Guild Wars 2

Id like to dematerialize a few rumors going around the community recently, of certain upcoming expansions. The talks became very prominent because of certain PR sent out from gaming websites along with NCSoft reports, etc.

The truth is, we’ve been around this block over a dozen times in gw2’s time. Whether it was 5 months after launch during the beginning of LS1 with colin saying “big things to come”, or whether it was Colin saying “big background projects” during an interview at Pax or an Interview of January 2014.

Reality is, there is probably no expansion, and there is no good evidence to support this belief. I really think an expansion would be great for the game but I think for Anet its not the route they want to go with releasing content. Their playerbase has stabilized which is good and not surprising. Season 2 was mildly successful(has ups and down but isn’t a failure). It could use improvements here and there and perhaps a Season 3 will shine upon these. I think that we may get some more big features here and there, and perhaps an improved Season 3 after two, but not an expansion like i’d like.

There have only ever been 2 arguments made for Anet’s works on an expansion.

1. The big background project. This is a phrase we’ve heard uttered a few times by Anet devs. Its also one that we heard a very long time ago. So long ago that its not unreasonable to believe it could be something we’ve already experienced, like Season 2 or a specific feature we received.

2. Where is the rest of the Anet staff? This is probably the worst and most speculative belief propelled by Expansion truthers. Ive heard a lot of people, like say WP, say that there are plenty of people at Anet we haven’t seen for a while, yet the problem is, the specific people or group or people are never mentioned. Its always “oh we haven’t seen a lot of people at Anet for a while”. its not saying who specifically isn’t there and because of that there is no good reason to believe people are missing or in the background if we can’t even name them.

Conclusion: Gw2’s may eventually get an expansion but its probably not anytime soon. Its probably far away, too far for your comfort. Season 2 actually seems to be the limit on content that Anet can pump out. They actually explained this in regards to a question I posed towards them in an interview about why we had such a long mid-season break, with their response being “quality over quantity” which is good yet still disappointing to me since id prefer shorter breaks. We’ll see Season 2 end soon, another holiday here, another feature pack there, and then probably back on track for the living world TV SHow.

Shun the non believer!

Shun!

@OP

What kind of sorcery is this!? Someone being reasonable on the forums!?

Seriously though. I don’t understand why so many people want an expansion. New races, classes, maps, etc. are all well and good, and I believe will come down the line. But having to pay an additional $60 to get all that doesn’t sit right with me. As it is now, they are offering all of those things, in time, for free. I feel that an expansion, even later at some point, would bring in a short burst of income from box sales, but after that, it will level out again, and probably not make as much money in the long run. Thats why games of all types are moving toward micro transactions. In the long run, it provides better income then straight box sales. Yes, WoW does continue to release expansions, but it would hurt them more to stop and moving toward a pure micro transaction system. They are in too deep to stop, IMO.

I will chip in some stuff i already mentioned before.

A-Net is following it’s own plan.
They are well aware that whatever their plan is would chase away the last chunk of people immediately.

So the we reached a peak of anger and frustration here at the forum.
So suddenly a “mysterious” blogger wakes up and decides… “oh yes, a good day to show up at A-Net”.
Of course he gets invited to a studio tour and sees all these “magical” things going on and all the Jazz.
We don’t have to mention that he can’t tell what he saw or what is important.
But he is allowed to tell that everyone is incredible busy and super stuff is going on…………….

Is someone actually remembering what happened the last time we hit a peak of anger and frustration ??

Right a “mysterious” interview popped up out of absolutely nowhere
stating that we get all the cool stuff…. new skills, new classes, new armor, precursor crafting.. and even more cool stuff they can’t talk about yet.

It’s the regular pattern A-Net follows.
I guess since we had a journalist and and employee interview, at the next peak
one of the gamer will win kind of a lottery and is allowed to come to the studios.
And he/she will see so much stuff going on but can’t tell because the stuff is soo awesome.

Well…. plus the reality facts… A-Net announced GW2 years before it came out.
They also hyped the living story and the world changes for a long time.

If they would have something to announce they just would do.

Yes they are working on stuff but their history indicates that it will most likely be
a new map with size of Claypool, a Squirrel pet, a purple kite backpack and 15 new cooking ingedients but also 256 new gem store items.
Like the last feature patch they will announce it as ground shaking and breath taking.

And then the cycle starts again……..

You guys can make you live much more easy.
Don’t expect the next huge thing. The people who made the awesome expansions in GW1 left the team long time ago. These days everything is given out to the cheapest contractors who never heard the word Thyria their whole life.

