If you have read my previous articles, then you are probably familiar with the fact that through this series of articles I am trying to share my experiences and opinions as a new Guild Wars 2 player who spent far too long playing World of Warcraft. If you haven't read them, you definitely should, because in them I wrote about how it took me several attempts and many years to stop looking for World of Warcraft inside Guild Wars 2.
In the second one, I had already gone much further. I finished the core game and the Heart of Thorns expansion, stepped into fractals and raids, started collecting Ascended gear and, most importantly, found a community that helped me finally make sense of everything that until then had looked like an unrelated mass of systems.
What does progressing in Guild Wars 2 actually mean?
That question sounds almost ridiculous for an MMORPG. I have played this genre long enough that I should know the answer. The level gets higher, the gear gets better, damage increases, raids, dungeons… After that comes a new patch, a new season, a new expansion and the entire process starts again.
You reach the cap, find your starting endgame gear, then better gear, then even better gear. One dungeon leads toward another. One raid tier toward the next. Damage slowly increases and you can very easily look at your character and estimate roughly where you are. Even with the horizontal progression that Guild Wars 2 has, that should be it, right?
Guild Wars 2's answer was much less tidy than I expected. Of course, there is a difference between Exotic and Ascended gear. There are builds, optimal stat combinations and content you need to prepare for. But very quickly you realize that the game is not interested in endlessly leading you toward a new tier of gear. Ascended gear showed me for the first time just how used I was to the MMO treadmill.
When I started getting more seriously into fractals, logically I became interested in Ascended gear. That was a part of Guild Wars 2 that was completely understandable to me. I need better gear. Great. Finally, we are speaking a language I know. I started looking at what I was missing, where I could get certain pieces, which stats I wanted and how infusions and Agony Resistance worked. It was a familiar MMORPG feeling.
I am missing something. There is a goal. I am working toward it. But then I realized one fairly important thing. When I finish my Ascended set, there is no new raid tier waiting for me that will make that set useless a few months later. There aren't another five colors of gear above it that I still need to conquer.
Legendary gear is a huge goal, but not because it simply has bigger numbers than Ascended gear. And that made me stop. Because it drastically changes the feeling of the grind. If I spend several weeks working on Ascended gear, I feel like I am making something that belongs to my account long-term. I am not just making a temporary version of my character that lasts until the next big patch. Maybe that sounds like a small thing, but after years of MMORPGs in which you know very well that a large part of your current gear will sooner or later end up at a vendor, the feeling is completely different.
Suddenly, the grind is not a race against the calendar. It is an investment in the account. And Guild Wars 2 is full of exactly those kinds of things. I think I actually got the first real hint of that philosophy much earlier, during Heart of Thorns.
I just didn't know what I was looking at back then. Heart of Maguuma was a huge jump for me compared to Core Tyria.
The maps suddenly became more complicated. More vertical. More uncomfortable. The enemies were more dangerous, and very often I would look at a location on the map and wonder how it was possible that I was practically next to it while having no idea how to get there. Especially Tangled Depths. I think every new Guild Wars 2 player sooner or later has to go through their own little existential crisis in Tangled Depths.
The map says something is ten meters away from you. Reality says you will spend the next fifteen minutes wandering through three tunnels, two caves and some passage you didn't even know existed. At first, that frustrated me. Then I started unlocking Masteries. Gliding improved. New movement possibilities opened up. I started understanding the map. I started recognizing routes. A place I previously couldn't reach suddenly was no longer a problem.
And that is where something interesting happened. My character didn't get ten new levels. I suddenly didn't have twice as much health. I didn't find a sword that deals twice as much damage. But I definitely felt like I had progressed.
The world that had seemed inaccessible to me just a few days earlier was now more open. I hadn't just become stronger. I had become more capable. That is the difference I was only beginning to notice in the first article. Now I understand it much better.
Guild Wars 2 slowly started changing the way I look at progression in an MMORPG altogether. I no longer think only about how much stronger my character is than seven days ago, but about how much more confidently I move through the game, how much better I understand what is happening around me and how things that once seemed completely unreachable now look perfectly normal.
It is a very strange feeling when you come from MMORPGs where progression is almost always clearly drawn out in front of you. There, you have a number that needs to increase, a gear score you need to reach or a raid tier you need to overcome. Guild Wars 2 much more often leaves you to judge for yourself how far you have actually come.
And that is exactly why, at the beginning, I often had the feeling that I wasn't progressing enough.
I would play for several hours, finish several events, do fractals, maybe some raid training, collect a few things I needed and, at the end of the evening, look at my character. The level is still 80. The gear is mostly the same. Damage hasn't suddenly exploded. There is no huge number telling me that today I am 12 percent better than yesterday.
But then I return to content that gave me trouble a few weeks earlier and suddenly realize that I no longer experience it in the same way.
An encounter that previously looked like complete chaos starts becoming much clearer to read. A fractal in which I used to follow others and try to figure out where I was even supposed to stand, I now go through without thinking. A map where I constantly got lost is no longer a labyrinth. When someone in chat mentions a certain event, currency or location, I no longer immediately open Google because I am starting to know what they are talking about.
