Let me be clear: many of the choices made in the Sixth Age, were, in retrospect, a mistake. Not because I don't like the lore (that's the mistake chaos elemental is making in her psychological analysis) but because they don't work for the game at a technical or production level. Well the strict quest requirements, and the level of lore familiarity necessary to get onboard are two different things. The World Wakes was the intro quest to a brand new, extremely high fantasy, super high powered RPG game. An analogy I think works is that you sit down to play D&D, and the GM says "okay guys, we're starting with level 40 epic character - you're the foretold saviours of the world and you're going to be battling the gods themselves during the time of troubles".įor people like chaos elemental and the others who felt really engaged with the story promised by the sixth age, that's a super exciting premise. Some people like that overwhelming sense of being dropped in the deep end and just rolling with it. To be clear we're not abandoning the story. Abandoning it would have meant, in 2019, having a miniquest where Sliske is explicitly confirmed to be dead, Jas makes it clear that she'll give humanity 1000 years to prove themselves to her, and the gods all get sucked into a black hole. What we did is try to pay off those plot points as quickly as we could with the resources available. You might not like the strategy, or the execution, and certainly there are parts which haven't worked out as well as I'd like, but we specifically chose not to abandon it. There's a lot of emotional attribution going on here about vendettas and what I do and don't personally like. Let's be absolutely clear about something here: my responsibility is not to write about what personally interests me. It's to write (or more accurately, to strategically plan) what best supports the game. Look at the various instances of what I'm personally responsible for. The stuff I choose to write when I occasionally get free reign. It's super deep lore for people who are super invested in the game's ancient world and characters. Leave me with a word document and nothing else important to do and I will write endlessly about dead Mahjarrat, all the gods of the First Age, exactly how magic works, what the relationship is between the ancient elements and anima, how gods work, etc. The part of the player base that I regularly engage with are as invested in this stuff as I am, but it's far from the majority. I slip it occasionally into lore books and the like because I enjoy it, and because there's a small audience for it, but I never prioritise it. The analogy I've been using is that the Sixth Age is like the switchscape of lore - it keeps raising the stakes on your level of investment - the "skill ceiling" for understanding the story, if you will. Your only choices are to understand everything or to just lose interest.
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