At the release of Heart of Thorns I called this expansion fantastic. In most respects I am still going to say that. On the other hand, there’s just a lot of hate towards it. This post is some attempt to discuss that from what I’ve encountered.
Let’s start with positive things:
- Guild Wars 2 needed some sort of End-Game content.
- Heart of Thorns provided End-Game content.
Just to be perfectly clear, the largest complaint with that is: “It all takes place in Maguum.”
That said, set back for a moment and look at what Guild Wars 2 was before Heart of Thorns in terms of its End-Game.
- Dungeons for gold
- Fractals for Ascended Gear (once you crafted your first set)
- Open-World bosses and maps: Cursed Shore, Champions (until they were nerfed/removed), and Silverwastes
The majority of the game was taking place in Open-World. This was probably the most unique selling point in terms of what Guild Wars 2 had to offer unique from every other MMO.
After Heart of Thorns:
- Dungeons gold reward was removed
- Fractals are pointless
- Raids are the only access to ascended gear after you have crafted your first gear.
- If your guild can’t / won’t raid you need a new guild. If you can’t/won’t find one you need a new game.
- People are rightly kittened off about the fact above. Developers or a company making the decision to directly remove people from the game because they don’t fit a niche piece of content (because the niche piece of content is the only thing in development) deserve all the hate they get because no sane person can’t imagine it would happen or just get worse.
- Crafting Ascended Gear is nearly gone until you devote all of your evenings on at least 8 characters to getting 50+ Empyreal Shards a night as dungeons rewarded 20 per path and world chests give only 2: even Jumping Puzzles. If you don’t have 8+ characters to do this, devote evenings. If you are crazy enough to say, “go do dungeons… go do dungeons and then say it…”
And, the Rest of the Game:
- PvP, as far as I know, does not reward Ascended Armor
- WvW, as does from one achievement chest, maybe two.
- WvW is essentially dead right now. Maps are too large and keeps are pointless as they are just a flip and switch. Also the lead designer for WvW has quit so says the rumor mill.
- Skins are a big deal to most people, but the skin creation has really slowed down of late even from the Gem Store. Those created, like Bladed Armor are very hit and miss, shifting wildly between pretty awesome to ultra cartoony (often in the same set).
Sets are falling off lately in favor of Outfits. I’m not sure what the opinions are on all of this, but there has definitely been a sharp falloff in themetic designs. To give you an idea what I mean Aetherblade was incredibly themetic whereas Striders isn’t exactly anywhere and pushing the ‘serious and cartoony’ confusion generally demonstrating a consistency that Guild Wars 2 does not do cartoony well.
Heart of Thorns launched with relatively no new skins of any kind what so ever. There are a few gated skins, and a few account bound drops that are quite good, but in general the 60+ skins discussed pre-launch appear to be a sum total and not sets as many suspected.
- Most people were into the idea of tagging up with people in meta events or one-off encounters to get something done from Hero Points to picking a Ghost Pepper.
- Dyes are a big deal to people, but in general a single good dye costs half as much or more gold than a precursor.
As far as is known no new dyes came with Heart of Thorns.
On to the Strong Complains.
- No new armor sets that drop from creatures in Open-World or through collections (at least so far known) besides Mistward.
- No new weapons that drop from creatures in Open-World or through collections (at least so far known) besides Mistward.
- The vast emptiness of most maps.
- Gliding not having been capitalized on beyond Verdant Brink.
Each map has progressively less to do with gliding. Especially at later levels.
- Too much use of teleports.
Nuhoch Wallows + Waypoints transformed fairly complex maps into a series of instantaneous transitions.
Reduced the chance of one player running into another.
Created a wide divide between varied player choices: some going for Exalted Crafting long before realizing there was Nuhoch Wallows or what they really help.
- Too much goal-oriented content.
If you aren’t goal oriented in Heart of Thorns you’re not playing it. The design of both the maps and every particularity of content is such that no progress can be made unless you are oriented toward doing that thing and that alone.
- The goal-orientation is individualistic in such a way that no two characters are likely going to meet on task for the same goal. Especially this is the cast in later levels as players diverge by level 41 in masteries toward their own needs from collection to acquisition of Insights.
- We could get things done on our own.
This gets a lot of confusion and bringing it up is a good way to be told, “You are just going to have to learn to play with others.” I’ve made that particular comment myself often enough. However, that is not what I am talking about.
Precursor Crafting is Time-gated, Ascended Armor crafting is Time-gated, and the final tier of Masteries post level 134 are locked beyond some pretty out of reach achievements for most of the player community. Essentially people just call it what it is, “Time gated to keep us playing.”
Unfortunately, that’s very 90s of Anet. We’re living in the 21st century. If your partner, parents, or consciousness keys in on the fact you just spent 30 days to craft 1 armor set for 1 character a divorce, grounding, and/or job search is in the foreseeable future. And anyway, it’s obvious the game is saying “You’ve reached the end of content, please return to the game,” at that point.
What was Anet trying to do?
