GUILD 2 -SEASON 2 DETAILS
ArenaNet’s Associate Game Director Steven Waller and Studio Design
Director Chris Whiteside walked us through a tiny bit of the new Season
content, which builds and feeds back on Season 1’s story. In the game,
you’ll be alerted of some strangeness in the Brisban Wildlands, and will
come across these weird vine things that have been encroaching upon the
human territory. You’ll meet up with a Seraph outpost that is guarding
a portal to a new area, and learn that some new threat has taken out a
Zephyr ship that was participating in the Festival of the Four Winds.
The new area beyond the portal is called Dry Top, a region referenced in the original
Guild Wars.
It’s an open world area similar to the other locales in Guild Wars 2,
with soloable story instances that scale with your party size. There’s a
sense of verticality in the way that Dry Top’s map has been designed,
and a shifting sandstorm will affect your visibility and act as a type
of event that determines different objectives and rewards. As you
progress through the story, you’ll find out that (spoilers) the Zephyr
leader is on the run, a saboteur is chasing after him, and you’re the
man/woman/asura/charr/sylvari/norn to figure out what’s going on.
Dry
Top is comparable in size to Southsun and synergizes the open world
with Guild Wars 2’s story, aiming to address some pacing concerns with
the previous Season’s content. Apparently, the ArenaNet team has been
working with people in other media industries to understand how to
better make superstory arcs, interrelated Seasons, appealing characters,
and other features that are common to good storytelling in television,
films, and other forms of entertainment. Additionally, Seasonal
achievements will now unlock when you complete an episode rather than
being the driving force of how you go about completing Living Story
content. You’ll get rewards upon finishing the episode for the first
time, and can then go about tackling the achievements and experiencing
the content with a different focus.
I’m a big fan of Guild Wars 2 and the direction that
ArenaNet has taken with its Living Story content. I know there have
been some gripes about the lack of replayability and overdependence on
achievements in Season 1, and while neither of those things have
bothered me a jot, it does seem like the developers are seeking to
address them directly with Season 2. Starting today, you can jump in
and see for yourselves - be sure to let us know what you think!
