I Want What They're Having : GW2, EQ2

The news that Episode Four of Living Story Season Two would be the last for several months came as something of a surprise. No, wait, that's not quite right. It came as a total bolt from the freakin' blue!

ANet have somehow managed to eke out the reveal of a single new explorable map, one that's roughly a quarter of the size of the map next door, over the course of two months, and almost convince us we're getting something amazing. How did they do that? All the lore arguments about the original GW1 Dry Top being a small area aside, it's really not a very impressive achievement, although the way it's been marketed definitely is.

Now we learn that it will be another two months or so before the process starts up again. At this rate it will take more than a year to add the equivalent of one, complete explorable area.

Compare that to recently-announced expansions for other MMOs. The upcoming EQ2 expansion, news of which so impressed me, includes two massive overland zones, fourteen dungeons and a new playable race. WoW's Warlords of Draenor proposes to expand Azeroth by more than half a dozen outdoor zones plus dungeons and another ten levels. FFXIV's as-yet unscheduled first expansion is mooted to be as large as the entire game was when it first launched.

There are plenty more where those came from. Even MMOs that aren't going down the Big Box route can claim to have added major new game systems in expansion-like updates - SW:ToR's Galactic Starfighter and Galactic Strongholds brought PvP space combat and housing to that game, for example.

By contrast, what have we had in the two years since GW2 released? At the start the signs looked promising. In the first four months there was a new, explorable map, Southsun Cove, swiftly followed by no fewer than nine "fractal" dungeons. At that pace, who needs an expansion, right?

Since then, however, world building has slowed from a flood to a trickle. There's been one WvW map, Edge of the Mists, and one explorable map, Dry Top and that's it for permanent new areas. Oh, hang on, no it's not - how could I forget Cragstead and the North Nolan Hatchery from the very beginning of Living Story One? Anyone visited either of those recently?

Along the way we've seen a reasonable amount of temporary real estate appear only to vanish like morning mist when its purpose has been served. Dungeons, like The Molten Facility and, um, was there another one? Oh yes, the Krait Tower in Kessex Hills.

We've had small storyline pop-ups like Canach's Lair and off-the-wall experiments like the Super Adventure Box and naturally we've had the usual flurry of seasonal and holiday content like Tixx's Infinirarium and The Mad King's Realm. We even had the gorgeously detailed and highly popular Bazaar of the Four Winds and look how that turned out.

Right from the start ArenaNet's insistence on a dynamic, living, changing world has been controversial. While most players understand why content related to specific holidays only hangs around for a specific period, the idea that almost all new content should be dangled on a string for a week or two and then snatched away was a difficult sell from the beginning and the current direction of developmental travel seems determined to take us down an altogether different road.

Changes to existing maps that tie in with a particular storyline are a longstanding and widely accepted tradition in MMOs. Sometimes they leave permanent scars on the landscape to puzzle and confuse future generations of players, like the huts of the Rude Individuals that still litter Qeynos Hills a decade and more on, or the shattered remnants of Scarlet's probes that glower banefully across Tyria even now. More often they just vanish when their function is no longer required.

With GW2 in general and the Living Story in particular, AreneNet have attempted to sell the idea that their approach to content addition is something radical and new. For a while that seemed almost plausible. Certainly the pace at which they approached things was unusual. The appearances, completely unexpected and unheralded, of whole-cloth additions like Fractals and the SAB were bold, striking coups. The introduction of the bi-weekly Living Story sent ripples across the genre.

From the perspective two years down the line, however, things look somewhat different. GW2 has not added more, new, permanent content than other MMOs I play, when judged on that timescale. If anything it has added less. Moreover, I would strongly question whether it has even given us more temporary content than we are used to getting elsewhere. After all, every active MMOs runs storylines, holiday events, anniversaries, and a variety of one-off or ad hoc activities as a matter of course.

Just today I noticed that my No Bombing At The Moonfire Fair post from last year had popped back up in the top five weekly posts list for this blog, leading me to surmise, correctly, that Square had switched the event back on for its annual appearance. This is just what MMOs do. In a few weeks Mad King Thorn will, we assume, burst out of what's left of the Lion Statue in LA and start haranguing us all over again. Many MMOs, EQ2, LotRO and WoW among them, even have in-game calendars so players can keep track, so frequently do these time-limited events arrive.

GW2 has already created a number of set pieces that can and will recur. Even the Bazaar of the Four Winds may make a comeback - it's not at all clear how much of the flying fleet came  down over Dry Top, after all. Two years on a solid framework for celebrating high days and holidays has been established.

Outside of that, over the course of its first two years I don't believe GW2 has added much, if any, more regular content than the average MMO. Unlike most other passably successful games of its genre, however, what it has not done is produce anything even remotely comparable to an expansion.


Although the real figures are kept frustratingly obscure from us, I think few gamers would argue that any of SOE's MMOs can be more commercially successful right now than GW2. How is it, then, that both Everquest and EQ2 get substantial expansions every year and regular, substantial content updates throughout the months between? Regardless of anyone's opinion of the relative quality of these additions their quantity isn't up for question.

To stick with the current MMO I know best other than GW2, last year EQ2 received a full-scale expansion with Tears of Veeshan in the autumn of 2013. By the time that arrived players had already enjoyed the free Scars of the Awakened update in spring, which added a large explorable zone and a new, full-size dungeon, and, as if that wasn't enough, they'd also had the Dawn of Darkness update in June, giving them alternate, high-end versions of several existing dungeons.

Well, if EQ2 is so much better, why don't you go and play that instead, then? Oh, wait, this isn't map chat, is it? No, the point isn't to score points, just to note that, for all ANet's high-visibility effort, the progress being made isn't all that impressive. It's not quite treading water but then it's not the Australian Crawl either. More like doggy paddle I'd say.

With spoilers in mind I'll leave it a few more days before I get into what I thought of the actual content of the "mid-season finale". I'll just say that it took me less than three hours to complete and that I haven't felt like repeating it on the second account yet. With everyone else getting expansions between now and Wintersday, though, the second half of the season had better come up with something substantial. Man cannot live by amuse-bouche alone.