- This isn’t asked a lot. I’m not sure why, but the assumptions are pretty broad. If for no other reason than to open some sort of dialog about it let’s go into it.
If you look at the wide swath of MMOs available most are pretty much awful. WoW’s dying because there’s really no way in if you haven’t been playing in forever and Blizzard has a bad habit of nerfing classes into disuse for years at a time.Further, there’s no content. The game is just a grind for gear treadmill.
Dark Age of Camelot is still out there and Everquest, or varied shards of all of these. Guild Wars 1 is another to fit into this old genre of game.
They are all dying out. We can recognize them, but most players can’t identify in words what it is that’s dying.
To put it simple: The Grand Narrative.
In old games the real confrontation to which all players were to surmount was the frontier. Dragon Age: Inquisition is the first game in a decade to recreate that. The frontier is the unknown. Even if memorized, its very nature is such that all confrontation with it is only tentative. Unlike games today group dynamics were not competitive, but complimentary. In short, the group was its own biome moving in, amongst, and often at odds with another biome. Your party was vital and you were vital to your party for being a apart of it.
Today the reverse is true. Your build is vital, but your build is a meta calculated down to its optimum summation. You are slaved to its implementation – trapped in a rail cart heading the wrong way – as is demanded by the biome which you are supposedly to confront. Rails cannot be steered. In reality you are absorbed by that biome and forced into some sort of dance, effectively becoming a puppet on strings.
The Grand Narrative has always been a challenge to realize in MMOs because each player is conceived to be the Hero. Only where games have chosen to determine that those events with which the player is involved are grind is this actually successful.
It requires that skill diversity or concentration (that combination specifically), rather than armor stats, also are the meta. Only the complimentary coordination of skills with limitations affords this reality.
Guild Wars 1 achieved this because though our player was not always the one determining the course of events were a vital part of their unfolding. Skills were diverse enough that it was unlikely you were to encounter a person doing exactly the same as you nor that they should need to do so.
This satisfied the heroic role without coming into conflict with the narrative that there were many heroes and heroics across the course of the story. It also satisfied the presentation that you were you and free to design “you”.
WoW 2004-2006, Dark Age of Camelot, and so on did this as well.
Everquest was the rare exception in success, but only because in that world no grand world events took place. Rather, there was grandeur to be sought in its own biome. Thus, the hero of Everquest was ever questing toward this goal of having had encountered the majesty, awe, and mystery of the insurmountable. You could ‘defeat’ something in Everquest only to the point of a stalemate. No extinction of the dragons or giants, even orcs, was remotely conceivable. The world did not alter, only your encounter with this insurmountable.
Anet has achieved in providing most of the original content to which other games at any period in time have achieved in one way or another. Further, most of that is still here in the game right now.
What it truly lacks though, is self-integrity, which in turns suggests it has not realized itself internally. Some of the devs have scoffed openly at RPers despite there being a strong and thriving community of RPers who aren’t RPing sex surprise, surprise. So that’s great. No points won there. WvW players have been on their knees for years for maps that make sense, but always we get gigantic maps and gigantic keeps that no army in real life can populate, much less a game world. This is utterly baffling because Anet specifically designed Guild Wars 2’s WvW after Dark Age of Camelot. Here’s just how easy it was in Dark Age to have a comprehensive WvW map:
http://www.valmerwolf.com/mappe/BG/bg-thidranki.jpg
One keep, three realms fighting over it. It’s a map where a person can actually use tactics rather than persist in some giant blob toward a pointless taking of a keep whose walls and doors are more flimsy than tissue paper.
PvP needs some love as well, with essentially a great possibility for competitive gameplay there too, but no devotion to the creation of unique maps or even many maps at all.
Perhaps the largest struggle for players is a sense of where the game is going. There’s been a consistency of mixed messages and contradictions from Anet about this since before launch.
If you looked at the trailers from Guild Wars 2 you would have thought this game was about dragons invading the world of Tyria we knew from Guild Wars 1. Guild Wars 1 had an awesome story that championed humanity’s diversity with its armors to its cultures. Guild Wars 2? Can’t decided what it is, but is trying to be WoW hard. Hylek are Elonans sometimes and other times Utopians from the unfinished expansion. Anet refused to make a character that’s not white, though we skin shaders. There was going to be something like elves, but we got plants. It worked out, I guess, but only in so much as they come closest to both elves and the Asiatic body type. I’m really not sure where other people (not white) are finding their closest match.
It’s always loomed darkly over Guild Wars 2 just what happened in the making of this game. Did People’s Republic of China threaten NCSoft that “Any Japanese or Dynastic imagery will be regarded in poor taste.”? We don’t know, but people still ask. Once that was gone did the rest of humanity get deleted from Guild Wars 2 as well? The only Korean style architecture in the game is smashed up into the edge of Stonesledge Draft and a jumping puzzle.
So, Guild Wars 2 has always struggled with what it is. It’s not related to Guild Wars 1 much but in name. It’s content isn’t much to do with its lore save on the most immediate face of it.
