Guild Wars 2 Into the Dungeons

Lore and continuity designer Jeff Grubb penned a new entry for the Guild Wars 2 blog titled “Into the Dungeons”, which, unsurprisingly, deals with the game’s dungeons’ design. Here’s a sampling:

Dungeons are multiplayer, instanced adventuring areas. Unlike most of the rest of Tyria, which can be explored by solo players, dungeons are designed to be played and enjoyed in pre-arranged groups, composed of either your regular guildies or a pick-up team. Whereas our event system creates a dynamic, ever-changing world and our personal story allows you to weave a tale unique to your character, dungeons represent an evolution of the original Guild Wars game experience: instanced areas with a single group of players running through them.

Calling these adventure areas “dungeons” is a bit of a misnomer, since not all of them are underground. However, since the dungeons in Guild Wars 2 evolved from the dungeons originally presented in Guild Wars: Eye of the North, the name pretty much stuck. They share two key traits with their predecessors: dungeons are group activities and they are very dangerous.

At the time of this writing, we have eight dungeons in Tyria. They are not beginner’s content; the earliest of them requires characters who’ve reached level 35.