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TFS -> RE: Friday, February 23rd Design Notes: Book 2: Reimagined - A Brief Respite (2/24/2024 4:07:12)
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I'm really glad Book 2 is being revisited! The original quests had a ton of cool concepts that were either woefully underdeveloped or scrapped entirely, and it's exciting to see them potentially get a second pass. I’ve got a lot of strong opinions about Book 2 and love writing huge bloviating textwalls that maybe two people will read, so I’ll take this opportunity to rant about what I think the rewrites have been doing well, what issues with the original I hope are addressed in the future, and what pitfalls I’m worried future releases could fall into.
First off, I’m enjoying the greater focus the Ateala have gotten so far. Like much of Book 2, they weren’t really given much explanation nor elaboration in the original questline - and after a few quests just disappeared, never to be mentioned again. I think the rewrites do a good job of introducing them as individual characters, as well as providing a more coherent backstory for why they’ve arrived in Lore – all while still leaving more lowercase-l lore for the player to discover in Book 3. This was one of my bigger issues with the original Book 2 questline, and I’m looking forward to seeing Atrea properly introduced as well!
Book 2’s brevity has more victims than just the Ateala, though. I believe that some of the less-developed aspects of Book 2 don’t do a good job of setting up Book 3, and that re-addressing them would substantially improve the game as a whole.
This biggest victim of this is obviously Jaania. Over the course of Book 2, she has no characterization, almost no dialogue, and ends up contributing nothing to the plot. Though there’s an effort to insert her into the story (a whole dedicated quest in a very brief questline), she doesn’t actually do anything - she isn’t instrumental in stopping Wargoth, nor is her reunion with Xan even shown on-screen. It’s clear that her only purpose in this questline is to set up Book 3, which begs its own question – why? Why designate Jaania as a future antagonist when her motives and character traits have to be retrofitted on? Her only defining trait in Book 2 is her relationship to Xan (which isn’t actually shown, and is only told to us by other characters) – who has almost no presence in Book 3 regardless. Given that she’s now a pretty well-defined character as of Book 3, I really hope her Book 2 incarnation is significantly re-written (or just written); it’d be nice if her Book 3 incarnation felt like the payoff of an arc and not just something completely arbitrary.
I also don’t feel like Jaania’s experiences in Book 2 properly inform her choices in Book 3 (though this is, again, more about the story itself than the character writing). The only harmful uses of magic she actually sees in Book 2 both come from the same one guy (whose power is extraneous to the rest of the game’s world anyway) - wanting to regulate the use of magic for the everyday people of Greenguard doesn’t seem like it logically follows. Nor does controlling the Mana Core, for that matter, as Wargoth generates his own mana anyway. The brief mention of Elemental Dissonance™ that does occur in Book 2 is said to have been caused by the Fire War and the Final 13th at the end of Book 1 – I think if this plot point was expanded upon, so that Elemental Dissonance™ and it being caused by magic had more of a role in the story, Jaania’s goals and motives in Book 3 would be better contextualized. As it is, Book 2 doesn’t do a very good job of setting up Jaania and Book 3 feels a bit weaker for it; I’d really hope to see this addressed by the rewrites.
Related to Jaania, I also feel like Book 2’s ending is super abrupt and unsatisfying. It doesn’t feel like it’s set up by the events preceding it, nor is it reconciled with the events following it (though this is a failure on Book 3’s part, not Book 2’s). The only acknowledgement of it present in the entire game is an extremely brief exchange about halfway through Book 3, which doesn’t provide much explanation regardless (How did the protagonist give Jaania the impression that they were dangerous? Why didn’t Jaania go back and unfreeze them when she learned that they weren’t? Why was Drakonnan allowed to walk free? How is Jaania capable of one-shotting Warlic? Why wasn’t the ice block moved? Why didn’t Xan and Warlic show up after the protag thawed?) Obviously this isn’t something that a rewrite would change, as so much of Book 3 is contingent on it, but I think properly building up to the ending would drastically improve Book 2 and possibly mitigate some of the issues with early Book 3.
