Sand Lions In My Own Garden : GW2

When the first promotional videos for Path of Fire appeared I commented that some of the shots appeared to have been taken from the Lord Room steps at Air Keep on the Desert Borderland in World vs World. The similarity was striking.

It wasn't just the generic desert nature of the two locations or even that the color and texture of the stone and the quality of the light they reflected were all identical. It was all that plus the fact that the very distinctive architecture, seen nowhere else in the game before, matched perfectly.

I speculated that the Desert Borderland map, far from having been an outtake from Heart of Thorns, as often suspected, might have been an early escape from the then-unsuspected follow-up to HoT. Now that we have our hands on the real thing that possibility seems even more likely.

The Desert Borderland, it was often claimed, must have been intended for HoT because it was clearly designed with gliders in mind. If you cast your mind back to the original design, with the barricades and the absence of stairways and ramps, it now seems likely it was designed for mounts as well.

The most convincing evidence so far, however, may be something I ran into tonight while doing my dailies. Since the expansion dropped I've barely set foot in WvW so I was taken completely by surprise to find that the familiar wildlife has been replaced by creatures from the Crystal Desert and points south.

Between Air Keep and North East tower I spotted sand lions, shadhavars and rock gazelles. Whether there are sand eels or sharks lurking beneath the dunes I cannot say. Only that I saw none.

With this change to the ambient environment I consider the case proven and closed. The Desert Borderlands are part of The Crystal Desert and therefore belong to the Path of Fire. They just arrived a couple of years ahead of schedule.

The Secret World: GW2

When GW2 started it looked for a while as though it might follow the development model I've always preferred for MMOs; one where regular, permanent content is continually supplemented by one-off, never to be repeated, "you had to be there" events. It used to be close to the norm for the genre but as commercial success moved MMOs further and further along the mainstream curve, this particular expression of "exclusivity" fell out of fashion.

I consider this not just to be a mis-step for the genre but a fundamental change in its function. Unrepeatable content that yet left an impact that could be seen years later by players who weren't there when it happened was one of the defining features of playing online - that and talking, competing and co-operating with strangers. The shared experience of such events, events which had a beginning, middle and end and which left lasting changes to the landscape or structure of the game, contributed hugely to the sense of MMOs as Virtual Worlds as opposed to merely games.

Mrs Bhagpuss's Charr Mesmer modelling the Catmander Tag

ArenaNet struggled on with this concept for a long while, even after the very first flagship event, The Lost Shores, crashed and burned. The entire first season of The Living Story relied on content that appeared, hung around for a while, then vanished. Often it left the physical environment altered, sometimes in ways that now appear mysterious and strange.

I sometimes wonder what new players make of locations like North Nolan Hatchery or Cragstead, which seem to exist without any in-game purpose. That thought came back to me last night, when Mrs Bhagpuss ported me into the hidden area behind the waterfall in The Desert Borderlands so I could buy my Catmander Tag and Mini.

It occurred to me as I explored the cave behind the waterfall that someone at ANet, possibly a lot of someones, have never given up the fight, even though an increasingly intransigent, demanding segment of the audience, arguably although not necessarily the majority, has, over the course of the last five years, driven the developers into a corner.

The requirement is that everything that's added to the game must remain - at least theoretically - available to everyone forever. It can be gated by whatever means you like - real money, time played, luck - but the possibility that anything there ever was can be yours, whether you've played since launch or started yesterday, is sacrosanct.

A young quaggan misunderstands the Pirate Ship Meta

The most recent example and probably the most cynical (because acquisition is gated by lockboxes purchased through the Gem Store) is the addition of  a vendor that sells signature items from Living Story events that can no longer be replayed. Some of those, like the Selfless and Thoughtless potions, once the rewards for lengthy grinds, remained until now badges of honor - or at least effort - for those who displayed them. Others, like the Minis from Lost Shores, were increasingly scarce, highly valuable trading items on the exchange.

Now you can have them all - in theory, at least. This is ANet's "if you can't beat 'em, exploit 'em" response to the barbarians at the gates. There is, however, a much more subtle, almost subliminal faction quietly at work beneath the surface.

Yellow Catmander puzzles over the futility of life.

As The Living Story limped on into its third season, bound both to instances and a funereal cadence, it began to be supplemented by something known only as "Current Events". These were patched in much more frequently, with no fanfare other than one solitary, enigmatic line in the update notes and sometimes not even that.

