Deep Dive: Reimagining the battle pass in Guild Wars 2

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as how indie developer Mike Sennott cultivated random elements in the branching narrative of Astronaut: The Best, how the developers of Meet Your Maker avoided crunch by adopting smart production practices, and how the team behind Dead Cells turned the game into a franchise by embracing people-first values.

In this edition, developers from the team on Guild Wars 2 tell us why they took an atypical approach to the design of its battle pass and how they sought to empower the casual player by design.

Hi, we are Chris Casiano, product manager, and Rick Luebbers, lead designer, from the Guild Wars 2 team at ArenaNet. In 2023, we are celebrating the game’s 11th year since release, and along with the launch of our latest expansion, Secrets of the Obscure, we also created a new significant core feature: The Wizard’s Vault. The Wizard’s Vault is a new method of cataloging and participating in our daily and weekly activities across all our game modes. With this overhaul, we aimed to increase player engagement, give players a more rewarding experience from their investment in playing and keep older content fresh. Guild Wars 2 is a sprawling MMORPG that’s been around for over a decade, and it’s important to us to keep all our existing content compelling regardless of when it was released.

The Wizard’s Vault is inspired by battle passes seen elsewhere in our closest MMORPG competitors, with our own ArenaNet spin. We started our design by looking at