Image by u/Quisee on the GW2 subreddit.
Guild Wars 2's release history is an often tumultuous one, and perhaps no single period in the game's lifetime exemplifies this better than the final stretch of The Icebrood Saga's release. With each new chapter only coming with half a map, many of the new achievements being uninspired and grindy, and entire episodes releasing without voice acting, player dissatisfaction was at an all-time high, and not even the genuinely high quality of the meta-events, strike missions, and story writing could quell the negativity.
What, then, would happen if all three of those things disappeared?
Thus came the release of IBS's fifth and final episode, Champions. It came with no new map or strike, and as for the writing quality... to say the least, most players were not impressed.
It's impossible to know for sure what led to this, but based on the content we received, we can make a pretty decent guess: the IBS team were blindsided by the finalized concept for the game's next expansion, End of Dragons, for which they would need to find a way to quickly kill off both Jormag and Primordus. Faced with the impossible task of not only concluding IBS's story in a satisfying way, but also somehow roping Primordus into the equation and speedrunning what is essentially an entire expansion's worth of plot and character development, the team invented Dragon Response Missions as a way of efficiently condensing plot and character developments into missions that were cheap and easy to produce.
Champions's release cycle was met with an intensely negative reaction from the playerbase. DRMs were panned as formulaic, repetitive, and boring. During Champions's release, which was itself split into small sections, players had nothing to do but replay the same couple of DRMs over and over; for players reaching this story episode later on, it's arguably worse, forcing them to slog through 10 repetitive missions in a row.
It's no secret that most players hold a strong disdain for DRMs, and to that I was no exception. I've always been a defender of IBS's story, even including Champions—the writing team were clearly given an impossible task, and did their very best to salvage it into something coherent—but I, too, found DRMs to be overly long and boring.
This all brings us to the "Return to The Icebrood Saga" event that just ended today, tasking players with completing various activities form the IBS releases, including replaying 5 DRMs. As was likely the case for most players, I dreaded this at first, but once I started working through it, I found that I was actually enjoying myself. I liked Dragon Response Missions.
This calls into question: what changed? How did such a universally panned gamemode improve so drastically? Did it really change that much, or was the community's—and my own—initial reaction simply overblown?
Dragon Response Missions 101
Before discussing just what caused my opinion on DRMs to shift so drastically, we must first discuss how these missions are actually formatted, and what aspects of them players disliked.
DRMs are a form of instanced content that are accessed from the Eye of the North. Similar to the IBS strikes and instanced meta-events, players can join public instances or form a private one. Unlike all other instanced content, DRMs scale in difficulty based on the number of players present; they can be done solo or with a party of up to 5 players.
DRMs also feature a unique level of customization. Players in private instances can activate up to three challenges for additional rewards: one buffs generic enemies, one buffs the boss at the end of the mission, and one adds a timer that the mission must be completed within. Each mission also allows you to choose from a set of allied factions to recruit, with each one providing players with unique benefits during the 2nd event and boss.
As mentioned multiple times already in this article, DRMs are very formulaic, each following the same format. They begin with a pre-event where players must scatter across a large area to complete objectives similar to open-world events, with each mission having three simple objectives such as killing a certain number of enemies, saving civilian NPCs, putting out fires, etc. After completing all objectives, the mission progresses to a second pre-event, usually escorting an NPC or defending against waves of enemies. Finally, the mission ends with a boss.
One of the biggest issues players initially had with DRMs was the first pre-event. Originally, this event would be tied to a rather long timer after which the mission would automatically progress to the second stage, yet one too short for solo players to realistically complete all the objectives. This resulted in a situation where you were often just wasting time waiting for the real event to start. This, however, is an issue no more; along with the 'Return to IBS' event came a change to DRMs, adding scaling to these objectives while also removing the timer and thus making it mandatory to complete all the objectives. This change has made the objectives much quicker and more manageable for smaller groups, and the stage as a whole more engaging.
