First let me start by saying that I am overall enjoying this expansion, and feel like I have gotten my money’s worth. This is not a raging post; you won’t find any foul language or finger pointing here. However there are some things that are bugging me, and I want to see what others have to say about the expansion. If there are parts where my opinion is from lack of information please, please correct me. I cannot shake the feeling of a rollercoaster of enjoyment, disappointment, and questions and I hope discussing this with you all will help ease my worry. I’ve always been a forum lurker, never really posted anything, but I’m desperate to have someone to talk about this with. So here I go!
I feel like I’m going to get crucified for this, but before you pull out your torches and pitchforks hear me out. When ANET says the word “expansion” I immediately think of what to expect from GW1. I can’t help it, even though I know I shouldn’t. Thousands of hours, nostalgia, my first game when joining the PC master race yatta yatta; moving on. Heart of Thorns feels like a mix of a shady Kickstarter and a WoW expansion. It feels like a WoW xpac because it’s only a handful of maps, no new dungeons that I’ve seen unless they are fractals, and a raid that will be out sometime after launch. Currently, while they may be big, there are only three new maps available for exploration. While I’m happy to see guild halls, I’m a little disappointed that they take up two of the five new maps. It feels like the same amount of content as any other level 80 map, just spread out across a bigger area. The amount of vistas, event chains, and general exploration are just slightly more than what we see on some other maps.
I say a shady Kickstarter because there wasn’t a lot of visibility of what’s going on with this expansion during its development. Yes I want to be surprised to some extent, but I don’t think there was enough communication and visibility on what we were getting. Did ANET ever tell us how many maps we are getting, or did they just roll into “These maps are huge!” It almost feels like this was a “Here’s what we have so far, more will come later, you just don’t know what it is or when it’ll be out.” I also could have sworn up and down that they were putting those adventure things in the main game maps as well as HoT, however I’ve been told I’m loony on that one.
Other than revenant, HoT, and all things HoT mastery, what are players that have not bought HoT yet missing? Do players still on the original xpac still get tyrian mastery? If a player new to GW2 buys HoT and levels up through the original game, do they get living story season 1 and 2? If not, that’s more of a concern of “Who the heck are these new people?” when diving into the HoT story rather than my own selfish needy ways.
I have more but I’m really hoping for some decent feedback instead of trolls. On a positive note I can say this is an insanely smooth xpac launch. Compared to a lot of other games this launch has been absolutely golden. Huge Kudos to your Engineer, DBA, and Networking teams on this.