Guild Wars 2 arrives on Epic Games Store: A guide for new and returning adventurers
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بحلول Dave Tach, Contributor
First published by NCSoft in 2012, Guild Wars 2 has arrived with more than a decade of adventure and narrative available at launch. Its mountain of content—including the base game and five significant expansions—is tantalizing but maybe even a little overwhelming to newcomers. With so much on offer, where do you start?
That’s just one of the many questions we asked the folks behind Guild Wars 2, hoping to ease new and even returning players into the venerated online world. After all, who knows the game better than those who’ve been building it from the beginning?
So in this Guild Wars 2 story, we’ll walk you through what it’s like day-to-day and teach you what you should know about every expansion. By the time you're done reading, you’ll understand how the game works and where you can fit in.
Guild Wars 2 every day
Since its inception, Guild Wars 2 has been about telling an evolving story that responds to the players experiencing it. Players can feel that in the game’s update cadence, which alternates between paid expansions and periods of unfolding narrative in-between. But what does it feel like to play day-to-day?
“We want Guild Wars 2 to feel like a world where there’s always something new to experience,” Lis Cardy, Head of Marketing, told the Epic Game Store. “Between the major updates for expansions, skill and balance updates, PvP seasons, WvW matchups, and festival events, there’s rarely a week where something new isn’t starting. We’re also constantly working on and putting out quality-of-life improvements that can help the world feel fresh and exciting to even the most veteran of players.”
In other words, Guild Wars 2 is always serving dishes large and small to its players. And that brings us to the main courses: expansions.
Heart of Thorns
Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns was the MMORPG’s first expansion. Released in 2015, it offered ArenaNet the opportunity to make big evolutions on the base game. And perhaps none was as big a rethink as the introduction of specializations.
“One example of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns iterating on a system to improve it was the replacement of trait lines with specializations—a change that we made for the expansion itself but that affected the game for all players regardless of expansion ownership,” Cardy said. “Trait lines and specializations are both parts of a player’s build that allow them to customize their playstyle, but the specialization system is more streamlined and user-friendly."
The expansion’s tentpole feature was the addition of raids and player-versus-player experiences. Those were centered on the game’s expanded geography as well as the new Mastery system, which allowed players to effectively specialize.
“A core element of the new maps in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns was the way they were built to work with the Mastery system that we also introduced in that expansion," Cardy said. "We created maps that offered new opportunities for traversal—huge canyons to glide over, tall spires you’d need to catch an updraft to reach, secret passages between distant locations — and built an account-wide progression system that introduced those new ways to interact with the world."
Finally, Heart of Thorns added raids to the mix, intricately built into the ever-expanding map.
“Raids represent the ultimate team challenge in Guild Wars 2, requiring advanced tactics and coordination between 10 players. We also did an extensive rework of our Fractals of the Mists, which are like bite-sized dungeons for parties of up to 5 players, to make them more appealing as a sort of intermediate challenge on the way to raids. And the maps we introduced in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns each has a ‘meta,’ a series of events that funnel players toward an epic map-wide finale for large groups.”
Cardy said that the developers are still learning from and iterating on PvP aspects of Guild Wars 2 that date back to this expansion, which is influencing the current development of a new PvP mode.
Path of Fire
Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire, released in 2017, brought mounts into the game. And you can learn a lot about Guild Wars 2 and its developer’s philosophy by the way they introduced these mounts.
“When we started designing mounts,” Cardy said, “we wanted to make sure that they were more than just a speed boost to move players from Point A to Point B more quickly—that’s pretty much the opposite of the entire philosophy of Guild Wars 2.
“One way we leaned into that was by exploring different movement styles and mechanics for each mount. For example, the Springer has a high jump, the Skimmer glides over water and hazardous terrain and the Jackal can teleport short distances. Like the Masteries that we introduced in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, these mounts came out alongside maps that were essentially built to take advantage of their movement, with adventures and races designed with the mounts in mind.”
End of Dragons
Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons marked the game’s third expansion, and it continued the game's gradual iteration. A great example are the mounts that were introduced in Path of Fire, which gave rise to a co-op mount called the Siege Turtle with End of Dragons.
“Iterating on what’s come before is, as you’ve noticed, a big part of our approach,” Cardy said. “The response to mounts in Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire was very positive, and we wanted to continue to see what we could do with the system in Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons. The Siege Turtle is a large mount with a momentum element to its movement, so it has a very distinct feel as you’re riding it around—and that’s before you start using the Jump Jets to gain altitude! Beyond its distinctive movement, though, we also experimented by making the Siege Turtle a two-player mount. Once a player summons their Siege Turtle, a ‘passenger’ can join them to manage cannons while the primary player pilots the Turtle.”
End of Dragons also brought a bit of “non-combat activity,” as Cardy put it, in the form of fishing holes.
Secrets of the Obscure
Released in 2023, Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure marked the conclusion of the End of Dragons saga that began way back in 2015 with Heart of Thorns.
Each Guild Wars 2 expansion had brought new areas to the game’s map, but Secrets of the Obscure did something new and vertical.
“Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure took us to two new places: high in the sky, and another world,” Cardy said. “Going above Tyria to Wizard’s Ascent and Amnytas was fun for us. Not only were we exploring mysteries going back to the original Guild Wars with its mysterious Wizard’s Tower, but we got to create a palatial new architecture style and experiment with what it would look like for the tower’s magic to go haywire and alter its surroundings."
Secrets of the Obscure didn’t simply wrap up a saga. It also introduced a new way for the narrative content to unfold—one that continues today, focused on releasing more content more regularly.
“One way we did that was by breaking the expansion story into pieces—about half of it goes live on the initial launch day, and additional story chapters become available over the course of three more releases (included in the base cost of the expansion) which come out every 3-4 months,” Cardy said. “Those story chapters are accompanied by other additions…which means that new things to do and experience are coming into the game every few months.”
Janthir Wilds
Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds is the game’s current state of the art, and it’s the first installment that Epic Games Store players will experience playing out in real time.
Janthir Wilds also includes some fun side activities that harken back to the fishing escapades introduced in End of Dragons: Homesteads.
“With homesteads,” Cardy said, “one of the things we were most excited about was giving players a chance to show off their creativity with what they made. We tried to place as few restrictions as possible on what players could do, and provide robust placement tools. The response has been incredible—players have built jumping puzzles, dark fortresses, hobbit holes, and more.”
Getting started in Guild Wars 2
With so much to do and so much to see, we asked Cardy for any advice for new players just jumping in from the Epic Games Store platform.
“My first piece of advice to new players is always to take your time!” Cardy said.
Guild Wars 2 wasn’t built in a day, and it doesn’t need to be played in a year—or even sequentially. In short, step in, feel it out, and do what feels right.
“Speaking very practically, our expansions aren’t locked in sequential order, which means that if you’re brand-new and just bought Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds, you have the option to use the Level-80 boost that comes with the expansion to immediately have a max-level character and dive directly into the new story, but I don’t know that that’s going to be the right approach for everyone. For a lot of folks, I think it’s worthwhile to take some time to get to learn the game and level up normally—all the max level content will still be there when you’re ready for it.”
Guild Wars 2 and its expansions are available now in the Epic Games Store.