Have Expansions Actually Gotten Smaller? — Guild Wars 2

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Guild Wars 2's new content model, offering smaller and more formulaic expansions in exchange for faster turnarounds and more frequent & consistent patches, has been widely divisive among the community. A common sentiment I've seen make the rounds is that players feel like they're getting less content overall now than they were in the old content model—but, is that actually the case? If it is, just how wide is the gap?

These are the questions I aim to answer today. Buckle up, because we have a lot of work to do and a lot of rules to cover.

Methodology

Before we get into the data itself and analyze it, we need to set a lot of ground rules. What counts as an expansion? What counts as content? How will we measure the amount of content over time? All of these questions need concrete answers, so let's go over them each individually.

What is an expansion?

For the purposes of this analysis, I will be considering all content updates, not just full expansions. I consider a "content update" to be any major update which introduces significant playable content such as new explorable zones, new story missions, or new instanced content such as dungeons, fractals, raids, or strikes. 

If an expansion is split into multiple significant releases—such as the two expansions made on the new content model, or the living world seasons—I will consider each distinct release as its own content update. On a case-by-case basis, I will consider some content to be part of a nearby update even if it wasn't released on the same day—for example, Ura LCM is clearly a part of JW: Repentance, even though it released two weeks after the rest of that update.

I will be excluding a few notable releases and types of releases from the data. Firstly, I will not consider launch content as its own update. Launch content had six whole years of time and far more developmental resources, making it inherently much larger than any update to come after; this would massively skew the data and is ultimately not relevant to what we're looking for. 

I will also be excluding the Living World Season 1 releases. Due to their ephemeral nature, they were likely developed on a very different schedule than other content updates; furthermore, the fact that their original versions are no longer playable, in addition to the fact that some portions of it weren't adapted in the Return To LW1, make it difficult to accurately gauge the content they contained. I will, however, count the updates which reintroduced LW1 content as permanent additions to the game as their own updates.

Finally, I will be excluding repeating updates such as festivals, bonus events, WvW tournaments, PvP seasons, etc. Some of these updates consist of little to no actual new content, while others primarily reuse content introduced in years past; their additions are difficult to quantify and would also skew our data, so they aren't worth the headache. If one of these updates includes notable content unrelated to the event itself, I will include it in order to consider just that content in the data.

How will we measure time?

The fairest way to analyze the amount of content we're receiving over time would be to consider the amount of development time allotted to each content update. Unfortunately, we don't have public access to that information, and it's further muddied by the fact that updates are often in development during the release cycle of previous updates, and that sometimes multiple major updates are worked on simultaneously—for example, we know that IBS: Champions was in development alongside EoD.

We will group related updates—such as individual releases of an expansion or living world season—into "eras", largely following the same categorization used on this wiki page. We will consider the duration of each of these "eras" to be the time between the release of the final update of the previous era and the first update of the next era, and I will include data for how much content was released per-year in each era in addition to the raw data of each individual update.

The aforementioned wiki page is also my primary source for what content was released in which updates; feel free to peruse it to come to your own conclusions.

What is content?

This is by far the toughest question to answer. What do we count as "significant new content"? How do we even being to numerically compare things as wildly different as open world zones vs instanced boss encounters vs new game systems or masteries?

The answer is: we won't. I have created a list of different types of content that I consider to be major, distinct additions to the game; we will track each of these categories individually for every update. Our categories are:

  • Story steps
  • Open-world zones
  • Other explorable zones
  • Meta-events
  • World boss encounters
  • Instanced encounters
  • Adventures & activities
  • Combat additions
  • Major masteries
  • Aesthetic masteries
  • Legendary equipment
  • Game system additions

Of course, simply showing you the types of content I will track isn't enough. Let's get into the nitty gritty of how I'll be counting all of these content types, and the various exceptions and grey areas they bring up.

Story steps

Story steps are one of the most straightforward content types we will measure. This is simply a measure of the number of story steps in a release. I won't make any sort of deeper comparisons regarding the content found within each story step or its quality. Additionally, I will exclude a few exceptions which are either exceedingly small or otherwise lack meaningful content, such as 'Remembering Scarlet's War' or 'Prologue: Rally to Maguuma'.

Open-world zones

Open-world zones are also a very simple content type. This is simply a measure of the number of open-world explorable zones added in a release. An open-world zone is a public instance which is visible on the world map and can be freely teleported to from the map; story zones that appear on the map, such as Fahranur, do not count, nor do raids or non-PvE zones such as WvW borderlands.

