Adventuring Forth

[Karizee]

Adventuring Forth

by Byron Miller on July 16, 2015


Hi, I’m Byron Miller, and I’m here to showcase Adventures, a brand-new style of content coming in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™. Adventures are small, fast-paced, single-adventurer events that challenge you to master a wide variety of skills in a race against the clock. What’s more, adventures are custom-built with leaderboards that allow you to compete against your friends and guildmates for bragging rights.


Where We Were

In the early, conceptual phases of Adventures design, we examined some of our more static content types—things like skill challenges, jumping puzzles, and renown regions—in an effort to determine where they were successful and where we thought they could be improved. We felt that these types of content lacked replay value, had limited ties to the game world and its story, and didn’t do enough to encourage social interaction. Our open-world event structure didn’t make it clear which activities were available to participate in when events weren’t running, which frequently left our world in a state where there were either active events to do or seemingly nothing to do.

Adventures are our answer to these problems. Each Adventure showcases a seemingly simple path to victory that requires strategy, practice, and mastery in order to excel and ultimately achieve success.


Where We Want to Be

Adventures are an avenue for you to hone a variety of different skills. Participation in Adventures utilizes our Mastery systems, alongside player skills and transformations, to provide diverse experiences and challenges. A great example of this is our Shooting Gallery Adventure in Verdant Brink.

A Pact ship carrying many human nobles has crashed in the Maguuma Jungle. Survivors, frightened by the thought of being stranded in the jungle, have made makeshift target dummies out of their spare clothes and are practicing their accuracy using discarded Pact rifles. Grab a gun, and show these nobles a thing or two about marksmanship!

The premise of this Adventure is simple—you have a short amount of time to shoot as many targets as you can before the nobles’ shoddy craftsmanship begins to show and the target dummies degrade. You’re given a rifle with a few shots left, and you can collect additional ammunition that’s strewn about the area. Additionally, the nobles will give you ammunition as a reward for accuracy and prowess.

However, the area isn’t exactly easy to navigate, and there are target dummies all over the place. Not only will you have to recognize the pattern in which they appear, but as your score increases, more and more dummies activate, forcing you to make split-second decisions about which targets to shoot and which targets to leave behind.

Knowing where and when to pick up ammo, where the speed-boosting mushrooms are located, where your next target is likely to be, and even when you can take several shots in a row without having to move will all help you earn a gold rating in this Adventure. We’ve designed every Adventure around learning the skills necessary to perfect them, building replay into the core of the activity.





Core Design

There are certain design concepts that are critical to the Adventure experience. Most importantly, when you’re participating in an Adventure, you should be the master of your own destiny. This means that no other player should have a direct impact on your success or failure. Any Adventure that involves combat with monsters has been instanced, and where there are Adventures in the open world, we’ve ensured that you will never have to compete with other players for resources or objectives.

Additionally, we’ve been keen on reducing unpredictable randomness in our Adventures. Where something may seem random at first, we encourage you to pay closer attention to the underlying patterns and systems with which you are engaging.

Finally, we believe that rapid iteration, including the ability to quit and restart quickly, is another key aspect of the Adventure experience. If, for whatever reason, you want to restart an Adventure early, you can close out your Adventure and hit the restart button to be teleported back to the beginning of the Adventure. We understand that if you’re trying to earn a place on the leaderboard where execution is key and every second counts, the downtime between attempts should be as short as possible.

As you progress through outposts and event content in the world, more Adventures will open up. This means that when you or other players clean up events in an area, there will still be readily available, on-demand content to experience, regardless of the current state of the open world.


Leaderboards

Because Adventures are about mastering the game, it was natural to allow you to showcase your skill through a competitive system. Each and every Adventure in the world has its own leaderboard, allowing you to compare your performance with those of your friends and your guildmates and encouraging social interaction.

In addition to bragging rights, leaderboards will also provide you with sweet rewards. Each leaderboard can yield a daily participation reward, but the meat of the loot is at the top. Each board has three tiers—think gold, silver, and bronze—that require a certain minimum score or maximum time to enter. Upon entry in those prestigious tiers, you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.

Happy adventuring!


https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/adventuring-forth/

[Kelimbror]

Interesting concept, but I'm not sure making everything a time trial is the way to go. I personally don't like time trials, so I don't know that the leaderboard/competitive function of this is really appealing. Time trials can completely ruin content as a clock ticking down ensures that any mistakes mean there's no point in continuing. That sort of pass/fail mechanism undermines the actual enjoyment of content from a design perspective.

Now, if these are actually short enough and easily repeatable like Mad Kings Clocktower, then perhaps it will mitigate all of the negative effects of this type of design. I think everything has its place and this is no exception. Some jumping puzzles are relaxed and you can take your time and others, like the Griffin Rook or w/e make you rush it a little bit more. Variety is good.

I'll just have to see how this pans out.

[zito]

I did an adventure where you just collected parts for 30 seconds

It wasn't really interesting or enjoyable. It was like the most generic bland heart quest we have but on a timer

All it was, was avoiding vines

[Fencers]

Kinda feel this is like a worst version of Rift's Instant Adventures.

[Kelimbror]

I did an adventure where you just collected parts for 30 seconds

It wasn't really interesting or enjoyable. It was like the most generic bland heart quest we have but on a timer

All it was, was avoiding vines

You did it on a beta event? If so, this sounds like the worst feature ever. I'd rather have more jumping puzzles and regular world events than this. Add time records and leaderboards to jumping puzzles for all I care, but don't try to make the most rudimentary quests into E-sports. That's just idiotic.

[zito]

Yea I'm pretty sure Anet is doing what Anet does which is overselling something.

Adventures are most likely going to be boring heart quests and hard PvE content will end up like dungeons. zerg dps

[Svifnymr]

timed minigames/ events/ heart quests, meh. I'm not competitive so don't care about my time, so we'll see if any of them are fun when done.