That is where Guild Wars 2 progression becomes almost invisible until you look back.
The biggest progression often isn't on the character screen
I think that may be the most interesting part of all this to me. Guild Wars 2 very often moves progression from the character to the player.
Raids showed me that better than anything. When I first stepped into them through the training sessions organized by The Waypoint Inn, of course I had an appropriate build and tried to read the basics before we started. But very quickly I realized how little that build means when you don't understand what is happening around you.
During the first few attempts, you watch effects all over the screen, follow the commander tag, try to maintain your rotation and at the same time understand why you just died. After some time, you start recognizing the pattern. You know what is coming. You know where you need to be.
During that period, I didn't get some miraculous piece of gear that solved the problem for me. I simply became a better player.
And that is progression that, in other MMORPGs, was often hidden from me behind gear. Of course knowledge plays a huge role there too, but the gear treadmill very easily gives you the feeling that there is always something else you need to obtain before you are truly ready.
Guild Wars 2 much more often forces me to ask myself whether I am ready. That is a big difference.
When I look today at someone who has been playing Guild Wars 2 for years, I no longer look only at Legendary gear, titles or the number of achievement points. I notice much more how naturally that player moves through content that still requires concentration from me. They know where to go, they know what is worth doing, they recognize the situation before I do and make decisions without that moment of panic that a new player knows very well.
Their biggest advantage often isn't just what they have on their account. It is what they know. And the more I play, the more I like that kind of progression.
I started to stop asking “what is best?”
Another thing Guild Wars 2 changed for me is the way I choose what I am going to do when I log in. Years of playing World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs trained me quite well to look for the optimal path. If I have two hours tonight, what is the most efficient thing to do? Which dungeon gives the best gear? Which daily must I not miss? What will increase my power the most?
In Guild Wars 2, at first I tried to do the same. I looked for the best next step. The problem is that there often isn't one. Or, more precisely, there isn't only one.
One evening I feel like playing fractals and that makes sense because I am working on Ascended gear. Another evening the guild organizes raid training and I go there. The third evening I join a meta event that I hadn't planned on doing at all because I see a commander tag and dozens of players on the map. Sometimes I simply continue the story.
And I increasingly have less of a feeling that I spent my time “wrong.” That was probably the hardest thing for me to accept. The MMORPG player in me constantly wants a checklist. He wants to know what he has to do. Guild Wars 2 much more often asks what I feel like doing today.
Of course, there are optimal farming methods here too, dailies, weeklies and things that are more useful to do than others if you have a specific goal. This is not a game without grind or without efficiency. But the difference I increasingly feel is that the game is not constantly trying to convince me that there is only one correct way to use my time.
For the first time, I don't feel like the race continues without me
This is probably the biggest thing Guild Wars 2 has changed for me compared to other MMORPGs. I don't feel panic when I am not playing. That may sound like a very strange compliment for an online game, but I think many MMO players know exactly what I mean.
There are games where you take a break for a few months and coming back almost feels like returning to work after a long vacation. First, you have to see what changed, which gear is now relevant, what you need to replace, which systems were added and how far behind you actually are compared to the people who never stopped playing.
With Guild Wars 2, so far I don't have that feeling. Of course, a player who played for six months while I was away will have more things, more gold, more experience and probably completed goals that I still need to start. But I don't feel like my character has lost value in the meantime.
What I have built remains. The Ascended gear I collected is still relevant. The knowledge I gained remains. Content I haven't had time to play yet hasn't disappeared just because new content arrived. And that completely changes my relationship with the time I spend in the game. I don't feel like every time I log in I am in a race against someone. Even less against developers who will change the goal in a few months and tell me to do everything again.
That doesn't mean Guild Wars 2 doesn't have huge grinds. It does. You only need to look at what some Legendary goals require and it very quickly becomes clear that ArenaNet definitely knows how to make something that will take dozens or hundreds of hours from you.
But even then, there is a difference. It is a goal that I chose. Not something I have to complete because without it my character will very quickly become unusable. And maybe that one sentence contains the biggest difference between the way I used to look at MMORPG progression and the way I look at it now.
Progression has become more personal to me
When there isn't one huge ladder that everyone has to climb, then what you consider progression starts depending on you. For me, Ascended gear is currently progression because I want to go deeper into fractals. Raids are progression because I want to get better at them. Knowledge is progression because I want to stop depending on the Wiki page every time the game mentions some new system.
For someone else, none of that may be important at all. Their goal may be a Legendary collection. Another player wants to complete the map. A third wants PvP. Someone can spend an evening customizing their character and be completely satisfied. And that is probably the reason why Guild Wars 2 can sometimes be so confusing for new players, something I also wrote about in the previous article. When the game doesn't have one answer to the question “what now?”, then you have to find it yourself. That is a weakness.
But the more I play it, the more I realize that at the same time it is also its biggest strength. Because when you find the answer, it is no longer a goal the game imposed on you. It is your goal. And achieving your own goal always feels different from filling a bar that someone put in front of your face.
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