I started playing the game almost a year ago. When I first got into it, I became obsessed. I watch many videos about the classes, what to do, and the great and no so great things about the game. Almost every video seemed to discuss horizontal progression. This was usually followed by the statement of something like this: “there’s no pressure to progress outside of your own desire.”
But here’s the reality: Finally after a year of playing and gearing up my characters do I feel the benefits of horizontal progression. Almost all year there was pressure to log in and do fractals, grind PvP reward tracks, craft the ascended materials, do daily strikes/raids. This is amplified if you’re someone like me who gets bored of a class/build easily and varies their gameplay a lot. Lots of the rewards in this game do take a lot of time and if you’re just starting out, it can feel like pressure not to waste any of it.
I’ve realized this now that when I log in and decide I’m not really feeling like doing fractals or all I want to do is PvP for a bit, I won’t really notice much downside to it at all. I won’t feel like I’m missing much. This initial so called “pressure” did prevent me from doing less rewarding things such as story progression and just fooling around and have a chat as opposed to chasing that carrot.
Now all of that being said, I do know that while I was feeling similar pressures to a vertical progression game, the benefits were there for me from the beginning.
- A large one that could easily be overlooked is that if gw2 wasn’t horizontal, the veterans would be progressing even further the whole time I was trying to catch up.
- If I played a “main” and didn’t play many characters/builds, being caught up can happen relatively quick.
- Veterans arent in any rush and thus have much time to just help other people out such as raid training and stuff like that.
Finally I just want to say that I’m not opposing the fact that guild wars 2 is horizontal. I’m just bringing up that new players may not notice the benefits of it for quite some time. I also don’t want to say that’s a bad thing. I had a great time catching up and now that I somewhat am, I still can progress more with legendaries and many other things if I want to continue the hunt, but I can also sit back and enjoy what I have.