The History of Guild Wars 2 - 2000-2021 Retrospective

guilt for sue came out almost a decade ago and it is a game that has had a profound impact on my life i've spent thousands of hours in syria and i met most of my best friends while playing the game today i want to take a look back at the history of this game i love so much from where it all began a fledgling studio forging a brand new ip to where we are now with guilders 2's end of dragon's expansion just a couple of months away this is the history of guild wars 2. the story of guild wars starts all the way back in the spring of 2000s mike o'brien patrick wise and jeff strain three very prominent developers at blizzard's entertainment left blizzard to found their own studio arenanas arena's first game was guild wars an online multiplayer rpg it released in april of 2005 only a couple of months after world of warcraft though the vargoth was taking the gaming world by storm quickly attracting an enormous amount of players thus while guild wars wasn't as much of a phenomenon as well it did very well for itself guild's wars was very different from mmorpgs at the time the game was not about grinding for gear to get stronger players could reach the level cap very quickly and getting the best gear was not much work at all in guild wars victory would be determined by player skill not by hour's plays there is also no subscription fee required to play you just bought the game in a store activated your account and that was it you could play as much as you wanted to without having to pay for a subscription this is what got 11 year old me to choose guild wars over world of warcraft and i was definitely not the only one but the internet still had to make money somehow they chose to do this by releasing new campaigns these were a bit like expansions with new content professions and maps but you could also play them stand alone arenanet started releasing these campaigns at an incredible pace factions came out a year after the original game and nightfall followed only six months later another thing that set guild's horse apart from the big mmos at the time was that his world wasn't fully persistent it wasn't fully online you would see players in cities and outposts but once you set foot outside of those it would just be you and your party the explorable maps of the worlds were instances as arenanet started work on the fourth campaign guilty utopia they started to experiment with their established formula they created a prototype of a persistent map where you did see other random players running around the developers also had lots of other new ideas for utopia and it was becoming more and more difficult to add those to the existing guild or swan eventually arena decided to take their brand new ideas and move them to an entirely new game that game of course was guild wars 2. in 2007 a guild wars 2 was announced in an article in pc gamer fans were promised something entirely new unlike go to swan a guild wars 2 would feature multiple playable races the roles would no longer be instance you could now see other players and player movements was greatly expanded we got a pretty good idea of what the core ideas behind cultures 2 were dynamic events were introduced and so was world versus walls to tide kilter's fans over arenanet also announced a final expansion for guilty swan this was ive the north but the real excitement was for the big new game a beta had been announced for 2008 so it couldn't be that far away right at the time the article was published arenanet only just barely started working on guilders 2. there were still many more long years of development left the 2008 beta did not disappear and for the first couple years arenanet developed the game mostly in silence guilters 2 sounded like this incredible game but one thing was becoming clear it was still many years away the ways for guilders 2 would last 5 years in total eventually arenanet started telling us more and more about the game gilders 2 was going to be a big persistent mmo just like the enormously successful world of warcraft but it still retained much of arena net's core philosophies the game would once again require no subscription fee and player skill would again be more important than grinding for gear guild wars 2 started attracting the attention of other players in the mmo community arena talks to those about issues they saw with other big mmos and how goku still was going to solve those i swung a sword i swung a sword again hey i swung it again guilders 2 would do away with the dps tank healer holy trinity so that a group of players could just hop into a dungeon without having to wait for a heater to show up there would also be no gear treadmill instead good gear would still be good gear years after being acquired dynamic events replace traditional questing to make the wolves feel more alive events would just be happening in the world whether the players would be around to experience them or not these ideas resonated with a lot of mmo players at the time and the hype around guiltless 2 started getting bigger and bigger playable demos for guilters 2 started showing up at several conventions around the worlds and then finally after a series of beta weekends guys are still released in august of 2012. guild of stew was received with near universal acclaim on metacritic the game averaged a score of 9 out of 10 with one reviewer calling it the best online roleplaying game in years sales were also looking really good before the game has come out more than a million players had pre-ordered this and two weeks after launch the game surpassed 2 million in sales at the time it felt like everyone i knew was playing guilders 2. my friends from high school my online friends from other mmos in fact there were so many players that the servers couldn't really handle as well there were many issues with players not being able to get into the same map flows and arena not even