If an update adds only a portion of an open-world zone, I will score it as a fraction based on its relative size compared to the rest of the map.

Other explorable zones

This category is for large explorable zones created for purposes other than the open-world. The maps used in raids and fractals, for example, are often large and intricately-designed areas worth considering; however, the fact that they lack dynamic events and other aspects of open-world zones clearly delineate them.

For this category, I will count every raid zone as 1 map, using them as our basis. Given that fractals are generally smaller and often reuse assets, I may value them on a case-by-case basis as either .25, .5, or .75 of a map. I will also include guild halls in this category, counting them as 1 map.

When it comes to competitive maps, I will include WvW borderlands and sPvP maps in this category as well; due to their large size and the fact that they include various mechanics and objects unique to WvW, I will count borderlands as 3 maps, while PvP maps are scored as just 1.

Meta-events

I consider a "meta-event" to be a major open-world event chain. This is counted on a case-by-case basis, but there are three general characteristics I look for to determine if an event chain should be considered a meta-event:

  • It awards a Hero's Choice Chest upon completion, or an equivalent container
  • The event chain ends in a battle against a world boss encounter (see next subheading)
  • While in the area where the event chain takes place, a "category" graphic appears in the events pane, with constituent events in the chain being listed within this graphic rather than as standalone events

If an event chain meets one of these criteria, I probably consider it a meta-event. If it meets two or three, I almost certainly do. If a large event chain is divided into multiple parts—such as how the main Auric Basin meta is divided into 'Trial by Fire' and 'Battle in Tarir'—I will generally count the entire chain as one collective meta-event. 

I will only consider event chains; single events are not meta-events. The constituent events of a meta-event should also be dynamically related to each other and/or build to a larger climax. Furthermore, the popularity of an event chain has no bearing on whether or not I consider it a meta-event. Allow me to provide some examples:

Finally, let's discuss some examples of content that aren't necessarily "open-world", but that I will be categorizing as meta-events for the sake of this data. I will include what I will call "instanced meta-events", which are 50-man instanced content which follow a similar format to open-world meta-events; for example, 'Battle for Lion's Arch' or 'Dragonstorm'. I will also include each unique Convergence. As the pre-events in a Convergence are generally always the same, each variant will count as just 1 meta-event regardless of how many bosses it has.

World boss encounters

A world boss encounter is a unique open-world boss. As is the case with many of these, I will count these on a case-by-case basis. Here are some of the characteristics I will look for to determine if a boss is or isn't a "world boss encounter":

  • It has a unique name and/or model (e.g it isn't just a champion version of a generic enemy type)
  • It has unique mechanics (not necessarily completely unique; the fight should simply feature mechanics that distinguish it as a notable and interesting encounter)
  • It is tied to a meta-event, especially if it is the final boss of said event

For encounters that consist of multiple bosses intended to be fought at the same time, I will collectively count them as one boss (for example, Triple Trouble, the Octovine, or the Janthir Syntri versions of Greer and Decima). For bosses that appear in multiple places or across multiple different maps, I will also collectively count them as just one boss, and they won't count towards the data of updates they appear in beyond their first appearance (for example, the Adolescent Leviathans encountered in Seitung Province and New Kaineng are identical, and collectively only count as one boss for EoD; the Adolescent Leviathan encountered in Janthir Syntri does not count as a boss for JW, since it is identical to the prior EoD boss).

A boss being powercrept or easy does not eliminate it from being a boss; however, the boss should be capable of theoretically putting up a fight. For example, the Ley Line Anomaly is considered a world boss even though it is a pushover; the Choya Pinata is not considered a world boss, as it doesn't fight back. The popularity of a boss also has no bearing on its status as a world boss.

Bounties presented an interesting issue when considering these rules. Many of them have unique mechanics, and all of them have unique names; on the other hand, most of them are very simple, and no sane person would compare them to actual world bosses. Even so, they definitely deserve to be counted somehow. The solution I decided on was to collectively count all of the bounties in a map as 1 boss; on a case-by-case basis, I may make exceptions for individual legendary bounties—which tend to be much more unique—and count them as .5 of a boss on their own. Finally, for all LW4 maps except Sandswept Isles, which have very small bounty pools, their champion bounties will collectively count as only .5 of a boss.

Finally, just as I counted the events of "instanced meta-events" as meta-events, I will be counting their bosses as world boss encounters; the exception to this is the convergence bosses, which are more of a marriage of open-world and instanced encounter design and, in my opinion, should be counted as instanced encounters.

