Guild Wars 2 has seen a tremendous amount of mostly temporary, but still exciting content over the first year of its Living Story. What has been overshadowed by the story of Scarlet and her plans for Tyria however are the multitude of game-enhancing features that ArenaNet has been working on over the months as well. That all changes a bit later today when the first mammoth Feature Pack goes live in-game as ANet gives us a Living Story break before season 2 begins (presumably next month when the game launches in China, I’d say). We had a great interview and demo of the new pack on the dev server with Colin Johanson and Jon Peters, which we’ve pasted below. But just below that, we’ll give you a bulleted list of all the things coming along with the Feature Pack when it launches a bit later today.
- 40 New Traits – Gained via exploring and events, or straight up gold/skill point purchasing.
- Major changes to runes, sigils, and class balance – finally two-handed weapons get two sigils!
- The Wardrobe System – Every character’s skin unlock is accessed across the game for good! Including legendary skins!
- Dyes are now ACCOUNT bound
- LFG is getting some much needed overhauling
- WvW XP is now account bound!
- Armor Repair Costs are gone, and Traits can be reset anywhere for free
- PVP now has its own reward tracks that allow you to PVP to unlock dungeon skins, earn gold, skill points, and more. No more separate rewards from the rest of the game.
- The Megaserver system will tie all servers together to fill up empty maps
Now, Ripper X (gonna keep throwing him under the bus here, because he deserves it), accidentally riled up the GW2 community with an unintentionally cryptic tweet at the show. We didn't mean anything by it. Truly. It was intended to just be a harmless tweet, but we obviously under-anticipated the passion of GW2's fans.
This is just the very cut and dry bullet-point list. Watch the video preview, check out the update when it goes live later today, and realize that ArenaNet was not kidding when they said they’ve been listening to what the players want from GW2’s features over the past several months. Every quarter or so, ANet will release a new feature pack bringing in tons of new quality of life improvements. This is only the beginning, and gives us plenty of toys to play with while we wait for what will become of Taimi and the rest of the Living Story crew this spring.
Bill Murphy / Bill Murphy is the Managing Editor of MMORPG.com and lover of all things gaming. He's been playing and writing about MMOs and geekery since 2002, and you can harass him and his views on Twitter @thebillmurphy.
