ArenaNet heard you wanted more communication, and now, that’s exactly what you’re getting. Guild Wars 2’s new-ish Content Design Lead, Andrew Gray, has chimed in on the MMO’s official forums with an address of sorts for the playerbase. Though he begins by admitting 2019 was Anet’s “most challenging” year to date, he also says the team is trying to carry forward a specific “legacy” instead of giving in to the status quo, and that clearly includes the old status quo of staying tight-lipped on the future.
So Gray’s outline for 2020 is threefold. The living world content will continue on with Visions of the Past up next before the next episode. Episodes three and four after that will include a map that is “meta-focused with a push-and-pull feel similar to WvW in a PvE setting” with high replayability – that’s a big thrust for all of the team’s content going forward, apparently. And then episode five will “revisit some of the types of content [ArenaNet] pioneered in the past” – here he references the community impact on content from season one, which as you’ll recall is the opposite of replayable, so it’ll be interesting to see how the studio’s learned from that.
Fractal fans out there? They’re not dead. “I am personally committed to Fractals and see them as an area that deserves more focus and attention going forward,” Gray says. He’s put former fractal dev (from season three) Cameron Rich on new fractal stuff.
Finally, Gray focuses on raids. Like many other studios, ArenaNet appears to have come to the conclusion that people don’t like raids because they are hard, with little intermediate content leading into them.
“Raids are a trickier beast. They’re a unique experience and community that we want to find better ways to support, the biggest challenge in creating more is the small audience they attract. We gathered data to determine why, and the most common answer was that there is a giant leap in difficulty between raids and other endgame content, and there isn’t anything to help players work their way up. Our intention was for Strike Missions to be that intermediary step into 10-person content. As we’ve mentioned before and you’ve likely noticed, strike missions are getting harder. Once a full suite of strike missions is complete there should be a graceful ramp up to the existing raid content rather than the imposing leap that previously existed, and our hope is once that ramp is in place, the number of players participating in raids will go up. In addition to that, we’re striving to make improvements to Strike Missions themselves to make grouping easier, and to improve the rewards. We hope this will help introduce more people to 10-person content, which will in turn increase the number of people interested in Raids. Regardless of if that succeeds or not, we understand the importance of balancing our efforts between accessible content with broad appeal, and content that appeals to the more hard core audience, and recognize that we need to do a better job of supporting the latter.”
All in all, this is a significantly further-ahead look at content than we’ve gotten from ArenaNet in years, and we’re here for it. More like this please.
Oh, and bonus: Guild Wars 2 will have a big presence at this year’s PAX East; Gray says Visions of the Past will indeed be explained at the show.
Are you going to #PAXEast this month? So are we! We'll be on the show floor this year and would love to see you. Stay tuned for more details soon. We're also part of Thursday's "Build Your Guild" panel, so add that to your PAX schedule! https://t.co/UUXmXmyZi1 See you in Boston! pic.twitter.com/4x72EfI7UO
— Guild Wars 2 (@GuildWars2) February 3, 2020
