Did you know that the Heart of Thorns expansion came out a month ago? It does seem that if you weren't in the Guild Wars ecosystem already, you probably at best had a passing knowledge of the expansion, probably about as much as you did the game itself. Even the community — in the months before the expansion, bleeding away from the game every week — had very limited knowledge of its contents, of its release date. Under a solid nine months of silence after its prior content delivery stream — the living world — concluded its second season, it seemed a little too sudden, in the later half of June and early July, that we were being propositioned for money to preorder the game without really any idea of what was in it, what it concerned, or when it was coming out; and yet, the preorder prompt highlighted the most expensive, luxurious package for the player by default.

The proposition was this: given your experience with Guild Wars 2 so far, and without knowing what it is we're planning other than the generic trappings associated with the term "expansion pack", can we count on you to give us $99 for: in-game microtransaction currency valuing $40; exclusive skins and a minipet; a pre-order bonus title; and the game itself? Or hey, alternatively, how about just $50 for the game itself?

It's important I outline this perspective in the wake of the expansion's release because it is integral to picturing the sombre result of the leap of faith asked of the player population. Given the price point, equal to the cost of the base game — it having twenty-six maps, nine dungeons, six cities, and several different modes to play — and this lengthened communication blackout, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect a similar ambitious undertaking to fill that precedented value?

What Heart of Thorns included was this:

• A truncated conclusion to season 2 of the living story, at about half the length.
• Four open-world maps with three different vertical biomes.
• Gliders (but only in the expansion's maps).
• The Mastery system, which replaces the endgame experience bar for optional or required "masteries", which themselves get unlocked to be trained toward a total "mastery rank". This replaces your level.
• Guild halls for your guild.
• A new crafting profession, "scribe".
• A new profession, the revenant.
• Etc, etc. etc.

Mere quantity will not describe enough here — these are wonderful additions, certainly worthy of a $30 add-on, not necessarily a new game in their own right, but that is not even the concern. Guild Wars 2 took five years to develop on a modified codebase at least ten years old by present day; in nine months, that they've sped up development to this degree is cause for celebration, since it must have taken a considerable amount of time to add anything to the game before now.

My concern is the nature of the additions, their structure; and what this means for the further foundation of the game from here forward.

From the game's design manifesto:

Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment.

Mike O'Brien, April 27 2010

Guild Wars 2 was specifically built on a kind of fluidity and personal ambition unparalleled in the games before it; and like the quirks of its predecessor, led to its categorical subordination by fans of the genre, and likewise adoption by a like-minded niche audience. While the MMORPG upheld and codified the archetype and personal development into distinct, tangible roles and progression that were intended to fulfill through declaration, Guild Wars 2 wanted it to be in your hands what your characters would be. While other games in the genre had you on an individual quest, competing with your friends for rewards and kills, Guild Wars 2 wanted you to always be encouraged to work together and be universally rewarded. The personal story was diversified based on race, upbringing, personality (until a later patch half-removed it, leaving the options dangling, nerves intact), anything to make your understanding of the canon personalised and then leaving you to define what made you want to play, because the game is fun in itself. Development happens in real time in the social connections and roles you make yourself.

The additions implemented in Heart of Thorns are meant to be a threshold undertaking, a large push toward streamlining future advancement; it is intended to lay the foundation for the future:

...it's touching every major system and major component of the game, taking all the lessons we have learned so far, and saying: 'Hey, how do we make this better? How do we push the game even further?' To be in a good place moving forward for where GW2 is going to go."

Matt Wuerffel, March 26 2015

The pushes include contextual development, easy developmental iteration; and the immediate impression is that this is not an expansion pack for the players so much as the developers, redirecting their talents toward streamlining everything, and offloading the cost of that necessary task to the players in the hopes of greater, bigger stories in the future. Placing new masteries to earn in new areas, in a supposedly indefinite mastery rank that, again, replaces the level. Allowing a framework for future expansion in a controlled, unchaotic way, so that content delivery is efficient and consistently profitable.

The issue is that these additions are also all about grinding for reward. Beyond the story — itself quite slim — you are left for goals that are made to cost as much as possible to keep you playing the maps which themselves are so long, so consistently action-packed, that it triggers prior anti-grind game measures playing them normally, as the diminishing returns system decreases your loot and experience points the longer you play on the same map.

