I recently completed the Guild Wars 2 achievement of completely exploring the entirety of the core Tyrian map with my main character.  This is something that I have been working on somewhat in the background since I started playing, and have recently kicked into high gear to get through the last few things on the map.

One of the great things about the Guild Wars 2 world is that it is very well crafted.  Specifically, the areas are not randomly (or pseudo-randomly) generated – instead, the terrain and ecology are crafted, which makes exploration extremely rewarding.  I find this particularly appealing, because instead of having everything look the same, just generated with different random variables, everything looks distinct and different.  Sure, if you go through the same area multiple times, it looks the same every time, but for me, this provides a sense of familiarity and expectation rather than boredom.  I like the fact that Queensdale looks the same every time I walk through it (modulo slow changes in the world and events that crop up periodically) – it reminds me that Queensdale is a singular place, not just a collection of probabilistic maps.

Another thing that I found that I really liked, that I would not have put a lot of stock into initially was the points of interest.  There are a lot of these scattered around the world map, and they are very easy to ping and move on.  But, as I was grabbing these, I really liked that these really were points of interest – whether it was a particular inn or bar, someone’s home, or some anomaly of the world that was worth calling attention to.  While the crafted maps made areas feel familiar, the points of interest often felt the areas feel unique and mysterious.  This added a dichotomy to the world that made every area of exploration interesting, and fed my want to continue the exploration.

With the core Tyria map complete, my next goal is to complete exploration of the rest of the map (the living story locations, and the Heart of Thorns maps).  I’m looking forward to this (even though the Heart of Thornes maps are crazy difficult), so we’ll see what happens.