Hardcore Casual

The exploration achievement content has been the highlight of GW2 for me so far. For those who might not be aware, every zone (I believe) has one achievement that is accomplished by finding a ‘hidden’ location. This location is not marked on your map, and generally ends with a large loot chest and gaining said achievement. Do not confuse this with other unmarked loot chests; you will know this content when you get the specific achievement for it.

The challenge associated with these locations varies, but generally it’s been a mix of actually finding the place, completing some jumping, and fighting veteran-level mobs. The Asura starter zone is a brutal series of jumps that reminded me of old-school Mario or something like Meatboy, while the Human starting area is fairly easy in terms of jumping, but has some tightly packed mobs that might present a challenge.

Spoiler about the third Human zone achievement incoming, feel free to skip to the END SPOILER note if you have not experienced it yet and don’t want it detailed.

The third zone’s achievement is in a cave system inhabited by pirate ghosts. As I was looking around, another player was in the area and after some informal teamwork (taking down mobs) we grouped up and decided to tackle this together.

The first step is to swim underwater through some caves. The swim was tough thanks to the mobs, and only with some teamwork did we make it through. When you finally come up you are in an area with torches that must be lite. There are four of them in total, but nothing alerts you that you have found them all or that when you light one it did anything. In the center of this area you have a deep pool of water with veteran mobs, but initially it does not lead to anything.

However, once all four torches are lit, a section of the wall underwater slides down and you can progress. It would be very easy to miss this, especially since once the fourth torch is lite, a small chest appears, trying to trick you into thinking you are done. Very clever bit of design there.

Swimming into the newly opened section takes you into somewhat of a water maze. Due to the vertical movement of water, this is actually a bit tricky. The mobs swimming around don’t make things easier, and to top it all off you occasionally have wall traps that jet out steam, dealing a solid amount of damage. Lots of downed-state happened here, but again thanks to teamwork, we always recovered and finally made our way out.

Once out of the water, you take a path out of the caves and onto a hill cliff overlooking the zone. At the top are two NPCs who inform you of a great treasure being guarded by a bunch of birds. They have bird feed with them, but they say they don’t have the energy left to carry it. You can pick the feed up, and must make one final jump to reach the last area. Fail this jump and its back to square one, since you would fall out of the puzzle area and back to the normal zone. Luckily we did not fail the jump, but I could see some ragetears being shed when you do.

The last area is a small bluff with about ten mobs, three of them veterans. If you attempt to open the chest, they agro and quickly kill you. If you drop the feed first, they become distracted long enough for you to grab the chest, get the achievement, and flee. Just for kicks, my friend and I fought the mobs after we both got the chest, and with some solid skill and plenty of dodging, we managed to take the whole pack down and gain some decent loot (the mobs are 4 levels above you, even downscaled, which results in greatly increased loot drops).

END SPOILER.

Once complete, we jumped down and talked a bit about the content and others like it. As it turned out, I had missed one of these achievements in the previous zone, despite being in the right area before. My friend went to do some WvW, while I went back to get that other achievement. All in all it was great content, and highlighted a lot of what makes MMOs so special.

For starters, I love that it was not marked on your map, because that’s what real exploration is about. Having so many things pre-marked in GW2 is somewhat of a downer, but I could see impatient (read: bad) players complaining if Anet removed things like the hearts or vista markers. My only hope here is that they don’t Blizzard this content and eventually add a map market for the exploration achievements, or dumb down the challenge, as that would ruin a large part of the ‘reward’.

I also love that it was not explicit group content (must form a group before entering or other artificial control mechanisms), but strongly encourages you to team up. Since this is not instanced, who you team up with can be random or prearranged, which is also great. This works even better thanks to the mechanics of GW2, in that you don’t have the holy trinity and everyone can rez (everyone being able to rez is awesome all around btw, and something that all MMOs should have).

Finally, the difficulty level was great. At the end, I felt like I actually worked towards something rather than simply putting in X amount of time and being given a reward. That feeling is worth far more than any item drop or in-game achievement, and it’s been very rare that a themepark has done this in the last… ever?

Nice work by Anet, and I highly recommend looking around and finding these bits of content.

Anet is selling that once you hit 80, you can still go back to all areas of the game and enjoy the content as intended because you scale down to it. I’m not buying that.

