Heart of Thorns Impression.

LSo two weeks ago ArenaNet surprised the Guild Wars 2 community with an announcement that there would be an Expansion Pack coming out sometime soon. This Expansion Pack would continue the story from the current Living World story arc as well as adding a lot of new content to the game that has been in demand for a while. I'm going to talk about the pieces of revealed information that I liked and what I'm hoping for in the upcoming expansion. 

 Lets start with the story, the current story arc ended on a cliffhanger showing the Tyria's greatest united military the 'Pact' being destroyed during assault of the Maguuma Jungle where the Elder Dragon Mordremoth was hiding. Through the story instances I found out that the Sylvari were minions of an Elder Dragon, however Caithe a Sylvari disappeared with a promise to protect the only remaining legacy of the player friendly dragon Glint. When the expansion starts I think that the new chapter in the continuing story to involve me the player convincing the world that maybe some of the Sylvari are still friendly, or that there may be a way to save the Sylvari from the influence of the Elder Dragon. Between finding a way to save the Sylvari race, locating Caithe and Glint's Legacy that she stole as well as figuring out how to beat the Elder Dragon I expect there to be a lot of story content to rival a few chapters worth of the living world stories. Considering that I will be paying for a full expansion, I hope that this new expansion story is at least as long as the personal story that came with the release of the base game.

 In regards to the new maps and Player vs Environment (PVE) gameplay, with the lack of a standing army to fight the Elder Dragon, it suggests that players will probably be doing more of the activities that were previously assigned to NPCs in earlier content. The latest map released for Guild Wars 2 had a map where players were entrusted with securing and upgrading fortresses and escorting supplies to upgrade these fortresses to withstand enemy attacks. I expect that the new maps will build up on this style of gameplay with more content being dependent on player involvement in the various regions of the maps. Since the pact's airship invasion failed we will probably have to progress a long siege over land and through the jungle reminiscent of the straights of devastation invasion gameplay, to bring the heavy weapons of the world to bare against the might of Mordremoth.

The Expansion announcement also told us that there would be a new heavy armor profession the Revenant and a specialization for every profession in the game. This means that everyone will be busy learning the new abilities of the existing professions or learning the new one. So everyone will be returned to their 'newb' like state where they don't know for certain what works best for their chosen profession at launch. This is good, as currently there are 'efficient' builds which causes folks to all follow the exact same blueprint for creating their characters and I want there to be more opportunity for builds to move away from these Meta (cookie cutter) builds. As for the changes to each profession, as there have been no releases on what kind of adjustments are going to be coming for them, so I can't really say anything about them.

Lastly the new feature I am most happy about is the announcement of more Guild based activities including the ability to obtain a 'Guild Hall'. ArenaNet has clearly announced that they intend to put the 'Guild' back in Guild Wars 2, so I'm hoping for possibly dungeons or fights that require a high level of coordination but are still completable by small Guilds with around 10 people representing.

What I've been doing until now

So its been about 4 months since my last Blog Post. During this time I wandered around a bit between several books, games and tv shows, which is why I didn't have any specific topics to talk about.

However towards the end of October during some casual gameplay I came across a new Guild to join in Guild Wars 2 (GW2). After joining this guild my interest in the game sky rocketed and while I wanted to make a few posts about it, between school and my new dedication catching up on content in GW2 I had less time to spend on creating blog posts. Goes to show that a game is more enjoyable when you have good company to play it with.

Since I have now caught up on all the living story content and achievements, I'm going to be going back and talking about what I've experiences this past few months.

Visiting Dry Top

First thing I did when I got back into Guild Wars 2 was try and catch up on the Living World story. I missed a huge chunk of content from the season 1 of the living world including the destruction of Lion's Arch. I have to say seeing Lion's arch a ruin and all those memorials scattered around the map made me wonder as to whether Lion's Arch will ever be remade, most of the buildings in the city were made out of the hulls of boats that were washed on top of the cliffs. Now those boats are all wrecked and in pieces, while it might be possible to repair them I suspect that Lion's Arch will get an overhaul, all those boats will have to be removed and brand new structures will be made.

Then there is the living story season 2, I am extremely grateful and happy that ArenaNet has decided to make each chapter of the Living World Story in season 2 re-playable as long as you have the chapter unlocked. I went and spent a few gems to purchase the chapters I missed, and I must say it was well worth it. These last few chapters have had a lot more intricate stories to them and I feel that the new personal story style approach to telling the living world is a brilliant system. It also makes sense to do it this way since from lvl 1-80 we've had a 'personal story' that used the same system to get us into what is happening in the Tyria.

The two new maps 'Dry Top' and 'Silverwastes' are also amazingly well crafted, when I first got back into Guild Wars 2, I spent most of my time running about events in Dry Top. The way there is always something happening, layered areas that can only be reached by clever use of the Zephyrite crystals is a good way to keep folks active in the map.

Then there is the main reason I'm staying in Guild Wars 2, my Guild. My last guild was friendly and somewhat active, but I guess I didn't click so well with the way things worked in that guild. This guild however, its a challenge to not get involved in the Guild Chat no matter how strange things get. Recently we started making animal noises whenever things seemed quiet, yes it is strange but oddly fun. For our Guild events (missions, challenges, puzzles) for several weeks now we've struggled to try and complete things on our own, only to need the aid of other guild in completing our objectives. This weekend however we were able to get through the puzzle and the one challenge we kept failing all by ourselves, I felt very proud and ecstatic of the Guild upon achieving this. I think I've finally found the Guild that I've been looking for.

TL;DR - I'm back in Guild Wars 2 having joined a new Guild and I'm enjoying myself. I will be updating this blog, hopefully more regularly. I've already got a few topics to post about this week.


More things to come:
What I think of GW2 - Heart of Thorns
Book Review - Sword and Staff trilogy
Game Review - Space Engineers