They spread by word of mouth (and Dulfy, of course) and they only began to appear in your Quest Journal Achievement List after you happened to stumble across them in-game. I found them to be reliably and consistently more interesting, enjoyable and thought-provoking than the Living Story content itself.

Caution: Moving Parts

These, too, have now been consolidated and codified, hardened into the game as official Achievements accessed through their own tab. Like everything else, they must always be there for anyone who wants them, evermore.

And that's fine, provided there are more unpublicized pleasures to come. ANet have arrived at a bizarre state of doublethink, in which the entire landscape of the game, both in and out of instances, is now, by canon, snapshots in time. Every Map is frozen in stasis. How we as players figure in that or where we can find the part of the game that occurs in "the present" escapes me but I'm sure someone, somewhere understands it.

Against this chaotic, incoherent and unmistakably fudged backdrop, the struggle continues. The weapon of choice for this insurgency? Cats.

I forget exactly when collectable cats began to appear in the game. It was earlier this year, I think. Tyria has always had a lot of cats, along with rabbits, owls, hawks and various other "ambients". They never interacted with players in any way until, suddenly, they did.

Who would notice that a cat had an interactive speech icon when targeted? Someone must have. Then Dulfy knew. Then  we all knew. Knew to speak to cats, to feed cats, to find cats installing themselves in our Home Instances.

Can we watch another channel? I'm bored!

After that, Catmanders. As far as I can tell, this wasn't documented in the Update Notes but somehow, someone knew and word spread fast. There are two Catmander Minis (vanity pets), two Commander Tag Variants (with cat ears) and two Catmander Home Instance spawns, which come with kittens, who do battle with each other.

The Blue Catmander can be purchased near the end of the Alpine Borderlands Jumping Puzzle. The Yellow Catmander is in a hidden cave behind the waterfall in the Desert Borderlands. Dulfy has everything you could possibly want to know.

Television is all very well but you can't beat the thrill of a live performance.

Everything, that is, except anything at all about the amazing cave itself. I always wondered why there was a huge waterfall and an idyllic lake in a hidden corner of what was a) a desert and b) a battleground. I've wandered around there several times, exploring and, naturally, I'd gone behind the curtain of the waterfall, looking for secret caves, because that's what you do when you see a waterfall.

I'd never found one but there was one there. You have to drop down from the top, edge along, drop again, go behind the water, jump up, edge along some more and finally do a little dink and you're in. After I got ported inside, after I'd gosh-wowed all round and taken my screenshots, I came out only to realize I'd forgotten to feed the cat some chilli to get the house pet, so I had to find my own way back in. Even with the video to follow it took me half a dozen attempts.

Catmander inspects the troops at a training session.

What I'm wondering, after all that, is this: was that cave always there? Did some designer, some artist, create that back in 2014/15, just to let it sit there, unknown until now? Was it always filled with quaggans and cats or were they added when someone came up with the Catmander pun and thought it was too good not to use?

There's more: why are all the quaggans children? Where are the adults? Why are the cats being trained to fight? Why are the training dummies all frogs and why do they have buckets over their heads? Why is the quaggan working the puppet theater dressed as a ghost?

Is that a television that quaggan is watching? What does that orrery represent? WHY DOES THIS GAME NOT HAVE A FULLY FUNCTIONING HOUSING SYSTEM?

There is more going on here - more that makes me think, makes me feel I'm somewhere real, for a given value of reality - in this hidden cave than in all the episodes of LS3 put together. Much more.

This is what we were promised. The fight goes on!

Fly, My Pretties! : GW2

Two years ago, red desert sand replaced white alpine snow as the backdrop for World vs World. There was no explanation for the (deeply unpopular) change, which appeared to have absolutely no connection, either thematic or lore, to the jungle-themed Heart of Thorns expansion of which it was nominally a part.

ArenaNet were very clearly aware of the discontinuity. Someone was either amused or uncomfortable enough about the whole thing to script a couple of conversations in which NPCs question each other about who built all the towers and where they might have gone. Naturally none of those NPCs comes up with any kind of explanation.

The Mists, the realm where the endless struggle over territory between worlds takes place, has always been something of a mystery. According to the wiki, they are "the oldest thing in existence, the proto-reality that exists between the worlds, constituting the fabric of time and space that connects the multiverse together."

