In just under 2 months, the first expansion of Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns will be released. This introduces raids – and they are meant to firmly challenge players.
Running Against a Wall
In an interview with mmorpg.com, two developers (Colin Johanson and Mike O’Brien) discussed their ideas about the raids and other content of Heart of Thorns in more detail.
When asked what players could expect regarding the difficulty of the raids, the response was: “Essentially, our goal for your first visit is quite simple. You should be thoroughly defeated. You should leave the instance asking questions like: What can we improve? How should we redistribute our traits?”
But even after the initial conflicts, defeating the enemies should not be a piece of cake. “When you defeat the first boss, it should only be by the skin of your teeth. And then this learning process repeats with the second boss. Just when you finally ‘clear’ a raid, we want to introduce a new one already.” That this is a difficult endeavor in practice is probably clear to the developers as well. So far, no game studio has been able to produce content faster than players can manage it – at least not without artificially raising the difficulty.
Whether it will ultimately play out as ArenaNet intends remains to be seen. The right goals are definitely in place.
