I was very excited for the Janthir Wilds expansion of Guild Wars 2 in part because I love Guild Wars 2, but also because Janthir was introducing a feature beloved by many yet enacted by few: player-owned housing. I have a love-hate relationship with player housing because while it’s fun to have own own place in a game filled with thousands of other players, I can never determine what exactly to do with my housing plot. This is not the point of this post, though; a week or two after Janthir’s release, World of Warcraft dropped it’s next expansion, The War Within. I had pre-purchased TWW a month or so before launch because I had spent a month back in Azeroth one week and I could also get Dragonflight, an expansion I didn’t have, for free with the pre-order of TWW. It seemed like a good deal at the time but since WoW has a subscription and GW2 does not, I did the math and sided with GW2.

I had written a few times about Janthir, flipping from “this sucks” to “it does not suck” in the span of a few hours, but since I suck at math I am instead playing WoW and not GW2. What gives? I, for one, would like to know.

The only reason I can think of is that right now I do not want to deal with what GW2 is asking me to do, which is a lot, but also a little. If that sounds vague, welcome to my psyche. Janthir has a main story and a bucket-load of side quests, same with The War Within. Right now, though, I am thinking that WoW’s straightforward, old-school theme park method of quest-based progress is what’s clicking for me. GW2 has always provided players with a lot of freedom in how the game can be approached, and it’s feeling a bit too unrestricted for me right now. I feel that the point at which I dropped the game was a point where I didn’t really want to do the main story, and I really didn’t want to go off and do world events, and I really was feeling the FOMO around discussions people were having about things like legendary gear unlocks. WoW and TWW seems absurdly uncomplicated in comparison, even though I’m starting out in the last chapter of a book I have only skimmed through (I have no idea who most of these characters are, or what the hell we’re doing, but I’m doing it anyway).

So I don’t feel bad about loving GW2 and liking WoW, but playing WoW and sidelining GW2 but it does feel a bit weird to me.