Metrica Province
The asura's laboratory in the jungle
A tree grows out of a cube that hangs unsupported above a paved plaza. The stone around it is angular, edged with inlaid cyan lighting, and the banners on the pylons are the flat, precise geometry the asura prefer over any woven cloth. Behind the cube, a thin crescent moon shows through the cloud. Nothing here is trying to look natural. Everything looks deliberate.
The plaza is in Soren Draa, a small asuran town built around the eastern side of the gate to Rata Sum. It is the first place a new asura character sees after they step out of their opening cinematic — the architecture deliberately echoes the capital on the other side of the gate. Half the point of the plaza is to make travellers feel they have not really left the city yet. A minute's walk in any direction from here and the jungle takes over. Soren Draa is the threshold. Metrica Province is what lies beyond it.
Where the zone begins
Metrica Province is the asuran starter zone. It sits at the southwestern edge of the Maguuma Jungle, in the region the game calls the Tarnished Coast — a warm, humid land of pine, palm, mangrove, red-rock ravines, and steep river valleys, more Central American than Mediterranean. It connects north to Brisban Wildlands, northeast to Caledon Forest through a shared jungle border, and southwest through the asura gate at Soren Draa into Rata Sum. The Ullen River enters via waterfalls in the northeast, cuts south across the map, and eventually crosses the southern border near Loch Jezt.
For new characters, the zone covers levels one to fifteen, plus a small level-sixteen sliver at the Thaumanova Reactor site in the far northwest. Twenty-five named areas fit inside it, along with sixteen renown hearts, sixteen waypoints, roughly thirty-five named landmarks, nine vistas, and one meta-event on a two-hour timer. The Peacemakers — the asuran police, mostly golems in blue livery with a scattering of asuran officers giving orders — patrol the roads and settlements, and are the closest thing the map has to a common thread. Everything else is a competing project, an argument between krewes, or the debris of a failed project.
Rata Sum, briefly
Rata Sum is the asuran capital city, and worth a paragraph even in an article about the lands outside it. It is a floating superstructure — cubes stacked on cubes, held aloft by magitech mechanisms that the game does not entirely explain, with lifts and asura gates connecting its multiple levels. The three colleges — Statics, Dynamics, and Synergetics — occupy dedicated halls and give the city its academic-political shape. The Arcane Council governs from the Council Level at the top. The gates on the ground floor connect to Lion's Arch, Hoelbrak, the Black Citadel, the Grove, and, through the north gate of the Creator's Commons, to Metrica. In practice, the city is where you go to train, respec, buy from craft masters, and access many of the personal-story chapters.
Metrica is where you go to do the work — the gate drops the player onto a landing at the western edge of Soren Draa.
First work at Soren Draa
Soren Draa has a waypoint, an inn, the Terranexic Lab, a chess table set up in one of the plazas, and, in the streets around all of this, a slow-burning problem with Inquest thieves who keep trying to walk out of the town with boxes of golem parts. The Peacemakers, as patient as policing golems are, ask the recruit to help stop them and calm a set of PM-900a golems that have started malfunctioning on the north side of town. Neither task is dramatic. Both establish the pattern the zone will keep to: these are lands where the sentences begin with "help krewe X with project Y".
Soren Draa connects north to Obscura Incline, east to the Hinterlabs, and south to Wildflame Caverns. The recruit's first real assignment sends them east to the Hinterlabs, where the Snaff Prize is being competed for — an award named for Snaff, the great asuran inventor and mentor to Zojja, killed by the Elder Dragon Kralkatorrik in the events that broke Destiny's Edge. Every year, a krewe wins the prize for a genuinely revolutionary invention. Every year, the Inquest tries to sabotage it. The recruit's personal story begins in the crowd at the Hinterlabs, with a golem malfunction that was clearly engineered, and it doesn't take a full afternoon to figure out who did it.
