I recently came back to Guild Wars 2 after a long hiatus. As someone who enjoys jumping puzzles and exploration, I’ve been very happy with the changes made to Lion’s Arch recently. The nooks and crannies and winding paths and mazes of debris have made the city more interesting to traverse, in my opinion. There are a lot more scenic vistas and places to climb nowadays, and seeing where you can go feels more rewarding.
Or it did.
So in Lion’s Arch, where the Cloud Skimmer used to hang above the Trader’s Forum, there’s this impressive mountain of rubble. Maybe you’ve climbed to the top of it, stood on the edge of a fallen tower up there, and taken in the ruins of the city. It’s a nice view.
With the recent update came a new, completely unnecessary invisible wall. You can no longer climb to the top of that mountain of rubble and ship parts, to get a glimpse at the whole city from what was one of the highest points in that part of it.
I suspected that this area was blocked off because it allowed access to a nearby cliff with parts that had no collision—essentially a broken bit of environment. But the problem is that you can pretty much walk around the invisible wall and onto that cliff without any difficulty whatsoever.
I feel like the invisible walls and ArenaNet’s stance on independent exploration is lazy on a lot of levels. For one thing, they’re a poor fix to broken and collision-less environments. I’ve actually been playing this game and exploring for so long, I’ve seen ANet remove collision from certain buildings and places just to discourage people from visiting them.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, this isn’t even about the stuff near the edges of the maps. There’s so much space in this game that just isn’t for us: Empty buildings and districts in Divinity’s Reach that have been closed or walled off, mountains and structures and even instanced areas that don’t need to be instanced, or can only be accessed once and never again. ArenaNet just doesn’t really seem to like empty space, but they don’t seem all that encouraged to fill in certain regions with content when it’s just easier to put a wall around it. The only thing they seem to dislike more is when people climb on stuff they haven’t put a wall around yet.
Whether you find these places as interesting to visit as I do, putting walls around them shrinks the world. It’s so rare to find a gem of a place tucked away on the map that isn’t already marked as a Vista, or the entrance to a jumping puzzle. Finding these places can be their own reward, though even adding an event or NPC, or even a silly Easter Egg, beats turning part of the map into nothing more than a backdrop, and making the world feel more empty and fake. Things feel less grand when you know that the part you can immediately walk into is the only part that really exists.
Closing up empty buildings and blocking off parts of the map seems to basically say that I’m only allowed to enjoy the content the creators want me to, when they want me to. This perspective seems prevalent in a lot of this game’s design decisions, which may be why many folks are struggling to find their immersion, or at least to find a reason to log in every day.
I get it if you don’t want people breaking out of the map, but is the best solution really just to break the environment more, or cut a chunk of it off entirely? Is it so bad if folks just want to climb to the top of a broken tower and take a picture of the content you spent so much time putting together?