Top-tier armor that increasingly pushes the boundary between recommended and required is significantly more expensive and significantly harder to get as a random drop. You won't get this stuff just by playing — now you either go grind the gold out to craft it yourself or, maybe, just maybe, buy the gold with real world money. The pressure is on: the armor is more necessary, more scarce, and more expensive simultaneously if you intend to play the game seriously at all.

The guild hall system pressures players to join larger guilds that in turn pressure consistent playtime and increased commitment. The hall itself requires at least a dozen people — at the top of their game, if so — to capture, meaning temporary alliances are a must or larger guilds are then the only ones who can get this selling point of the expansion. The new crafting profession is coincidentally by far the most expensive in the game, which keeps their numbers scarce while still providing an equal achievement for mastering it; the question becomes, who is the one person in the guild who gets the profession, and what happens if they stop playing?

While I could mention the new legendary system, legendaries were originally meant to be scarce, and so their four-tier, hundreds-of-achievements progression system is justifiable. It takes significant investment.

This just leads to base gameplay. The structure of these new additions universally requires a significant amount of grinding and commitment — and this wouldn't be an issue if, as O'Brien states, the game is fun "from moment to moment".

Of course, fun is subjective — but the game definitely prioritises different kinds of fun. The later-game segments of the base game, in Orr, are all about constant engagement. They have several meta-events that allow limited-time vendors and the gradual takeover of the map in exchange for the entire map shard (your persistent instance shared with people from your world) participating in full force. You are consistently attacked, only able to explore in the few moments between nameless mob encounters. In Heart of Thorns, all of the zones are endgame zones, and the meta-events require more and longer participation. You are not permitted to idly explore, and to pick and choose what interests you; in the expansion, you will be required to participate in these events to get anywhere at all — and you will have to find your way into a fuller shard if you want to progress. More players in fewer shards for longer periods of time is the implicit pressure, and this makes for far less casual and far less individualised play.

You are alert and at arms, slowly gaining the experience for your mastery of choice; obtaining box after box of random loot for the odd chance at something valuable; and over time, gaining less and less of both by thegame's own grind prevention measures. Players invariably then head to the greatest farm train and park themselves behind a commander's tag instead.

There is a principle in game design that states that the player will always opt for the best solution for a given problem. It doesn't matter if you want them to take out a specific gun to take out a foe — if their gun of choice does the job betteranyway then that specific gun will never find use. It needs to demonstrate its own use.

In Guild Wars 2, farming gold — this is also known as grinding, if you're keeping track — becomes the most efficient solution over naturally heading out to do whatever it is the player finds fun. Ergo, if the player is not having fun moment to moment, why are they playing the game? To work toward something in the future that is fun, instead. The journey is subordinate to the end reward. This is also what every other game in the genre does.

In making its future iterations more efficient, the game has deprioritised its prior principles in favour of promoting fuller, fewer maps, that require to be manually moved to different shards in order to progress; longer player investment per session, which in turn gets punished by prior game mechanics, because end-game 'optional' rewards are becoming less optional, and more the de facto endgame. If you are making your own goals, it will almost invariably be one of these streams, that all coincidentally require you to begin a grind.

But are you having fun?

I hesitate to criticise this series because I love it — I love the universe and its progressive take on recovering from disaster (and not reliving the glory days of the past). I loved the first Guild Wars enough to play it for seven years as my game of choice, simply getting lost in the world, crafting my characters' stories. And the developers are so friendly, so available that it feels like striking down my friends — they comment on forums everywhere, their personal twitter accounts far from hidden, and all in love with their work. It's this sincerity that made the chaos of the base game so appealing: they so focused on different areas, so continually experimented, and so rewarded you for experimenting with them that the formalisation of this experimentation also brings with it a bittersweet ending, because it so seemingly requires adopting the antithesis of its manifesto to operate.

This is the future of Guild Wars 2. I hope we're ready for what comes next, and I hope we have fun.

Really good blog post!

Oh god, that's right. I forgot all about the expansion. I should really get back to it and level up my Revenant.

The original HoT price point of 45 EUR was too much for me, not knowing exactly what I'll get in terms of PvE content and the story.

