Welcome to the Weekly Map Recap, a series where we look back at one map in the game each week. We’ll look with a critical eye at how each map represents its theme, proves faithful to its lore, and implements its design. We’ll see how effective its gameplay is, whether the art holds up, and the forecast for the map’s long term retention. With 52 maps to date, it’ll be quite the journey!

Links to the previous entries in a reply at the bottom!

Icebrood Saga Primer

Living World Season 4, by all accounts, was intended to be the end of live service support for Guild Wars 2. Other Arenanet projects were spinning up, and support for GW2 was intended to enter a quieter phase.

That didn’t come to pass, of course. Disaster struck at the studio when a substantial portion of its staff were let go following the closure of a number of projects (community speculation says three) by Arenanet’s parent company.

What followed was a confusing and alarming time to be a Guild Wars fan (though I’m sure it was similar for the developers themselves). After an extended period of silence with no concrete statement on the future of the game, the studio rented a theater to make their next announcement - something they had only done for expansions in the past.

What they announced was the Icebrood Saga - Living World Season 5. Famously, they touted expansion level features without showing any, although it seems clear from community digging that those seemed to be on the table at one point. We’ve found evidence that new Elite Specializations were even planned for the IBS (which, for the record, was a poorly planned acronym), but later fell by the wayside.

So what did we end up getting in the Icebrood Saga, anyway? Astonishingly, the parts of it that came out before the studio was told to produce End of Dragons are all quite good. The content that we care about for our purposes - the maps - are all really stellar examples of the studio taking everything it’s learned from the past decade of map development and mixing it together.

Just as an example: Bjora Marches has the content density of a Living World Season 3 map, came out in parts like Living World Season 2 maps (which helped content density and quality), and features two major metas (ala LWS4), both of which have the spectacle and rewards of smaller HoT metas. It’s awesome.

On top of that, the team did something really interesting with these maps, which is that they are each different ‘styles’. Grothmar Valley is a relaxed exploration-style festival map, almost like a cross between a vanilla map and Labyrinthine Cliffs. Bjora Marches is more of a PoF map on steroids, with exploration and puzzles galore combined with more solid and rewarding metas. Finally, Drizzlewood Coast captures the kind of ‘full-map meta’ feel of HoT, on top of a ‘PvE WvW’ structure. It really makes one wonder about what the remaining maps would have been like. Perhaps we’ll see implementations of those ideas one day - Arenanet rarely throws things away for good.

So looking forward to the rest of the articles, the Icebrood Saga is interesting partially because it has such solid maps despite its other flaws. We’ll see what they rank starting with Grothmar Valley next time!

----------------------

That's all for today! Next week, we'll kick off the Icebrood Saga with Grothmar Valley

External link →