Tyrian Chronicle: Map Completion - Explore or Achieve? .

With Heart of Thorns arriving just a month from now, it’s far past time for players to be knocking off the last items on their “Vanilla Game” bucket list. What’s on your list will be different depending on what you like to do in the game and how long you’ve been playing it, but for me as a player who joined the game fairly recently there is one obvious achievement to work towards: 100% map completion.

While the goal is a straight-forward one, I go back and forth on how I accomplish it. There’s the explorer route: wandering around level-appropriate zones, looking for interesting sights and climbing mountains simply because they’re there. And then there’s the achiever route: treating the map completion menu in the world map as a to-do checkbox, hitting the important bits and moving on, and sometimes even using outside tools to make the process more efficient.

There are arguments for both routes, although I think which one you choose comes down to playstyle and what you want out of your Guild Wars 2 experience. When it comes to map completion, are you an explorer or an achiever?

A Case for Exploration

One of the unique game elements that ArenaNet emphasized at the launch of Guild Wars 2 was exploration. You don’t run from exclamation point to exclamation point, you wander down the river and happen to encounter some Norn who want you to join in their snowball fight. Where other games might have invisible walls, Tyria has secret caves and camouflaged jumping puzzles that take you to unexpected places.

This design philosophy is reflected in the map completion achievement itself. Consider “Point of Interest”, a name with no sense of urgency. Finding one of these doesn’t (necessarily) kick off an epic event and in most cases they’re not even that difficult to uncover. It’s not an essential plot point. It’s just, y’know, if you’re in the neighborhood you should check out this cool spot.

Another pro-exploration map feature is, obviously, vistas. (Confession: completing vistas is arguably my favorite part of the entire game.) Even if you find a vista on your map, it often takes a lot of looking around your environment to just spot where you’re intended to go.

And once you do find that shining, floating map, you get to explore again to find out exactly how you get to it. Sometimes this task is easy, such as spotting a suspicious series of elevating rocks next to the vista, and sometimes it’s much, much more difficult. For other spots, it’s an exercise in exploration and observation – I prefer not to share how many times I jumped off that cliff in Lion’s Arch for the vista that’s out on a rock before finally talking to the handy NPC that just sent you there. More than once I’ve spent 5 or 10 minutes throwing myself against what simply MUST be the path before taking a moment to approach the spot from a different angle and realizing that I was wrong all along.

Guild Wars 2 is a beautiful game, with landscapes that still stand up to new titles even three days later. The whole game is designed for immersion, to lose yourself in the snowy mountaintops and deep lakes and everything in between. Getting 100% map completion is about taking your time and enjoying your tour of Tyria.

A Case for Achieving

Let’s be honest – map completion in Guild Wars 2 is basically just a big to-do checklist. It’s right there every time you open the world map: you have finished X% of the map, you have found Y number of Points of Interest, you have Z number of renown hearts to complete before you’re done.

While everyone has their own playstyle, it can be quite satisfying to be goal-oriented in an MMO. Map completion seems to have been designed with this in mind, consisting of a number of smaller achievements, each with their own happy noise and award when you finish, which all adds up to one big achievement with one big treasure chest.

The average MMO player has gotten a bit older, and with age comes an increase in responsibility and diminishing time available to play games. Sure, I could meander all over the map, heading towards the next thing that looks interesting. Or, alternatively, I could make optimal use of my time, plan a route ahead that covers a zone efficiently, and log off 90 minutes later with the satisfaction of having knocked another area off my list.

While Points of Interest and vistas might feel like they were designed to encourage exploration, at this point three years after launch completing renown hearts is decidedly more in the “get it done” category. Sure, there are some examples that stand out as being fun or silly, like scaring rabbits while you carry their feed bags, but it feels like the vast majority of renown hearts are “kill 10 rats” with a bar to fill instead of an exact counter.

Even vistas aren’t immune from the itch to cross another item off the list. That Lion’s Arch vista that I mentioned previously? I figured out how to complete it by looking online for a guide. There is only so much time that I want to spend hurling myself at the wrong cliff face, and there are some wonderful third party tools out there to make map completion fast and easy.

Which Do You Choose?

There is a viable case, in my opinion, for both being primarily an explorer or an achiever when it comes to map completion achievements. The world is beautiful, and full of hidden sights and snippets of fascinating lore that only those who take the time to enjoy it will discover. On the other hand, it’s nice to feel like you accomplished something in your evening playtime, and not all of the map features are voyages of discovery.

How you complete your map is, at the end of the day, up to you. Which is your preferred method? Maybe you employ them both or have another way of doing it all together.