I was expecting ArenaNet to release a core -> expansion upgrade for less money, so those who have already invested years into the core game, would not need to buy it again.

After realizing this wasn't going to happen, I said fuck this, and never bought the expansion. It seems I did the right thing, since the story is very short and lackluster (according to WoodenPotatoes videos).

Also, the engine is still the old DX9 engine from 10 years ago (tho modified) and doesn't perform well on modern PCs.

After almost 12 years of following Guild Wars and ArenaNet (I was in the original alpha back in 2003), I think this might be it for me and this franchise.

First i want to say that this was a really well written blog post. Hopefully people will take the time to read it despite it being a long blog post.

I think that a lot of stuff that Arenanet says is just a pure marketing speak. Before the basic game was released Arenanet told us a lot about the so called dynamic events and how they are different. The reality of those dynamic events is that they are scripted events which always reset back to their original starting point. People still go from heart to heart for leveling purposes. So instead of quest giving npc´s we have events which replace the traditional quests.

For HOT Arenanet said that there wont be any traditional leveling which is actually true. What Arenanet didnt say is that leveling masteries in HOT requires tens of millions in exp in order to get all of the masteries. This means that you have to basically repeat the events over and over again until you get enough exp. This gets really stale after doing 4 or 5 meta event chains for each zone (one zone is also such a maze to navigate that most people tend to avoid it which leaves 3 zones to earn exp in).

It is also pretty weak that it took Arenanet 3 years to release an expansion (which has only 4 zones). I dont think that Arenanet would have even released the expansion if their living story would have been as much of a success as they claimed it was.

Good post. I like the design of the new maps and gliding is actually really fun. Masteries aren't too bad, and I think they could really expand on those in the future. Revenant is really fun, as well

But, a big reason that I play Guild Wars is for the story/lore and I think that they really missed the mark. Too linear, too many threads started last year that weren't even mentioned. Maybe living world S3 takes care of it (ANet is usually pretty good about listening to fans)

As of now, I've pretty much put my playing on hold. Maybe when S3 comes out and they balance some of the grindy nature of the Guild Halls, I'll return

Edit: And don't even get me started on WvW

Great post. I really loved the original Guild Wars and expansions, but had a hard time getting into GW2. While they sold the original as a casual experience, this one felt too much like an actual mmo to me. GW2 is a great game, just not the GW experience I originally fell in love with. I still occasionally boot the game up to see whats changed, hoping it will grab me.

We find ourselves kindred spirits, friend. I look for what I had in Guild Wars 2 — and bits of it is still there, lore remnants, little hints back to the old days, but it feels like someone else's story. Something was reduced for a persistent world.

I've tried so hard to like Guild Wars 2, but it just feels like they took everything that made the first game great and tossed it aside in favor of an incredibly bland WoW clone.

Great post!

Personally, I mostly stopped playing GW2 before HoT was out; all that was keeping me in the game was my foolish quest to get a Legendary (not even grinding for gold initially, but that ended up being the least painful option in the end), and doing Guild Missions with my guild. I just couldn't handle the grind anymore. Doing World Completion was the first downhill slope, and I didn't feel compelled to do any of the other content because what the team considers "fun" and "challenging" seems to be mostly incompatible to what I feel.

I was hoping that Heart of Thorns would bring back some enjoyment to the game, but nothing in the expansion feels like it's gonna make me enjoy the game again (judging by this post and what my friends and guildmates have told me), and that's a real shame, because I really liked GW2 before I hit the end-game.

Guess it won't tear me away from Final Fantasy XIV any time soon after all.

Iii agree with most of the points you brought up, aside from specifics of mastery and the super top tier gear being needed.

That gear is only a tiny amount better than previous, with the most expensive part (A full armor set) being an only 2%~ increase in damage, whereas weapons (Still kinda pricey but still only one item compared to the 6 of armor) and trinkets (Takes mainly daily log ins) add up to around 10%. Like, you'd want the armor if you're among the 5% of the playerbase doing the very difficult raiding or high level fractals (Minidungeons), though having a good class composition or build is way more important.

