Hundreds of individual steps, artificial waiting times, half a dozen currencies – the quest for the Sky Scale is chicanery, but also kind of good.
Now let’s be honest: If you’ve ever owned a flying mount in an MMO, did you have any sort of attachment to it? Probably not, unless you’ve stalked the protodragon in WoW back in the day, before there were three of them sitting on every mailbox in Stormwind. Or you captured the ultra-rare horse from the ice cream citadel. Otherwise, the way to the ride through the air is not very exciting: You slam a bag of gold on the counter of a merchant, then you take off with your flapping beast – done.
I have just completed the quest series for the riding dragon in Guild Wars 2. This type of mount goes by the slightly stupid name of “Sky Scales” and must be earned through a chain of 28 quests, each of which consists of countless individual steps – sometimes a whopping 21 of them, sometimes only 18.
All in all, in order to gain the privilege of a personal house dragon, you have to complete not just dozens, but several hundred tasks. Players of normal intellect therefore spend a few months working on this monumental task or simply don’t do it at all.
Dragons are luxury
You absolutely do not need a sky scale in the game. You can simply unlock a paraglider and sail through the air with it, the pocket dragon is not much more mobile. Or you can play the quite humanly attainable Griffin, which is without any exaggeration the best mount that has ever existed in an MMO.
But we already had Griffin, we were through with the story several times, had all the characters at maximum level and the best possible equipment. At some point you get bored, then your brain temporarily stops working, you turn to your girlfriend and say: “Hey, let’s unlock Sky Scale!” And the day is fucked, because you now spend it moulding for hours in one and the same area.
There you are supposed to find 21 dragon scales scattered all over the place and hidden. In the age of online walkthroughs, this isn’t terribly difficult, so we just picked them up. So far, so good.
Then you are supposed to complete 30 events (these are the dynamic quests in the game) in the same area. It doesn’t matter which ones they are. Just jump on everything that is happening somewhere around you. You do this to unlock merchants who sell dragon medicine, which you now have to use to heal 14 hidden sky scales, still in the same area. Once you’ve done that, you can finally leave the zone and … haha, kidding!
Nope, after that you still have to collect 21 dragon eggs, which are also all hidden, partly in exactly the same places where you bagged scales and cured dragons a few hours earlier. For some reason, Guild Wars 2 does everything it can to kill off any remaining motivation through monotony.
Suddenly Around the World
Now the quest doesn’t go on at all for a while until a timer ticks down from two hours. In the past, this timer even lasted 24 hours, but fortunately it has been lowered in the meantime. Then the game sends you all over the world.
Sometimes you have to complete a mini-dungeon that you didn’t even know existed. You explore some very remote, completely hidden places that you have never seen before in the game. Later on, you’ll also be asked to knock out a (world) boss or complete jumping puzzles, where you’ll have to prove everything Mario taught you on the N64.
This is doubly clever, because on the one hand you are encouraged to interact with game content and parts of the game world that you may have completely ignored until then. It also keeps comparatively old content in the game relevant and alive. We were never alone for long during our adventure.
At least: If you don’t feel like doing certain jumping passages or bosses at all, there is also special dragon food from this point on, which you can make yourself or buy from other players. This allows you to skip these extra challenging steps of the quest series (and only these). Those who are playfully unable to master certain climbing orgies are thus not excluded and still get the opportunity to complete their quests. At this point, your personal sky scales have also hatched and now require your attention and care.
Fire-breathing Tamagotchi
Long before your dragon is fit to be a mount, you can visit it in its nest, feed it, clean it and play with it. This is also part of the quest: sometimes you kill monsters around the world and bring your protégé edible bits and pieces, sometimes you visit all kinds of merchants to buy toys for the dragon.
Later you play hide and seek with your dragon or throw balls at each other. No kidding! You have to play with your future mount in order to bind it to you. And honestly, when the creatures are finally fully grown and trained, the first flight feels a whole lot more meaningful and cool than riding some instant goat I bought on the side for a chunk of gold.
Besides, it just looks cool when you fly towards a group of monsters on your dragon, jump off at the last moment and first watch your mount spitting fire and burning your opponents to cinders before you work on their remains with your sword. After all, your scaled partner is not just decoration and means of transport. And nothing is as spectacular as a huge army of players riding dragons into battle against a world boss.
Was that alone worth the effort? Rather not. For a week, we immediately started playing whenever Claire came home from work and only stopped when she had to go to bed. We spent hours collecting stuff, mastering jumping passages and fighting our way through events. For an optional mount.
I like my sky scales, thought the idea of raising and caring for them was great, and I also like that the dragon fights a bit. But you have to be a complete idiot to do it in one piece instead of doing a few steps of the quest chain every now and then.
