Guild Wars 2 Game Director Josh Davis has a brand new studio update Dev blog all about what we can expect from Guild Wars 2 in 2023, including a big content release shift.
When it comes to development strategies, ANet will continue to involve the community. “Since 2021, we’ve put a renewed emphasis on developing Guild Wars 2 with a player-centric approach, where step one in our development process is to seek out and understand the problems and frustrations that MMO players face.” They will be continuing work on quality of life improvements and giving some love to systems that may be a little underbaked or could use a revisit.
This long update is forward-looking, for the most part. in the next phase, when it comes to expansions, the team will pivot to a strategy that involves releasing several smaller, lower-priced expansions more frequently, instead of one huge expansion every few years. With the new release cadence and development strategy, they will plan to release additional content for the expansions via quarterly updates, so that new releases will happen more consistently.
So how will this look? The first release will kick off a new story arc, and also include two new open-world maps, two Strike Missions, rewards, and gameplay and combat updates. After this, the quarterly updates will add another map, new dungeon, more story chapters, challenge modes for Strike Missions, more rewards, and additional content for the systems they introduce. Over the course of a year, there will be four scheduled big updates, and then when that's done, we can expect a brand new expansion soon afterwards.
First though, a new End of Dragons chapter is coming. On February 28th, Guild Wars 2 will get new content that seems to be a way for the team to move towards their new model.
“With familiar allies like Detective Rama and his hat at your side, you’ll travel to a new location in Cantha and come face-to-face with a deadly foe that resides deep within the Jade Sea. That storyline will conclude a few months later with an update that introduces additional playable space to the map, adds meta-events and boss encounters, and lays the groundwork for future to-be-announced adventures.”
In the first half of the year, expect the DirectX 11 transition to complete, returning festival and holiday events, bonuses, and more. There’s even an outline of a roadmap.
- February 14: Profession Balance Update, WvW Objective Reward Scaling, Chromium Embedded Framework Upgrade
- February 28: New Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons Map and Story Content, Soo-Won Legendary Variant
- March 28: Super Adventure Festival
- April 18: DX11 Upgrade Complete
- May 2: Profession Balance Update