People “missing” include the original director (Eric Flannum?), writers, among others. The living world team’s size also happens to be around 20-30 people, only. So they are clearly working on something big in the background. Even NCSoft has talked about it several times.

Yes, the likelihood of an expansion in the works is low.
I would also like to add, regarding 350+ employee count that people like to hang on to, consider the perspective of this person’s company:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2e0uf6/a_different_perspective/

300-400 people working for the company is NOT that much, period. Our company is hovering around 350 people and we STILL don’t have enough developers, engineers, admins, and architects to take care of the infrastructure.
…
We have significantly more personnel on the non-technical and customer service side of the company that on the technical side as management feels that Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service make the money that keeps the business running, not the technical side that we rely on so heavily.

Also, we’ve seen or are going to see the “big projects”:
The living story which released a few maps and reworked a few maps (Edge of the mist map took nearly a year to make, so extrapolate from that).
Trading post revamp which took nearly two years.
The backend is completely rewritten for the upcoming PvP changes.

If people want to get hyped up, they will get hyped up… honestly, it’s probably better for the playerbase to believe that an expansion is on its way eventually than for them to think that no expansion will ever happen.

“There is probably no expansion..” Well duh , I think they would have anounced SOMEthing if there were ?

While this is only based on personal observation, and obviously speculative, I think if ANet have been working on an expansion, then the lack of confirmation was a big mistake. A lot of players seem to have gone from “will literally throw money at ANet for content” to “kind of regret having given the money they have”.

Again, this is just my observation, I could be wrong.

IMO, the major difference between the past ‘been around the block’ and now is that in the past, Anet has said that they want to see if the Living World can provide the content and feel of an expansion. They hadn’t at those times yet. Because of this, expansions have been in the “not planned but not off the table” phase.

Well, now is the point where they’d showing whether or not they determined such.

There’s a lot of aspects, IMO, that point to an expansion being possible. But I’m not getting my hopes up, because there’s also plenty of aspects that point to it not being possible.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

IMO, the major difference between the past ‘been around the block’ and now is that in the past, Anet has said that they want to see if the Living World can provide the content and feel of an expansion. They hadn’t at those times yet. Because of this, expansions have been in the “not planned but not off the table” phase.

Well, now is the point where they’d showing whether or not they determined such.

There’s a lot of aspects, IMO, that point to an expansion being possible. But I’m not getting my hopes up, because there’s also plenty of aspects that point to it not being possible.

It took Arenanet much more time and resources to reach the point where the LW concept is able to deliver en expansion. With season 2 we have now a robust system that can embed content to be delivered in a story.

Now is the time when the other teams and their projects behind the curtain have to be delivered during season 3. The LW team did a great job to implement additional content with their limited resources. But the LW can not provide the feel of an expansion pack since both concepts are too different. Only the quantities can be comparable after a certain time.

Belenwyn.8674:

It took Arenanet much more time and resources to reach the point where the LW concept is able to deliver en expansion. With season 2 we have now a robust system that can embed content to be delivered in a story.

Now is the time when the other teams and their projects behind the curtain have to be delivered during season 3. The LW team did a great job to implement additional content with their limited resources. But the LW can not provide the feel of an expansion pack since both concepts are too different. Only the quantities can be comparable after a certain time.

The bold is why folks think there’s an expansion more than anything else. And you have to wonder:

ArenaNet has been – until their silent treatment – proclaimed the Living World to be their bread and butter for GW2. So what’s this/these other project(s) about?

Why is the Living World team apparently so limited? A recent news article hints that the studio isn’t just lounging around, and I find it hard to believe that what we’ve been getting is taking a full studio of 200+.

I will be quite disappointed if there is no expansion in 2015. The content we get feels tiny compared to expansions of other MMOs.

“There is no expansion” can’t completely be true.

It has been officially said that expansion type content is on the work, hasn’kitten

The only question is the delivery method which may or may not be through an expansion model. That is how one can tell there is no expansion : if the expansion content is delivered differently.

Half Life 3….not confirmed?

Konig Des Todes.2086:

The bold is why folks think there’s an expansion more than anything else. And you have to wonder:

ArenaNet has been – until their silent treatment – proclaimed the Living World to be their bread and butter for GW2. So what’s this/these other project(s) about?

Why is the Living World team apparently so limited? A recent news article hints that the studio isn’t just lounging around, and I find it hard to believe that what we’ve been getting is taking a full studio of 200+.