Mastery is... weird, ideally it should be an overarching goal to work towards while doing other things. With the early expansion mastery abilities, it absolutely isn't. To the point where during the first quarter of my time with the new content I absolutely loathed it. Nearly all the first and second tier masteries should be baseline or with the exp required halved (or more), traversing the new maps without them is a painful chore. Later on, and with the core game masteries, it actually is that, with mainly stuff for slight travel or reward benefits.

It's... a troubled expansion to say the least though. A lot of the reason I personally play, character customization and combat/build mechanics, weren't expanded upon nearly as much as I hoped. At least without a sub fee it'll be painless to return with later updates.

Really good, insightful read, thanks for this. And thanks to Austin for tweeting about it, because I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

What's happening to Guild Wars 2, to me, has always felt like an inevitability. From its release it's always been focused on pushing players towards the baked-in microtransactions, as if it were a free-to-play title and not a full-priced release. It's guiding design principle has always seemed--to me--like a case of "here, have a taste of this. Want more? Well, that'll be a premium..." as if the game were doing you a favour by even giving you a chance to buy it. The freemium design constantly hitting me in the face made me quit playing after a couple months.

Anyways, right from character creation this style of design is immediately apparent: there aren't enough character slots to have one of every class. Then, once you enter the game world you are bombarded by semi-useless items and the available bags and banks fill up, at which point the second wave of premiums hit you: stash space. From experience, to equipment--even money... it's all monetised. Really, every place one could possibly think to charge they in fact, will. And if they can't get your wallet, they will at least get your time.

So, yeah. As engaging as GW2 can be, their greedy design has been there from the get-go. This expansion sounds like another in a long line of bad decisions. The thing I wonder is: how long will the playerbase tolerate this abusive relationship?

Awesome write up!

I had a damn good time with this game for the first year or so. It was easily my favorite online RPG, MMO-style thing around. I even got way into the lore of the world and invested in very heavily into the GW universe. It was a rad time!

But then the fractal of the mists update came out and I was very disappointed. I immediately noticed they were moving toward a design model that demanded as much of my time, and money, as possible.

Your overall point...

because it so seemingly requires adopting the antithesis of its manifesto to operate.

...is frustratingly accurate. I was being asked to grind; hop on the treadmill and keep up! (Or maybe invest some real money into the market and buy your way out?) I found myself playing less and less until I finally stopped.

What you are describing here seems like the logical conclusion of what they set in motion with the Fractals update. I am disappointed in how accurate my stupid hunch may have been.

Thanks for writing. Gonna share it with a friend of mine who is also a former GW2 player. :D

I mean, the expansion is kinda only half done. So much is "in progress" -- legendary progression, raid development, even some of the backpacks that are outare really only half-possible to get.

Regarding ascended gear, you should really consider the effects of social pressure. Ascended armor has become "recommended" by developers for top tier content. It used to be an optional token bonus for opt-in grinding; hell, most of the people I play with in World vs World would opt for exotics anyway, but I do believe that the pressure is tightening to opt-in.

That's the pervasive and scary thing: the subtlety. Everything is just so slowly, slowly becoming a de facto endgame. Less and less is truly optional when every option is the same amount of investment and work.

I just want the game for idle explorers.

Thanks for this thoughtful post. I've not been an active player since ~Dec 2013, and haven't really been keeping up on the expansion news. This is pretty depressing to hear, though. I wonder how much of the new emphasis on grind is in response to complaints that there wasn't enough to "do" in the endgame. I fear that difficulty fetishists have won at the expense of those of us who found GW2 to be the perfect MMO-in-small-doses.

There are a lot of great things about Guild Wars, but I felt like they fell short of their goal of having fun "in the moment" during the original game. The fact that gameplay went fundamentally unchanged from level 30 on to an unusually high level cap meant that even if things were pretty and sounded pretty and had cool jumping puzzles, I never got the feeling of progression I would ultimately need to justify playing an MMO quality story.

The grind has become quite bad. Everything requires tremendous amounts of time or luck. And they gated things that should be built in features behind masteries like auto-looting.

