Good Morning Friends! I am exceptionally excited that today we are getting the first drop in the new content that follows End of Dragons over in Guild Wars 2. I had the sudden realization yesterday that this was a thing, and not only coming soon… but today. I am nowhere even close to catching up on the story with my Ranger, so I will be venturing back to my Necromancer to experience the tasty new content. I think more than anything I am interested in seeing the sort of content drops we should come to expect from the loose roadmap posted on the 13th. In theory, the content we are getting today should be representative of the drops we will be getting each quarter. There has been much speculation on what exactly this roadmap and shift away from full expansion and full living world season means for the game, but I am interested in arriving at a more predictable release cadence. I guess my hope is that we see something akin to either Season 4 or 5 maps with lots of stuff going on in the game, vendors selling useful things to plug holes in your gearing process, and maybe even a really good meta or world boss.
After completing my Skyscale I set my sights on getting my racing beetle. This honestly was a pretty quick quest at least compared to what I went through with collecting scales and eggs. This chain of meta-achievements is almost entirely focused on the Domain of Kourma. Once again I employed BlishHUD to mark the locations of the various bits and bobs required for the quest. The piece I struggled with the most was the event centered around the invasion of the Moon Temple. I kept popping into the zone periodically while working on things with my Ranger, and almost without fail, I would arrive after the event had just finished. On Sunday I managed to catch the event just starting and pushed my way through the sequence of events and finally was able to break the plague beetle jars required to get the final component in the Beetle Feed quest.
So now I am the proud owner of Petey the amazing Roller Beetle. In theory, I should be able to use this to pick up a few Mastery points that I am missing that required breaking down walls with this little guy. I’ve not spent a lot of time on this, because given that I have a Skyscale… I am using it most often. I did however spend about fifteen minutes just zooming around the zone immediately following the quest. It feels very F-Zero when zooming about and less like the Mario Kart experience I was sort of expecting. I need to go try some of the racing tracks. Ultimately my focus has been on getting mounts because they are very much something that you immediately feel account-wide. I spent some time on my Guardian last night and having access to the Skyscale just drastically improved the experience of roaming around and poking away at map completion.
More than a fair amount of my time is honestly just exploring the world on the back of my Skyscale since getting it. It is extremely shocking how much detail has gone into this world. For example these tarps hanging up in Divinity’s Reach. Prior to the existence of the Skyscale, there was no way in hell you would ever be able to get this close. There are little subtle details that you barely notice from the ground, like all the guy wires attached to the surrounding buildings. This was an almost unneeded level of detail at the time this game was released and is just eating up resources that few people would even have a good enough setup to notice them. However the fact that they are there is interesting to me. Sure there are a few that sort of jut off into infinity and never make contact with anything, but the vast majority look like they would legitimately hold tension.
The World has always been the most interesting character in Guild Wars 2. It is such an intricate living thing that it never ceases to impress me. While I struggled with grasping the combat and role mechanics and honestly still do at times. From the day I first set foot into Alpha, I thought the world itself was exceptionally special. The other day I swam down someplace I had apparently never before and realized there was an entire underwater section of a living world zone that I had never explored before. Moments like that really cement how cool and intricate the zone design is, and similarly as a result I think this is why the shift to smaller more reliable content drops interests me. I am hoping as a result we keep getting these self-contained areas of content that are deeply intricate. I think I’ve come to realize that I enjoy specifically designed zones more than I enjoy the ability to roam an entire world without zone barriers.
The only thing that the ability to fly across an entire continent has really given us is a bunch of weird liminal spaces where nothing much is happening. I would rather see zone designs where every corner of a zone is packed with interesting detail, than the ability to free fly over wide sweeping vistas that are more or less empty. Sure there are moments that look cool as the clouds roll in over the world as you are flying across it… but also you stop existing in the zone itself. In World of Warcraft, I would point my mount in a direction, climb to as high as I could… hit the auto run button, and then alt-tab out while moving in a direction. The active flight of the Skyscale forces me to stay focused on what I am doing, and as a result, I am also way more likely to dip down and join an event that I pass. In WoW I made a straight line between quest objectives and rarely interacted with the world as a result.
Both have their places and there are times that I find myself teleporting to Mistlock Sanctuary just to have a moment of safe reprieve from the otherwise hectic pace of the world. I also find myself trying to figure out how to get to places that I have never gotten to before, if for no reason other than to give me a new vantage point on scenes that I have already seen. Both design models have their place, but I think I am just more engaged in the action focus of a game like Guild Wars 2 than I am in the traditional MMORPG mold at this point. I am sure at some point my brain with shift again and I will put away all of my ARPGs and crave something more sedate, for now, I am just going with my instincts.
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