Janthir Wilds after two weeks

I've been mainlining Guild Wars 2 Janthir Wilds since the release date on August 20th 2024 and therefore I have thoughts about the expansion.

Secrets of the Obscure was the first expansion in the new cycle of yearly expansions that Arena Net is trying out to make developing GW2 more steady and sustainable. Because of that, it had expectations riding on it and, on release, it seemed like it would fullfill them. To be fair, the content and story of base SotO were not bad. Not the best, but definitely not bad. It felt like we were entering a new era of the game and that the studio was getting its footing.

Considering it followed up the release of Gyala Delves, a map (and accompanying story) widely regarded as some of the worst produced in the history of the game (perhaps competing with the original Season 1 and Champions), base SotO could have turned out way worse.

But then, the Kryptis nation attacked.

The updates to SotO were definitely a low point to nearly rival the previously mentioned low points. A initially beautiful but repetitive map, released in three parts, packed with events but mostly annoying, accompanied by a story that was trying to do too much for its run-time and therefore fell flat, with unappealing enemies and only mildly appealing allies⁽¹⁾, the three updates that constituted our foray into Inner Nayos and concluded the story of SotO quickly squashed any optimism the community had for this release cadence and the following expansion.

So, with the community at levels of doom rivaling the ones after Champions, Anet’s next release would have to be good and it could not be more of the same.

And oh boy. Did they deliver!

Janthir Wilds was announced with a banger teaser trailer, showing sweeping icelandic vistas, tall mountain cliffs, and a Norn character coming out of the water wielding a spear, a weapon that had previously only been available underwater, as well as a tease about the story and the biggest release feature, player housing.

Everything looked great. It definitely felt fresh, well thought out, something new and intriguing. I have to say that, personally, I think this is the best hype they’ve given us since the Path of Fire and Season 4 eras.

The trailer and teasers did a lot to spur the community into a frenzy of excited speculation. In the following weeks, we got blog posts explaining the new spears, more information about the housing system, and, finally, we got our hands on the actual expansion.

I was cautiously optimistic. Everything so far had sounded pretty good, and I was hoping the expansion lived up to it. Of course, I wasn’t expecting another great release like PoF or most of the following updates, but I was at least hoping for a bit better than base SotO. Fortunately, the release actually exceeded expectations.

JW takes a slower, more deliberate approach to both story and gameplay. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I enjoyed the slower story instances, filled with dialogue, where various factions that seemed somewhat forgotten by the narrative come together to create a sort of Tyrian united nations and, predictably, clash in both motivation and personalities. It was a delight for me to watch these characters interact, to be the metaphorical fly on the wall.

I have to shout out the extra step here that anyone who only plays through once won’t know about, which is that the very first story step, where the player character, the Commander/Wayfinder, is called to attend the first meeting of the new Tyrian Alliance, is race-dependent. It would have been easy to have one of our past acquaintances be the one to call us there, but I appreciate that Anet took the extra development time to create a more unique experience.

The gist of the story is this: Tyria is allying because there are threats out there that no nation is prepared to face alone. The Kyptis attacks made it abundantly clear. While it’s not an emergency, it’s sensible to create this alliance now. This is also the debut of the Astral Ward as a known force in the world, from previously defending Tyria from the skies and remaining secret to everone, even the Order of Whispers.

As for the Commander/Wayfinder (from now on, just Wayfinder), we are tasked with investigating reports of odd threats to the north of Divinity’s Reach, in the Janthir region. Turns out that there is a tribe of Kodan living there, the Lowland Kodan, that Queen Jennah has mostly left alone and whose alliance and cooperation would be beneficial to the Tyrian Alliance. With us are coming Caithe and Malice, two characters that at first felt like an odd choice, but which made more sense as I played through the story.

Caithe isn’t busy since Aurene went to sleep, so she comes with us because of rumors of a potential cure for what is wrong with the Pale Tree (whom we’ve heard little about since, as far as I remember, Season 2!). Malice because the reports made the new threats sound like a sore spot for the history of the Charr: Titans!

