Traditionally, one enters the expansion of an MMO with a number of thoughts. There is a sense of anticipation regarding the new content available to experience; a drive to explore the new environments and discover rare treasures and Easter eggs; a determination to take on the new challenges before you and continue to forge a story of your character amongst other things that make an MMO special. That being said, my time with expansions in the past has kind of been marred by the feeling of a need to ‘rush’ through the content so you can remain on par with the overall progression. Whether it be rushing to max level so you can start gearing up for the end-game raid, or practising with your new skills to stay competitive in the new pvp season, for many players a lot of the content will fly past them swept up in xp numbers and the occasional ‘ding’. Over the past few years, this concept has become less and less appealing to me, so to have Guild Wars 2s new expansion Heart of Thorns not following this convention with no level or gear cap increase has renewed my interest in playing through such content. Now I've had a couple weeks with Heart of Thorns, I would say that it has been a thoroughly enjoyable one that I'm looking forward to its continued progress.
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| The new character select screen has a nice UI fade-out showing off your character and the jungle motif. Screenshot taken 22/11/2015 |
Heart of Thorns takes off from where Season 2 of the Living Story left us with The Pact in tatters after the attack by Mordremoth which tore the airships from the sky and sent Sylvari into an internal conflict as the jungle dragon twisted their thoughts. The Pact Commander (the player character) is charged with picking up the pieces of The Pact while leading a small band of adventurers (more commonly known as Destiny’s Edge 2.0) to bring an end to Mordremoth; something which requires a great deal of exploration and information gathering.
The story in this expansion has evolved from the game's initial release in 2012, removing the side-by-side dialogue cut-scenes and replacing them with in-game NPC conversations which feature in a mix of both open world and story mission instances; making the conversations feel a lot better in terms of context as well as getting the player character to voice / emote their thoughts to groups of people. It is clear that these story missions have also learnt from the previous Living Story seasons with the addition of movement / vehicle mechanics (see the Zephyrites for such an example) but where it has added its own new feature is through the integration of the mastery system added in Heart of Thorns.
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| The vines of Mordremoth cracking the stone it falls upon, show-casing the power of the expansion's main antagonist. Image from Guild Wars 2, Heart of Thorns release trailer via YouTube. Accessed 23/11/2015 |
As I mentioned earlier, Heart of Thorns doesn’t have any level cap increase which may spark the question “what character progression is there to be had?” Masteries is what answers this through an alternative levelling system that looks to level environmental skills to aid one’s journey through the Maguuma Jungle. For example, one can learn how to use a glider to assist in getting around the map in short bursts. As you put more mastery points into this skill (a currency obtained by completing HoT objectives / achievements) you learn how to use up-drafts to gain height, stealth techniques to stop enemies knocking you out of the sky, and leans to become more efficient. On the surface, this doesn't really do much, but in depth it gives the player a great experience of the map much like a metroid-vania; where you find a canyon you can’t cross at first but with that one skill improvement you find a way to reach the other side. For me this was experienced early on in my playtime when I didn’t have access to the jumping mushroom skill (Itzal mastery). There was an event involving the recovery of wyvern eggs from a plateau that took some 30-60 seconds to climb normally, but with this mastery I was able to reach the top in 10 seconds, allowing me to have a much greater contribution for the event. I feel it's a rather clever way to extend the playtime of maps, because you can’t just rush through it 100%’ing everything without taking time to learn the new skills. As I mentioned previously, I was one to rush through to end-game in previous MMos but my time in HoT hasn't felt rushed and in turn i’m taking note of more of the landscape, its characters and events.
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| Flying high in the canopy showcases how much space is in the map. Draw-distance aside, it's pretty big. Screenshot taken 22/11/2015 |
Another thing I'm loving about these maps is the verticality they hold reinforcing the importance of these new masteries and depth of the playable space. Before the expansion launched, there was a lot of talk about how each map would have 3 levels of interaction (Roots, Jungle and Canopy) and although each level doesn’t constitute a full map, it does add some interesting dynamics to the game-play. The first map of the expansion (Verdant Brink) has you fighting in the jungle during the day, but when night falls you find yourself up in the canopy battling with one of the zone’s boss battles using your newly honed gliding skills to stop you meeting an untimely end below. Although I have thoroughly enjoyed playing through this content there is something that has marred my experience being performance issues when interacting with large groups of players. Having 15fps when trying to dodge a large fire breath attack from a rampaging Wyvern Matriarch creates its own unique challenge, but it is definitely one that I would like to not contend with. This of course wouldn’t be an issue once I get my new PC built, but for now if you’re someone who has a low-performance PC you will probably find yourself sticking to the small form content such as the story and adventures.