Instanced encounters

An instanced encounter is a boss or other unique combat challenge found within an instanced environment such as a dungeon, fractal, raid, strike, DRM, or convergence. These are also counted on a case-by-case basis, but follow similar standards to world boss encounters and generally have some of the following characteristics:

  • It has a unique name and/or model
  • It has unique mechanics
  • Beating it is tied to progression through the content it is a part of, especially if it is the final boss of the instance
  • It has unique loot and/or achievements tied to it
  • It has a challenge mode

Similar to world bosses, I will be counting encounters that have you fight multiple bosses at the same time as just one boss for the data. Additionally, I will also be counting certain non-boss challenges, such as Wing 1's Spirit Run and Wing 3's Escort.

I will count some challenge modes as additional encounters if they make significant changes to the fight (so, for example, I won't count Keep Construct CM or the "reduced healing" fractal boss CMs). For most CMs, I will count them as .5 of a boss; on a case-by-case basis, I will count certain CMs that largely overhaul their fight as a completely distinct encounter. As Convergence CMs don't actually change the individual bosses much but are notable content that deserve to be counted, I will be counting the existence of each unique convergence's CM as one instanced encounter.

Adventures & activities

This data is straightforward—a count of the number of open-world adventures and instanced activities that are included in an update. For maps with both expert and master griffin courses, I will collectively count both of those adventures as 1 item.

In this category, I also include jumping puzzles and mini-dungeons. While those are a very different form of content, they fill a similar role in being repeatable open-world content separated from the main gameplay loop of epxloration and dynamic events, and I believe this is the most logical place to include them.

Combat additions

"Combat additions" is my catch-all term for major additions intended to give players more build options and playstyles in combat. It includes professions, elite specs, weapons, and relics. These things are all pretty different, though, so let's go over how I decided to score them.

I decided to use a new weapon on a single class as my baseline in this category, counting it as 1 combat addition. Relative to a weapon, I decided that an elite spec is worth 3 points, and an entire new profession (Revenant in HoT) is worth 10.

For relics, I decided that a set of 6 new relics should count as 1 combat addition. I ultimately decided to not count the 40 core relics introduced in SotO; because relics replaced the role previously held by the final effects of runes, many of these core relics were equivalents to pre-existing effects and/or were generally very simple, and including them would skew the data disproportionately in SotO's favor.

Major & aesthetic masteries

I decided to split masteries into two categories, those being "major masteries" and "aesthetic masteries". I consider a major mastery to be a mastery line that introduces significant new gameplay features and/or effects related to a major feature; a consider an aesthetic line to be one that adds, well, anything else. Passive buffs, boosts to rewards, retreads of existing masteries, or other abilities that are very niche & situational and/or that are only used as keys for a set of specific locks.

I decided to split masteries up this way because I do not believe some of the less impactful mastery lines should be considered with the same value as major new features like mounts or gliding. I will be scoring each mastery line as a whole for this data, rather than each individual mastery; which category a line falls into will depend on which category the majority of its masteries fall into, weighted in favor of major features.

Legendary equipment

Another simple one. This data is a count of the number of pieces of legendary equipment introduced in any given update. I will count a full armor set as just 1 additional legendary, but will consider each weight a distinct legendary. For legendaries with variants—such as the gen 3 weapons, the obsidian armor, or Klobjarne—I will not count any variants as additional legendaries.

Game system additions

Finally, this category is for major additions or changes to the game's core systems. This is reserved for very major changes, such as the addition of the game's open-world megaserver system, or the overhaul of the daily system and introduction of the Wizard's Vault. 

I will once again decide which additions to count here on a case-by-case basis. I will generally look for the following characteristics when determining if a systems update should be considered:

  • The addition or change should be significant enough that it will impact the daily gameplay of most players
  • The addition or change should be prominent; something the team could—or did—promote as a major feature rather than a back-end change that's a footnote in the patch notes
  • The addition or change should be a significant new system or a severe or total overhaul of an existing one; it shouldn't simply be a small addition to an existing system

 Total Content Measures

Finally, I included tow additional columns in my spreadsheet which serve to add together the rest of the data and give us a rough idea of the "total value" of each release, and particularly of each era. These are more subjective than the rest of the data, since I had to make some calls regarding which items should be included and whether any items should be weighted or not. For this reason, I'd recommend citing these columns as definitive measures of the total value of a given release; even so, they do help to give us a general idea of how much content is included in each release and to compare them to each other.