Finally, the Wayfinder is given a secret mission by the Astral Ward: find the missing wizard, Waiting Sorrow.

Waiting Sorrow was a character that haunted the narrative during SotO. She was a great wizard, the first that Isgarren recruited. She created Amnytas’ defenses and the Heart of the Obscure. She used to lead the Bastion of the Celestial and was both a good friend and mentor to Dagda. Then, one day, she just left. Possibly using magic, she hid herself from the Astral Ward and has remained undetected by them for some time, though how long is unclear.

But since Mabon’s death, the protective veil he kept over the region of Janthir has lifted and now the region is open to the rest of the Astral Ward. Frode suspects Waiting Sorrow is there and sends us to find her.

This is when we, finally, get to the first map, the Lowland Shore, where we meet with the Lowland Kodan, who have separated from the other Kodan and Koda’s influence centuries ago. They are weary of magic, but welcome us and the Astral Ward’s help in fighting what they call “the strangers”, which are titanspawn, confirming Malice’s worse fears.

I won’t recap the entirety of the story, but suffice it to say I was impressed and enthralled. Lowland Shore is a beautiful, mountainous map, with forests and tundra, bogs and rivers and seas and it just looks absolutely gorgeous. It’s jam packed with events, ranging from threats, to every day tasks of gathering resources and running a village. One of my favorites is preparing a fish from catch to drying. There is a TON of flavor in this map and it is best explored on the back of the “new” mount, the Warclaw.

We previously had Warclaws, but they were useless for PvE. In JW they have been revamped into a fast, versatile mount that can traverse almost all terrain, with some skill and finesse. As much as I love my Skyscale, I do enjoy having plenty of opportunity to use another mount. Lowland Shore also incentivizes the use of the Griffon, with its tall cliffs, the Skimmer for water traversal and even the Springer, if you’re feeling frisky.

At this point, we get into contact with the Lowland Kodan, get involved in some family drama, look into the strangers and make the Kodan more comfortable with the Astral Ward. For our help, we are given a Homestead, the location of our new housing system, and taught how to build, decorate, and care for it. It’s all pretty neat!

Then we catch up with one of the strangers, an actual Titan, who escapes. This leads us to have to go into the second release map, Janthir Syntri, where things are not so idylic. Janthir Syntri is on the isles proper. It is a mostly flat land, weathering terrible storms. It used to be the site of a human town, Gavril, which was occupied by the White Mantle.

JS is not as beautiful or developed as Lowland Shore, but that’s not to say that it’s a bad map. Its visuals are striking in their bleakness, with swampy areas and cold beaches beset by storms. Overgrown ruins, a bloodstone crater, and sulphurous springs round out the map. While the events aren’t as well thought-out and enjoyable as the ones in Lowland Shore, they do a decent enough job of showing the issues with the area. The lore here is also jampacked, going from the Mursaat, to the White Mantle, to the Charr, all the way up to modern Kryta with Caudecus and the events of Bloodstone Fen. It’s honestly impressive.

On a first playthrough, while doing the story, exploring, and doing the (amazing) side stories, both maps feel great and cohesive. I honestly think this is some of the best story work Anet has done in recent years, especially since the end of Season 4.

It’s after the initial playthrough that things get less good. To be clear, I’m not saying it’s bad, but JW does have some issues that I think need to be polished in the following months and also for the updates coming out soon.

First and foremost for me is that JW is buggy. Very buggy. I personally prefer bugginess to missing content, because bugs can be fixed, and Anet did spend the first two weeks releasing near-daily bug fixing updates. Regardless, there are still plenty of bugs in the expansion, from mistimed dialogue, to stalling events, drops that don’t happen and animations that don’t play. Nothing game-breaking in the grand scheme of things, and the more egregious bugs (like the world bosses on the second map becoming unbeatable) have been fixed. Still, after the honeymoon phase, every time I encounter a bug I can’t help but feel that little sting of the lack of polish.

