Four Legs Bad

"Are centaurs evil?" asks a child in Claypool, Queensdale.  "It's more complicated than just good and evil," replies the mayor.

No, it really isn't.

Centaurs are the enemy of the human levelling experience, making their first appearance in the tutorial then returning as a recurring foe throughout Queensdale, Kessex Hills, Gendarran Fields and Harathi Hinterlands, and other than the background chatter quoted above I can't think of a single time in any of these zones when they are painted as anything other than irredeemable bastards who must be fought at every opportunity.

As much as it's only incidental background the placement of that conversation is actually rather clever.  It's a child asking the question, and the mayor of a town well protected by a garrison of soldiers answering.  In other places, where the centaurs appear in greater numbers and are a more immediate threat, it's far less likely that anyone would be so even-handed in their views.  It's a good example of how Guild Wars 2 conveys information about people and places indirectly rather than through long info dumps.

This extends to the mobs as well.  The centaurs have an extensive array of war shouts and death cries that contribute a lot to their characterisation, as does the visual design both of the centaurs themselves and of their camps.  The player learns a lot about them just from looking and listening and it's all very well done - there's a reason why "For the Tamini!" has stayed in the back of my mind for years.  The centaurs also have a very distinctive silhouette which makes them instantly identifiable in a melee, and when the combat is as fast paced and frenetic as it can be in this game it's undoubtedly useful to be able to immediately pick out friend from foe during an attack, and see at a glance how many allies are still on their feet.

I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on this while adventuring through Harathi Hinterlands.  Perhaps unsurprisingly - the zone after all takes its name from one of the tribes - there's a lot of centaurs there, and they are all richly deserving of being cut down in swathes by my character.  The rule of two legs good, four legs bad was even more underlined once I encountered friendly Skritt.  I'd been killing these guys back in Queensdale but here I was helping them out... against the centaurs of course.  Fine by me, because I like the Skritt - they're hilarious, and love shinies as much as the average player does.  Whereas the centaurs - arrogant, cruel, bloodthirsty barbarians that they are - only ever inspire the urge to charge in and kill another dozen of them en route to the next objective.

Assuming that is that killing centaurs isn't of itself the objective.  There's usually a message up in the top right hand corner of the UI notifying the player of a nearby unexplored point of interest or vista, but a few times in Hinterlands all it's said is 'Attack The Centaurs.'  Okay, you don't have to tell me twice.

Making an enemy that's this satisfying to fight isn't as easy as it sounds.  Yes, most MMO players will cheerfully slaughter anything if there's something in it for them - especially if that something is XP and shinies* - but every now and again I've encountered an enemy in a game that I don't want to fight, and here I'm not talking about the rare ocassions when that's intentional.  The relentless culling of wild animals in some MMOs can become jarring.  Looking at you, LOTRO.

*Skritt should be a playable race.  We are all Skritt.

Then there's the time when I'm just not convinced that the foe I'm fighting is any kind of threat, which can take the shine off of any heroics.  My dislike of the Alliance in World of Warcraft has its roots in this, when, in pre-Cataclysm Elwyn Forest, the first thing I was ever asked to do in the game was to kill some kobolds.  Since they were wandering around outside a mine and apparently minding their own business there was something about walking among those intelligent (kind of) humanoids and striking them down at will that felt off to me.  So much so that I decided to see if the Horde would be more to my liking.

(This isn't about morality.  I ended up in Tirisfal Glades doing far worse things to the Scarlet Crusade, but that wasn't the very first thing I was asked to do, and when I did go up against them at least they fought back.)

This seems to be something of a recurring issue for WoW.  On one ocassion post-Cata when I did wander back over to the Alliance the narrative in Westfall utterly failed to sell me on the idea that the Defias Brotherhood were the bad guys.  They were the ones who were handing out food to starving refugees while the soldiers did nothing but stop those same refugees from seeking shelter and safety within the walls of their outposts.  To top that off, when I returned to Stormwind at the end of the zone to tell Varian Wrynn what was going on his answer was to send more soldiers, and to pay some adventurers to go into the Deadmines and kill the Defias leadership.  If I didn't already dislike the Alliance I certainly would have after that storyline.

There's no such divided loyalties in Guild Wars 2, at least not as far as the centaurs are concerned.  Despite what the mayor of Claypool might say to the contrary, they are always and unambiguously the bad guys, and for all I've snarked in the past about how omnipresent they are in these early zones they're memorably well executed.*

*Metaphorically and, if I time my attack right, literally.