halted sales at some point to increase server capacity gilder still looks like it was off to a pretty incredible stars i loved guildress 2 at launch and i had an absolute blast leveling my first characters to max level lots of my friends were playing too and together we were discovering this brand new version of tyria bit by this but eventually i started to notice that a significant portion of my friends stops playing the game it's a common trend with mmos nowadays at launch there is a gigantic rush of players but once the hype has calmed down a bit many players quit and move on to the next big thing while we don't have any data on how many players were playing ghost was 2 that is what it felt like in those early days many players reached max level and i felt a little bit lost on what to do next at next level the main activities that were available to players were pvp those results and farming pve for prestigious cosmetics there was a set of dungeons and open world events but as compared to other existing mmos that had been releasing content for years there wasn't really all that much there were no raids so there was no big challenging raid bulls waiting at the end to be taken down many players including myself fell in love with the game regardless replaying the content there was over and over but many others felt that after reaching max level and getting the best gear and experiencing every bit of content there wasn't anything left for them to do the phrase and guilters 2 has no end game starting to regularly appear on various gaming forums many of the initial players moved on from guilders 2 but despite that a healthy active player base stuck with the game and it was very clear what they wanted us more content it didn't take long for arenanet to start releasing regular updates for guilders 2. halloween and winter's day two festivals fondly remembered from go to swan made their way to the sequel shortly after launch new mini dungeons jumping puzzles and even events were at us but the first major content release for goto stew was the lost shores they lost shores added a new map to the game for the very first time southern golf an arena that decided to turn this into a special event there was a one-time meta event where players were talked with establishing a foothold and taking control of the islands this was a really cool concept the map version just dropped into the game in its final stage players on the server i had to capture it first it was like being part of guild wars 2 history of course a lot of players were excited to be a part of this one time event probably a little bit too many players these servers were struggling to keep up and back then the game didn't have the player calling options that we have now this meant that the huge concentrated crowd of players led to pretty abysmal frame rates the low shores also added another major piece of content to the game the fractals of the mists fractals will let you place short dungeon buffs in sets of 3 and players could progress to harder difficulty levels to enter the higher fractal levels a new gear tier was required ascendant gear it felt like fractals and ascendant gear were designed to give pve players more progression to give them more goals to go for after reaching max level after all a common point of criticism at the time was that guilty's 2 had no end game previously the best gear turned the game was exotic which was extremely easy to acquire ascendance gear gave players much more of a long-term goal to rotavars after reaching the level cup asana's gear was initially met with major backlash from a large part of the community lots of players were concerned that this new gear tier would mean a geared treadmill would be added to goats 2 after all and that grinding for new gear terrors would become commonplace arenas responded that this was not their plan at all there would be no stronger gear tears added beyond the cenos and to arena's credits they kept true to that promise almost a decade later a santa scare is still the gear with the highest stats in the game and players seem pretty okay with its existence no gear treadmill is added and exotic gear is still absolutely viable it's just that if you really want to max out your stats it will take a little bit more effort than just buying exotic gear on the trading post despite the technical issues with the lost church meta events aren't pressed on with their vision of a constantly changing dynamic walls and they kicked off living world season 1. the idea was to make the game almost like a tv show with new content releasing all the time thus only being available for a limited amount of time you better tune into the game regularly or you would miss some of this the living roles kicked off with a thrilling premiere you ran around fixing signposts but after this more interesting updates started releasing regularly sometimes the story would be told for open world events but there was also instance contents several dungeons were at us like the molten facility and the avalate retreats but these dungeons only stayed in the game for a couple of weeks before being removed again a true highlight of living world season 1 was the super adventure box the super adventure box was released on april fool's day 2014 it is a special jumping puzzle activity with a retro platformer aesthetic arenas even made an old-school commercial for it with a song about disturbing real-life riddle [Music] [Applause] [Music] most players loved the super adventure box but again it was only temporary nowadays super adventure box is a festival and it comes around once a year despite much living world season 1 content being only temporary there were also some permanent additions to the game the quaddle a pretty boring vote boss before was revamped and became a true challenge with players struggling to get their first kill the brand new triple trouble worm balls was even more challenging with many