Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Guild Wars 2: Taking the Foundation to New Levels
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The Guild Wars 2 site has been updated with a new blog post to discuss how the Heart of Thorns expansion will bring a renewed focus and improvement to the core principals on which the game was built: "the power of our dynamic event system, the belief that playing with others makes for a better experience, the impact of environment on stories, and the joy of exploration and discovery."
To that end, the very detailed post discusses how maps are being created with purpose and replayability in mind and that give players a reason to return. The core philosophy is that each dimensional map will be structured for depth of experience rather than expansion of the land mass. The team is adamant that the world that came before should not be an empty wasteland, but one that players want to revisit.
Heart of Thorns will also feature the new Outpost System with dynamic events tied to each one complete with local characters and lore. According to the article, the outposts give meaning and context to the areas in which players are adventuring. NPCs will take an active role in assisting players by journeying with them, helping build defenses and more.
Players will be able to unlock Adventures, mini-games complete with their own specific UI, as they move through an outpost:
For example, rather than completing a jumping puzzle, an adventure may challenge you to complete that puzzle in a certain amount of time. Unlike events, however, individual performance is tracked and measured. It’s a challenge for you to overcome. Your performance in adventures will be scored, and you’ll be able to see—and test yourself against—the scores of your friends and guildmates. Because adventures take place in the open world, you’ll see other players working to overcome the same challenges as you, and in many cases you’ll be able to work and excel together. Adventures are a reimagining of the concept of permanent content that you can challenge yourself with and enjoy as you move through the world that’s been around since launch. As a result, you may see some activities you heard about before the launch of Guild Wars 2 make an appearance as adventures.
ArenaNet is also committed to giving Guild Wars 2 players challenging content as they move through the game's open areas. In Heart of Thorns, players will face off against terrain, monsters and bosses that will offer more challenge than any other open world content in the game thusfar.
Intrigued? Read the full and very comprehensive post on the Guild Wars 2 site.
Comments
If I was to compare it to another game, firefall would probably be the closest (though they are still very different).
The Silverwastes (which Anet has admitted to being a precursor to what you can expect from the expansion), is kind of a mix between standard PvE, and a PvE version of WvW (world pvp). Which is actually pretty fun and interesting. It can still get repetative, but it's fun coordinating with others on your map to strategically push back an invading army of PvE minions. Not as challenging as an actual organized WvW battle, but still fun in its own way. And the rewards you get from them atm are pretty nuts.
Firefall came well after GW2 and WoW's phasing is repugnant for grouping to say the least. I think it's going to be similar to the Centaur Camps DE in the game, or Te'Quatl. Basically it's events that chain one after another until a big boss fight. Failing part of the chain makes it basically fall over and then there's a wait until the next chain start up again (usually 1-2hrs).
Sometimes the events that start a DE chain are found on completely opposite sections of the zone it's in and requires puzzle solving. Best example of this is Oola's Lab in the Matrica Province, where a crystal key only rarely drops from mobs in the entire zone and only gives a slight description to it's use but not full name. Once you take the key over there and open the door, it becomes an escort of the Archeologist team through the lab of dysfunctioning security Golems while trying to find all of Oola's research materials.
I'm very excited to see what kind of advanced DE's they've placed inside Maguuma as well as what kind of new puzzles can be solved.
Nah they're not quest hubs, they're "outpost systems" lol gotta love those PR guys.
Same here. I was thinking of jumping back into ESO for the PVE around the end of March, but after starting a new character a few days ago in GW2 I'm not so sure that I will head back into "Tamriel" anytime soon.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
Have you even tried the silverwastes events? You should know the difference between the two. Quest hubs are static, with the exception of escort quests if we're judging by more traditional quest hubs. If you fail to defend an outpost, it's defenses will reset to zero, and you'll need to raise it up again. You also need to escort supplies to each outpost to build it's defenses. Merchants are also locked. Other events will not continue either. If you want to hate on GW2, at least be correct about it. lol.
So video game are not suppose to be repetitive?
"The core philosophy is that each dimensional map will be structured for depth of experience rather than expansion of the land mass."
Could someone explain this please? My first thought is small maps. Small maps that maybe you play more than once with different stuff?
edit- I was thinking too much "Rather than a more traditional strategy of rapidly expanding land mass with limited content to fill it, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns will focus less on total land mass in the expansion and will instead focus on depth of content within that gameplay space. Each map will be rich in content, rich in 3-D play space, and very deep in replay value to ultimately provide more gameplay value to our players and not leave an empty wasteland of rarely played content behind."
Smaller maps with more stuff, because big maps are bad
I have managed to enjoy leveling 7 class up to 80 without any XP Boost, but can't seem to bring myself to enjoy leveling a thief.
Nope not hatin lol
But yeah you pretty much exactly described the new style of quest hubs in WoD expansion. And they are really fun. Please look forward to them
Quest or "outpost" hubs (I'll just call them adventure hubs from now on) is one feature I wanted along with Tanks and Healers (or at least the ability to viably specialize into such, even if there's no taunt). In addition to Player Housing and sitting in chairs.