The company designed a robust vehicle over the last two years. The vehicle is running reliably and mastered the “elk test”. Now it would be time to put the heavy cargo on it and drive it to us.

In addition Arenanet hired Leah Hoyer. This indicates a heavy focus on story and a story-driven expansion in my eyes. This means : Expansion but not a traditional pack…

What is life without hope?

As much as I would like to see a traditional expansion you have to keep in mind that ANet could likely handle 2.5 living seasons per year; if one season follows the current trend of 2 zones with a new set of gear/weps per zone then over the course of 2 years you would see 5 zones with a 5 new sets of gear to work toward which sounds like an expansion to me.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

As much as I would like to see a traditional expansion you have to keep in mind that ANet could likely handle 2.5 living seasons per year; if one season follows the current trend of 2 zones with a new set of gear/weps per zone then over the course of 2 years you would see 5 zones with a 5 new sets of gear to work toward which sounds like an expansion to me.

Sounds like a very small expansion to me. The 3 zones (southsun, dry top, silver wastes) so far have been very small in comparison to the zones included in the game. Also no new dungeons, no new classes, no new races, no new permanent dungeons for ages, no new weapon choice, only new healing skills noone uses, some useless new grandmaster traits).
I wouldnt have paid more than 20 USD / 15€ for this kind of expansion.

Malediktus.9250:

Oldirtbeard.9834:

As much as I would like to see a traditional expansion you have to keep in mind that ANet could likely handle 2.5 living seasons per year; if one season follows the current trend of 2 zones with a new set of gear/weps per zone then over the course of 2 years you would see 5 zones with a 5 new sets of gear to work toward which sounds like an expansion to me.

Sounds like a very small expansion to me. The 3 zones (southsun, dry top, silver wastes) so far have been very small in comparison to the zones included in the game. Also no new dungeons, no new classes, no new races, no new permanent dungeons for ages, no new weapon choice, only new healing skills noone uses, some useless new grandmaster traits).
I wouldnt have paid more than 20 USD / 15€ for this kind of expansion.

Be that as it may you’re not paying for it unless you forget to log in, then if your talking 2.5 seasons that’s still only 20$ which is reasonable in price for 2.5 seasons.

sunset.3056:

What is life without hope?

Real life?

There was some article or thread post I read claiming that if/when they release Tengu as playable race players would only be able to play Tengu by purchasing special Tengu character slots that would sell for $20 USD instead of $10 USD.

A double priced slot is kind of an interesting idea, if that’s what they’ll do, considering how time consuming it must be reskinning ALL the current armors in the game to fit Tengu bodies.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Be that as it may you’re not paying for it unless you forget to log in, then if your talking 2.5 seasons that’s still only 20$ which is reasonable in price for 2.5 seasons.

I would rather pay them 60€ for a proper expansion than getting this for free.

Malediktus.9250:

I would rather pay them 60€ for a proper expansion than getting this for free.

They’ve been expanding the game almost monthly. Why do you need a big dropship dump of an expansion all at once just because it’s how people have done it before? The multiple expansions over a period of time are more digestable.

What would a “legit expansion” even look like? Something like all the expansions they’ve made so far except in a big lump that you have to wait a long time for?

Why wait a long time for new stuff when you can get new stuff in waves all year long?

Hell even proper expansions can get burned through pretty quickly, taking my time I leveled my DK to 100/played through Nagrand up to the Green Jesuz death match with Non neck Hellscream, at least these small episodes provide enough open world content to keep you occupied longer.

If there wasn’t an expansion in the works, Ree and Jeff would be the ones writing the living world stuff.

Those writers that you mentioned are probably in charge of the advertising/hype dept to fire us up for the ‘very big things’ such as the spoon collection, and Doritos commander tags

Whether it’s an actual expansion or new races and classes and weapons and skills, I don’t know. But I do believe all that stuff IS being worked on.

I don’t care if it’s an expansion if I get the content.

Expansions will eventually come. I don’t know when but I always get a feeling they will come in one form or another.

Mo Mo.1947:

Malediktus.9250:

I would rather pay them 60€ for a proper expansion than getting this for free.

They’ve been expanding the game almost monthly. Why do you need a big dropship dump of an expansion all at once just because it’s how people have done it before? The multiple expansions over a period of time are more digestable.

What would a “legit expansion” even look like? Something like all the expansions they’ve made so far except in a big lump that you have to wait a long time for?

Why wait a long time for new stuff when you can get new stuff in waves all year long?

