Sylvari week - all info from the promotion week

[Scutilla]

Loving the sylvari changes. Still won't replace asura as my target main though- hopefully their week will come soon since they're going to be playable at the demo.

1.) the world of GW doesn't have a equator, if it did that siverpeak would only be at the north and south part of the GW world.

Ignoring the fact that all planets have equators by definition, we know that Tyria has one because it has seasons- they're mentioned in the manual, and we know that winter/Colossus is cold because of all the antics during Wintersday. We don't know the Shiverpeaks' and Pale Tree's positions relative to the equator, but they're probably in the northern hemisphere since the Crystal Desert and Elona are to the south (possibly placing Cantha in the southern hemisphere?). But that's a subject for the lore crew.

Plants change during the seasons because winter is hard on them and because they want to reproduce during good weather. Sylvari don't reproduce to our knowledge, and as animal-like plants they're durable enough to survive the cold, so there's no reason for them to change with the seasons.

[Alaris]

Tyria is flat.

[Bilbo Baggins]

And I have screenshots to prove it! They don't want you to know man, but I've seen it... I've SEEN IT! The Great Northern Wall man! why do you think they want you to run AWAY from the charr? if you run past them you get to the END of THE WORLD man! They don't want you to know, but I know man...I know...

[gildhur]

Tyria is flat.

[BrettM]

Please learn how climates and seasons work in real life, please, if you want to talk about applying seasons to a game.

TY! And some people might want to google "temperate rain forest" while they're at it.

[Cythrea]

True, Maguuma might be a northern rain forest, but I always assumed Maguuma and adjacent Kryta were supposed to be tropical or subtropical, given the dense jungle-and-swamp terrain. I never got very far in the game aside from Factions, but the Crystal Desert could be explained if it's in the rain shadow of the Shiverpeaks, with Maguuma and Kryta on the other side.

[BrettM]

The Crystal Desert is what's left after the Crystal Sea got boiled off during the fight between Abaddon and the other gods, and it's well south of the Southern Shiverpeaks. Ascalon and the Charr Homelands are on the eastern side of the Shiverpeaks, and are well-watered, temperate areas described somewhere as a high plain. Kryta, on the western side, has a kind of voodoo/zombie/bayou vibe going, so it's more of a Gulf Coast environment than tropical.

It's hard to tell what the Maguuma is supposed to be. The Tarnished Coast is technically the southern part of the Maguuma, but looks much more temperate. The Maguuma we see in Prophecies consists of large areas of bare, red rock with a profusion of plant life found in deep depressions and ravines containing shallow ponds, lakes, and rivers. The plant life appears to be a sort of mix, tending toward the tropical. There are waterfalls all over the place, but heaven knows where the water feeding those is supposed to be coming from.

I don't think ANet consulted a whole passel of climatologists and ecologists in designing their continents. They ended up with a pretty odd patchwork.

[sorudo]

Uh, GW takes place on a planet, and planets have equators. And there certainly are equatorial mountain ranges, with snow even, in real life.



Northern Canada doesn't flood in the summer. Neither do Greenland, Iceland, Russia, or other north-temperate and sub-arctic regions.


Please learn how climates and seasons work in real life, please, if you want to talk about applying seasons to a game.

ok, if you are so smart, where is the equator of guild wars?
oh yeah right, you can't say.

[Cythrea]

Because we don't have an overall planetary view that would tell us where the continents are located on the planet except in relation to each other. If you bothered to learn a tiny bit about climates and planetology, you'd know that all planets have equators and that due to Earth's axial tilt, the equator receives the most and most direct sunlight of any region on the planet, hence equatorial regions being the warmest regions on the planet while climate steadily grows temperate and eventually arctic as you head towards the poles. Earth's axial tilt is why we have seasons at all, again due to the amount of sunlight hitting the surface, and why seasonal cycles are reversed in the northern and southern hemispheres: summer taking place in June-July-August in the north, and in December-January-February in the south.

I learned all this in high school, incidentally. And I am going to assume that the planet Guild Wars takes place on is Earth-like and behaves like Earth until and unless it is stated otherwise.

[Karuro]

Well the only help we have is this

and the old GW2 logo.

Though I have this memory of seeing the planet on the floor in a GW2 video somewhere too.