The two additional columns are "gameplay content" and "all major content". The former combines the total number of story steps, open-world zones, other zones, meta-event, world bosses, instanced encounters, adventures & activities, and legendary items added in a release. In short, it's a measure of all the new content added in a release which constitutes actual new gameplay for players to go and do. The value of open-world zones is weighted to be tripled for this calculation, as those are clearly the main focus of the game as a whole and are without a doubt one of the aspects of the game that demands the most development time by far.

The latter calculation, "all major content", includes the previous number in addition to the combat additions, major masteries, and game system additions of a release, with game system additions being weighted to have double the value. I chose to do this because these additions generally have wide-reaching ripple effects on the rest of the game and introduce minor new content in places you wouldn't expect, and because they're the type of thing that inherently requires a large amount of developmental resources.

The Data 

With my methodology established, let's finally get into the meat of this article: the actual data, and the conclusions we can pull from it. I will start by showing the data for each "era" one at a time, along with any notable decisions I made regarding what I did or didn't count as content or how I categorized or scored it.

Also, one last thing before we get into the data. I've decided to make the full spreadsheet of this data public; you can find it here if you're interested. I highly recommend giving it a look so you can follow along as I describe the data in the following sections; it's also full of notes explaining many of the decisions I made and exactly what content was counted towards each score.

Living World Season 2


Unsurprisingly, LW2 is the era with the least content in almost all respects. Its total gameplay content is less than half or even a third of that of several other eras, and its total major content fares similarly poorly. 

This data really highlights how absurd it is that this season is still sold for the same price as the others—especially when you consider that the data here is including its open-world content, which all players can access for free. When you remove those, its score is made up entirely by story steps and game system additions, the latter of which all players also get for free. When people say that LW2 is nothing but story, their words are truer than they likely realize.

There ultimately isn't a lot else to say about LW2. Let's move on to the next!

Heart of Thorns


HoT is a very strong expansion. It has four open-world zones packed with meta-events, world bosses, and adventures—the former two largely thanks to its new "outposts" system. As the expansion that introduced masteries, it also has quite a few, most of which add significant gameplay. It's the era with the second-highest "combat additions" score, with nine elite specs and an entire new class—Revenant—to its name.

Based on the methodology explained above, I counted all of the outposts in VB, AB, and TD as distinct meta-events, which is why HoT performs so well there. Most of these outposts don't actually have unique bosses, if they have a boss at all; nearly half of HoT's world boss count comes from the VB night meta.

Since I counted the post-HoT releases as part of the HoT release cycle, it also benefits from being able to count the first 3 raid wings in its score, giving it 3 more explorable zones and 11 whole instanced encounters. If you're wondering where the 12th encounter shown in the data comes from, I counted the Mind of Mordremoth CM as an instanced encounter due to its unique nature, and the fact that the Migraine achievement explicitly encourages you to take it on with a group.

In terms of total gameplay content, HoT is right in the middle of the pack; when you look at all major content, however, its high number of combat additions, major masteries, and game system additions (including the mastery system itself, guild halls, and more) bumps it up to second place. It's also second place in terms of both gameplay content and total content per year.

Living World Season 3

 

LW3 scored a lot better than I expected it to. I had construed it as an era completely lacking in instanced content, but that couldn't be further from the truth—not only did the 4th raid wing release during this era, we also got the Nightmare and Fractured Observatory fractals, two of the best—and largest—in the fractal catalogue.

In addition to its instanced content, LW3 ties with LW4 for the most open-world maps in an era, and it has a rather long story. It has relatively few meta-events, world bosses, and activities, however. One of the main reasons for this lack of open-world content are the Ember Bay and Bitterfrost Frontier maps, which are both quite simple maps and contribute almost nothing to LW3's open-world content score. Siren's Landing, which contains one of the season's few real meta-events, also uses four generic champions as its bosses, which I did not count; if this meta's bosses were more significant and unique, they would have boosted LW3's score quite a bit.

Relative to other content cycles, LW3 scores in the middle of the pack in terms of gameplay content, but lags behind a bit in all content due to a complete lack of combat additions. Similarly, it scores very well in terms of gameplay content per year, but fares worse in terms of all content per year.

Path of Fire


One of the most notable aspects of PoF should jump out at you as you look at the data: it is the only era to consist of exactly one release. Whereas every other era was either split into multiple smaller releases (Living Worlds or new-model expansions) or had a number of significant post-launch patches (HoT and EoD), PoF came and went as just a single release with no following patches. While the duration of other eras ranges from 1-2.5 years, the PoF era is the shortest by far, lasting just 127 days.