servers competing for their world's first skill a new vote versus vote map was added which players could access while queueing for the other maps there were also new fractals with several of these temporary dungeons making a return as factual content living world season 1 culminated with an attack on lion's arch the biggest player hub in the game during this event lion's arch was transformed into a war zone npcs and essential services were relocated to the visual keep in gennaron fields that's right for just a little while the mostly unremarkable visual keep was the player hub of guild wars 2. the attack on lion's arch is very fondly remembered by many players but to this day there are still many in the community who miss the old's original lions arch after the finale of season 1 there was a bit of a gap before season 2 kicks off at this time goto stu had been out for almost 2 years and many people were hoping for an expansion announcement they would have to wait a little bit longer though there was no expansion on the horizon just yet arena nets filled the gap between seasons 1 and 2 with the release of a so-called feature pack this feature pack update contained a ton of new features and quality of life improvements some big highlights were the wardrobe which took fashion wars to the next level and mega servers mega servers effectively merged all kilters 2 servers together making the vaults feel more alive and active than ever before early leveling zones were now once again filled with plenty of players but mega servers also took something away in early go to stew there was a certain sense of community on each server i used to be on fire shiverpeaks and i felt like i knew all the big guilds on my server when i walked into lion's arch i felt like i knew half of the players there mega servers took that sense of community away but they did make the game feel much more active and alive i never would have missed many of the people i played guild still with today if it weren't for mega servers after a couple of months season 2 of the living worlds finally started season 2 did away with the temporary nature of season 1. because season 1 content would often get removed a couple of weeks after release it meant that while readiness had produced a ton of content only a small part of it was still accessible it also made getting back into the story after missing an episode's kind of a jarrong experience so if season 2 the story was told for replayable permanently accessible story instances two new maps for others dry top and the silver race and new story was released every two weeks hold on a second let me repeat that every two weeks these releases were kind of small this new story was releasing constantly maybe it was even a bit too fast i very much recall many of my friends falling behind season two also had a mid-season break during this break another feature pack was released a true expansion was still nowhere to be seen but these feature bags were steadily improving the game the trading post was entirely revamped and collection achievements were at us for collection achievements players had to collect sets of items in modern times collections have kind of become the quest system of guilders 2. if there's a big item to rook towards with lots of steps it's probably implemented as a collection but perhaps the biggest change introduced by future pack 2 was the new player experience [Music] alright calm down everyone it really wasn't that bad the new player experience was designed to retain more of the new players trying out kilters still and to make the leveling experience less overwhelming there were now level up rewards and there was a point on the screen appointing new players to potential stuff to do those features that were previously available to players from the beginning like the downstate and weapon swapping were now only introduced upon reaching a certain level many hearts and beginner zones were simplified and you would now unlock more and more weapon skills as shoe levels the new player experience was received somewhat badly by the existing gothic 2 player base many players felt that these changes were unnecessary and that resources should be spent on new content for veteran players instead the effect that we still didn't know anything about a true expansion probably didn't help i personally thought that the controversy was a bit overblown while not every change hit the mark it's important to remember that these changes were meant for newer players not for the veteran players who already knew the game inside out ever since dispatch arenanet hasn't changed much about the experience for new players i think that's a shame and i would love to see them try to improve the leveling experience further after a couple of weeks season two continued and wrapped up with a spectacular finale the finale finally gave the veteran playerbase what they wanted a teaser for a guilters 2 expansion howdy thorns was announced featuring lots of new features and lots of new maps to explore the community excitement was off the charts and the base game was also announced to be going free to play however we would have to wait quite a while before we could hop into heart of thorns this was one of the longest content rounds the game has ever seen there was almost a year between the end of season 2 and the release of heart of thorns we were kept pretty busy with expansion news betas and the rebuilding of lion's arch but this was still a long period of time without much new content to play when harder force finally came out the community loved this for the most part harder forms added masteries elite specializations new maps gliding a new profession guild's halls and more a race for others and fractals were revamped the pve end game of guilters 2 was really starting to get fleshed out there was a new world versus world map and also a new pvp gamemode called strongholds strongholds unfortunately dies