As Guild Wars 2 continues to refine its new annual expansion cycle, today's major update adds its first raid in over 5 years

pcgamer.com:

Last year, Guild Wars 2 switched to a new annual expansion cycle—swapping out the sporadic expansions of old for more regular, smaller releases. Expansions now launch with two open world maps and a handful of new features, and then gets filled in across the rest of the year through major quarterly updates.

The first of this new style of expansion, last year's Secrets of the Obscure, suffered from being ArenaNet's first attempt at working to this scale—attempting to cram too much story into too little space, with later updates suffering for it. This year's expansion, Janthir Wilds, is a clear attempt to evolve and adapt—to take what the studio learned and to move forward with something that better fits the new structure.

So far it's mostly been a success. But the big test of this year's expansion happens today, with the release of its first quarterly update, Godspawn. Instead of expanding the world map, it adds the game's first raid in over five years.

This is something of a gamble. Part of the reason it's been so long since the studio last released a new raid wing is that the game's playerbase tends to skew more casual. You'll find plenty of people pottering around open world maps completing meta events and hunting for achievements. But the raid LFG menu tends to be much quieter.

ArenaNet's solution here is twofold. First, the normal mode, which launches today, is designed to be on the easier end of the difficulty scale—an attempt to bridge the gap between two very different sets of the game's playerbase. Similar to the more recent Strike missions—shortform boss encounters with some raid-lite mechanics—the studio then plans to add challenge modes for all bosses in a future update, as well as a legendary mode for the final boss. This latter difficulty sounds similar in scope to the legendary version of the recent Temple of Febe Strike mission—an encounter that took the game's top team nine whole days to finally defeat.

Secondly, the map and bosses of the new raid are