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| This boss event requires the players to glide off and throw eggs at it to make the ground safe and continue the fight. Screenshot taken 22/11/2015 |
This is not to say that you’ll have a worse experience because one of the things i’m loving about HoT is its range of content available. Adventures have been a great deal of fun for their ability to add small parts of competitive events without the taxing performance above. These challenges are dotted around the map (usually correlating to a nearby outpost which may have conventional events tied to it) and task the player with racing/fighting/flying/etc their way to achieve a gold, silver or bronze reward. These adventures also have leader-boards on them, which allow for players to hone their skills and look to get on the top of the leader-board for all to survey, which personally has been a task that I usually come mid/high in the rankings. The adventures also have a nice connection with the mastery system, as many challenges are easier to achieve higher scores through the use of said skills e.g. Tendril Torchers has a mesa which one can access via a jumping mushroom, allowing you to clear a large number of tendrils that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible.
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| Alongside Adventures, finding hidden mastery points adds to the enjoyment of exploration. Screenshot taken 22/11/2015 |
As you can probably tell by this post, I am very much enjoying my time in HoT, but if you’re from a traditional MMo point of view, you maybe thinking that not having a level/gear cap increase somewhat diminishes the experience of an expansion. This of course can be an issue but I feel that HoT has created an enjoyable combat loop with enough customisability to keep it fresh. Since entering the HoT maps, I have tried a number of builds on my trusty engineer ranging from heavy damage condition builds to the more supportive boon / healing builds which have been relevant to keep some of the my more ‘glassy’ companions alive. New stat combinations in gear have helped in making these builds more viable, but the addition of the specialisations have added a new interesting dynamic to my favourite profession in the name of the ‘scraper’. This build gives the engineer a proper melee weapon (tool kit has been around but i’m classing it as a skill in this context) in the Hammer alongside an array of mobile drones to assist you in combat. Like with many players, I went for my specialisation straight away to give it a try and found myself getting a lot of fun out of the build with its mixture of CC and combo fields, but in the long run I think I would need to properly invest in a gear setup to get the most out of it.
Engaging with other specialisations has been a mixed bag of feelings between co-operation (pve) and competition (pvp). I love how different weapon types like shields, torches, warhorns have these interesting skills such as the Chronomancer with their shield; but the learning process to properly know how to act on these skills has been a bit annoying especially due to my low performance set-up. To give you an example, the Chronomancer elite skill ‘Gravity Well’ is a large aoe that causes float, pull and knock-down but due to my graphic settings and culling I get a very faint outline of this skill, if anything. I also have a similar experience with the Dragonhunter skill “Hunter’s Ward’ because the barrier won’t show up on my screen, so naturally I knock into the barrier and potentially not get off that life saving elixir throw (speaking from personal experience in spvp). Naturally, this will improve when my hardware improves, but i’m in that awkward space of not sure whether the range of skill effects correlate with a reasonable means of educating yourself to act upon it.
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| A check-list with little hints to the next objective makes achievement hunting fun in-game rather than a chore. Screenshot taken 23/11/2015 |
The last thing I wanted to talk about was something that on the surface is really minor, but I absolutely love as an explorer / achiever. In the past, if you had an achievement with multiple tasks to hand (e.g. coin collection in Dry Top or the Dive Master) you had little means to know which ones you were missing outside of external guides. In HoT, they have now put in a proper list system for these achievements so it's much easier to have a in-game / world means to discover and explore. When I first came back to Guild Wars 2, I wrote about this explorer nature and how it really gets me involved in the world, so having this information available to me keeps me from alt-tabbing to Dulfy and just following a guide (not that it's a bad thing I just personally prefer the current setup).
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| The Scrapper with his drones give Engineers a new way to play. Image from https://www.guildwars2.com accessed 23/11/2015 |
Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in HoT as an experience continuing my enjoyment of the world of Guild Wars 2 and the MMo as a genre. Having a expansion that doesn’t right off your achievements of the past couple years as well as giving you new challenges to go up against seems so logical that looking back at the WoW/Rift expansions makes them look ‘old-fashioned’. A level cap increase feels arbitrary and now i’m enjoying the maps because I like being there, not because I need the xp to get to the next place. This expansion respects your time whether you want to spend 30 minutes a day doing a couple events or power game your way through a 10 hour binge in meta events and raiding; which is something I hope stays relevant in the months to come. Whether you’ve played many MMos or completely new to the genre, I think this game and its recent expansion Heart of Thorns is a great game to get involved in and experience what it has to offer.
