It's become increasingly clear that ANet have lost touch with the original philosophy behind GW2. Heart of Thorns offers none of the heart and soul present in the base game, instead replacing it with grindy mechanics and gimmicks to sink players' time into rather shallow content.
This isn't to say GW2: HoT is all bad, however. The level design is, as always, gorgeous, and they'veIt's become increasingly clear that ANet have lost touch with the original philosophy behind GW2. Heart of Thorns offers none of the heart and soul present in the base game, instead replacing it with grindy mechanics and gimmicks to sink players' time into rather shallow content.
This isn't to say GW2: HoT is all bad, however. The level design is, as always, gorgeous, and they've continued the painterly art style from the original game. The result are some very compelling visuals in the new game zones. However, the layout can make zones feel smaller than they are. There are no more wide-open spaces to roam, and zones sometimes feel claustrophic as a result.
The visuals have been coupled with absolutely solid sound design. New skills and enemies look and sound fantastic, and the voice acting through the story is great as well. The score is absolutely wonderful. For this I'll give them credit: they certainly know how to make the game look appealing.
The combat as well feels great. Enemies are more difficult, without lazily just upleveling and reskinning mobs as you'll find in most other MMOs. This requires greater skill on the part of the player to take down mobs, especially veteran and champion enemies. No more mindlessly pressing "1" until everything is dead. Heart of Thorns demands you understand your class and your build, and for this I commend the game designers.
However, no amount of visuals or even smart mob design can hide the fact that core gameplay mechanics that made the base came so refreshing have been critically altered. Make no mistake: HoT feels nothing like vanilla GW2. The first instance you'll run into this new design choice is when you begin to experiment with your class's new elite specialization. You'll find that to fully unluck the spec line, you'll have to accrue a total of 400 "hero points" spread throughout the new zones. Hero points throughout Tyria work as well, but its the expansion points that you'll be scratching your head over. To unluck most hero challenges, in other words, to even approach the challenge, you'll need a corresponding "Mastery" skill. Mastery skills are the new way ArenaNet seems to have chosen to gate content, and its a rabbit hole I hope we don't go any further down.
Mastery points essentially work to gate content via "hard gating" mechanics like walls, death traps, and otherwise locking areas of each zone in otherwise inaccessible locations. Mastery points work like old skill points, ie they appear on the map to be interacted with to acquire. However, many of these points are also gated behind other Mastery skills. The end result is that you'll be running around every map trying to pick up whichever mastery and hero points you are able, then grinding exp to level up new masteries. There are Mastery points in the beginning expansion zone, ones that you'll encounter almost immediately after stepping through the portal from Silverwastes that you'll initially have no idea what to do with. The whole experience feels rather poorly designed, and nowhere on the map is it explained what skills you need to reach which point. Ultimately it makes for an incredibly confusing and frustrating experience.
These gating mechanics wouldn't even be so bad, had they been properly explained in-game, if it weren't for the massive exp grind involved. The Mastery system are essentially new levels, and you'll gain new mastery levels in order to allocate mastery points after leveling up in the traditional manner. However, the entire Maguuma Mastery tree requires a very large amount of exp which can't be gained anywhere else than in the expansion zones. With only four zones available you're going to find yourself repeating the same point defense or escort events over and over again. This is especially troublesome for story advancement, requiring long breaks of repetitive grinding between story instances. Ultimately it kills immersion and I can't help but feel the arbitrarily high exp requirement was simply ArenaNet's way of stretching out content.
You'll also find that content is no longer fully soloable. Certain hero point challenges involve killing champion mobs with a time limit. Grouping does occur naturally in GW2, but its still frustrating to wait for a PUG to show up. Its also troubling thinking about leveling alts after the zones begin to empty of players. Full solo-ability was a great feature of the base game, so why remove it?
All-in-all, GW2: HoT feels like a classic case of "if its not broken, don't fix it" where ArenaNet seems to have tried reinventing the wheel in an already successful game. The content gating feels out of place in a game that pioneered open world exploration and a "do whatever you want" gameplay style. It's not that Heart of Thorns is bad, its just that many of the design decisions they implemented don't seem to fit the base game, leaving a feeling that this expansion hasn't been an effective extension of the Guild Wars franchise.… Expand
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