For starters you have more skills and abilities as an 80 downscaled than you do when playing the content at the ‘correct’ level. That would not be a major issue if having more skills/abilities did not make you directly more powerful, but in GW2 it does. The fact that your gear will also be better tuned (no toughness stats on an lvl 80 caster for example) will make an impact.

But all of the above would not be a huge factor if the game tuned you down to the average level of the content. Sadly it does not. It puts you at the max level, which makes things rather easy. This is great for those who are looking to steamroll their way to 80, or for those who enjoy faceroll content in general, but if I’m expected to play the content for the content itself, not for progression/advancement reasons, faceroll is a bad difficulty setting.

The saddest part is that, at level, the content in GW2 is not insultingly easy like in most themeparks (from what I’ve seen so far anyway). It’s not ‘hard’, but it will keep you awake and occasionally make you think about what skills you are mashing. I’ve actually managed to die a few times (of course there is basically no death penalty, but baby steps).

It would be nice if you could select the level you scale down to, so those who want to faceroll could always run around at the max for that area, while others could elect to drop to the average, or even a level or two below that. Hey, maybe they could sell me that in the item shop…

Lack of progression is the second biggest killer of MMOs (progression you can’t be bothered with being number one), which is why I’ve always maintained that GW2 will live or die by how successful WvW is (and to a lesser extend the arena stuff). Consider everything you currently find fun in GW2, remove the progression, and ask yourself if you would still do it? Now ask yourself if you would do it more than once.

Most ‘dynamic’ events are dressed up “kill X” quests, and while the dressing is often times very nice (more on that in a bit), the point remains that if killing boars or whatever did not lead to something, most would not spend hours killing boars for the ‘gameplay’ factor. That’s why people still mine Veld in EVE 10 years later, and no one is going to be fighting back the centaurs in a month (more on that later as well). Has GW2 improved MMO combat and exploration from the generic themepark model? Yes. Is it improved to the point that you would play it just for that, repeatedly? No.

And because the answer is indeed no, you need the MMO secret sauce, progression, to keep you going. Take a look at player behavior around a ‘dynamic’ event that triggers shortly after it just finished. Notice how many people can’t be bothered to care the second time around. If the gameplay itself was that good, they would, but for most events, it’s just more of the same and the window dressing has been seen, so you ignore it and keep going.

The sheer volume of content will keep people busy for some time, and that along with its quality justifies the $60 buy in. And for many that’s all that matters, which is fine. But for those who play MMOs for the community and the continuity that goes with these games, the lack of progression, and ultimately purpose (outside of PvP), is something to keep in mind.

Now about that nice dressing: Anet has put in a lot of detail into GW2 content, and most players are going to miss a whole lot of it because WoW has trained them to be leveling monkeys rather than engaging with an active world. And because GW2 is not a ‘real’ world, you could be forgiven for not caring about the actions of NPC X, because we all know they are going to reset sooner rather than later, and tomorrow nothing you did will matter.

Still, the detail is there, and it’s pretty cool. One little example was an NPC that is collecting chocobos (or whatever GW2 calls them) in the human lands. Once you herd them into a pen, you can watch a little animation play out, and then trigger the escort quest. Once the NPC makes it to town, they again have some animation play out before turning into a vendor that sells baby chocobos. Out of curiosity, I stood around and watched this NPC, wondering how they are going to reset back to the first phase of the event. I was fully expecting the NPC to just go poof after a minute or so, but in a great show of detail, they actually walk into a nearby building and only go poof when they reach a door you can’t open. Minor? Very. But still pretty cool. Once.

Oh and about those centaurs. As expected, they are currently on the endangered species list as the hordes plow through the zone, meaning that ‘world’ event is always locked in its final victory phase. By the time Wilhelm gets around to playing GW2, you can bet the centaur will be fully in charge, and the final ‘defeat’ event will be waiting for him. Should he and his gang decide to ‘impact the world’, they can have a nice bit of content progressing through the phases, until they ‘win’ and move on, allowing the centaurs to again reset things.

Is the above better than 100% static quest hubs? Yes. Is it the virtual world dynamic that UO had in beta with its ecology system? No. So yay for progress, but let’s not cheer and celebrate until we actually get there, eh?