Guild Wars 2

I have seen this quite a lot, people keep caring about number of maps. I want to say that numbers of maps doesn’t really matter. It’s all about density and replayability , Anet could probably make 20 Lonar’s pass size boring and unoriginal maps but that is not what they are going for. As long as the new maps are dense and fun the numbers really doesn’t matter. If people are still not stasfied with how MANY maps in HoT, then I suggest Anet to split every HoT maps into 2 or 3 maps(for ex. split Verdent Brink into 2 average size maps), there you go guys you got your 10 maps expansion.

Expectations. We know they’ve only had a finite amount of time to work on the maps. the more maps there are, the lower the quality we would expect, and the fewer the maps, the higher the quality we expect. There’s a balance in there somewhere with the right number of maps and the right level of quality.

If there’s only one map, it better be a really good map.

If there are multiple maps, they still need to be good, but I’d be more forgiving of mistakes.

If the game had launched with just one map and it be Lornar’s Pass type, I’d likely be disappointed. But if it had been say Cursed Shore or Silverwastes, I’d be happier. But since Lornar’s Pass is just one of a number of maps, I’m more easily able to forgive the boring nature of Lornar’s Pass.

Denseness and fun are important but also important is exploring and just plain ole wandering around looking at things. There are plenty of people who like to jump on each rock and try to climb each hill just to see if they can get anywhere not obvious or see something that no other player has seen before. If the maps are small and few, then those activities are quickly finished.

warbignime.4610:

I have seen this quite a lot, people keep caring about number of maps. I want to say that numbers of maps doesn’t really matter. It’s all about density and replayability , Anet could probably make 20 Lonar’s pass size boring and unoriginal maps but that is not what they are going for. As long as the new maps are dense and fun the numbers really doesn’t matter

I do not think that most people really care about the exact number of maps but about the amount of new content that is on these maps. And the number of maps is only a rough and simple (but not exact) approximation for the amount of content.

Some people fear that this expansion, content-wise, would be a “small” expansion.

Also: Different players have “fun” on different types of maps and with different activities. If A-net would only release one map in silverwastes-style (which they clearly don’t), all players, that do not like this map-type would have no other new map that could be fun for them.

And: Not every player likes packed and dense maps with three biomes and a lot of verticality in them. Some players would like more open maps with more space in them, that others find boring.

Because the more I get for my money the happier I am.

I think it’s just a short-hand way of asking about how much PvE content will be included, that sometimes gets misunderstood.

I imagine the people asking about it are assuming that the amount of stuff to do per map will be the same either way, so more maps = more content and less maps = less content.

It doesn’t look like that’s Anet’s plan, but it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done things differently and confused people. Unless there are loads of maps I expect this argument to keep coming up on and off at least until the next expansion, same way we still get people coming on the forum to ask how to find quests and quest hubs even though a major part of their promotion was that neither of those things would be in the game.

I like exploration. I like it even better when there are varied maps. In fact, I like exploration more than the dynamic events, and certainly a lot more than event maps like SW or VB.

Because of marketing.

Perhaps the new maps are twice as big as the old ones, but saying an expansion only gets 4 new maps is underwhelming for people who don’t do any research about it.

I only want one map, and a new one added every 6 months personally.

I don’t care for density at all, as in I find it immersion breaking and generally no fun at all. So I’d much rather see several sprawling maps than fewer, denser ones.

Because people view quantity as quality. I hate Lornar’s Pass. Number of maps means nothing to me, the amount of fun things to do in them does. 1 map with 100 interesting activities is better than 100 maps with 1 interesting activity in each.

Zok.4956:

Some people fear that this expansion, content-wise, would be a “small” expansion.

This. Exactly this. I play an elementalist. So far, what I saw in Beta, there was really nothing there to improve my gameplay (for the style I enjoy.)
The new weapon? Is an offhander. 2/5ths of a weapon bar. That’s rather disappointing.
The Tempest traitline? I like the first minor adept trait. Nothing else there for me, but thanks to the new traitsystem, I’m pretty much forced to choose that if I wish to enjoy the new profession mechanic.
There is 1 new ultimate, 1 set of utility skills (4 is pretty much the minimum, you can’t add just 1 utility skill. I suppose they could’ve added just 3, but that wouldn’t be inline with other utility sets.)
And there is 1 new profession. You got 1 new character slot if you owned the base game before paying 50€ for the expansion.
There are whole lot of 1’s there. Feels very minimalistic for 50€.

It’s not that we just want a bunch of maps to play its that we want to explore all of proffecies all of factions and all of nightfall…and at the rate of the amount they release it will be 20 years down the road before they ever get to any nightfall maps. and we all know this game is barely sustainable right now let alone 20 more years down the road.

