So, I announced to Team Spode today that I am not leaving the zones of the new expansion, maybe ever, but at least not until I get my own little baby dragon to flit around with.
Guild Wars 2 has always had a bizarre focus on movement. Jumping puzzles are a core gameplay element. Each new expansion seems to bring a new mount that must be used to navigate through the zones. There’s the raptors, the rolling beetles, the griffons, the springers, the skimmers, the skiffs, the warclaws, and introduced with Living World Season 4, the skyscales. Optional until now, required by the latest expansion, Secrets of the Obscure.
Arena.net isn’t leaving players high and dry, though — you get a rental skyscale after you complete the expansion’s intro quest, “Hell Breaks Loose”. That quest introduces you to the final boss of the expansion as he stalks you through a plane of Hell in a tense game of hide and seek, only to be yoinked by an old friend into the skylost environs of the Astral Ward and the Wizard’s Court.
It’s up to Tyria’s famed Commander — me — to set things right.
Since I haven’t played many of the expansion storylines or living world episodes, it’s always a little jarring to be told of all my famous deeds (killing gods! ending the dragon cycle! saving the world so many times!) when I haven’t actually done any of these things. It’s real imposter syndrome in the game. (yup, that was me. heheh. saved you all.)
Like any good Commander, I let my minions do all the work, and I just show up at the end to take the credit.
Anyway. Due to being a lightweight in GW2, I don’t have many of the mounts. I’d started Living World Season 4 in order to get the skyscale, but then the expansion happened, and Jovan and Calrain were telling me how much easier it was to get a skyscale in the new expansion, and so I left LW4 unfinished (as usual) and started in again in a new place.
The lands here are covered with rifts. Interplanar holes torn in reality which lead straight to Hell, and its our job to close them. If this maybe sounds a little bit like the rifts in the MMO called Rift, well, yeah. Although Rift did them better. Nonetheless, it’s the same deal. A rift opens up, demons pour out, you kill the demons, sometimes a boss comes, you kill the boss, close the rift, and you’re done.
In typical GW2 fashion, these events can spread throughout the zone, building and building until an epic finale. We did one of those last night, or rather, Team Spode did them as I mostly tried to grab the waypoints and keep up. I’d only started the expansion that day, and I hadn’t been able to explore everything in that time.
So anyway. No skyscale pictures. I’ll save those until I have my own. My rental buddy is nice enough, but it’s not mine.