Who the asura are
The asura are Tyria's fifth playable race, added in Guild Wars 2 after being introduced in Eye of the North in 2007. They are small — barely waist-high on a norn — long-lived, magically adept, and unshakeably convinced that they are the pre-eminent civilisation on the planet. They call everyone else bookah, a mildly derisive term that translates roughly as "you great slow lump", and use it without embarrassment even when they are asking a favour. Their culture is organised around research: everyone belongs to a krewe (a research team, usually five to ten strong, structured around a lead researcher), and every krewe belongs to one of the three colleges.
Their history explains a lot about the country they now live in. The asura spent centuries in the Depths of Tyria, a subterranean empire connected by their own asura gates — magically stabilised wormholes between paired anchor points. They believed themselves alone at the top of the ecological pyramid, until the events leading up to Eye of the North. An Elder Dragon called Primordus began to wake beneath them, and its lieutenant, the Great Destroyer, led an army of destroyers up through the Central Transfer Chamber — the hub of the asura gate network. The asura evacuated en masse to the surface.
Two hundred and fifty years later, that emergency evacuation has become permanent, and the jungle they chose to settle in — the Tarnished Coast — is what Metrica Province is now a slice of. Rata Sum, built new after the exodus, is their capital in exile that long ago stopped being an exile.
The landscape is dense with the physical residue of asuran research: private labs, discarded experiments, deactivated golems, ancient transfer chambers half-buried in the undergrowth, the ruins of older asuran facilities from before the exodus, and — increasingly since the game's launch — the wreckage of Inquest projects that have gone wrong at various scales.
The Inquest drives the map's tension. They are a schism from the college system: in principle, just another krewe; in practice, a heavily funded and morally unrestricted organisation that experiments on sentient beings, harnesses Elder Dragon energy for weapons, and treats every other krewe on the map as either a competitor or a resource to be captured.
The road east: Hinterlabs, Loch Jezt, Jeztar Falls
East of Soren Draa, the road climbs through Obscura Incline — a low ridge of jungle above the river, with a salvage krewe under Senior Researcher Shoon fending off Inquest incursions — and drops into the Hinterlabs, a strip of open ground with three labs on it. Professor Gahf runs a school for asuran progeny (the asuran word for children); Doola's krewe does golemancy research; the Opticalium tries to work out how to store lightning. The Snaff Prize competition is centred here, with the recruit helping any of the three teams they choose. The tutorial is not subtle: the recruit learns that asuran research is competitive, that golems require maintenance, and that at least one of the krewes will lose their prize because the Inquest walked in and stole it.
North of the Hinterlabs, the ground drops sharply into Loch Jezt, a broad river-lake in a canyon, and then east along the water into Jeztar Falls, a set of cascades where the river drops down toward the Ullen. PR&T Esoterics has a lab on the falls, and they need help feeding oozes into a reservoir; further along, Researcher Kaii's team is trying to sort through the scrap heap Incomp Optics abandoned. Between the two of them, the recruit will do more heart-work per hour than in any other stretch of the zone.
The sound of the falls is what one remembers of this stretch. The Ullen cuts a valley through the jungle in a series of stepped pools, and the paths follow the ledges above them. The way a levelling asura sees this valley now — skimming over the water on a skyscale or a skiff — is not the way they saw it in 2012, but the ravine below is unchanged. From the air above Obscura Incline, the river runs east through a green corridor toward Loch Jezt, cliffs stepping up on either side to warm-lit jungle, an asuran facility built into the eastern side, its cyan lighting on despite the hour.
The rider in the shot above is on a skyscale wearing a Clockwork skin, a black-winged mechanical thing on articulated struts. The mount is a later addition to the game, but the valley below it is the valley a launch-era asura walked through on foot.