pretty fast but looking back it is honestly impressive how many features were added by heart of thorns heart of thorns was for the most part a huge success and has really turned guilt 2 into the game that it is today of course there was also criticism of the expansion as well some players were disappointed by the number of maps in heart of thorns while the maps were bigger and more vertical than ever before there were only four of them and one of them was a big event map which wasn't really meant to be exported alone heart of thorns added a new area but some people were hoping that an expansion would mean an entirely new continent like back in the guild's one days over the years many people changed their opinion about this while there were only four maps the heart of force maps were very replayable and many players still think that heart of thorns is the peak of guilders 2 map and event design another common piece of criticism was that heart of thorns was too challenging while some players loved the challenge there were also more casual players who had trouble surviving and navigating the jungle eventually the difficulty of heart of thorns was toned down significantly but the heart of meguma is still considered by many to be the most challenging area in all of guilders 2. after the release of heart of thorns there was a once again a long content drought depending on who you ask for almost a year the next living world season was nowhere to be seen but during this time irene has a walls releasing race rings regularity high deforms has made the pv end game of kilt stew much more interesting before the most common and effective strategy to clear pve content was to have a full glass canon dps party and kill the enemies before they killed you with the introduction of elite specializations and raiding race groups were now much better off having dedicated tanks and dedicated supports as well some vaders call this the golden age of guilters 2 while those of non-raiders call this one of the biggest content droughts the game has ever seen in the summer of 2016 it was finally time for living wall season 3. arenas once again tweaked their living world's formula episodes would now release with two to three months intervals instead of the previous two weeks while the weights between episodes was now much longer episodes became much more meaty each episode now added a new map and had much more story contents than the episodes in season 2. season 3 was received very well and most players prefer to new formats sometimes an episode would also include a new legendary race or fraxel in my opinion season 3 was a pretty great time to be a guild wars 2 fan during season 3 arenanet also openly told about a second expansion being in development the playerbase was speculating it's on about this new expansion and after heart of thorns expectations were very high unfortunately several months before the expansion was revealed a massive leak appeared on the internet spoiling much of the features and content of the new expansion the community was honestly pretty good about this the league wasn't spread around too much and most players that had seen the league were careful not to spoil others shortly after the end of season 3 the next expansion was officially revealed path of fire would take place in the crystal desert and elona featuring bigger maps than we had ever seen before there were also new elite specializations but the biggest feature of bubble fire by far were mountains the player base had always been very skeptical about mounts being added to guilters 2 but they were received very well mounds and go to steel aren't just a speed boost the mouse gives you brand new methods of traversal like the springer that can jump really high mouse added a whole new dimension to exploration and bubble fire's maps were very much designed with them in mind powerful fire had a very short marketing cycle it came out only two months after its reveal this time and there was no content drought at all but because of this shorter marketing cycle it also felt that there was maybe a little bit less hype around this release mounts were definitely the big feature of puff of fire besides mounts and elite specs pufflefire didn't really add too many new features it mostly build upon the formula which was established by heart of thorns the new maps were gorgeous and were very well received initially but nowadays a lot of players feel like they lack replayability it feels like most players still spend a lot of time in the heart of thorns maps but not as much time in the powerful fire ones one of my favorite things about buffer fire was the secret hidden and gryphon mount after finishing the game's story and unlocking all the mounts that had been advertised it turned out there was actually another secret mount players could go for players would have to complete them many steps and pay a bunch of goals before they could unlock the secret griffon rumors about this hidden mount were spreading around the player base and me and my friends had a blast trying to figure out how to unlock it exactly amazingly puffle fire was not followed by a content drought like how the thorns was season 4 kicks off only a couple of months after public fire's release and the story continues where it had left off new maps race and fractals were added and in my opinion the storytelling reached entirely new heights in season 4. new mounts were added as well there was this super fast hard to control roller beezel and also the free flying sky skill there was not much goals required to unlock the sky skill but together players had to complete a long time-gated collection this was not received very well by the community many players were excited to get their sky skill on release day but were met with time gates which were almost a week in total i personally actually kind of enjoyed it despite me not liking having to wait around i kind of enjoyed having