Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
The game has been notoriously preachy and saccharine in recent years, with the only actual stakes being targeted at throwaway one-scene wonders such as Tesleen and anyone even remotely antagonistic. If the game wants to be philosophical then it can put its money where its mouth is and start killing at least one decently prominent protagonist every few patches.
Crystal Exarch, the main NPC of ShB, gets shot at the beginning of the last act of the expansion and is whisked away by the antagonist while grievously wounded while at the same time we're suffering from our success of killing the lightwardens and are on the verge of dying and taking the entire world with us. I would count that as stakes.

As well as the twins being held captive by the Garleans, and getting pushed out of our body and needing to rush to Zenos and stop him from killing people we know while inside us. People will have opinions about Ultima Thule, and the Scions in general, but their being brought back was still tied to us being able to defeat Endsinger. No one in my examples died, but that doesn't mean there weren't stakes. "Stakes" doesn't have to always mean someone dying as a consequence of them.

Killing people left and right will do nothing but make the players stop caring about the characters and shouldn't be something that you depend on for your story to create stakes or tension. If you resort to that as an ongoing thing then your writing has already failed. Killing a character should have purpose in the story, it shouldn't be to just make it "dark" and to introduce new characters.


I think you might have a case of rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and a selective memory because the game has been super hokey since ARR and hasn't changed in tone since then. The only thing that's different is that the cutscenes are longer now.