The entry goes on to tell us that "The Mists resonate from the worlds around them, forming bits of their own reality - islands of existence that reflect the histories of their worlds." The Mists are a reality but not the reality, which is handy, because it means anything can happen there and no-one has to tell us why. Or how.

Rytlock Brimstone went to The Mists and came back changed. Changed into a new Class, The Revenant, one of HoT's key selling points. Far from explaining how that might have happened, the writers turned not explaining it into both a plot point and a meme - "Later, Cub".

At the time, the vast majority of WvW players were so incensed with the supposed unplayability of the new map that not even the few who acknowledged the game even had any lore cared to speculate on where that hated map might have originated. When anyone did comment on the provenance the general assumption seemed to be that the Desert Borderland was a rejected or surplus PvE map from the expansion that arrived at the same time.

That theory was given considerable credence by the design and structure of the map itself. It seemed to have been created with gliding, a signature feature of Heart of Thorns, very much in mind. The entire map is riven by cliffs and fissured with clefts. Rope bridges cross canyons, steps descend dizzyingly from blue skies to dark shadows. Anyone who has learned to glide in the vine-clogged Maguuma depths yearns to glide in the clear, free air here.

And now we can. In a move many had long requested but few probably believed would ever come, out of the blue Anet have enabled gliding in World vs World. The response from WvW veterans has been predictably curmudgeonly and the addition of gliding is only "a test for gliding in WvW. If we discover with this test that gliding is not appropriate for WvW, we will disable it". Enjoy it while you can.

I foresee unexpected consequences by the barrow-load. Gliding hasn't just been enabled for the Desert Borderland, for which it is eminently suited, but for the old Alpine Borderlands as well. I can immediately think of a whole raft of previously unreachable areas that could open up with just a short flight and if I can think of them you can bet our Commanders are already drawing up lists of spots to place siege where no-one can destroy it and our Mesmers are plotting their new, impregnable hidey-holes.

And that's only thinking of the borderline "fair use" problems that will need to be addressed by changes to code or structures. I'm sure there will be a slew of flat-out exploits for the spies and cheats and hackers to enjoy at our expense as well.

Still, I'm really looking forward to Tuesday, 8th August, the day my glider will unfurl in The Mists for the first time ever. My Elementalist will be riding her Magic Carpet into battle and with luck I might finally stop dying when I misjudge the drop as I jump off the cliff in a mad dash from Citadel to save North West Tower.

All of which is very well, but once again it begs the lore question. Why have our gliders started to work when they never did before? Why is it that they only work around structures we control? Who's behind all this?

Well, did you know that according to legend the only current access to The Mists comes courtesy of none other than... Balthazar? I didn't. According to the wiki "...the only known fixed means of entering the Mists is within Lion's Arch, which is said to contain a portal with a bluish hue made by Balthazar which fluctuates between different places of the Mists".

Balthazar, the very same rogue god - the God of War, let's not forget - currently filling the Main Villain slot in both the Living Story and the Path of Flame expansion. How intriguing that both gliding and Legendary Armor, another key feature of Heart of Thorns, should come to The Mists just as the God who gave us access to them strides to the fore.

And think about this: if it hadn't been for the intense player pushback that forced Anet into a U-turn, right now all the borderlands (save Eternal Battlegrounds) would feature a desert map that looks for all the world as though it fell, not from the Heart of Maguuma, but straight out of the forthcoming expansion.

It never made any kind of sense for the Desert Borderland map to have been a rejected design from the jungle-themed Heart of Thorns development cycle but it fits right in with everything we've seen from The Crystal Desert, where we're going in September. There's one screen shot that looks almost identical to Air Keep and Fire Keep could be Balthazar's Summer Palace.

Is it too much to imagine all this was planned out before the last expansion? That at least some of what looks from the outside to be fractured, reactive, pragmatic might in fact be considered, patient, imaginative? That somewhere in ANet Towers there remains at least a vestige of the rumored ten-year plan?

Pretty to think so.

It's Not The End Of The World Vs World : GW2

Of all the many and substantial changes brought about by Heart of Thorns, those that landed like an airburst on World vs World were arguably the most significant of all. Behind the curtain ANet may well be toiling away on the real WvW revamp but, when it comes, it can hardly be expected to have more of an impact than the arrival of the Desert Borderlands. It all but killed WvW.  

