Hands-on With Guild Wars 2: The Only Way

Evil never sleeps, and neither does … whatever the Inquest is plotting in Guild Wars 2.

Despite getting a press preview and having access to the dev server for the latest chapter in the ongoing story, I’ve done my best to avoid story spoilers, because those are best experienced on live servers – both for myself and for you. Even so, there’s plenty to talk about and to experience, with the update going live as of this writing.

The Only Way continues the story begun with the launch of Visions of Eternity. Leading up to this chapter, it’s clear that ArenaNet is trying to obscure the true intentions of its main players: both the Inquest leader Vloxx, who’s probably not as evil as his associates, and the wizard Isgarren, who’s not as loyal an ally as he should be.

What small chunk of the story I did experience continued your character’s trek through the wild places of the mystery island of Castora, uncovering more ancient seeker ruins in the jungle. The Inquest is still searching for something, and it’s up to us to stop them. At least, that’s how things start, but don’t be too surprised if the hero/villain tables are turned. Even Canach gets in a little soul-searching, to give you an idea of how much characters are playing against type.

A drooping Isgarren, he of the typically nigh-limitless power, looked about as awake as I do before I have my morning coffee. For once, he’s taking things seriously, or at least seriously enough to warrant true sacrifice. A voice line he spoke during the story chapter, “Our task is more important than me,” underscored the gravity of the situation, even if the party did occasionally need to take the time to let him rest. As you can tell from one of the trailers, he might finally be willing to divulge a few important secrets; let’s hope they’re not given out as he expires.

Garden’s Guardians

The story will only take experienced players a few hours to go through. But what about the rest of the new content?

The zone is called Eternity’s Garden, and it was described by the devs as “exploring an old place that’s new to us.” The vibe is similar to Starlit Weald, with lots and lots of jungle interspersed with ancient Seer and more recent Inquest activity, but with a few massive facilities letting you know unequivocally that you’ll have bigger problems to deal with than a few pocket raptors.

The biggest problem of all is at the Seer Forge. In previous zones, we fought against two of Castora’s great guardians: Kela, Seneschal of Waves in Shipwreck Strand, and Gwyllian, Seneschal of the Forest in Starlit Weald. The Inquest tried to control these two but failed. Now we’ll have to face off against the third such guardian, the All-Seer, in the meta-event Shackes of the Ancients.

On the bright side, we’ll have a little help for this one. We can befriend seer constructs, who hate the Inquest as much as we do for their intrusions. With their help, we can take the forge from the Inquest and repair it to get the energy flowing. Then it’s a lengthy, multi-phase battle with the All-seer on par with the final battles against the previous guardians.

Wayfinder’s Finds

Two new legendary accessories ship with this update, one each specialized around PvE and WvW gameplay. The PvE accessory is called Stellar Radiance, and it can be earned entirely through PvE gameplay – no WvW required!

If you are up for some WvW action, however, Strife Unending looks to be a swell addition to your arsenal. The devs didn’t want to add much more visual clutter to WvW, which has enough of that already, so its only base effect is a light blue glow on your hands. As you accumulate kills in WvW, you’ll get more impressive effects when you unsheathe your weapons, up to five levels’ worth. Projectile paths on siege weapons also glow, so you’ll always know when you’re getting blown to bits by someone with the fancy gear.

If you’re not quite up for the legendary grind, you can still get some fine-looking loot, including the Ward Hunter armor set and Gwyl Monarch weapon set. The latter has a butterfly-wing/stained-glass look that’s sure to appeal to people who like that aesthetic. Heck, I’m not even into it, but I’m still going to try and figure a way to cram it onto one of my characters because it looks that good.

Other rewards you can get either through content or the new Wizard’s Vault offerings include the /flex emote, a punching dagger skin, an otter pet for rangers, and the Swiftwing Raptor mount skin. Additional mastery abilities in the Castoran Survivalist tree include Combat Maneuvers, which allows you to interact with invisibility-granting stashes during combat, and Lucky Shield, which restores all health when it activates. The new wardrobe system, which received some flak upon launch in February, will also be getting a fresh coat of paint to address player complaints.

Even though it’s been a bit of a spell since Visions of Eternity launched – about six and a half months – the time was well-spent, according to statements from the GW2 dev team. “We’re trying to make the releases feel more like part of a whole rather than individual chapters,” said Lead Narrative Designer Matthew Medina. “We’re trying to get away from ‘the story is X amount of content.’ The goal is that you play all of it.”

Another major update is planned to go live before the end of the year, which might put a crimp on the “yearly expansion” model that Guild Wars 2 has adopted over the past few years. This hopefully means that the revenue from the expansions has been good enough to afford a little breathing room and more space between the free updates. As Lead World Designer Nick Hernandez put it, they want to “make sure we’ve got enough development time.” That’s a luxury some devs can’t afford, and I’m all for it if it leads to better overall quality.