Another interesting thing about PoF is that it has absolutely zero instanced content—a distinction it shares only with LW2. While you'd expect it from the latter, the fact that an entire expansion had no instanced endgame content at all is a bit mind-boggling. To my understanding, the never-ending "GW2 is dying" discourse started around PoF; with this revelation, I'm led to wonder if the complete lack of new instanced content was one of the main catalysts for that idea.

PoF's score is carried by its open-world content, of which it admittedly has a lot. Split between its 5 zones are 6 meta-events and an impressive 13 world bosses, though this count is significantly boosted by the fact that I included bounties; without them, it falls to just 5, namely because two of its meta-events—Casino Blitz and Junundu Rising—lack real bosses.

PoF also introduces 5 new mastery tracks, all of which are significant. It shares the distinction of having no aesthetic tracks with LW4—and LW2, but that one's cheating, since it has no masteries at all. Finally, PoF has a respectable combat addition score—27 points for its 9 elite specs—and quite a few adventures, which boost its score up a lot.

In terms of total gameplay content, PoF actually scores second-to-last, saved by the pitiful existence that is LW2. It fares only slightly better in terms of all major content, just barely edging out Janthir Wilds—a fact that could very likely change once the latter expansion's final release comes out.

While PoF scores quite poorly when compared to other expansions, the script is completely flipped once we start measuring content over time. PoF ranks first place in terms of both gameplay content and all content per year—and quite comfortably at that, beating second place by 90 and 120 points respectively. This is largely due to our methodology for measuring the length of an era being very favorable to PoF. The first release of an expansion is almost always the largest; since PoF had no post-launch releases, thus making its era incredibly short, these categories were essentially rigged in its favor.

Living World Season 4

LW4 picks up right where PoF left off, with not a single major release between them. This season was incredibly content-rich, and it kept up a decent pace with new major releases for the entirety of its nearly 2 year duration. While I've been unable to find any explicit sources for this fact, it seems to be generally accepted as fact among the community that the living world model—which allowed players to get new releases for free by simply playing when they came out—nearly drove ArenaNet bankrupt.

First, LW4 has the best instanced content score of any era, with the only competition to even come close being IBS. This era gave us raid wings 5, 6, and 7, as well as the Twilight Oasis, Deepstone, and Siren's Reef fractals. The score also benefits significantly from the fact that all three of the PoF raid wings featured a full suite of CMs. Additionally, I counted all three of the statues in wing 5 as distinct bosses. With this high number of new raids and fractals, LW4 also claims the title of the era with the highest "other explorable zones" score.

Instanced content wasn't the only thing LW4 excelled at, however. It ties with LW3 for the highest number of open-world zones, with a total of 6—but unlike LW3, all of LW4's zones feature at least one notable meta-event and world boss, with several having multiple of each. LW4 also benefits from inheriting the bounties system from PoF, which granted a decent boost to its world boss score. Said score is the second-highest of all eras, only barely losing to EoD—and only beating PoF by half a point. LW4 also benefited form having quite a few adventures.

Interestingly, LW4 actually has the shortest story of all living worlds, coming in at only 31 story steps—just 1 less than LW2, but significantly smaller than LW3 and IBS. It should be noted, however, that its actual story content is likely actually longer than LW2's; I believe that, early on, the team were much more liberal with how they split up the stories, with LW2 being split into a larger number of smaller steps than it would have been if it were created today. Of course, that isn't something we can easily measure, so that's just conjecture on my part.

Finally, one last point to sing LW4's praises on—as mentioned in the prior section, it shares the honor of having no aesthetic masteries with PoF, with 3 major new mastery lines to its name. The usefulness of the roller beetle and skyscale go without saying, but the mount skills granted by the Crystal Champion track can be used on any mount and are incredibly useful as well. 

In terms of total gameplay content, LW4 commands a strong second place, only falling behind EoD. Despite having almost no combat additions, it only falls a single place when measuring all major additions, losing to HoT by about 20 points.

Despite having so much content, LW4 was one of the longest eras of the game, lasting nearly two years. As such, when measured in terms of content per year, its performance is more middling—and when measured in terms of all additions per year, it actually loses to SotO. What an upset!

The Icebrood Saga


In terms of pure content, IBS is one of the strongest contenders. I don't think the average player realizes just how much content this season gave us—largely because the majority of players don't like a significant portion of what IBS has to offer, but that's irrelevant to my data.

