Heart of Thorns ushers in a new era for Guild Wars 2. By Phil Savage
Guild Wars 2 is different to other MMOs. It favours public events over NPC quests, giving its community an incentive to work together. It makes it easy and painless to group with friends, and rewards people for adventuring through zones below their character’s natural level. It experiments with open-world design to create fights against monsters so big they fill your monitor. It even destroyed its capital city as part of a two-year chain of updates that spawned new landmarks, harder challenges and more complex and collaborative events.
Heart of Thorns is Guild Wars 2’s first expansion, and it’s different too. It adds a new region – the Heart of Maguuma – and new enemies, bosses and events. More than that, it marks the beginning of the next phase of Guild Wars 2’s development. It introduces systems that will be expanded on throughout its life. “This is not ‘hey, wouldn’t it be fun to do an expansion pack? Let’s throw in some features,’” says ArenaNet president Mike O’Brien. “This is us thinking about what Guild Wars needs to continue to grow and evolve for years to come.”
There’s a traditional template for an MMO expansion: an increased level cap, new tiers of gear, and a dramatic shift to the economy that often results in a community abandoning old zones and dungeons in favour of new, more rewarding content. ArenaNet hopes to avoid this by introducing an entirely separate system of progression. Heart of Thorns won’t raise the level 80 limit. Instead, players journeying through the jungle will earn ‘masteries’ – a set of specifically tailored upgrades designed to help them through the new events.
Some masteries enable passive buffs that boost defence against the expansion’s new enemies. Others enable characters to learn ancient languages in order to find and unlock hidden locations. In the demo I played, I chose something more immediately gratifying: the hang glider. Heart of Thorns’ maps will be more vertical than any previous zone. Each will feature three biomes: the floor, the roots and the canopy. The hang glider lets you smoothly soar between sections, although in the demo, the playable area was too small to get a sense for its scope. Nevertheless, anyone who’s ever face-planted after a jumping puzzle attempt should welcome the ability.
Not all of the masteries are limited to the new zones, either. The build of Heart of Thorns that I played included two potential game-wide bonuses: one that enabled precursor weapon crafting and another that provided buffs and extra rewards in Fractal dungeons. “We really think of the masteries system as the endgame progression system for Guild Wars 2,” says Crystin Cox, monetisation lead. “It’s not just about the Heart of Maguuma. There’s a whole bunch of land and content that’s already there.
“We really do want you to feel like masteries is what endgame progression is about,” he adds, “and we also wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like we were leaving behind that part of Tyria. It’s still important and it’s still got great content in it. We wanted to add more reasons to go back and experience that again. We definitely wanted to make sure [masteries] felt global.”
Maximum-level players will also have the opportunity to choose a specialisation. Each profession will provide a different specialisation option, and choosing it will enable the player to unlock a new set of combat abilities designed to significantly alter and expand their class. “We’re trying to make it feel like it’s almost a sub-profession or a secondary profession, if you will, and not just a new set of a couple of skills,” game director Colin Johanson tells me. “Their profession mechanic changes as well.”
So far, the only publicly revealed specialisation is the Ranger’s possible transformation into a Druid. Picking it will let the player equip the ranged fighter with a staff, giving them plant-based attacks. The idea is to expand each profession’s role, giving them extra utility in combat.
“In some cases, we went way outside the box,” says Johanson. “It’s definitely trying to create a wider variety of roles for players in combat and with their profession.”
Only one specialisation will be available per profession in the expansion, but – as with masteries – this is now the template for adding to Guild Wars 2 as a whole. “Every decision we made, and the entire reason we made this expansion,” Johanson says, “was so that, when this expansion releases, we have the framework. We have the pillars we need so that we can regularly grow the game in the future.”
“It needs character progression to keep that possible,” says O’Brien, “so you can evolve your characters – even though you’re max level, and even though you’ve got the best gear in the game – and learn the skills and abilities you need to take on new content that you can’t take on yet. This expansion pack is all about laying the groundwork; the features that we need in place so that we can build that new character progression and new challenging content for years to come.”
Heart of Thorns’ new areas are designed to offer some of the most difficult events that ArenaNet has yet produced. Regular players can get some idea of what to expect from the Silverwastes – an experimental zone added late last year as part of the Living World storyline. It introduced a new enemy type – the Mordrem – that specialised in crowd control, and a layered event cycle made up of multiple stages. ArenaNet sees Silverwastes as a test run for some of the expansion’s ideas, and plans to take things even further in the new zones.
In the demo, I took part in a multiple-stage event on the jungle floor. Mordrem forces were harassing a pact outpost, and I was tasked with helping to clear them out. Players organised into numerous related roles – killing enemies, planting bombs and providing sniper cover from a cliffside vantage point. These parallel tasks are designed to keep events varied across multiple attempts, yet still form a cohesive objective across the event as a whole.
With the Mordrem dispatched, I was sent off to fight the Wyvern – a new legendary tier boss. Guild Wars 2’s boss design has become far more complex over time, going from simple challenges like Shadow Behemoth and Shatterer to the more involved Twisted Marionette and reworked Tequatl. The Wyvern seems like a natural progression of that trend. His napalm-like fire breath stuck to the metal platform my group was fighting on, reducing our battleground. As we failed to stun him at a crucial moment, he took off – flying overhead and laying down strips of fire, thus dividing us and making it difficult to resurrect downed players. It was a tough fight, and all the better for it.
As this is a Guild Wars 2 expansion, dragons are at the centre of Heart of Thorns. Specifically, an elder dragon called Mordremoth. At the end of the Living World updates he was revealed as the original creator of the Sylvari – the game’s playable plant race. In the opening cutscene, it’s revealed that many Sylvari turned to Mordremoth’s side when they entered the jungle. It’s a new direction for the story to take. Previously, the game’s sense of cooperation and togetherness bordered on saccharine. Now, mistrust and suspicion are rife. It’s not yet clear how strong the dragon’s control is over the race, nor how it will affect the way Sylvari players are treated.
“It’s been fun for us, because before we even made Sylvari that was the plan,” says Isaiah Cartwright, lead designer. “The narrative we want to tell is that there is almost a racism in the game now... people don’t know which Sylvari is good and bad, and that naturally makes everyone think all Sylvari are bad. Being a Sylvari while navigating that is really fun.”
More than ever, Guild Wars 2’s story will be venturing out of instances. Even Heart of Thorns’ new profession, the Revenant, is tied deeply to the game’s lore. A heavy armour class, the Revenant works by channelling the spirit of legends – historic figures who will be recognisable to players of the first Guild Wars. There are five legends available, and you can switch between them much like the Elementalist switches between elements. The difference is that legends are more than just a power set. They have a personality, too.
The demo provided two such legends and both offered a dramatically different playstyle, changing the healing, utility and elite skills. Taking the power of jovial dwarf king Jalis Ironhammer, I gained more survivability options, more support options and, more crucially than either, giant floating hammers that rotated violently around my character. The other legend, the demon Mallyx the Unyielding, was entirely different. His focus is on status effects, and the more I collected, the more damage my character could output. Even healing works on this principle – providing HP based on the number of conditions my character was carrying. It’s a new way of playing that encourages tactically taking damaging debilities.
Heart of Thorns will also introduce a new Guild Hall system, and new PvP and world-versus-world maps. There are plenty of bullet points in its feature list, but the reason I’m excited is that this expansion lays the foundation for the game’s future. For ArenaNet, it’s not just about the next year of the game’s life, but about the next two, three, four years and beyond. If all goes well, we’re about to enter the next era of Guild Wars 2’s development. As someone approaching 500 hours in its existing incarnation, I couldn’t be happier.