Heart of Thorns hits great heights at times, but falls on its face at others.
By Leif Johnson
If you visit the Guild Wars 2 zones that predate the new Heart of Thorns expansion, it’s easy to spot the players who’ve spent the bulk of the last few weeks in the new content. They’re the ones jumping off of cliffs out of habit, fully expecting their Heart of Thorns-specific hang gliders to whisk them over sweeping panoramas and on to glory. But they don’t; they drop with a nasty thump below.
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Above: Watch the Heart of Thorns Launch Trailer.
The Heart of Thorns expansion itself is a little like that. It’s great fun in the right circumstances, but when those circumstances shift a tad from the ideal, it falls a little flat on its face, with increasingly empty zones and the illusion of open-ended horizontal progression.
Gone are the awkward cutscenes where speaking characters faced off as though they were about to brawl in Street Fighter.
If you’ve been on hiatus from Guild Wars 2’s 2012 debut, you’ll notice some improvements immediately as you jump into the expansion’s storyline at level 80. Gone are the awkward cutscenes where speaking characters faced off as though they were about to brawl in Street Fighter; instead, your character speaks aloud to his or her entourage in the normal third-person view. It’s a nice touch, as it results in a story experience that’s pleasingly like a third-person action gam. Three years have honed developer ArenaNet’s storytelling skills, as the new tale avoids the chummy narrative of the original in favor of a darker direction in which the bulk of the leafy Sylvari race live in thrall to their creator, the dragon Mordremoth. This leads to tension in the lore that even extends to Sylvari player characters. It’s a good premise and generally entertaining, but at times it feels rushed, leaving many unanswered questions in its wake.
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Above: Everything you need to know about Heart of Thorns.
It’s an ambitious design, although it doesn’t take long to feel the ways in which it clashes with existing methods of navigation.
It helps that the stage for these scenes is so dang gorgeous. All of the action in Heart of Thorns takes place across four zones in the Maguuma Jungle, and the aesthetics involved are such that I must have stopped to simply drink in the scenery at least thirty times. The music enhances the artistry further, as in-house composers Leif Chappelle and Maclaine Diemer show here that they’re more than capable of picking up where original composer Jeremy Soule left off. Taken together, they’re the perfect backdrop for the verticality of the new zones. Action unfolds everywhere from the forest floor and the middle tangles to the upper canopy, where the ruins of the allied fleet lies in desolation following an attack by Mordremoth in the wake of the final living story update before the expansion. It’s an ambitious design, although it doesn’t take long to feel the ways in which it clashes with existing methods of navigation.
Thankfully, there are new methods of navigating these expanses, and that’s where the Mastery system comes in. It replaces the traditional leveling bar with one that focuses on leveling select skills such as hang-gliding, mushroom-jumping, and learning the languages of Maguuma’s homegrown races, which provides a reason to revisit areas later. Jumping on mushrooms and talking with frogs is cool and all, but it’s the glider that’s king in this regard. It’s a smart way of introducing an airborne mode of travel that avoids the content-skipping traps of flying mounts. You have to be smart about where you use your glider, and thus, it mixes strategy with convenience.
The trouble with Masteries is that it’s sometimes frustrating to scrounge up the XP needed to fully unlock them. The new zones don’t have any traditional quests; instead, you get the lion’s share of Mastery XP from the numerous dynamic event chains unfolding throughout each region. These are tough events, full of charging and swarming enemies that often make soloing impossible, which wasn’t a problem just a few days ago when Heart of Thorns was brand new and groups were plentiful. Just two weeks in, though, I already often find myself on maps with virtually nothing going on. I’m alone with these swarms. Sometimes a notice pops up saying that I’m invited to join a more populated map (with an XP boost, to boot), but oddly enough, it’s occasionally almost as unpopulated.
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Heart of Thrones — Expansion Pack Screens
Heart of Thrones — Expansion Pack Screens
Heart of Thrones — Expansion Pack Screens
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Heart of Thrones — Expansion Pack Screens
Heart of Thrones — Expansion Pack Screens
Heart of Thrones — Expansion Pack Screens
Heart of Thrones — Expansion Pack Screens
Heart of Thrones — Expansion Pack Screens
I don’t think it’s an issue of interest in the expansion; it likely has more to do with something off about the way the game decides when it needs more instances of a map. After all, it’s always possible to find busy groups through the Group Finder (who’ve probably filled their map instance to the brim), but if the other maps are looking like this so soon after launch, I worry about what they’ll look like in a few weeks. It’s especially alarming in light of the fact that this is what passes for new group PvE content in the absence of any new five-man dungeons (although new 10-man raids will be out later this year).
There’s no indication that you need certain masteries to advance into particular story missions.
Still worse, there’s no indication that you need certain masteries to advance into particular story missions. You’re free to focus on leveling any single one you choose, yes, but at least twice I discovered I would have been able to jump into the next story mission by unlocking a mastery that I already would have completed with the XP I was pumping into another one. After that, the only option is to grind more daily events.
One easy way of lessening that pain, I found, was to juggle the Mastery leveling between my Warrior and Ranger characters. One great thing about Mastery points is that they’re account-wide, which makes leveling alts far less painful. Leveling alts is particularly appealing in Heart of Thorns actually, since each class comes with new “elite specializations” that unlock new weapons and alternative playstyles. The catch? They can only be unlocked by completing all the base class’s skills with hero points. The novelty of their designs usually make them worth trying out like in the case of the Guardian’s metamorphosis into a longbow-wielding Dragonhunter with traps that are arguably more effective than a Ranger’s. However, it fails spectacularly in the case of the Warrior’s humdrum Berserker specialization, which seems merely useful for an occasional damage boost at best.
But if you want an entirely new start with a class? That’s where the versatile new Revenant comes in, which draws on the powers of four legends from Tyria’s past in order to switch between a focus on tanking, healing, or damage dealing within seconds. It’s a flashy class, full of animations like slamming down a hammer to pave a stone road, but I also discovered with my couple of hours with it at around level 35 (after a boost) that it didn’t feel terribly different from other classes. I liked this, to my surprise. It means the class is just another strong alternative rather than the hot thing of the hour that quickly oversaturates the population.
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Two weeks on, there were never enough people playing it for me to truly see it in action.
A selection of group content rounds off Heart of Thorns’ features, such as an enjoyable new “Stronghold” map that’s inspired by MOBAs. There’s also a sprawling, beautiful new world-versus-world battleground called the Desert Borderlands that grants powerful bonuses for holding keeps, but two weeks on, there were never enough people playing it for me to truly see it in action. (I suspect, or hope, that this is merely because everyone’s still working on the core Maguuma content.) The majestic new guild halls also mark a welcome social addition, but they suffer from prohibitively high costs for smaller guilds in order to get the full use out of associated features like the new Scribe tradeskill.
Despite my reservations, I’ve had a lot of fun with Heart of Thorns and I’ll continue to. It’s an ambitious expansion that takes some risks at a time when the genre needs them most, and if ArenaNet’s past content schedule serves as any indication, it’s likely to continue to grow and expand, much like the jungle it depicts.
In an age when too many MMORPGs rely on the same old formula, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns does a commendable job of evolving the gameplay that’s made it so popular over the years. When it stumbles, it’s in its ostensibly open-ended mastery progression that’s more set in stone than it seems, and in its heavy group and dynamic event focus that doesn’t always jive with empty maps. Even so, it does a good job of overcoming these shortcomings with an entertaining story, a fun new class, generally attractive elite specializations, and a new vertical focus on exploration.