Aside from that issue, what else did players have against DRMs?
Repetitive Missions
As mentioned earlier, the DRMs were the only new content added for most of Champions, and they were spaced out. They also came with very few interesting achievements, with most of them simply requiring players to replay the same missions over and over again.
Even now, players making their way through the story will find getting through Champions to be a bit of a slog. The missions don't feel very distinct from one another—the objectives in the first event are generic and often repeat between missions and the 2nd events are all basic and forgettable, leaving only the bosses as unique features. We'll discuss the bosses more in the next section, but for now simply know that they're also rather simple and forgettable. It doesn't help that most of them are simply buffed-up generic enemies; though they have unique names and attacks, the fact they use the same models as many generic enemies makes the fights feel even less distinctive and interesting than they actually are.
Confused Boss Design
DRMs were pretty clearly rushed out the door, and one symptom of that is that their overall design philosophy feels confused, perhaps even unfinished. They are presented as a new form of instanced content, accessed from the same portal as strikes and even complete with daily repeatable rewards and a system of priority missions very similar to the priority strikes system.
Despite this, DRMs aren't just a new form of instanced content. They're a mandatory part of the main story, and thus need to simultaneously function as story missions, complete with plot and character progression.
While I believe this union of story and instance content actually works surprisingly well for the story end of things, with the writing team getting some surprising mileage out of simply having characters talk during the escorts and at the beginning and end of each mission, the content itself suffers significantly, and this can be seen clearest in the design of the DRM bosses.
DRM bosses need to function as story encounters, which strictly limits how complex their fight mechanics can be, and the fact they're designed to be soloable also eliminates most of the stock mechanics found in other gamemodes as options. At the same time, the fact that these are also instanced group fights prevents the fights from utilizing some of the more unique and cinematic moments sometimes found in story encounters; essentially, DRMs get the worst of both worlds.
All of this is compounded by how rushed Champions as a whole seemed to be, and the result is that each boss only has a few simple attacks and mechanics. Some of them, like Ryland or the Destroyer of the Third Fortress (see what I mean about the names?), are interesting enough to be solid fights, but the others come off as basic and forgettable.
Beyond the simplistic fight mechanics, the other main consequence of this confused design direction is the actual health pool of the bosses. Their health pools are tuned more similarly to other instanced bosses rather than story fights, which causes the fights to drag on, making the simple mechanics only stand out more.
Lack of Rewards
The final big issue with DRMs is a lack of rewards. Their rewards aren't terrible per se, but for a gamemode where each mission takes significantly longer than most strikes or fractals, it seriously lags behind other options.
A lack of gold and resources isn't the only issue in this department, either. DRMs are severely lacking in unique and interesting achievements, with only a few of the bosses having extra achievements tied to avoiding certain attacks or the like. The achievements we do have are for beating each mission a certain number of times with challenges active and for completing them with each different allied faction—that is, just playing them normally over and over.
What Changed?
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, I actually had a lot of fun with DRMs when I replayed them as part of the recent bonus event. I just spent about a thousand words railing on them for their flaws, so what all changed to make them more enjoyable?
Pre-Event Fix
As mentioned earlier, a change to DRMs was rolled out along with the bonus event, removing the timer from the pre-event and adding scaling to each of its objectives. What used to be a grueling and pointless 5-minute wait for unbeatable objectives to time out is now a quick 1-2 minute romp around the map until you fill out the progress bar.
As this initial period made up a significant portion of the time spent in DRMs and was the least interesting and engaging of the three sections, the recent fix has been a godsend. With these changes, getting to the boss is a much quicker and more tolerable affair.
Player Skill
One of the points I made above was that DRM bosses tended to drag on for a long time, which highlighted the simplicity of their movesets and made them kind of a slog to get through. What I did not mention is that I was very, very bad at the game back when I first did DRMs. We're talking a hammer Herald doing less than 10k dps—well before that spec could give quickness. Additionally, I did most of them in public lobbies, where I was paired with other players who most likely performed similarly poorly, as the vast majority of the playerbase does.