GW2's large-scale, open world, siege-based, three team PvPvE game mode, the wobbly third leg on the game's rickety tripod, had been limping in slow circles through the doldrums of neglect for the best part of year when HoT arrived. Never the success it was hoped, WvW had been intended to act as a kind of end-game for all; instead it had long ago settled, some would say slumped, into a specialist niche.

For a while the incursion of semi-regular "Seasons" into the endless, Valhallan cycle of weekly matches, succeeded in drawing the uncommitted, the curious and, especially, the acquisitive. The lure of Achievements and Titles and Stuff filled the Alpine Borderlands (then known only as The Borderlands) with nervous neophytes slumming it from PvE. Some of them even learned to like it and hung around.

Unravel the ancient mysteries of a lost civilization. Or just get a great tan.

Once Seasons fell into abeyance due to ANet's secret and as-yet unannounced plans, interest beyond the hardcore drained away fast. By the summer of '15 WvW was bumping along the bottom. Or so we imagined.

Only when Heart of Thorns arrived did we realize just how much further there was to fall. By then, Yaks Bend had been a Tier 1 server for a while. Even playing as we do just outside North American prime time, Mrs Bhagpuss and I had become used to seeing lengthy queues on two or three maps every evening. Come the weekend it was sometimes just too busy to bother and we tended to give WvW a miss until things quietened down.

The Desert Borderlands put paid to that little problem. It's been many weeks since I've seen a queue anywhere other than Eternal Battlegrounds. EBG, as it's known, was the only one of the four WvW maps not to be replaced. In one of the most striking examples I've ever seen of customers voting with their feet, almost the entire remaining population of WvW moved from their homelands to the contested but familiar territory of EBG.

What the heck is that thing?

The other three maps, featuring one of ANet's artists' finest ever creations, a stunningly beautiful, intricate, hauntingly mysterious landscape just begging to be explored, lay neglected, unused. Unused, at least, for their intended purpose, conflict. Instead they formed the backdrop for a desultory cavalcade of uncontested keep-takes as small zergs rotated the points.

That was in Tier 1. Several rungs down the ladder, as it bounces between Tiers 4 and 5, Ehmry Bay is home to my third account. Prior to Heart of Thorns, while we never had queues at the times of day I played, there was always a Commander organizing on the home Borderland and operations happening around the maps.

Now I had the place to myself. I could have been playing a single player game. Each day I trotted up to do my dailies - taking a sentry point and killing a dolyak, two of my favorites - secure in the knowledge that no-one from any other team was likely to try to stop me.

It's a desert, Jim, but not as we know it.

The silence and solitude were very useful. I was able to spend a lot of time learning the new layout, studying the mechanics, developing, testing and perfecting tactics for taking camps and smaller objectives on my own. It reminded me strongly of happy days spent scouting and clearing orc camps in the snows of Velious a decade and more ago.

It was, in other words, jolly good solo PvE. World vs World it paramountly was not.

Everyone seemed somewhat taken aback by the changes. Anet had chosen to trial the Desert Borderlands only in small, closed beta tests, before an invited audience. Although there was no NDA, surprisingly little information had filtered out. I tried to follow the discussion but, really, there wasn't one.

When the new maps and their significantly different mechanics finally arrived the reaction was hostile. Voices raised in favor were few and often qualified. The more, the most, common reaction was denial. These aren't the maps we want. We never asked for them. We're not going to use them.

And people left. For once, there was much else to do. A whole new expansion's worth. In retrospect, launching the new version of WvW at the same time as a large tranche of PvE progression, new sPvP content and the long-awaited (or dreaded) introduction of highly competitive raiding was not the cleverest of timing.

Oh, come on! Now you're just trolling.

Absolutely no-one who wasn't already playing WvW paid the changes even the slightest attention. Why would they? They were way down at the end of a long shopping list of far more interesting items, to be gotten to sometime, never.

Among the committed WvW core there was mostly consternation. There are people who only play WvW. They could hardly avoid the changes, although most wished they could and many tried. Some soldiered on but this was the demographic most disturbed by the upheaval.

We had players whose entire game-life revolved around sitting in keeps and towers watching for invaders. Every day. For hours. Overnight their entire purpose was removed. There were no invaders, not any more.