Have you played any other MMOs at all?
It’s been said over and over in these type of threads, expansions generate hype, and have all kinds of content that these LS updates can’t deliver, like classes, races, new continents, etc…

And there’s empirical evidence to support my claim that expansions are more successful than whatever ANet is doing. See Burning Crusade or the more recent Warlords of Draenor. You can also look at FF14, the developers pump out five times the amount of content ANet does and still has room for expansions.

LS updates only serve to keep a small amount of players hooked to the daily grind, but opening chests in the Silverwastes gets boring after a while.w

There’s no doubt they are working on “stuff”, and not just minor things.

People need to keep in mind that GW2 isn’t a traditional MMORPG. It’s always trying to be different. This was the same for GW1 also.

People are seeing this with the wrong perspective. GW2 updates the game in non-traditional ways. So far, it hasn’t updated the more traditional things, such as new races and classes. There has been new zones, pvp maps and eotm, etc., in a more traditional way though.

The problem is, we haven’t been given any future to look towards for the game. There isn’t any long-term investment that players want/need. That’s the real issue.

Yes, i agree with OP. The big background projects Colin was mentioning back in a day turned out to be feature packs and EotM etc., and they’re not small by any means, but in no way it’s an expansion scale, i believe, most of the players were hoping for when they heard about that. And all this “we haven’t heard from some ppl in AN for awhile and there are some big names there” (i.e., maybe they’re just not working there anymore), and all this “stuff” some fanboy saw them working on while passing by, it all reminds me at this point of some conspiracy theory people are playing. I remember something like that happened after ME3, people didn’t want to believe that Bioware can end a trilogy like that and kitten them over like that. Same here, people don’t want to think that there’s nothing expansion big coming to GW2. But it’s very possible. I voiced exactly those concerns back in a day when LS strategy was announced, there was a usual “nothing off the table” comment. Here we are, a year and a half later, it might be nothing really ON the table as well, not only off. Nothing on, nothing off, maybe there’s no table at all. xD But it’s too early to sprinkle ashes upon one’s head, year is not over and they might say something about it in early 2015 etc. If it comes eventually, i believe it will be that late because of LS essentually, it probably means that they started to work on it way later than they shoud have.

SkylightMoon.1980:

Reality is, there is probably no expansion

So, to rephrase this: you are yourself not sure (‘probably’) whether your ‘reality’ is true or not.

So what is it you are adding to the discussion?

He has as much evidence for believing there won’t be as I have for believing their will be. Over time, one of us will be proved right.

I have the feeling Anet is going to stick to the LS as the “Expansion” because think about it, if you replay S2 from start to when it finally finishes and if we ever get to be able to replay S1 that is an expansion pack worth of content. Just not what people normally think of expansions, large new maps, new races / professions, skills, weapons and so on.

Players tend to forget that since LS is feed to us at a snails pace, where new releases take 2 hours at best to beat (or with the last one roughly 30mins).

I like LS but at this pace it’s going to be 8 years until all the dragons are included.

How I view Anet’s take on adding new weapons/weapon skills, races and so on is they back themselves into a corner and don’t know how to go about making them and including them because of how the game was made. Take the Sims 4, EA found out people don’t like how everything they loved from the last one was strip out but said the CAN’T include that stuff do to how it’s was made. I think Anet is in the same boat, they would love to add stuff like that but don’t know how to do it do to the way the game was made and just naturally thought people would love the game for how it was made and never ask for anything new.

As for the chance of an expansion and people thinking it will be $60, way back when, when Anet commented on this they said if expansions were made it would be more inline with EOTN and not stand alone games like Factions or Nightfall, so if an expansion is made it will probably be around $40 not $60.

joshc.3129:

if you replay S2 from start to when it finally finishes and if we ever get to be able to replay S1 that is an expansion pack worth of content

No.. Not at all. Remember when ANet actually handed out large chunks of content for free? Remember the Sorrow’s Furnace update from GW1, that alone was worth more content than an entire Living Story season in GW2.
And don’t even try to compare the Living Story to one of the real expansions… Living Story is a failed experiment but ANet loves to hang onto stupid stuff because it’s oh so innovative and new, instead of accepting how it drives away their playerbase.

Inb4 “don’t speak for me bla bla”.

Sogradde.8016:

joshc.3129:

if you replay S2 from start to when it finally finishes and if we ever get to be able to replay S1 that is an expansion pack worth of content

No.. Not at all. Remember when ANet actually handed out large chunks of content for free? Remember the Sorrow’s Furnace update from GW1, that alone was worth more content than an entire Living Story season in GW2.
And don’t even try to compare the Living Story to one of the real expansions… Living Story is a failed experiment but ANet loves to hang onto stupid stuff because it’s oh so innovative and new, instead of accepting how it drives away their playerbase.

