A Short Review of Valindra's Tower (Warning: Spoilers!)

sandukutupu

After a recent run on VT the end game and climatic finale of the Dread Ring. A fellow player asked, "Why is it you spend 300 hours getting to the end game and realize you can't kill the main story line villain?"

My friend and I discussed this one for a long time. All the MMOs and games we played, you can defeat the villain. In the original Guild Wars, we went to Hell killed Satan! Ok it was, the Realm of Torment, and Satan was a god named Abaddon, but you get the idea. So we were both very disappointed by the fact that she escapes after the battle.

But more so by the content of the final battle. It feels like a dance off as we jump about taking pot shots at her. There is no substance to it. We wanted to see, and expected to see, when we first played Valindra's Tower, was Valindra's plan to raise the ancient black dragon, Lorragauth, as a dracolich. That thing is so HUGE she could have a fortress mounted on the back of it. You ride your mount through his skull it is big as a house.

Between us, we came up with a much better story. In our scenario, Lorragauth rises and Makos teleports your party up to his back where Valindra is controlling it. You arrive inside a fortress on the back of a dracolich. Battle your way to Valindra, while Knox and the rest are fighting on the ground. You take out her power centers and the whole thing crashes down. Now the final battle takes place and the fortress is now sideways and crumbling while you defeat Valindra and destroy her phylactery.

Instead we get a bad version of "Dance Dance Revolution" and this is why most of us only attempt kill her once. My friend on his first play though called me up and said, "I am done, I won the game. My character is dragging her phylactery back to the Doomguides!". The ending for this module is very lack luster when compared to the highly cinematic beginning that features that same villain.

pitshade

Short answer is that Valindra is an established character from the Forgotten Realms and isn't going to be permanently defeated unless and until WotC decides to do it. Given that she has further appearances in this and other media, it simply wouldn't work out.

sandukutupu

True, that is the problem when they chose an intellectual property rights villain and not something made up "in house" or more generic. But the sad truth remains, snatching victory away from the player and the trivial quality ending are still poor marks for the end of the player's time put in to complete that leg of the saga. For example; What would you think of a movie that started with an awesome battle sequence in the first few minutes then regressed to an anti-climatic ending? None of these modules have a better ending than the HD trailer at the start. I am not talking about "eye candy", I am talking about substance, material, intensity, and something to make the player feel a sense they accomplished something. The trailer at the start of the game, makes the new player think, "Wow! Who are these people? I need to know these awesome heroes and their story.". But that is as far as it gets. Even if you remove the permanent demise out of this, you still don't get a great ending with the current mediocre final battle.

pitshade

It's hard to say, especially after all this time, but given that both Mods 1 and 2 carried on from one of the major plot threads in the original game, it seems likely that the studio intended to return to Valindra. Curse of Icewind Dale always seemed like it was just an interlude before we got back to the recurring storyline but then 2 mods of tie-in modules and then Elemental Evil, another tie-in actually, disrupted everything. The original story designers are all probably long gone. IMO it is best to think of it simply as a story, interrupted and never returned to like Coleridge's Kubla Khan.