Preview: Without Dragons, Guild Wars 2 Secrets of the Obscure Enters A New Era

mmorpg.com:

I was thoroughly underwhelmed when Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure was first teased/announced. I know the mystery around the Wizard’s Tower has been something players of both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 have been clamoring for; it’s just never really resonated with me. I was also having trouble getting excited about some new mysterious threat we knew nothing about. 

After ten years of the story revolving around my favorite thing, dragons, anything would have a hard time following. Plus, I wasn’t quite ready to leave Cantha and those characters yet. So, did spending almost two hours running around in Secrets of the Obscure content get me more excited about it?

End of Dragons , the most recent GW2 expansion, capped off the overall story we’ve been progressing through since 2012. The Elder Dragons represented an existential threat to all of Tyria. Thus, it was our task to deal with them. However, we learned that although we needed to “deal” with them, killing them was destabilizing the world, which was an even greater problem than the Elder Dragons were in the first place. After all, some life always survived the awakenings; if the world imploded, nothing would remain. Thankfully Aurene solved that problem for us. Yay, it’s peaceful days with no world-ending threats forever. Right? Yep, that’s totally how MMOs roll.

Outside of the story, expansions continuing the way they have has started to pose a bit of a threat to Guild Wars 2 ’s stability. The most apparent issue is adding nine new elite specs every expansion has played havoc with profession balance in all aspects of GW2 . I’m not entirely sure we’ve reached equilibrium since the last set was added. Additionally, needing to find new and exciting niches for each