Inb4 “don’t speak for me bla bla”.

Sorrow’s embrace is not worth more than the entire Living Story and anyone who says so doesn’t remember it. It was four big quest chains and yes, they were good, but… that’s what they were. Four big quest chains.

And that’s most of what Anet gave away for free, until Guild Wars 2 was announced and they started the War in Kryta many years later.

Sorrow’s Embrace I could do a couple of times and it was nice….but Drytop and Silverwastes are free zones (and so is Southsun).

Stuff like Triple Threat, the Karka Queen, The New Jumping Puzzles are all free too. SAB was free. I’m not sure everyone would agree Sorrow’s Embrace was better than SAB even if it’s not in game now.

Picking the one example of content Anet gave for free until it stopped selling new content for Guild Wars 1 is just a bit disingenuous.

Edit: And you could probably finish Sorrow’s Embrace in 2 hours.

Malediktus.9250:

Oldirtbeard.9834:

As much as I would like to see a traditional expansion you have to keep in mind that ANet could likely handle 2.5 living seasons per year; if one season follows the current trend of 2 zones with a new set of gear/weps per zone then over the course of 2 years you would see 5 zones with a 5 new sets of gear to work toward which sounds like an expansion to me.

Sounds like a very small expansion to me. The 3 zones (southsun, dry top, silver wastes) so far have been very small in comparison to the zones included in the game. Also no new dungeons, no new classes, no new races, no new permanent dungeons for ages, no new weapon choice, only new healing skills noone uses, some useless new grandmaster traits).
I wouldnt have paid more than 20 USD / 15€ for this kind of expansion.

We got 1 new zone (Southsun Cove) in almost 2 years (24 months), but got 2 new zones (Dry Top, Silverwastes) in just 5 months. That’s a rather big change, from 1 zone every 24 months, to 1 zone every 2.5 months, so there is still hope. Although the new zones are smaller, they are more packed with events and things to do than the old zones.

The new Healing skills have some use, for example the Elementalist healing skill is excellent. There are great choices in the new Grandmaster traits too, for example Revealed Training for Thieves is a great trait. Just because you think the new grandmaster traits and healing skills aren’t good, doesn’t mean they aren’t, what did you expect, to make new GM traits and Healing skills that give more DPS so the Zerker-meta people get even more damage?

SkylightMoon.1980:

Reality is, there is probably no expansion, and there is no good evidence to support this belief.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

Sogradde.8016:

instead of accepting how it drives away their playerbase.

You mean you and a few other players, because every time I log in the player base online is always big.

Have you ever played Sorrow’s Embrace? To complete all the quests took a little over 2 hours, the same time it takes to complete 2 LS addons. So when LS2 ends and if we are ever able to replay LS1, yes it’s an expansion pack worth of content.

Labjax.2465:

If people want to get hyped up, they will get hyped up… honestly, it’s probably better for the playerbase to believe that an expansion is on its way eventually than for them to think that no expansion will ever happen.

That’s only true if the expansion will eventually come, and if it will happen within a reasonable frametime (and not, for example, 5 years from now). Playerbase waiting for the things that won’t come is good only for Anet. Not for players.

Lyndis.4653:

It has been officially said that expansion type content is on the work, hasn’kitten

Well, yeah. At the beginning of 2013. And we were to get it through that year’s Living Story content.
Hope you liked it.

Mo Mo.1947:

They’ve been expanding the game almost monthly. Why do you need a big dropship dump of an expansion all at once just because it’s how people have done it before?

Because there are things that simply can’t be done piecemeal. And others that would suffer degradation of quality.

If they can’t introduce more than one zone at a time (and need several months at least between such introductions), then things like Cantha or Elona are simply not possible for them to make. Trying to do that one piece at a time would not only take ages, but also result in something that would be just a collection of individual pieces, not a single bigger whole.

Astralporing.1957:

Labjax.2465:

If people want to get hyped up, they will get hyped up… honestly, it’s probably better for the playerbase to believe that an expansion is on its way eventually than for them to think that no expansion will ever happen.

That’s only true if the expansion will eventually come, and if it will happen within a reasonable frametime (and not, for example, 5 years from now). Playerbase waiting for the things that won’t come is good only for Anet. Not for players.