IBS has the second-highest instanced content score, losing only to LW4, and it's easy to see why. This was the season that introduced the concept of strikes, and it gave us a total of seven. On top of that, it also gave us the Sunqua Peak fractal, containing three fights and the CM perhaps most deserving of being called a distinct new fight. And then, of course... the DRMs.

A while back, I wrote an entire article on the hidden potential of DRMs. Like many players, I hated them on release, but upon revisiting the content later, I found them relatively tolerable and even a bit fun. I say this because I foresee some people arguing that the DRM bosses should not be counted as instanced encounters; on this, I disagree. While some of the DRM bosses are indeed very simple, having just one or two attacks and a single unique mechanic, there are plenty of other instanced fights and world bosses that are just as simple or even worse than these. I made it clear in my methodology that the quality and popularity of content should have no bearing on whether or not it's considered for inclusion in the data, and that is a point I will stand by. Besides, I strongly believe that many players' negative feelings on DRMs are clouded by their general dislike of Champions as a whole; a few of the later DRM bosses in particular are genuinely great fights, and if the exact same designs showed up in a strike or fractal, I'm convinced nobody would have complained.

With all that said, there are a lot of DRMs—10, if I counted correctly. These instances make up nearly half of IBS's instanced content. It should be noted that I didn't consider any DRM CMs for scoring, as, to my knowledge, none of them cause any actual changes to the mechanics of any fight, but rather add arbitrary difficulty through stat boosts and a timer and such.

Moving away from instanced content, IBS actually has the longest story of any of the living worlds—and for that matter, the longest expansion story, period. EoD technically contains more story, at a whopping 56 story steps, but that's because LW1 was reintroduced during that era. If you split those stories up, LW1 is 30 steps long (though some parts of it are missing from the original run) and EoD itself is 26, including the post-EoD storyline in Gyala Delve; IBS's 39 steps easily clears both.

When it comes to open-world content, IBS ties with LW4 and EoD for the most meta-events, with all three having 10. IBS achieveing this many with just three open-world zones is impressive, but remember that all three feature multiple metas, with Grothmar Valley featuring four. Several of these metas lack a real boss, hence the era only having 1 more boss than it does metas. 

Its meta count is also boosted by the fact that I counted both Forging Steel and Dragonstorm as meta-events. While the logic for Dragonstorm is quite clear, I'd like to explain my reasoning for Forging Steel. While I counted the Ancient Forgeman as an instanced boss, I decided that the rest of Forging Steel should be represented as a meta-event. It is completely unique among its fellow strikes, featuring an open-world-esque event structure complete with optional objectives. I believe this structure is very similar to meta-events, so even if you don't think that the instance should be formally classed as an instanced meta-event, I believe it makes sense to include it as one in the data, since its creation would have required a similar amount of developmental resources and it provides a very similar experience to players.

Finally, I'd like to point out one last thing before we compare IBS to the other eras: its masteries. IBS introduces 6 new mastery lines, and it has the worst ratio of major:aesthetic masteries of any era by far, with only 1 major track and 5 aesthetic tracks. While I consider the waystation a major new mechanic, since it's useful across the entire game, IBS also brought us the essence mastery lines, which are the poster-children of aesthetic masteries, and the Raven Attunement line. While Raven Attunement seems like it should be a major mastery, with it unlocking a variety of new ways to move around the world, in practice it's just used as a key to a set of various locks across Bjora Marches, and its new abilities are similar to things achieved by previous mastery lines.

IBS performs rather well in terms of both total gameplay and total additions, despite gaining almost no points in the latter category. In both rankings, it places in 3rd and 4th respectively, right behind LW4. The script is flipped when measuring its content over time, however; in both measures, it's second-to-last, saved only by LW2. This is primarily because IBS is the longest era by far, lasting just over two and a half years—and a significant portion of that time was spent in the relatively content-light Champions release cycle.

End of Dragons


EoD is the single most content-rich era of Guild Wars 2's releases. This is because EoD's core content, which was very extensive to begin with, was combined with the reintroduction of LW1, which brought with it a ton of story content, plus a little open-world content and a new strike as a bonus.

As discussed in the above section, combining the core EoD story with the LW1 story and the post-EoD Gyala arc gives this era a grand total of 56 story steps to its name. EoD also has a decently strong set of instanced content, with five strikes and a fractal—all of which have CMs, several of which have CMs that I chose to count as distinct fights due to their complexity.

EoD's open-world content is quite strong as well, with 5 zones, 10 meta-events, and 15 world bosses. These scores benefit a bit from the reintroduction of LW1, as I counted the Tower of Nightmares and the Battle for Lion's Arch as instanced meta-events, and also included Scarlet's invasion in the count. Similarly, the bosses associated with these events were also included in the world boss score. I also counted the updated versions of the four Core Tyria starter zone world bosses in EoD's score, since they were updated during this release cycle. 

