Today marks the launch of the Heart of Thorns expansion for Guild Wars 2, and developer ArenaNet has announced that since going completely free-to-play a month ago, the game is enjoying its personal record number of subscribers.
According to co-found Mike O’Brien, “This has been a memorable year for ArenaNet and our Guild Wars 2 player community. We energised our fans in January with the announcement of Heart of Thorns as the first expansion to Guild Wars 2, and we’ve seen steady growth in our player base ever since. Our community is widely recognised as one of the best and friendliest in MMOs – many of our veteran players organised in starter zones to welcome new players the weekend we made the core Guild Wars 2 game free. We’re eager to see how our fast growing community continues to flourish, and we hope they’re eager to embrace where their Guild Wars 2 journey takes them next in Heart of Thorns.”
This also coincides with increase in competitive play, featuring not only PvP, but WvW, which is “World vs. World” combat, where players from three different servers battle in the Mists, feraturing open-world combat on five large maps with up to several hundreds of players per map.
”ArenaNet recently announced the launch of a $400,000 Guild Wars 2 Pro League PvP tournament, launched in partnership with ESL,” adds the press release, ”and the infographic highlights how PvP player participation has grown by 135 percent since last year. There is a statistic showing that 40 percent of max level players showed up in starter zones to welcome new players the day the core game went free, showcasing the friendly reputation of the player community. Topping it all is an astronomical figure – more than 1.4 billion hours – totalling the amount of time players have put into Guild Wars 2 since launch, nearly the same time modern humans have spent walking the earth. The infographic can be seen below.
The Heart of Thorns expansion adds a new region, the Maguuma jungle, with a new region boss, a sinister elder dragon. The expansion also brings new game modes, features and game play improvements as well as an all-new profession called the revenant and elite specialisations that add new weapons and skills to every existing profession in the game. Also included in the expansion is an all new PvP mode called Stronghold and the new Desert Borderlands map for WvW combat.
Gamers can check out the expansion on the official page here.