All 4 of the new maps suffer from serious design flaws. All 4 zones are on a set timer, where the events start at a set time and the meta event or reset happens regardless of player interaction. In the first 3 maps the problem is there are not enough events to keep the map active for the entire time. Each map involves taking outposts, and each outpost has a set event chain. Once that event chain is complete then very few events happen. An organized map can get these quest chains done in about 30 mins, which leaves roughly an hour of this weird situation where there really isn't anything to do. Or if you finish an outposts quest chain you are left with ~1/4 of the map with nothing to do. So all you are left to do is grind, and since the maps are so large what little events that do happen it is tough to stumble across them, or get to them before they finish. There are no NPC's guiding you to event's or flagging you down as you run by saying "hey help some giant plant ate my best mate! Go over there and save him".

Because of this lack of events, and long timer you usually end up on a dead map. And it leads to basically all you do is pull up a website that has each zones timers (universal across all servers) and then go in to lfg and try to taxi in to whatever instance is organized. And if you get in great, but if not you are stuck and need to wait 2 hours for the next chance to even attempt it again. This is basically a re-imagining of EQ and camping named mobs. The thing that makes this more infuriating is all of these maps follow the design principles of an earlier map they released called Drytop. Where you had a 1 hour cycle where for 45 mins you do events (which were on a timer and new events would kick off across the zone every 5 mins) and build up a zone level. Then it would switch over to a 15 min sandstorm, that triggered new events with higher rewards, and uncovered chests that you could unlock. And depending on the level you achieved in the earlier cycle it would trigger optional boss events. But the cool thing was even if you were solo, or had 100 people in the zone you could still find stuff to do. Guild Wars then went on and further refined this with the Silverwaste zone. Where you had this zone wide meta event, that you would attack/defend forts and build up a zone wide bar. Once the bar reached 100% it would kick off the meta event, and then once the meta event ended there was the short run around and get loot do other things phase before it all reset and started over again. This was great because if you joined a big organized map you would quickly progress through the events, but still if you were alone you could do some events and still progress the event bar. And as you did events other people would join the map until you got near the 100% then people would taxi in to the map organize and do the meta event. It worked well because you always could be doing something, whether you had 5 hours to kill, or only 5 minutes. The new zones are a minimum of an hour plus commitment if and only if you happen to log in at the right time, and get lucky that you joined a full map.

How do I think they should fix the zones.
Verdant Brink, the map's gimmick is a day/night cycle that lends itself to the drytop model. However they need to add more events that are doable by a single person once an outpost is taken. Maybe pre-load some of the night-time events so you could rescue survivors/get supplies and build up the encampment level before nightfall (maybe not all the way to 4 but stop at 2).
Auric Basin, and Tangled depths. They need to move these to a Silverwastes type of map. Where instead a set timer once you fully complete all 4 outposts that it kicks off the meta event.
Dragon's Stand. Honestly I am not sure the best way to fix this map. It should be definitely moved off a timer and more to a SilverWastes style, but given the map construction I am not sure what you can do to make the map fun for people who aren't in massive groups.

And that is just the new maps, they also made tremendous errors with the Dungeons and Raids.

Yeah I'm with you on this. I tried it when it went f2p, played to like level 12 and was like "alright, I'm good, looks like it's gonna be more of this". I had other issues with the first guild wars but it was super intriguing between having the duo profession system that allowed you to play with so many ways of building your character and a truly unique combat experience that wasn't just right click things to death.

I tried to jump back on GW2 a couple of months ago and I honestly forgot everything about the game. It felt really bad because I just couldn't play the character that had reached the later game content because I was completely lost. I ended up making a new character and then it just kind of faded again. I really miss a lot of the things I did in GW2 though, the jumping puzzles were super fun to figure out with friends and I really loved the pvp. This expansion doesn't sound like something that will set me off but maybe if this really is a step in favor of development the next expansion will.

Great read, love to hear opinions on the current state of games I cannot keep up with!

They should make GW3 and make it more like GW1, while also finding a more interesting art direction.

You don't like the Daniel Dociu photocollage look?

@feignamnesia: I really like the concept art, but I don't think it made the transition to in-game particularly well. Occasionally I'll find a piece of architecture that looks wonderful from a distance (the original gates to Lion's Arch come to mind, and I really like Ebonhawke as well), but most everything else looks flat, and kinda generic.

If they actually nailed making the whole game in that painterly style I'd have probably had a much more invigorating experience running around doing all those events and hearts, as otherwise plodding as latter may have been. But that style seemed to have only made it over in the form of loading screens and some UI elements.