While most players disparage the Gyala Delve releases, they were the MvP when it came to EoD's adventures, introducing 10 of them. EoD also performed well in terms of masteries, with 4 major tracks and 1 aesthetic one, and it benefits from 27 combat additions points for adding the final 9 elite specs to the game.

In terms of both total gameplay content and all additions, EoD is the top scorer, beating second place by ~20 points in both cases. In terms of content over time, its performance is a bit worse, falling to fourth place in both measures. Similar to IBS, this is due to how long the EoD release cycle was—measuring at a little over two years, it's the second-longest in the game's history.

Secrets of the Obscure


Let's be honest. When you read the title of this article, this was the data you wanted to see. The new content model is contentious, but is it really producing smaller expansions as many players believe?

While you might expect SotO to perform poorly in terms of instanced combat, what with it only having two strikes and a fractal to its name, remember that I chose to count convergence bosses in this category as well. With their help—and some additional points from the three separate CMs (I didn't count the Convergence CM)—SotO manages to claw out a respectable 11 instanced encounter points, though this does still leave it squarely behind most previous eras.

One thing I found particularly interesting about this data is that it shows that stories under the new content model are significantly longer than the stories of previous expansions. The main stories of HoT, PoF, and EoD are 15, 14, and 16 steps long, respectively; in contrast, SotO and JW are 19 and 20 steps long. While one of the most common critiques of SotO is that its story was rushed, it seems attributing that issue to the new content model was completely wrong. Rather than the writing team trying to fit a normal expansion's story into SotO and being forced to rush due to a shorter expansion, it seems the actual problem might have been that the writers got too carried away with the increased story length of the new model. This is a topic that might benefit from its own article, but that's a task for another day.

Relative to most other expansions, SotO's open-world content is a bit light. It has only three zones, and while a total of 5 meta-events are spread between them, complete with 7 bosses, that isn't enough to beat anything but LW2&3.

SotO's biggest score contributor is its combat additions. Weaponmaster training unlocked elite spec weapons on all other specs, which technically meant two new weapons per class. Since these new combinations mostly reused the exact same skills, I decided to halve their point value, but it still came out to a full 27 points. Throw in the new weapon set and a few relic sets, and SotO comes out with a grand total of 40 points in this category, barely taking first place from HoT.

The rest of SotO's content spread is middling. It has an even spread of 2 major mastery tracks and 2 aesthetic tracks, and only 11 adventures and activites—not terrible, but not enough to keep up with most other eras. It also brought us only 1 new legendary, the obsidian armor set, putting it behind most other eras in that respect as well.

When directly compared to other eras, SotO performs generally poorly. It's third-to-last in terms of total gameplay content, though its incredibly high combat addition score gets it to the middle of the pack in terms of all additions. It's also on the lower end in terms of gameplay content per year, though it claims a very respectable third place in terms of all additions per year.

We'll return to this analysis in a later section, so for now, let's finish going over the data with the final era.

Janthir Wilds

 

JW is the current era of GW2 releases we find ourself in. The data here should really be taken with a grain of salt, as any conclusions we reach regarding JW will be accompanied by a big ol' asterisk. 

While we know some things about the upcoming final release—that it will bring us one map and a fractal, and that it will almost certainly have 3 story steps like every other post-launch release in the new content model—we can't be certain about anything else. We have no way of knowing how many meta-events, world bosses, or adventures will be in Bava Nisos. We have no way of knowing how big the new fractal's map will be, or of knowing how many encounters the new fractal will have.

With that said, we can still make some conclusions based on the data we do have. JW currently lags behind SotO a bit in terms of instanced encounters, as its raid isn't quite enough to make up for having fewer convergence bosses; this could change once the JW fractal and convergence CMs come out. While I didn't count the SotO convergence CMs towards its score, the JW convergence fights have much more pronounced mechanics, and I could foresee their CMs having notable mechanical differences—or simply forcing players to actually respect most of the bosses' mechanics through increased damage pressure or a stricter dps check.

Outside of instanced content, JW actually performs better than SotO in most other forms of gameplay content. It'll have one more zone than SotO, and it's currently tied with SotO for metas and world bosses; as long as Bava Nisos has at least one of each, it'll claim victory in those categories. It's also already beating SotO in terms of adventures and JPs, even without its final map.

