We Went Hands On With The Upcoming Guild Wars 2: Secrets Of The Obscure Expansion

Last week I got to take part in a Guild Wars 2 press event where we were able to play a little bit of the MMORPG's upcoming expansion, Secrets of the Obscure. During the event, we rode skyscales, closed rifts, and saw a small part of the new map's meta event.

To answer your first question, yes I did play a Mechanist using a Scrapper hammer, and it was glorious. That's part of the quality-of-life improvements in this expansion, the freedom to use any weapon your class has available to it with any spec. No more weapons only tied to one spec. Mix and match until your heart is content.

The first thing we did was mount up on our flying skyscale mounts and answer the challenge of a course that tested our flying skills as well as our shooting skills. You see, the new flight mastery skill line that comes in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure gives you many perks to your skyscale (as well as a way to unlock one if you haven't already). One of those perks is an aim-able fireball that we used to shoot targets as we flew around. This fireball can also be used in combat against enemies and, further down the mastery line, you can even mount up on your skyscale while in combat.

The next activity we took part in was closing a rift, which is a new mechanic in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure. Find rifts throughout the map and rip them open to defeat the evil menace that pours from within. It culminates in a boss encounter that will be pretty tough unless you've got a good group with you.

We also saw a bit of the new Strike mission coming with Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure and let me tell you, this guy was tough. He looked really cool though. No spoilers, so I can't go into too much detail but we only saw phase 1 of the encounter and it pretty much wiped most of the group.

Next, we took part in some of the zone's meta event, until an eldritch being straight out of an HP Lovecraft novel showed up and destroyed us. There weren't nearly enough of us running around to do a full meta event, so the devs helped us out a bit with the fight, but the visual spectacle of it all was quite something to observe.

The zone itself, as you would expect from Guild Wars 2 at this point, was quite beautiful, with unique architecture throughout and gorgeous vistas to catch a view from. The zone is made quite literally for skyscales to fly around in, so the amount of verticality was on point. Scale wise it was hard to judge the size of the map since we jumped around from waypoint to waypoint and didn't really get a chance to just explore, but I'd say it's bigger than many of the story chapter zones we get, but not on par with something like say, the End of Dragons map.

Overall it was an enjoyable couple of hours in the game and I'm raring to go when Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure goes live on August 22nd. It'll be nice to have another way to get a skyscale that doesn't involve me farming different story maps for resources for hours.