http://au.ign.com/articles/2012/10/22/whats-next-for-guild-wars-2
The following details sound pretty new to me:
In reaction to complaints that players felt some activities didn’t feel rewarding enough, after October 22 completing jumping puzzles and mini-dungeons will unlock much better rewards. ArenaNet will also make Guild Wars 2’s Karma resource much easier to obtain, so it’s not necessary to continuously cycle through events to build it up. After the update, running dungeons and completing monthly and daily achievements will also give out Karma.
In the time since launch ArenaNet’s has been examining its event design and seen how with enough players the challenge level of any particular open world event tends to drop. To maintain an element of difficulty, moving forward some events will be designed with layers, where certain challenges won’t trigger until the number of players nearby hits a specific threshold. This will be the case for a climactic encounter with a guild of NPCs called Modus Sceleris, members of which will pop up throughout Tyria to harass you. You can eventually find them all grouped together in one spot, and by interacting with them can take on challenges.
If you’re alone, initially you’ll fight off waves of their minions before challenging one of the members of the guild directly. Each member will have unique boss-like attack patterns in order to force you to move around and use your skills intelligently. If a lot of players gather around the event’s structure switches. Instead of fighting the guild members one at a time, you’ll fight all four at once, making for a more chaotic and difficult encounter. In other parts of the world, an invading group of enemies might take over a town, and if enough players are around to attempt to repel the attack, an elite monster might spawn right in the middle of the fight to ensure nobody involved gets too comfortable. It’ll be interesting to see how ArenaNet applies this philosophy of event design moving forward as older events are continually swapped around for updated ones.
For those who like to hunt around in every corner of Tyria, the Skritt Burglar challenges should be a nice surprise. Occasionally you’ll come across chests that may contain treasure or a Skritt creature with a giant pack on its back. The Skritt will then take off and scurry across the landscape, and, similar to how the treasure goblin works in Diablo III, you’ll need to chase and try to kill him before he escapes. Chasing is a risk, though, because the Burglar will run right through packs of enemies, and if you stop to fight that means he’s only getting further away. He’ll also occasionally stack up debuffs on your character or even temporarily turn you into a woodland creature. If you manage to avoid his roadblocks and score hits, he’ll drop treasure as he flees, which any pursuer can stop to collect. Just keep in mind that stopping to collect treasure also means the Burglar will get further away, and you may not be able to kill him to claim the bulk of the items he carries.
Aside from outdoor events, ArenaNet is also adding more mini-dungeons and jumping puzzles, some of which will feature new mechanics and enemies. In the Dredgehaunt Cliffs zone you’ll find a mini-dungeon that’s blanketed mostly by darkness and has some cool twists to the gameplay. Another mini-dungeon challenge throws you into an M.C. Escher-esque room of stairways and portals where you need to jump around and experiment with which portal leads where in order to find the path to the exit. Eventually you progress to a walkway comprised of hexagonal platforms with disappearing centers and need to inch along their borders to advance while at the same time avoiding enemies that will try and knock you off. This mechanic is repeated in the dungeon’s boss fight, where you’ll need to carefully walk along the edges of platforms to avoid falling through their empty centers while at the same time staying away from incoming attacks from multiple sources.
This is only a small piece of what’s being added to Guild Wars 2, and a promising example that these essentially free content updates should provide reasons to continue logging in month after month to see how ArenaNet is evolving its world.
