But Bree, you say, Guild Wars 2 already has spears. And you’re right! Spears as an underwater weapon have been in the game since launch. But what ArenaNet’s brand-new video is teasing is spears that work on land – presumably land spears for all classes.
In the video, the character is in the water with a typical underwater spear, but then she moves out of the water and uses the same spear to… well, actually just to pose in attack position and the camera swerves up and away from her to rest on waterfalls and some sort of village-like struture nestled high in the cliffside, surrounded by trees.
We wouldn’t be half sorry to see land harpoons and land tridents either, but at least former Paragon players will be happy now.
Meanwhile, ArenaNet’s Josh “Grouch” Davis has penned a dev blog as promised, focused on what the team learned from the development of Secrets of the Obscure. Davis says that the studio made “significant strides” towards its goals – delivering consistent updates, providing better support for core systems, and treating its workers well. “But as with all things, there’s room for improvement—both in terms of the content we deliver and the processes through which we deliver it,” he suggests. Notably, Grouch says some NPC story threads were rushed or unexplored in SOTO.
“For our next expansion, we’re going to tell a more grounded story set in a new region of Tyria, with more of a focus on local threats and the global conversation around those threats. Tyria, despite all its challenges, has continued to stir. While we leave Nayos and the Kryptis to enjoy their newfound freedom, the story will pick up on some threads started in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure—continuing with the Astral Ward arc, their moral ambiguity, and their relationship to Tyria.”
Davis suggests that SOTO’s map design wasn’t ideal for players or devs, so in the next expansion, we’ll get two maps at launch and the third in the second quarterly update, to be expanded in the third update. And it also sounds as if the Wizard’s Vault was a big success, so we “can expect to see a new system being introduced in expansion 5 that adds a meaningful new way to spend [our] time in Guild Wars 2.”
“Overall, we were a bit conservative with features in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure—trying to strike the right balance between scope, schedule, and risk while navigating a new content structure,” Davis concludes. “We’ve ironed out a lot of the kinks here, and it’s allowed us to be a bit more ambitious with our next expansion. Next week can’t come soon enough!”