My three wants from this game as a whole. In addition to access to Elona and Cantha.
I doubt they will ever add the ability to be 'pure tank' or 'pure healer'. Doing so would either be completely useless (wasted classes), or it would completely break the game (they would become 100% necessary). That said there are ways to make more tanky characters (i.e. bunker builds), and more support oriented characters (both with the ability to heal others, but more importantly SUPPORT others.) There are more ways to protect your allies than just healing them. Things like reflects, cleanses, combo fields, stealth, blinds, aegis, etc. are all very beneficial to a group.
I too hope they add Elona & Cantha. I know that everyone want's Cantha especially. I would love to see some kind of samurai, dervish, or paragon classes in the game.
You're thinking about it too much in black & white terms.
What they mean is that instead of essentially a flat map with a sky dome, they are actually going to be using that 3rd dimension a lot more. Most games really don't when it comes to general map usage. Sure there are hills and such, but essentially everything is spread horizontally. In HoT they will be stacking layered content.
A pretext to this would be the jumping puzzle you see in Silverwastes. It's just a jumping puzzle, but it takes you both underneath the entire zone, but also up above the entire zone at the same time. Most people focus solely on what exists on ground level, but the map actually has fairly large areas (both below and above ground) that are basically unused aside from the jumping puzzle and a few small events. HoT sounds like they will be expanding on this a lot more.
For example, think of events happening both above you and below you, as you're questing around your zone. That's what they mean.
They zones aren't going to be any smaller than what they've already done. Horizontally they probably won't be any bigger either, but they will have a pretty substantial vertical component to them.
you are right both but ArenaNet has an issue with big maps and playerspace, they leave nothing for players. In GuildWar's 2 maps there is no free space if they could they could add content in every pixel. So players miss the space to "breath". This is good and bad but anyway it is a casual themepark and what it does it does it right, in my opinion .
Same.
Bought ESO when B2P announced, but after my return to GW2 i just cant log to any other game. Marvelous world & underwater world, graphics, animations, mobs, events, bosses etc and thousands of ppl running around doing things. Its just great. I also am playing after a long time WvW and i find it excellent too. The game overall seems a lot better than i remembered.
I just cant wait for HoT!!!
All Time Favorites: EQ1, WoW, EvE, GW1
Playing Now: WoW, ESO, GW2
There's actually a good logic to it. Rapidly increasing the land mass of an MMO causes players to spread out further, diminishing the sense of community by making player interactions less frequent. If anything, Guild Wars 2 already suffers from some rather painful population spread (and suffered from almost unplayable population spread on many servers before the Megaserver system came about).
By increasing the replayability of content rather than the size of the zone in which said content occurs, they are clearly attempting to have their cake, and eat it too. If they do so well, these zones will be well populated and compelling. If they do so poorly, the result will obviously be underwhelming in terms of both quality and quantity.
The recent zones have been pretty high quality - better than most older zones by far - and these are merely precursors to the upcoming content. I fully expect the expansion zones to be some of (if not the) best zones yet in terms of replayability and depth.
I think the real question is - will they ever go back and give some much needed love to their older zones? If they intend to emphasize replayability over scope, they can't waste the content that they've already given us.
That is indeed one of the risks with their approach. If they don't design it properly it can easily start to feel too 'cluttered' and claustrophobic. It also can mean that there are a lot more camera problems, making it harder for players to actually see whats happening.
However, if they're designed as well as Silverwastes, I think they'll be okay. Ultimately we really just need to wait and see how the details look, and how the pieces start falling into place.
Yea that's one of the things I'm curious and I'm also interested in seeing what they will do with Lion Arch, it's not big on my list but I'm sure they will do something to it as well.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
WoD has nothing like Silverwastes. Not even close in terms of the great variety of event mechanisms that require player groups to communicate and cooperate while proceeding towards various events. Its design is unique even among other GW2 PvE maps. People just hop into it and spend hours together completing or failing all the series of events on that map. It's just a map of constant warfare. It is actually how a lot of original GW2 maps should've worked from the start.
Well considering they have more Vertical Space within each map, the sense of big is now not from what you see when you bring up your map screen in-game but what you see when you're in the map itself.
This is not a game.
I only just learned how to use thief in pvp - the class needs so many combos to use its full potential.. I would easily call it the most complex class in the game.
For pve I would just suggest sword/pistol and short bow in combination with leech heals.
I'm not sure how one goes from total landmass into "smaller maps".
25 small maps may be larger than 5 really large ones.
I remember certain MMOs that added twice the total landmass of the vanilla game in the expansion.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
They absolutely need to revisit the old world and fix alot of the design holes they left untouched for almost three years in several categories if they expect to have people playing long after the release of HoT can't stress that enough!
They need to revisit not just the zones but the rewards system, the loot system, PVE combat balance because several classes have gotten the short end of the stick on that one including the Engineer (which is sortof like watching WoW all over again under GhostCrawler's control in which one class was given all the love and another was hated), they need to revisit how they handle the TPcentric nature of their economy and reduce that, and they need to fix their inherent problems with Karma being all but useless now.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D