As mentioned above, the HP pool of DRM bosses is tuned more similarly to that of other instanced encounters rather than other story encounters. This means that newer and/or less experienced players will have significantly longer fights than those with proper builds, resulting in the fights being significantly less fun. As of my return to DRMs for the bonus event, I am a much better player with a very effective build, so the fights all felt the right length, and none of them dragged on long enough for their simple mechanics to get old.
Engagement Via Difficulty
As a general rule in game design, most players like a reasonable challenge. An encounter that forces them to think or to put in their A-game will be more fun than one that they're able to beat down halfheartedly.
DRMs are, as discussed above, story missions, and as such have to be easy enough for the average player going through the story beat them. This means that, in all aspects aside from their HP pool, the DRM bosses are designed around unskilled players and, thus, are piss-poor easy, even if they might take new players a while. This, too, only exacerbates the length of each encounter: 15 minutes of intense, high-stakes combat is fun and exhilarating; 15 minutes of easily-avoided attacks and monotonous damage rotations is bland and draining.
To their credit, DRMs came with a built-in solution to this issue: the challenges. When playing through them for the first time, I, as I suspect the vast majority of other players did, completely ignored these—since they only appear in private instances, it's possible many players never even realized they exist.
After the draining exercise of doing all 10 missions in a row for story completion, I had no interest in touching the gamemode again, much less trying out its challenges. During the bonus event, however, I elected to solo each of the DRMs I completed with all challenges on, and this made for a genuinely hard but very reasonable challenge. It forced me to make use of all of my resources and made the boss encounters in particular very engaging—sure, their attacks and mechanics were simple, but it only took a few hits to kill me, so I was locked in for each fight.
The Verdict — Are DRMs Actually Good?
Now that we've discussed the flaws of DRMs and what circumstances led to me enjoying them more the second time around, let's put it all together and decide once and for all: is this gamemode as bad as we all thought, or were we unfairly harsh (or, perhaps, just playing it wrong)?
Firstly, the issues regarding the initial pre-event have already been addressed by the developers, and this has massively improved the experience of DRMs. Bosses aside, the rest of the content in DRMs is certainly nothing impressive, but it isn't anything terrible, either—just some inoffensive, decently average content, if a bit repetitive.
As for the bosses, while I initially found them all to be kind of a drag, my revisit to the gamemode has placed them in a better light. While simple, the fights are perfectly serviceable if you have a proper build with which to beat them in a reasonable time, and with challenges active they can be some genuinely great fun. The fights also have unique value as the only real repeatable solo instanced content in the game.
The greatest sin of DRMs is their repetitive and formulaic nature. Now that I'm playing them the "right way", I can have some genuine fun with 2 or 3 DRMs in a day, but any more than that starts to get boring and repetitive. Their implementation in the story, requiring players to run all 10 of them in a row with nothing else inbetween, not only presents them in their worst light, but likely permanently turned many players off of the gamemode entirely, preventing them from giving them a second chance and discovering how enjoyable they can be in the right circumstances.
That aside, DRMs are also still lacking in rewards and achievements. Now that I've found how to enjoy them, I can see myself spending some time doing 1 or 2 missions a day to progress their achievements, but once I have them all and buy all the collectibles that cost defense seals, I can't see myself having any reason to ever return to the gamemode—in contrast, take strikes or fractals, which are both profitable enough to keep players coming back well after they've exhausted them of unique rewards.
Overall, I believe the widely negative reception to DRMs comes down to two main factors: players disliked doing 10 of them in a row, and the game did a poor job promoting the most enjoyable way to play them (solo or with a party of friends, with all challenges on). When played in smaller bursts in the right circumstances, they range from tolerable to genuinely very fun.
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