This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/guildwars2 by /u/Lon-ami on 2024-11-08 18:32:41+00:00.

I’m fine with new storylines and whatnot, but I can’t forget the many secondary storylines we left behind, stories that no longer feel important to tell. The new player experience is kinda outdated as well, and doesn’t really reflect the quality of modern GW2, which leaves a wrong impression in new players more often than not.

The idea is to take the core game, update it to modern standards, and add a few new things here and there. Updates to old content would be free for everyone, and you’d just pay for some of the new extras.

Here’s a few ideas of what this kind of expansion could bring to the table:

• Update the final fight against Zhaitan, turning it into an open world zone built around the elder dragon as a world boss. We didn’t have “moving platform” technology for airships back in 2012, but we do now.
• Expand Central Tyria masteries, giving new players very basic early access to endgame features such as gliding, mounts, fishing, and jade bots.
• Remake the Personal Story, condensing it into an episodic format with no branching paths. The Personal Story would be replayable, and include a hard mode as well. This remake would be a great opportunity to accommodate the introduction of new playable races now and/or in the future.
• Revamp explorable mode dungeons, condensing the different paths into an unified experience. Bonus rewards for vanquising the whole dungeon (cleaning all bosses and enemies), plus an option for hard mode as well. Story mode dungeons would be repurposed as story instances for the Personal Story.
• Updates to core professions, including the missing healing and elite slot skills.
• Repurpose racial skills into “elite professions”, which replace your core profession while equipped. Turning racial skills into new mini-professions would be the best way to provide cultural flavor for each race without disrupting balance. Elite professions would provide a compact experience with little to no customization.
• New playable race, tengu being the best candidate for Personal Story purposes.
• New skin variants for generation one legendary weapons.

Everything would be free for F2P players, except some of the new masteries, elite professions, hard modes, the new playable race, and legendary variants. The core game is also lacking on achievements compared to the rest of the game, and this would be a great opportunity to add lots of new achievements to boost old content engagement.

Release schedule:

• Expansion: Racial story arc (3/10 episodes, 5-6 different branches [one per race]), 3/8 dungeons, updates to core professions, new playable race.
• Patch 1/3: Orders of Tyria story arc (6/10 episodes, 3 different branches [one per order]), 5/8 dungeons, elite professions, Claw Island area expanded and turned into an open world zone.
• Patch 2/3: Forging of the Pact story arc (8/10 episodes), 7/8 dungeons.
• Patch 3/3: Invasion of Orr story arc (10/10 episodes), 8/8 dungeons, Arah story mode turned into an open world zone with Zhaitan as a world boss.

Elite profession ideas:

• Asura: Golemancer, with your own golem suit to drive.
• Charr: Sentinel, charr soldier fantasy.
• Human: Dervish, based on the GW1 profession.
• Norn: Shaman, with spirit form transformations at the core.
• Sylvari: Valiant, sylvari knight fantasy.

There would be no new content per se, the expansion would focus on improving existing vanilla content instead. The new playable race could get its own city and starting zone(s), but it wouldn’t be really necessary as long as its leveling experience is properly accommodated into the updated existing zones.

Opinions? :D

PS: This kind of approach could be applied to the missing second half of The Icebrood Saga as well, I’m pretty sure lot of people would love to see Primordus done justice on its own expansion.