Lyndis.4653:

It has been officially said that expansion type content is on the work, hasn’kitten

Well, yeah. At the beginning of 2013. And we were to get it through that year’s Living Story content.
Hope you liked it.

Mo Mo.1947:

They’ve been expanding the game almost monthly. Why do you need a big dropship dump of an expansion all at once just because it’s how people have done it before?

Because there are things that simply can’t be done piecemeal. And others that would suffer degradation of quality.

If they can’t introduce more than one zone at a time (and need several months at least between such introductions), then things like Cantha or Elona are simply not possible for them to make. Trying to do that one piece at a time would not only take ages, but also result in something that would be just a collection of individual pieces, not a single bigger whole.

Each part of Drytop was was introduced separately but they work together as a single piece. Any design can work like that if that’s your intent.

I can’t see anything preventing Anet from releasing Elona one map at a time.

Let’s say it takes them a year to release the entire map. That’s how long WoW players waited for an expansion with no new content at all.

Vayne.8563:

Each part of Drytop was was introduced separately but they work together as a single piece.

Heh, and here i thought about mentioning Dry Top as an example of clunky piecemeal building that results in less than it could be if it was done all at once.

Besides, look at that map design. It could never have worked if the map has not been planned from the get go to consist of independent parts. The piecemeal introduction heavily limited the potential design – most of the GW2 maps we already have could not have been introduced that way.

(and with the latest speed, which is actually higher than what it was before, a year is what, four maps at best?)

BlueZone.4236:

Yes, the likelihood of an expansion in the works is low.
I would also like to add, regarding 350+ employee count that people like to hang on to, consider the perspective of this person’s company:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2e0uf6/a_different_perspective/

300-400 people working for the company is NOT that much, period. Our company is hovering around 350 people and we STILL don’t have enough developers, engineers, admins, and architects to take care of the infrastructure.
…
We have significantly more personnel on the non-technical and customer service side of the company that on the technical side as management feels that Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service make the money that keeps the business running, not the technical side that we rely on so heavily.

Also, we’ve seen or are going to see the “big projects”:
The living story which released a few maps and reworked a few maps (Edge of the mist map took nearly a year to make, so extrapolate from that).
Trading post revamp which took nearly two years.
The backend is completely rewritten for the upcoming PvP changes.

A company that large not making something new is pure suicide. Of course they are working on something big. And what is the most logical next big thing? Taking a gamble and create a new game or creating an expansion for an existing one?

Astralporing.1957:

Vayne.8563:

Each part of Drytop was was introduced separately but they work together as a single piece.

Heh, and here i thought about mentioning Dry Top as an example of clunky piecemeal building that results in less than it could be if it was done all at once.

Besides, look at that map design. It could never have worked if the map has not been planned from the get go to consist of independent parts. The piecemeal introduction heavily limited the potential design – most of the GW2 maps we already have could not have been introduced that way.

(and with the latest speed, which is actually higher than what it was before, a year is what, four maps at best?)

Latest speed is one map every 2.5 months, however this includes the recent Feature Pack as well, we won’t have as many feature packs as we have updates, so maybe 1 map every 2 months will be more accurate, that’s 6 months per year. Obviously we have to consider if it makes sense to release a new map (story-wise) I doubt they will release a map without moving the story there

Keep in mind that the current introduction of maps is based on the LW CDI. Many people wished exactly this style of unveiling maps. DT and SW reflect some proposals of the LW CDI. But that does not mean that these are the only ways to implement maps. The more teams working on LW the larger the content beside the core story can be. Season 3 and 4 could therefore be much bigger contentwise than the current one.

In addition, the size of a map does not matter but the event density. The majority of the old-fashion maps are much more boring than the new one. The event densities of SW and DT are comparable with the orr maps.

I don’t get why you would want to gauge the speed of maps being released, while its the content in the map that you will be playing.

luzt.7692:

I don’t get why you would want to gauge the speed of maps being released, while its the content in the map that you will be playing.

People count only the number of maps not how many of those will actually have loads of people on them. See, in a game that releases whole full continents often, like for example GW1, the vast majority is literally empty and just standing there for people to say “look how many zones they added!” and then go and play just a tiny fraction of them.

Lots of people asking for an expansion base their logic on map size/number of zones as the primary issue. I’d rather get 3-4 zones that are all used, rather than 50 zones that only 3-4 are used.

I still hope they’ll do an expansion and add a lot of new weapons, armor, legendary items – etc.

I don’t believe they will – bust still try to hope for it. As stupid as that might sound.