Guild Wars 2

So this has had me scratching my head for a while…

Why are the “real” dungeon paths called explorable? They’re very linear and offer zero chances to do any exploration.

Dungeons that did offer some really fun options for exploration get invisible walls (*cough*Arah*cough*). Rather than making required encounters actually required for the reward and leaving the ability to explore the map, they just add elements to confine you to the linear path.

So……what is explorable about these instances?

The reason (story-wise) you go to the dungeon is the information you receive about the Destiny’s Edge members going on a certain quest. You help them do their quest and figure out their problems and leave the Dungeon behind (Story-mode) and later you can come back to explore the place after your story there is done, which usually involve some 1-time NPCs clearing up the mess we made, hence Explorable-mode.

During development these paths were described as having different variations to them as they would have random events which would occur. The result was supposed to be that each explorable path wouldn’t be exactly the same every time you ran it. I am guessing that turned into a huge mess or created too many technical problems since it didn’t actually happen.