Guild Wars 2

So, ANet loves their innovation. And that’s good! That’s the big reason we all fell in love with GW2 in the first place. But innovation, especially on such a complex system which is live, not in a lab, is both time-consuming and costly. Innovation inherently means making mistakes and failing over and over, while sticking with the known and old means the opposite. Innovation means less quantity per dollar. And this has become a problem in HoT as a whole.

In terms of quantity, this expansion provides, quite frankly, very little, compared to even GW2 at launch. We have 1 new profession, a new playstyle for the other 5, 1 Raid, 6 fewer dungeons (for purposes of replayability), 2 Guild halls, a new legendary system, a new progression system, flying (in 3/5 maps), 3 amazing maps, and an immersive personal story (among other various small changes and improvements; all good, but still relatively small compared to the game’s original quantity).

All told, I estimate we have less than a quarter of the quantity of content in the original game. At some point you have to stop breaking the mold with every new bit and just lean on the existing proven systems (even if you made and proved those yourself). Guild Halls, sure, could be improved, but right now I think we just need more of them. Same for Fractals, epic bosses like Tequatl (no, new map bosses don’t count as they don’t give direct rewards, nor are they as punishing by any means), and soon as we can properly verify it’s quality, more of the new Raids.

He have pretty darn good quality now; the overall positive initial reaction to HoT on the forums (compared to many a living story update) shows that innovation and quality have met. Now we need quantity. So ArenaNet, please, before you continue to burn massive stacks of resources on ‘Innovation’, I beg you, give us more of what you’ve made.