I also feel like expanding on the actual Elemental Dissonance™ and how it affects the Avatars would be a good way to recontextualize their appearance in Book 3. I think one of the bigger issues players have with the Maleurous saga is how the Avatars are handled – they’re incredibly hateable after their sole appearance in Book 1, they don’t show up frequently enough beforehand for players to have a good grasp of what to expect from them nor their role in the world, and the fact that they show up to assign trivial tasks after being deadbeats for the whole game makes it seem like the game itself doesn’t have a good grasp of how to use god-like figures. I think all of these problems could be alleviated if the Avatars’ appearance in Book 2 was substantially expanded – maybe with the goal of making them more sympathetic to players / more clearly defining their role in the world. Honestly, anything would be better than Fiamme showing up just to job twice and then never be mentioned again lol.
As for future concerns – I’m worried about what might not be addressed. I don't think there's been any official statement about the projected scope of the Book 2 reimagined releases- if there has and I just couldn't find it, someone please link it. I'm mildly concerned that, as more quests are released, this might end up being similar to the Sulen’Eska reimagining – where each individual quest is polished up but the underlying issues with the story and its structure are not changed. Considering that these are just Reimagined releases, and not something that followed the end of Book 3 and its command of development resources – I’m not sure how likely it is that Book 2 will actually be built into its own Book and not just a single questline.
I think the big pitfall with the original Book 2 is that it’s not a book. DragonFable really only has two distinct story chapters, despite labeling itself as having three. The plot of Book 2 isn’t bad by any stretch, nor is the lore or the writing – it’s the breakneck pacing, and resultant lack of development each concept gets. If Book 2 has to be rewritten, this is what the rewrites should be aiming to fix – there’s nothing else that ‘needs’ to be fixed.
You don’t need to read Geo’s old DN post to tell that a lot of content was planned and then scrapped. The titular Elemental Dissonance™ is only present in a single quest, and relegated to a line of throwaway dialogue that doesn’t actually have any bearing on the story. The Ateala are completely forgotten about after the first few quests, and then never mentioned again until… the Void Ship. Only one of the weakened Avatars shows up, and only once, before never being mentioned again – same with the portal to the Elemental Planes. What an Infernal even is isn’t explained until the latter half of Book 3. While Drakonnan and his redemption arc are technically present, he’s more like background scenery than he is a character – all he ever says is “…” and “!” while the Professor monologues (I’m not kidding, this is literally all of his dialogue for the entire storyline). Jaania, like Konnan, is also closer to furniture than she is to a character – and the lack of any meaningful dialogue between her and Xan is probably the biggest missed opportunity in the game. The reborn baby Akriloth at the end of Book 1 never actually segued into Book 2, as the plotline with the Great Dragons and warring elementals was scrapped entirely. None of these story beats are given the attention they need to properly develop, and feel incredibly abrupt as a result - I don’t think it’s possible for just a single general questline to incorporate this many elements in a satisfying way.
If Book 2 were to track with Books 1 and 3, these plot elements would all have their own separate storylines and be tied together with a finale arc – instead of having to cohabitate in a matchbox. Having several questlines’ worth of story squished into one questline is itself the problem - there wouldn’t be very much of a point to a Book 2 rewrite if the story structure isn’t overhauled.
I’ve also got a few miscellaneous talking points that I couldn’t really fit into any other part of this post:
-Why does the most recent quest reveal that the Professor is from Lore? This makes it immediately obvious to a new player that it’s Warlic, kind of weakens the reveal later lol.
-this will affect the wrath of wargoth economy i think
Um, I think this is all I have to say about the Book 2 rewrites. I think they’ve all been a pretty marked improvement so far, and even if Book 2’s underlying issues aren’t ever addressed I’m still definitely looking forward to these releases in the future. Also I can point back to this post in like four years to say my opinions were always accurate :^)
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