cant get any more cliche than this). BUT who cares? I could break every character to point how the whole thing is a cluster of very tired ideas, but it was executed in a efficient way, if you play the game, the storytelling is competent enough to sell that tired story and thats what ultimetly matters

The atlas is no different, and the campaign part of the story that you liked at the end of the day is also no different and im fairly positive if you gave it the same detached treatment you are giving to the atlas story, you would also scream "garbage". I mean, you say the atlas story is cliched? Wraeclast is a miscelaneous collection of a bunch of cliches from "no mans land" settings: Ill-explained "corruption" ruining advanced precursor civilization? Said glorious precursors fell came largely to their own hubris? Tech reset after the ill-explained cataclism? Plot objects that gives great power but at the cost of mind corruption but short-sighted people in power keep using they anyway?(despite the fact more than one civilization imploded because of it) Evil govern using undesirables to fuel evil schemes involving attaining "power" and said list of undesirables mushrooning out of control? Whole thing is solved when "random nobody"(said nobody becomes stronger than the top guys who were actively pursuing power for much longer and had much more resources... somehow... never occur to villians to just level grind...)... really theres not a single shred that wasnt used a bunch in various medias before, nor its the first time all those plot points are trown toguether in a story

And the villians? Those are EXTREMELY important since they are our gameplay oponents, and heck, the atlas villians are a massive upgrade from the classic villians: Every pinnacle boss had established personalities and their own reason to tinker with the atlas(elder embraced the lack of motivation as part of the character). The villians pre act5? Bunch of generic people seeking power and employing methods of over the top cruelty. Dominus at least had the "power" motivation clear, Piety? Why the fu she even wants to screw everyone? Oh wait she actually dosnt, and have a change of hearth after Dominus is dealt with, huh? Wasnt she acting out of obedience for Dominus after he spared her and allowed her to keep doing... whathever it was she was doing... and now she sides with the guy/chick that killed Dominus? And why the lady even keeps shadowing you if at no point she attempts to bring you to her side? And why the player exile even get that much attention for that matter? Piety seems to take an interest on him/her since early act1, but never bother to even try to capture you, and after all that crap on 4 acts, she changes her mind... okay, maybe it was corruption from gems... aparently having the crap beaten out of her rear cleared the corruption somehow. Seriously, speaking for myself, a big reason i accepted so easily the shaper personality rework and the maven's childish persona is because i felt it was a much needed break from the massive streak of generic villians who feels just want to compete who has the taller mountain of corpses or are generic mind-corrupted monsters with no real motivation or personality

These are corrupted 'Karui'. Also Tukohama just wants to smash things as it's his true nature no matter where you're from.
He would also kill even his corrupted minions for amusement if he feels like it.

For me personally i did not care much about the lore after act 4 Malachai and these god nonsense afterwards. For me they are ,like already mentioned here, transcended humans or half-humans in a weakened state after the long slumber by Sin's pet.

Also i hope we see more of the PoE world involved into gameplay instead of this Torchlight 2 mapping copy cat. Would be cool if we could visit various dungeons with multiple levels Diablo 1 style in various spots around the world. Here is a world map with some places we already visited.

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Vios_134 wrote:

considering that Kaom is Tukohama's son

I just wanted to poke in and sooth my pedantic nature to be clear;

Kaom uses the title "Son of Tukohama", but this is a religious title, not a literal one. Koam and Tukohama where seperated by thousands of years and at least two cataclysms.

While Kaom no doubt revered Tukohama, and perhaps would have been his avatar in the mortal world if he could manafest (in the same way Innocence used Avarius during his initial reincarnation), and it's possible that Tukohama spoke to Kaom indirectly in some way, though it's unclear how much agency and awarness the gods had in the state they where in while the beast was alive (Though it can be very easily argued even in that state, the gods had a pretty tangiable influence on the world, and seemed to possess or influence mortal forms that aligned with them idologically). We'll likely never know if this was the case with Kaom, if he became the bloodthirsty Karui king because of Tukohama directly or if that was just Kaom doing Kaom stuff.

I also want to add in that Kaom, for all his failings, had an objective in mind, his unification war against the Karui built an empire (or at least, the start of one) that could stand the chance of actually fending off Eternal Empire slavers. It's no shock he'd be enticed into a war against them aiding a rebellion, and less so he'd be a brutal occupier of Eternal lands. The PoE comics I feel did Kaom (and the Karui in general) a massive disservice with their portral of Kaom as something of a dullard and failing to investigate these aspects even a little. Though they where mostly about Victario.

T just wants to teach you the laws of war. Is that so wrong?

(...#1 have giant swords for hands)

You know what this game needs? More Haka. Not just a paid dance no one ever uses because why would they. I mean weaponised Karui-style Haka. Fire-breathing rage Haka. My ancestors beat up your ancestors Haka.

I gave it drop bears, but a better ruler would have given it the Haka.