Angry Salads
The third and final Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend, from 20–22 July 2012, felt like a dress rehearsal for launch: more races, more systems, more polish, and that sense that this was everyone’s last chance to poke at Tyria before it went live. The headline addition was the opening up of Sylvari and Asura as playable races, completing the roster and letting players see the last pieces of the world that had previously only existed in concept art and trailers.
The Sylvari made an immediate impression. As plant‑born humanoids emerging fully formed from the Pale Tree, they arrived with a shared Dream full of half‑remembered impressions rather than a conventional childhood, which gave their dialogue and personal stories a slightly otherworldly tone. Their starting area around the Grove—clusters of living platforms and walkways woven into a vast tree—reinforced the idea of a people literally grown from their environment rather than merely living in it. On the other side of the Maguuma Jungle, the Asura’s Rata Sum showed the opposite extreme: a hovering cube‑city of hard angles, force fields and orderly terraces, broadcasting that this was a culture built on logic, arcane engineering and a healthy dose of arrogance. Together, those two hubs added a great deal of flavour to the world, and the beta gave players enough time to see how their stories slotted into the larger fight against Zhaitan.
Exploration got a noticeable boost with the formal introduction of vistas. These camera points, perched on cliffs, rooftops and odd bits of terrain, asked you to do a little light platforming or route‑finding to reach them, then rewarded you with a short sweeping shot of the surrounding area. They quickly became a quiet obsession for some players, both as a way of ticking off map completion and as an excuse to test how much of ArenaNet’s art they could actually see from unusual angles. On the lighter side of things, Keg Brawl made its debut as a raucous minigame in which teams battered each other around a norn lodge while trying to grab, hold and throw ale kegs, providing a break from more serious PvE and structured PvP.
Competitive modes also took a step forward. Structured PvP gained the Legacy of the Foefire map, a three‑point conquest arena set among the ruins of Ascalon’s old capital, complete with guild lords behind each team’s walls as powerful secondary objectives. World vs World saw tweaks such as the addition of sentries—neutral guards posted along routes whose deaths provided score and map information, nudging players to skirmish beyond the main keeps and towers. Behind the scenes, the beta applied further tuning to downscaling and dynamic level adjustment, trying to ensure that high‑level characters dropping into lower‑level zones still felt challenged without completely overshadowing local players.
A host of small quality‑of‑life changes hinted at where ArenaNet’s attention was going. The “Deposit All Materials” option, accessible from the inventory gear menu, allowed players to dump crafting mats straight into the account‑wide material storage, freeing up bag space with a single click. Crafting stations offered direct access to bank inventories, cutting down on unnecessary back‑and‑forth between vendors and storage. Pet AI saw incremental improvements to make ranger companions less prone to getting stuck or ignoring targets, and the equipment preview window became a more reliable way to check how new armour and weapons would look before committing your transmutation stones or coin.
The weekend wrapped up with “Hunger Royale”, an end‑of‑beta event that riffed openly on battle royale and Hunger Games tropes. Players were dropped into team‑based survival matches where their health ticked down over time, forcing them to scour the map for ration crates to stave off “hunger” while fending off other teams doing the same. Ammunition and supplies were limited, so big zergs tended to starve; as the match wore on, deaths became more final, with fallen players returning as drones that could spot stealth enemies, drop shields or manufacture extra ammo for their surviving teammates. It was chaotic, occasionally unbalanced, and very much in keeping with ArenaNet’s habit of using beta finales to push their systems in odd directions.
By the time the servers went down that Sunday, the shape of Guild Wars 2 was much clearer. With all five races playable, vistas and mini‑games fleshing out exploration, PvP maps that tied into the world’s history, and small but telling usability improvements like material deposit and crafting‑bank links, the third beta weekend underlined the game’s intent to be both broad and surprisingly polished at launch. For many of those who took part, it also cemented the Sylvari and Asura—not just the “angry salads” and the tiny geniuses, but their cities and stories—as a big part of what made Tyria worth coming back to.
