UPDATE
Let’s check in with Secrets of the Obscure.
WHAT’S NEW IN THE BIGGEST GAMES
Last year, ArenaNet announced a new direction for Guild Wars 2. Smaller expansions, but released more frequently – each one rolling out in stages across the course of a year. Secrets of the Obscure, the fourth expansion, was the first to be released under this new structure. It came with two open world maps, a couple of new endgame strike missions and a handful of new features. It also came with a roadmap detailing the rest of the expansion, with a new part planned each quarterly update.
In many ways then, we’re still only three quarters of the way through SotO’s launch. Still, I’ve seen enough of it now to get some sense of how well this new direction is working.
Broadly, I’m optimistic about the current state of the game. One of Guild Wars 2’s major problems in the past was consistency. Sure, some of its Living World seasons were great. And both Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire were excellent expansions. But between the periods when great stuff was happening, there was often very little to do. Over its lifespan I’ve gone long periods without touching the game – in part because its horizontal progression systems don’t punish players for taking an extended break, but also because there was a lack of new things to come back to.
Now it feels more active, with the expansion updates being supplemented by festivals and interstitial bonus events that offer some extra rewards for returning to older parts of the game.
The new development format also seems to have empowered ArenaNet to make quality-of-life features a greater focus. Alongside regular balance patches, each update has also reworked some older part of the game – fixing up dungeons, streamlining older currencies and even reworking post-processing effects to be more granular, meaning you can benefit from some extra graphical flair without having to suffer through the game’s overbaked, headache-inducing bloom.
WIZARDING WORLD
So things are looking up from a delivery standpoint, but what about the things actually being delivered? Here it’s more of a mixed bag. The expansion launched well. The Commander, with nothing much to do following the end of the Dragon Saga, discovers a society of wizards waging secret war against a demonic threat. New characters were introduced and maps were full of interesting ideas, even though not all of them were explored in depth.
But in the subsequent updates, the quality has taken something of a dive. The third map is being released in chunks – a third of it arriving with each new major release. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a single space, and Inner Nayos doesn’t feel up to the task. It’s fine – it’s cool to have a map based in the demonic realm. But it doesn’t stand up to the pressure of being