something to do every single day i mean that eventually responded to the criticism by reducing the time gaze massively but to this day there are still many players who do not like the sky skill collection unfortunately season 4 was also the season in which disaster struck arenaness the studio was hit by large layoffs and many employees lost their jobs after the layoffs the player base was of course very concerned about the future of kilters 2. negativity reached an all-time high a couple of months later when arenanet announced the next season of the living walls the iceboot saga was announced with a real-life event at the more theater in seattle it's not that the iceberg saga looks bad because most players were hoping for something more maybe an expansion tease or new exciting end game concepts ice but saga just sounded like more living wolves and it just didn't generate the excitement the community was hoping for ice with saga's episode started to come as veggie dirty these episodes were in my opinion not bad at all the maps were really pretty and filled with lots of stuff to do i also thought the story was pretty great with a big focus on the char and their politics this iceberg saga despite its quality was considered by many players to just not be as exciting as a new expansion another point of criticism was that race and fractal releases had entirely grinded to a halls there was only one fractal released throughout all of the iceberg saga and rays for not being released anymore at all race had now been replaced by strike missions which were similar to race but significantly easier they remained as a stepping stone to raids as ten-man content that was more accessible there were some fun strikes with some actual challenge but the raiding community criticized most strikes as being way too easy and not very engaging and then one day arenanet suddenly teased that a new expansion for goldust 2 had entered developments they only showed us a single piece of concept art but this art seemed to suggest the expansion would take place in kanfa a fondly remembers continent that we had previously seen in guilty swan this announcement brought back a lot of excitement in the community eventually the name of the expansion was revealed ends of dragons and also it was announced that go to stew would be coming to steam though the expansion announcement had made many players very excited the iceberg saga was not quite wrapped up yes the global pandemic affects the developments pushing back releases and causing some episodes to initially release without voice acting the last episode of the icebu saga was not received very well the ending was split over three releases each adding a set of so-called dragon response missions many players criticized these as being repetitive and buggy and the ending of the story honestly felt very rushed to me it seems likely that a significant amount of development resources was shifted from the iceberg saga to the development of the new expansion that would explain why the ice blue saga's ending fell the biz undercooks while a large part of the player base has been very vocal with their criticism of the iceberg saga recently it has felt like things have been turning around the marketing cycle for end of dragons has rammed up and many players are very excited to play a new expansion for the first time in over 4 years during the race for the expansion arena that has started adding much requested features to the game with a very positive response from the community the legendary armory has made legendary items more sought after than before and it has motivated many players including myself to play the game a ton a beta for directx 11 support has been released significantly increasing the performance of the game those restructuring a feature to make it easier to play volt versus vault of your guild maze and to create more balanced matchups has finally resumed development and has started beta testing there is no doubt about this we are currently in a pre-expansion content drought but despite that fact it has been a long time since i have been this much into guilt or still and that brings us to the present in 2022 guilters 2 will celebrate its 10th anniversary end of dragons is on the horizon and i am incredibly excited for it so i'm going to be very positive for a little bit sir i think the new maps look gorgeous and fishing and skills look like a great addition for players that want to socialize the siege turtle feels awesome to control and the newly specializations will bring fresh air into every aspect of the game there will be lots of new legendary weapons to go for and it will also be a brand new set of strike missions at launch many raiders think that the ice boot saga strikes are too easy but these new strikes will get a special challenge mode briefly after their launch i really think that strike challenge modes have the potential to be just as good as raid bosses and that makes my inner raider very happy i think the future of guilders 2 is very bright with directx 11 and valence restructuring it feels like carinet is really investing in the future of this game there are tons of people playing right now and the expansion and steam release will only further increase that number i cannot wait to see what the future holds and that brings us to the end of my video i really hope you enjoyed this this video took a long time to put together if you enjoy rambling about guilters 2 be sure to stop by my twitch stream sometime over at twitch.tv specialty i am live 5 days a week and i would love to see you there if you want you can also join my discords and hang out with some of our awesome community members the link for the discord is in the description see ya [Music] so [Music]

Channel: Laranity

Views: 16,456

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Id: 9EDlJB3RyvI

Length: 29min 41sec (1781 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021