Second, the fucking communicator. It was a neat idea when it was used to replace having to go back to story NPCs or read in-game mails, but Anet has been abusing it, using it to broadcast random event NPCs, metas, even flavor dialogue sometimes. As a result, depending on how unlucky I am, I can easily have story dialogue, meta dialogue, and dynamic event dialogue all playing at the same time, creating an incomprehensible cacophony that I can’t escape from, since the voices follow my character instead of being proximity-based like the normal dialogue system. I sincerely hope Anet stops using the communicator outside of story. The only good thing I have to say about this is that at least NPCs aren’t abusing the whisper system anymore. It was fun when it was just Peitha in base SotO, but quickly got annoying once everyone was doing it in Inner Nayos.

And finally, the hearts. I do like hearts. I think they offer a small incentive to stick around in an area and in JW Anet has decided to sweeten the pot by giving us a kind of tier system that gives extra rewards up to a point. I’m okay with this.

However, in Janthir Synthri, something has gone very wrong. While Lowland Shore has plenty of events that one can do a lap around the map and get enough progression or tokens to finish all three hearts relatively quickly, on the second map things become a bit of a slog. One heart, the northern one, is fine. There are plenty of events around, as well as environmental interactions and enemies to gain progression and filling it basically flies by, even if I ignore the repetitive, copy-pasted, kill elementals events. There are more fun events to go for.

The other two however have no such luck. The south eastern heart has basically three unique events: find the threats at the camp, gather things, and kill ibogas in a kodan’s garden. The gather events are the kill elementals of this heart, except they don’t spawn as often. There is also the expedition and another event which happens during the bosses, but people want to be fighting the bosses, not doing random events. It’s kind of weird.

The final heart has only one event that rewards decent progression, which is one where players have to defend a flower from attacking creatures. Not the most engaging of events, but it’s fine. The rest of the events in this area reward very little. There’s an adventure and only one type of environmental interaction which make this heart a little less painful than the south eastern one but still.

Other than the variety and frequency of events, the problem here is that two full zones of the map have events and activities that are neither in a heart’s zone of influence, nor drop the tokens that can be traded in for heart progress. I don’t know if this was an oversight, if it’s going to fit in with the next update, or if it’s a bug, but I do know that it feels bad to ignore events in like half of the map because there’s no reason to do them other than achievements and for shits and giggles.

Hopefully these issues will be adressed sooner or later. For now though, it feels kind of bad.

Still, I’m enjoying my time with Janthir Wilds. Now that I’ve nearly finished all achievements, my routine consists of logging in, grabbing my gobblers, home nodes, and guild nodes, doing the Wizard’s Vault dailies and heading to Janthir for the hearts, where I do the two adventures in the north of Synthri for their tokens, do a lap around the map catching events, then finish off by turning in tokens and grabbing my daily map currency from each heart. I do the same in Lowland Shore and then decide if I want to work on achievements, crafting, or doing some of the past content.

Janthir Wilds doesn’t have its own repeatable instanced PvE content, or even really big grinds. The homesteads are great, but I’m not much of a decorator and I only dabble here and there. I’m personally not incentivized to play the maps just for the materials to make decorations. The bosses have a chance to drop a rather pretty but very rare skin, so I’ll do them if they happen to be up during my playtime. I can see how people who like to grind endgame would be bored by now.

Personally, I’ve had my fill and I am happy to chill, working on odds and ends until the next update, which should be coming out in November. This is the patch that will give us the new raid and expanded convergence content. Hopefully it will be good and we won’t have a repeat of the whole Inner Nayos problem!

I may write more in depth what I thought about the individual features of the expansion but for now this post has already run away from me. Long story short, I am enjoying this expansion a lot and I am cautiously optimistic for the future of GW2.