We had players who spent their mornings or afternoons building and maintaining siege, running supply and fortifying structures. Now no siege was needed and structures fortified themselves. Those players, for years among the most committed and appreciated, found themselves out of a job.

Most WvW players, however, also play other game modes. For them it was a very simple choice. They just gave up coming to the Borderlands at all.

Why would they? They didn't like the new maps, which were confusing, difficult to navigate, clearly designed with flight in mind and yet forbidden. The maps were empty so there was no-one to fight. Anyone who wanted fights was in EBG.

You want big fights? This is big fights.

The rest, which was almost everyone, was in Verdant Brink or Auric Basin, complaining about the grind or gosh-wowing about gliding or pushing through the story. Reports began to surface about the amazing final battle in Dragon's Stand, possibly the best large-scale event ANet had ever done and after that came the first Raid and of course there was Halloween and Wintersday, the two biggest holidays of Tyria's year and then the big money sPvP tournament started...

Well, with all that going on, no-one cared about WvW any more. The maps were horrible, no-one understood them, commanders didn't want to run them, and anyway the scoring system was as broken as it had always been so what was the point? WvW was as near to dead as it could be without actually being buried and forgotten.

Cue graphics: a gnarled, grasping hand thrusts up through the fresh-dug earth, clutching at a lowering, storm-filled sky. Three months on and the corpse begins to stir.

This last week or two has seen more activity than any time since before HoT landed. We had commanders with followings on three maps at once over the weekend. There have been big battles over keeps on home BLs. And this isn't just on Yaks Bend. I spent fifty minutes with an EBay commander last week, trying to take a single heavily-defended tower from Maguuma (and how good was it to be fighting Maguuma again? Boy, I've missed them).

I taunt you with my unplayable Tengu!

Gradually, very slowly, as people finish up their initial goals in the new maps and the last of the new car smell fades from the expansion, the WvW softcore is drifting back. Meanwhile the hardcore, particularly the command structure, has acclimatized. Commanders actually know how to lead a zerg from Impassive Rampart to Fire Keep without falling in the lava lake now. Players are beginning to get an inkling of how the Shrine buffs can change tactics, of when it's advisable to complete or counter the Oasis event, of where to place siege so it actually hits something.

It's been a steep learning curve and plenty have fallen off. Finally, though, some have made it to the top and others have picked themselves up and started to climb again. Just in time for today's Winter 2016 Quarterly Update to shake the ladder and send everyone flying in all directions.

Later today we'll get the first big, new content update since Heart of Thorns. It includes a major revamp to The Shatterer event, complete with a full set of achievements, the addition of gliding to all original open-world maps, the Lunar New Year holiday event and a bunch of smaller tweaks and changes.

It also includes some significant changes to the mechanics of WvW, almost all of which have been, perhaps for the first time in the history of the game, very warmly received by the people who actually play that game mode. Structures will still update automatically but only if the dolyaks get in, bringing purpose back to roaming and scouting. Player kills will increment war score, making skirmishing purposeful.

Last one to the Tower buys the drinks!

Most welcomed of all, only one opposing player will rally off the death of an opponent, down from five, and fully dead players will have to wait until combat around them has ended before they can expect to be rezzed. Those changes should significantly impact the ability of large, loose zergs to overpower smaller, more disciplined groups. Weight of numbers will still tell, but not in the overwhelming way it has until now.

Or so it's hoped. As always there may be unforeseen and unintended consequences. At the very least, though, these appear to be changes made in response to genuine concerns expressed by players who play WvW, not whipped up on the back of an envelope and dropped in on a whim to the mystification of all.

How long it will be before the full WvW revamp ANet aren't saying. What the game will look like after it comes, well they're not talking about that either. Rumor has it that Worlds themselves will be going away in favor of some as yet ill-explained Guild-based structure.

I had thought that, if that worst-case scenario did come true, the end of Yaks Bend would probably mean the end of WvW for me but, yet again, HoT threw me a swerve. In preparation for the changes to Guilds I joined a very large WvW focused guild, one that's synonomous with WvW on Yaks Bend and has been since the day the server opened.

It's a guild with absolute server loyalty, a guild that has never transferred servers and will never transfer servers. If ANet cut Yaks Bend away from under us, we will be Yaks Bend. In the meantime, the fight goes on. For The Yak! whatever the rules, whatever the map!