The middle ground: Voloxian, Akk, Desider
North of Jeztar Falls, the road climbs onto a broader jungle plateau. Voloxian Passage is a narrow strip of jungle-cut rock, with the Brill Alliance labs on one side and skritt cave networks on the other. Brill Alliance is a xenology krewe: they are trying to study the skritt, specifically to work out why skritt intelligence appears to scale with group size. Their researcher Yerkk is isolating individual skritt for IQ tests, and the skritt keep trying to raid the lab to free them. The recruit can help either side, though the framing rewards siding with Brill.
Further east, the Akk Wilds show the zone's ancient past. Great slabs of stone stand up out of the jungle like broken teeth, tealed with the same asuran runes and lighting as the modern facilities but obviously older — pre-exodus, from a civilisation the current asura would rather claim uncritically than examine.
Parnna's Gate, an ancient transfer chamber the Order of Whispers wants reopened, is buried in the ridges north of the Wilds. She thinks it connects to Calx's Hideout, a lab belonging to one of her ancestors, sealed since before the exodus. Between her heart-quest and Hrouda's ecology work — an asura genuinely trying to keep the jungle intact against Dr Bleent's ooze experiments — the Akk Wilds are where the pre-asuran past feels closest to the surface.
Desider Atum, west of the Wilds, holds the waypoint and a Lionguard outpost. It is the asuran map's small acknowledgement that the wider world exists and that not all the traffic on these roads is asuran. West again, Voloxian bleeds into Fisher's Beach Bend on the coast — a strip of beach at the mouth of the Ullen where the river enters the zone and where Aqualimit is trying to run a research operation with the local krait interfering at every step.
The Ullen and the way south
South of the Wilds and the Bend, the ground lowers into Michoan Marsh and Cuatl Morass — the two hylek regions in the zone. The hylek are the frog-people of Tyria, split into many tribes with intricate feuds. The Michotl in the marsh are friendly; the Cuatl in the morass are hostile, and the Lionguard have a heart-quest at Arterium Haven asking the recruit to help keep the road through Cuatl territory open. Between the two, the landscape is river, mangrove, low mud and low sound: warm, damp, buggy.
Where the Ullen runs down the western side of Michoan Marsh, one of the stiller pools is worth stopping at. A skiff sits at anchor: an alchemist's craft, dressed up in the Alchemic Power skin, converted — for the shot at least — into a small floating laboratory. An alembic and cauldron on the deck, a retort feeding a chimney, and off the port side a cloud of pink-and-cyan magical exhaust rolling out across the water.
The asura on board is running an experiment, or has just finished one, or is about to. The boat sits glowing on the river in an otherwise dark stretch of jungle. It is one of the truest things Metrica has to say about its own culture: an alchemist has decided that the best place to do his work is a moored skiff, a mile from the nearest Peacemaker patrol and with no oversight worth the name, and he is right.
The Inquest at the edges
The Inquest's reach into Metrica is easier to appreciate in the north and northeast of the map. Artergon Woods is where the Luminates power krewe keeps the zone's power grid running — a set of conduit towers that require constant maintenance and are constantly under attack, either by Inquest raiders or by the air elementals the towers themselves attract. Hexane Regrade, further north, is where the Inquest have effectively taken the ground. Peacemaker Owta has a heart-quest asking the recruit to help disrupt their complex, and the landscape here consists of concrete-and-cyan installations tucked into the jungle, with patrols of Inquest guards on the paths between them.
At the northeastern corner of the map lies the Inquest Outer Complex, the largest of their bases in the zone, running back into an Inner Complex whose contents are the subject of no public statement whatsoever. The vista on the outer terrace looks across the top of the facility: heavy asuran stonework in the diamond-shouldered style, cyan-topped pylons standing along the parapets, a huge glazed diamond window of running blue set into the front wall, and, to the left of it, a waterfall coming down the cliff into a pool beside the building. It reads as one of the more considered pieces of composition in the zone — the Inquest do not do anything unmonumentally — and it is the closest a levelling asura will get to their operations without going in.
