Guild Wars 2

So, after leveling an 80 of each class, spending WAY too much time in both WvW flavors, hating every bit of area pvp (not my thing, you guys keep having fun! It’s cool), all crafting to 500, lots of ascended gear, getting my kitten kicked in fractals (I’m challenged, I know…) and getting 100% map completion for my starter character, I’ve ran into a snag.

What to do?

Well, I like the game, so I find things to do. And one of those things to do is work on map completion for another character. After mastering leveling across eight characters, I’ve only ever explored the full world with one. I guess now is as good of time as ever to explore it again.

So, here’s something that’s become pretty glaring for me:
It seems like the overwhelming majority of the world isn’t even utilized by every day play. There are so many places, just sitting there, with no story, no dialog, no events, etc. Wonderful places, with wonderful architecture and colorful and interesting names.

I know we’re all gunning for new content and what not, and I certainly am, but if I could take a moment and offer a simple analogy. This world is a canvas, whose artists created a hellva masterpiece, but in it’s gameplay, we only ever focus on bits and pieces, as we view it. The rest seems almost ambient in nature, destined to remain on the sidelines of peripheral vision.

All we would need are a few extra quests, here and there, that involve these under utilized areas, to get people showing up there that are not doing so only for map completion and more than likely on auto-pilot, racing from POI to POI in the most efficient manner possible.

Just sneak them in there. A couple each patch. Across a couple of different zones. It’d give purpose to head off exploring again, without being driven by percentages.

Sadly, this is a huge problem with all modern games. Games are predominantly developed by artists these days, not programmers. Usually a modern game will have about 80%-90% of the crew creating models, textures, sound, music, levels and translations and about 10-20% of its crew actually adding the content to the game, and usually “adding it” just means “sticking it in somewhere so it looks nice”.

Guild Wars 1 was the opposite; it was largely developed by programmers, not artists, which is why it had such a dated and minimalistic graphics style, but everything was fully utilized in the game to its maximum potential.

Guild Wars 2 unfortunately fully embodies to the modern stereotype.