I played the beta during the weekend for a grand total of 3 hrs before I became incredibly bored. I explored every inch of the map that they allowed us to explore and even got to glide around a bit I killed every type of monster and all it felt like was just one big grinding map. you have to grind kills to unlock gliding then grind more kills to unlock the next teir of gliding…then continue killing things until u need to spend 1 point on upgrading then do it all over again. I was expecting it to be a bit more intuative like gliding to a location u can only get to by gliding and that would gain u exp toward gliding ability…nope its just killing more mobs over and over and over. there was only 1 of the 3 new mini games available to play during it and it was the same one featured on every video for the expansion. to be honest it wasnt even that fun and kitten near impossible to get 139kills in 3mins when i could barely get 40. theres loads about that mini game that make it impossible like the respawn rate is to slow and the bombs knock u down for 3-5secs, also the bombs do not blow up any of the worms. but that mini game really doesnt matter much. its the entirety of the masteries. the only way this expansion will feel exspansive is if the devs utilize the masteries in ALL other maps already in the game. If all the masteries are tied to that one map it will mean I spent 50 bucks on another 2-6week content area like the drytop which was free and had story missions and unique movement abilities and pretty good bosses and content.

So far from what I have experienced with the new class revenant is that it is way underpowered and squishier than my paper elementalist. I cant believe they made a heavy class die so fast in pve let alone pvp. I spent many hours farming and hording level up scrolls and exp boosters for this awesome new class only to play it and find out how horrible it plays. (i have 2 warriors and 2 guardians all lvl 80 as well as 2 elementalists a nec, a ranger, 2 mesmers and a sin. but whos counting alts here.)

Now if they dont make the map 10x bigger then the beta showed then yes I will be quite disappointed. because the amount of actual fun content is very lacking. and the only way to compensate that is to see better I even tried climbing on the roots of the vines which lead no where and certain death. so the “Depth” for hieght and virtcal ness of the map they shows felt much smaller then the underground puzzle in Silverwastes.

Overall the beta felt more like a pre-alpha state. and I hope they dont release it as is anytime soon…becuase right now I wouldnt play the map longer then 3hours.

Well the simplest way to measure content would be number of maps.
Mind you this measurement doesn’t take into account things like replayability, content density etc. but you know that’s how people are.

Because I want to know the amount of content included in the expansion.

I’d prefer to know the total area of maps in the expansion but measuring that is kind of tricky. I definitely do not see inaccessible areas (mountains mostly, and presumably the parts where you can glide down in the expansion) as contributing to the area and would prefer to count water as less than land; another person might see that differently.

Also I like to have a bit of diversity in maps (a potential problem regardless of the number of maps as the expansion is in a single region as far as I know), the higher the number of maps the greater the chance of them being somewhat diverse.
To me amount of content adds to replayability.

But because answering these questions might take quite a bit of time I’d accept the number of maps as at least an approximate indication of the amount of content.

If they were to say there’ll be over 20 Diessa Plateaus (at a cursory glance the best map to use as a unit of mesurement for area) in area (accessible land area only) in several different styles (like the regions in the base game) then the number wouldn’t be that important. As I don’t expect them to give me such a figure I’ll have to make do with the number of maps once they finally reveal it. And I really hope it’s more than “an expansion worth of content” (as I recall them saying about the living world).

People care about maps because they can’t think past MORE = BETTER. If there was 1 map and had more content than all of the maps combined so far, this would possibly blow people’s minds. Anet can’t afford to blow the minds of these kind of people.

Obtena.7952:

People care about maps because they can’t think past MORE = BETTER. If there was 1 map and had more content than all of the maps combined so far, this would possibly blow people’s minds. Anet can’t afford to blow the minds of these kind of people.

Well, there’s the problem of expressing “content” in any sort of value that can be compared to another value; As well as possibly differing opinions as to what actualy constitutes content.
If they’d manage to get as much content (the way I’d evaluate it) as the base game in a single map the size of this map would mean that even on a full map you’d still hardly see any other players; so I guess in a way that would blow my mind, the poor decision making of such a hypothetical situation that is.
At the moment I’d actually be pleasantly surprised if the expansion contains half the content of the base game.

As they won’t and probably can’t give me an estimate in “content value” (say, with the base game having a content value of 100 and of course fitting my valuing of content) I’ll have to use something else to estimate the amount of content.
And since number of maps has some relation to total area and total area has some relation to amount of content, I’d accept number of maps as that is the only one I don’t consider entirely unlikely to ever be released.

Another thing is that ironically I can’t try the content (helping me make an estimate of the value of the expansion, as they won’t give us any information about it) in the expansion without buying the expansion and I won’t buy the expansion without having any idea of its value.