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Easy mode for Guild Wars 2 raids is possible, but it’d take time away from other content

Icebrood Saga aims to bridge the gap between raiders and everyone else, but changes take time

Guild Wars 2 will soon see the start of a new Living World season with the Icebrood Saga. This big update will bring us strike missions, which developer ArenaNet has described as a sort of bridge for newer players to get into proper raiding. But some fans are just there for the story, and the stress of raiding is a bit too much – thus, they want a very easy ‘story’ mode to see the content those raids have to offer.

“There’s a constant, constant tug,” game director Mike Zadorojny tells us. “Do we go build new raids for the raid group, or do we pull somebody to go make the old raids easier? The Bastion of the Penitent is one that we get a lot of comments on, because it’s the Saul D’Alessio story and the mursaat. It’s a very powerful, moving story, and it was very self-contained to that raid. So unless you’re a raider, you never see it.”

Zadorojny says “I would not rule it out. The thing that we need to be careful about is how we manage that expectation. Because if we go back and release ‘story mode’ for an individual raid, that is taking time away from other things like being able to build additional raid content for the raiders. We want to make sure that we’re trying to service both groups.”

It’s tough to balance Guild Wars 2 difficulty across an array of players when the skill gap between them is enormous, but it broadly seems that Icebrood Saga will attempt to build bridges between the low and high-end players. It doesn’t sound like that means an explicit story mode any time soon, but it is at least the sort of problem the developers are currently trying to solve.

For more on PvP, raids, and world restructuring in Guild Wars 2, you can follow that link to read our entire, massive interview with Zadorojny.