JW also ties SotO in terms of masteries, with 2 major and aesthetic masteries each. The one category where it loses is in combat additions. While it does add 9 new weapons—the land spear for each class—and a few relic sets, there's simply no way for it to compete with weaponmaster training.

Compared to other eras, JW scores relatively poorly in terms of total gameplay content, and even worse in terms of all additions, being second-to-last. LW2 really deserves a medal for saving every other expac from the disgrace of being last place at anything. In terms of content per year, it doesn't fare much better, though it does currently beat IBS even without its final update.

Once the final JW release is out, I'll likely make another, shorter article going over how that changes this data and analyze how its final changes impact the conclusions made here in this article. I could foresee its final update boosting its overall placements above PoF in 'total major additions', above SotO in 'gameplay content per year', and above LW4 in 'all major additions per year'.

Have Expansions Gotten Smaller?

We've gone over the data for every expansion. We touched on it in the past two sections, but let's definitively answer the question you came here for.


To illustrate these findings more clearly, this graphic includes the total 'gameplay content' and 'all major content' scores for SotO and JW, as well as each of those scores relative to the release cycle's duration. The same data is included for three averages: an average of the three old-model expansions (HoT, PoF, and EoD), an average of the living worlds, and an average of all pre-SotO release cycles, expansion and living world alike.

With this data, the conclusion is pretty clear: yes, expansions in the new model are smaller. In terms of total gameplay content, SotO is almsot exactly 33% smaller than the average pre-SotO release cycle. It holds up better in terms of all additions, being only ~11% smaller, which I think is a very fair trade for how much quick the turnaround is on new-model expansions.

Of course, since these expansions all released over very different durations, just comparing the total amount of content isn't very fair or helpful. The actually important statistic is how much content is released per year. By this metric, we can see that new-model expansions are larger than living worlds on average, but that they fall behind both old-model expansions and the combined average.

I believe this is partly due to one of the faults of this study: how we determined the duration of each release cycle. As mentioned earlier when we went over PoF's data, it has absurdly high scores for its content per year, due primarily to the fact that it had absolutely zero post-launch releases. By consisting of just a single update, it essentially cheated the system, and its content-per-year score doesn't accurately represent how long that content took to develop compared to other release cycles; to put it in terms GW2 players might be more familiar with, it'd be like if SnowCrows measured a build's top benchmark by counting only the first 5 seconds of the rotation's opening.

Unfortunately, with the limited information we have available to us, there is no way to easily calculate the data in a way that's less biased in PoF's favor. Since PoF is a clear outlier—and for that matter, LW2 is also a clear outlier on the opposite end of the spectrum—lets see if we can reach a different conclusion using medians instead.

There we are. While SotO lags behind significantly in all categories compared to the average pre-SotO release, its content-per-year is actually on par with the median pre-SotO release.

Conclusion

As we approach the conclusion of this article, I'd like to stress that my methodology, while detailed, has some flaws, and this data has some subjectiveness to it. While I tried to be objective as possible when doing so, I ultimately had to make many choices regarding what content was and wasn't included in the data, and regarding how to value some pieces of content over others. There are also some forms of content, such as renown hearts, which I didn't cover at all; another person could do the same study and come to some different conclusions.

That said, while call this data 100% objective or conclusive, I think it more than serves to give us a general idea of reality. Ultimately, I've come to the following conclusions:

  1. New-model expansions are smaller than pre-SotO release cycles in terms of total content.
  2. In terms of content released per-year, new-model expansions are either on par with or more content rich than living worlds were, depending on your definition of "content".
  3. In terms of content released per-year, new-model expansions range from being on par with to less content-rich than pre-SotO releases as a whole, and in particular tend to be less content-rich than old-model expansions; however, that difference is much smaller than the community as a whole believes.

I'd like to mention again that the full spreadsheet containing all the data, as well as a ton of notes explaining exactly what content was counted in each score and my reasoning behind certain decisions, is publicly available. Check it out if you're interested!

As always, I'm very interested to hear what the community at large has to say about my findings. Do you agree with my conclusions? Would you have done things differently? (I'm open to suggestions, though it's very doubtful I'll go back and change the entire document)

Additionally, if you find a genuine mistake in the spreadsheet—such as a piece of notable content I missed or an item that was counted in the wrong place—please feel free to let me know, and I'll be sure to correct it as soon as possible. I'm not sure if I'll continue updating this document past the final release of JW, but I do want to make sure the data it contains is as accurate as possible so it can serve as a genuine resource for the GW2 community.

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