Guild Wars 2 Forum - Guild Wars 2 Discussion

More info about the actual content?

You have to be aware of how they designed maps through each era of the game. Fully encompassing map events don’t work without fully coordinated players, because the event chains are hard to push otherwise. Orr was specifically designed for coordinated push from one side of the map to the other….. they’re also the only maps to in the original line up that don’t have Heart quests (for a reason).

Bit of history on the game’s beta phases….. Open world events used to be the main focus of all the maps, would trigger on a regular basis, and would be how players would level up. However…. players had a tendency to move around too fast, and miss events in the cool down time between triggers. As a result, they’d very quickly wander into areas too high for them, and didn’t have a clear idea of how they were supposed to gain EXP, given how little killing mobs awards. Hearts were introduced as a way to slow players down long enough for an event to trigger nearby, getting their attention.

But then theres Orr. Orr, from Fort Trinity and on, is meant to pushed in a sequential order, getting the cooperation of the whole map to make it work. But it was pretty clear early on, that getting players to be coordinated for that long is incredibly difficult. Seeing behaviors early in testing- Players wanted to be in certain locations to farm for loot; and stopped participating in group events once they got areas that were easy to farm drops from. With the map cap as low as it was back in those days, you’d have 10-15% of the population doing their own thing, and another 40-50% focusing on easily farmed areas of the map….. that leaves only half the of the map pop bothering with upkeeping the map meta. The ultimate affect of this was seen in Orr after launch; where players were proactively working to make events fail, so they can retrigger events which are good for farming. The 2 most troublesome were the Grenth loop, and Arah Assault (which blocked access to Arah the dungeon).

HOT maps tried to address this, by using a Map’s meta for rewards, but allowed unhindered traversal for map complete and achievement hunting. Some where still locked behind event chains… and those remain the “most complained about issue” when it comes to feed back on the achievement and mastery progress.

What the new maps are suggesting are pretty obvious if you’ve looked at other popular MMOs. The Hydra looks to be their attempt at BAMs from Tera Online; very likely fused with a riff on Monster Hunter’s approach to tracking and trapping. In GW2 terms, BAMS are the equivalent of free roaming Champs, and offer bigger challenge and EXP reward if you’re up for killing them; or simply avoided if you don’t. But keep in mind that Tera has a traditional leveling grind, so there is greater incentive to fight them regularly. The whole premise of Monster Hunter is a long process of tracking a creature, observing it to learn its behaviors, and then setting a trap for it. Its a lot of prep work to determine the right strategy, bringing the right equipment, finding the ideal space to fight it in, and setting the right trap to make it vulnerable to attack.
If they’ve managed to replicate that with any measure of success….. the replay value of this is going to be as good as the raids (possibly better).

If the maps are as big as they claim… the large open space would make this type of content possible, but without interfering with traversal, like it does in HOT maps.

Everything I’ve seen so far suggests they’re pitching the playground design of the core maps; but now have enough room to insert regional metas that was introduced with HOT. Think about it….. they tried this once before with the Modrem invasion in the level 15 zones of Tyria. But it turned into a complete nightmare, because low level players couldn’t avoid it, nor could they participate due to the scaling. A larger, less dense map, enables the ability to insert these types of events without the kind of disruption created in existing maps. More importantly, mounts play into this as they’re built into the design of the new maps, and letting the Devs use a different approach to how they use fast travel and level layouts.

While pure speculation….. this has the potential to recapture the “trek” aspect of Guildwars 1, where players could spend up to an hour traveling to a remote location to look for rare drops, capture Elite skills, or used for some unique quests. As a result of this, group content becomes less chaotic, finally benefits forming groups “before” looking for an event. Up until now, most players show up just before the event with the biggest reward starts, do the event, then leave. If my postulation is correct- having a group comp before leaving a town greatly improves your chances of success, and greatly reduces Randos from scaling up events without being competent enough to contribute. Think about all their attempts to deal with AFKers at event locations, getting tags to get credit, then going idle for the rest of the event.

All in all… there is a lot of potential to leverage the larger space and higher population cap to start doing a lot of things the older ones can’t, given their designed density.