Guild Wars 2

Seven years is a long time to play a game. The morning of August 25, 2012 was a glorious day as I skipped over the hills of Queensdale as Guild Wars 2 was unleashed on the world. We were ready for the casual MMO that you could drop in and out of whenever you liked and you’d still be able to keep up as the horizontal progression and cosmetic endgame meant that you could drop back in any time you liked. Legendary weapons were the long-term goal and Giganticus Lupicus was the benchmark for high end play and hilarious game-breaking exploits.

After much consternation, swearing, and the odd reboot it finally happened. I upgraded my PC. I squeezed every penny together I had spare, got new components, prayed to Zommoros that whatever collection of trash I could afford would spit out at least 60FPS, and I started Guild Wars 2.

GW2 has only been out since 2012, and we are just a few months shy of it being seven years since then. However, the first tendrils of the GW2 story came with the release of Ghosts of Ascalon in 2009 and then continued in earnest with Edge of Destiny in 2010. There’s also some threads and questions which have only gotten the answers to recently, while others we sort of have an answer to? Let’s take a closer look at the long winding story of GW2 so far.

For years Guild Wars 2 has garnered a sense of cooperation and community within the general PvE population in a way that was welcoming to players of all skill levels and competencies. This was one of the founding principles behind my decision to make Guild Wars 2 an MMO I constantly return to. While the community at large still has a fairly stellar reputation as far as online games go, it appears that through the years, there are many players in game that have soured. This is what happened.

The lore surrounding the Guild Wars 2 Crystal Dragons – Kralkatorrik, Glint, Vlast, and Aurene, is head crushing in its complexity but also in places, ridiculous. Through some twist it turns out that Special K is vulnerable to his own magic, which led us to the crafting of Dragonsblood Spears, an item that gave us an edge in the previous episode. It’s a little bit turned around and just about stays on the right side of sensible to keep you going.

Recently ArenaNet talked about how one of the ways they are planning on keeping things feeling fresh is by doing more events between content updates. One example of these events is the no downstate in WvW event they did previously and has recently come back. Now we get our first look at the newest event World Boss Beat Down!

It’s finally here. More accurately it’s almost here. The reveal poster for Guild Wars 2 Living World Season 4’s finale, War Eternal dropped and it signals the beginning of the end. The battle against Kralkatorrik didn’t go quite how we expected it at the start of the year, and the end of All or Nothing certainly landed an emotional blow. Now with War Eternal looming over us, it is down to ArenaNet to make that emotional investment pay dividends.

It’s like clockwork. Every year, around the end of March I wait for the announcement that Super Adventure Box is returning to Guild Wars 2, along with a little cheeky April Fools gag from the folks at ArenaNet.

Over the course of Guild Wars 2’s storied history, there have been so many changes. Some of those changes have taken builds that I once loved, such as the Celestial Elementalist, and turned it into something as useless as playing a revenant without a specialization. Others have come and gone, creating builds that I could only love for a short time, like the hammer warrior, that eventually got thrown to the wayside in favor of more versatile, higher damage builds. Throughout all of these changes, it’s apparently clear that nobody knows what to expect. Then, the last balance patch happened.

This week there was a blog post from Mike Z, Game Director, to let all of us know a bit more about what ArenaNet’s plan moving forward after the recent layoffs and to give us some idea of what we have to look forward to in Guild Wars 2 moving forward. If you haven’t read it yet you really should because aside from there being some specific things on the horizon there’s also a lot of exciting potentials set forth here.

“Welcome Back, Commander”. That was the opening salvo to our Path of Fire review here on MMORPG.com. The second expansion in a long lineage of updates, Path of Fire’s quest to take on a god dropped on us five years after Guild War 2 launched and it’s been almost 18 months since we first spotted the Crystal Desert. But what about those who missed the boat to Amnoon? Recently, ArenaNet announced a campaign to return many of its lost heroes to the world but should you consider jumping back in after a short, or long, break?

From the onset of what the general public understands of massive layoffs in the gaming industry, these ejections are usually a stark foreshadowing of a darker picture. While that may not specifically be the case in ArenaNets case, or at least, it may be too early to tell whether this restructuring may indeed produce a leaner more profitable ANet, it behooves us to postulate on the broader picture of what ArenaNet may be leaving behind, and why we may not be out of the woods just yet.

After the last Living Story update, ArenaNet also released what looks to be three short stories about three characters who have played significant parts in our journey. This series is being called All or Nothing: Requiem and seems to be filling in some of the narrative which they haven’t been able to provide directly in game.

As you know, Guild Wars 2, hasn’t had the best news recently with all the layoffs and restructuring. Along with myself a ton of other people we haven’t given up hope on the game we cherish. ANet has reassured us that development will continue. We have a glimmer of hope in these sad times. When I first read the news, I was heartbroken. These people who I have come to know and see their vision come to life, gone.

It is almost a week on from the announcement that staff lay-offs were coming to Guild Wars 2 publisher, ArenaNet. As I begin to look back on the fall out of a pretty catastrophic wipe, Thursday morning is creeping up on me, and it seems like an appropriate time to sit and take stock of everything that has happened.