Going in is a different matter. Field events across the zone break open into fighting inside Inquest buildings: raids on the LUM0009 golem stores, drives to disrupt Mark II charging cores, extractions of captured Peacemakers. In the middle of one of these fights, in a lab interior that could be any of a dozen Inquest facilities, the party finds itself in front of a great polygonal machine of black stone and green trim, red crystals set into its faces, discharging fire in vertical sheets and lightning across the top. The machine does whatever the Inquest wants it to do until it stops. The party leaves the room, and the room is sealed behind them, and the Inquest builds another one somewhere else on the map.
The Survivor's Encampment on Muridian Uplands, further west, takes the brunt of this. The Survivors are Asura who used to work at the Thaumanova Reactor before it exploded, and who have been camping here ever since, running a rearguard action against Inquest raids on the ruin's border. Their heart-quest is one of the few in the zone where the framing isn't about research, but about people who are tired.
Beyond Muridian, at the northwestern corner of the map, is the ruin the whole zone eventually looks toward: the Thaumanova Reactor.
Thaumanova
The Thaumanova Reactor was an asuran research facility, built by a private consortium over an intersection of ley lines — the invisible channels of magical energy that thread through Tyria. The Inquest maintained a laboratory in the substructure. In roughly 1324 AE, under the guidance of a consultant they trusted but should not have — a sylvari calling herself Ceara, later Scarlet Briar, later the destroyer of Lion's Arch — they attempted an experiment on chaos magic.
They mixed in a source of energy they had inaccurately identified as more chaos magic; it was Elder Dragon energy. The reactor tore open the fabric of reality above the ley-line intersection. The city on top of it was destroyed. The chaos rifts that opened in the aftermath teleported creatures from across the world into the ruins, leaving the site divided into five distinct zones of raw elemental energy: fire, ice, water, earth, and a chamber holding a Branded crystal from the Dragonbrand.
The site is still dangerous. The C.L.E.A.N. krewe — Chaos-Localised Elemental Absorption Nullifier — has been running an on-site cleanup operation for a decade. Every two hours (at xx:45 on the game's timer), Rooba and her C.L.E.A.N. 5000 golem attempt a fresh sweep. The Inquest attacks the golem. The absorption fails, or partially succeeds, and the accumulated energy erupts into a Fire Elemental — a world-boss encounter for whoever is on the map. The elemental is beaten. The next cycle begins. The event has been running on this loop, largely unchanged, since November 2013.
The arena where the Fire Elemental spawns sits at the heart of the reactor site — a broken sweep of stepped stone terraces and cyan-lit spires, asuran architecture split apart by the explosion and left standing at angles, with rain sluicing off the tilted ledges. In the quiet windows between event cycles, when the elemental is down, and the next attempt has not yet started, the arena is one of the most striking spots Metrica has: tall stone up to the sky, blue-white bolts of lightning crossing between the towers, and the whole place empty of players except for whoever has stopped to look.
Fourteen years in the province
Metrica Province launched with the game on 28 August 2012 and has been left mostly alone since then. Cragstead-scale additions have not happened here. The Snaff Prize competition still runs at the Hinterlabs. The Thaumanova Fallout event still runs every two hours. The Peacemakers still patrol the roads. The Inquest is still running its labs at Hexane Regrade and its outer complex on the northeast border. Parnna's Gate still needs repairing. Every krewe in the zone is still asking for help with the same experiment they were asking for help with in 2012.
Scarlet Briar died in 2014, in the second season of the Living World, and the Icebrood Saga closed off the arc of Elder Dragons that Thaumanova was tangentially part of. The consequences of the reactor's rupture ran through the rest of the game's story: the ley-line network Scarlet unintentionally helped identify became the basis for two subsequent expansions' worth of storytelling. But Metrica itself does not know that — it is a low-level starter zone, and it remains the map a new asura sees on their way from the gate at Soren Draa out into the wider game. The province holds — competent, cluttered, sceptical, unaccountable, faintly ridiculous — and the asura who live in it would not want it any other way.
