14 DAY TRIAL // With the death of the main arch-villain Scarlet Briar last month, the first season of Guild Wars 2's living world ended, after spanning almost a year in a plethora of updates introducing new narrative and content.
ArenaNet now intends to raise the standard of life within Tyria by focusing on some of their massively multiplayer online role-playing game's systems, which will receive a shot in the arm in the April Feature Pack.
The update will go live tomorrow and includes a ton of balance tweaks and various improvements to the game's systems, and the big features which it will introduce will be the new wardrobe system, a massive overhaul of the traits, and the megaserver.
Guild Wars 2 traditionally offers a lot of eye candy to its players, with its developers striving to come up with exotic and sometimes eccentric new locales, weapons and armor.
The devs have always experimented with fashion and have also encouraged the player base to do so, offering a wide assortment of dyes and a transmutation system that allow gamers to design their own unique look.
Now, the wardrobe system will empower this feature even more, allowing players to possess greater creative control over their character's appearance. The new hero tab will be split in three, the basic inventory screen for gear management, the dye section which has its own separate menu with a few improvements, allowing players to preview the end result before committing to a change, and the wardrobe system.
The final tab is where various pieces of gear collected from all across Tyria will be stored. If players wear, salvage or destroy a piece of gear, this will end up in the wardrobe system. Then, gamers will be able to transfer the styles to other items of the same time for a transmutation charge, without the need to select the stone in the inventory, offering a much more streamlined experience.
The bank storage has also been upgraded with a new wardrobe tab, which reveals every single piece of art in the game, allowing players to preview all the artwork and providing further motivation for players to seek out new gear.
The second big change in the update is the massive overhaul of the trait system, removing the middleman and allowing players to change their traits on the fly without the need of a specialized trainer. The new trait system has been simplified, and each five points from the old system now equal a single point, making for easier and more impactful choices.
Unlocking new traits can be done by purchasing them at vendors or by pursuing a piece of content that, upon completion, confers the new trait to the player, making trait acquisition more goal-oriented. In addition, every trait line has an additional grandmaster trait, making for a total of 40 new traits.
Finally, the megaserver will serve to pool all players in the same place and allow maps to be populated by cross-server sharing, even though they were not before. Of course, when maps get full, overflow maps will automatically be creating, making sure that everyone can play to their heart's content.