If this morning’s big infodump on Guild Wars 2’s Secrets of the Obscure wasn’t enough for you, then feast your eyeballs on ArenaNet’s latest dev blog, which deep-dives the Wizard’s Vault. On its surface, the system looks like just another seasonal content pass – but it’s not.
“By directing players to various parts of the game with regularly refreshed challenges and rewards, the Wizard’s Vault system functions similarly to a seasonal content pass in other games,” ArenaNet notes. “But we tried to build the Wizard’s Vault from the ground up to be as player friendly as possible: exclusive cosmetics don’t go away at the end of a season, you can choose your reward order, and there’s no cost in gems or real money. Ultimately, our goal with the Wizard’s Vault is to help you find things to do in Guild Wars 2 and then reward you for doing those things.”
Players will essentially complete objectives for the Vault, earn Astral acclaim for doing so, and spend it on current or past Vault offerings. There’s no way to buy your way into a higher tier of the Vault, and you can always buy older things: “Our goal in doing this is to alleviate player anxiety about timed rewards—if something comes into the vault when it’s not a good time for you to be playing much, it’ll still be there for you later.” In other words, Anet kinda fixed a lot of the things people always complain about with these systems.
Objectives are basically a new system for dailies for PvE, WvW, and PvP content, which you can disable to tailor your experience to just the content you like. And while some of the rewards are obvious – like mount and weapon skins – the studio is also planning to introduce a starter kit for legendary weapons.
“One item bundle we’re debuting is a legendary starter kit, meant to provide a new inroad to the legendary crafting system. These starter kits are a way to turn your playtime into progress toward a specific legendary. We’re introducing starter kits for four legendaries in this first round of offerings and intend to rotate in others in the future; we’ll be watching feedback and usage to inform future iterations of the starter kits.”
Check out the whole flip-through on the official site.
