Guild Wars Lore : The Seer
Part of Wooden Potatoes’ ([link]) Guild Wars Lore summary videos ([link]).

Ah, yes. The Seer. The… Seers? Seeres? It was never clear if this was a name, a title, or its species, or what. Really, nothing about this guy (girl?) was ever clear. You basically are on a mission to hunt down someone named Markis, whom you barely remember, and along the way you have to fight Mursaat, who are none too happy to see anyone, much less you. (Why, who knows. They don’t know what you’re doing, or who you are.) They use Spectral Agony, a gating spell to keep players from ignoring them. “LOOK AT ME.” Then on this mission you are told there’s apparently a guy who might be able to help in some way. Or not. The dwarves aren’t sure, and don’t really care. Apparently this seer just hangs out in a cave for eons, floating with its four arms crossed for no reason, and the dwarves are all, “Yeah, it kind of just hangs out there. Sometimes it steals our hams.”

So you find this guy-girl, and it tells you to kill an eidolon, which is like a floating ghost squid, because it can use its essence (its poo poo) and just rub it all over your armor so the Mursaat can’t use their monster move on you anymore. Or something. It claims it’s from an ancient race that fought the Mursaat for unspecified reasons. And that’s about it. The Seer are almost never mentioned again, despite being one of the few interesting things the player gets to see during the mess that is Prophecies’ storyline.

The real reason for this is that the developers needed a way to get rid of their gating mechanic, and they probably had concept art for this guy lying around. “Use that, I guess. Just say it used to fight the Mursaat, to explain how it knows to do this.” And that’s how most of the story in Guild Wars is written. Then the writing team later waxes philosophical about it, referencing Tolkien and making lots of grand gestures and claims about allusions and metaphor and historical precedence. The ANet writing team has always valued loving talking about writing more than actually, you know, writing effectively. Always kind of annoyed me, but it’s just a video game story. Who really cares? I liked the game well enough to play it for half a decade. I only criticize things I like. If I don’t criticize something, I don’t like it at all! So it’s a compliment. Really. Really!

The Seer hangs out as a bonus on several missions. I actually drew him from another one, technically. I didn’t want to draw a cave. Deal with ittttttt