Norrhart Domains
Guild Wars getting a little visual polish in 2024 was a pleasant surprise, not because the changes were dramatic but because it signalled that even a “finished” game is still getting the occasional tidy‑up. It was as good an excuse as any to drag a squad of heroes back out to the Far Shiverpeaks, and to Norrhart Domains in particular—a slice of snowbound Charr country I’ve always had a soft spot for.
In Eye of the North, Norrhart Domains sits out in the Far Shiverpeaks as part of that chain of rugged, icy maps leading up to the Eye itself. It’s a harsh place: long, exposed ridges, deep drifts and visibility that can vanish into white‑out with a few steps in the wrong direction. Jotun warriors lope through the valleys, hostile centaurs and other beasts fill in the gaps, and here and there you stumble across shrines and Norn settlements that speak to older, more rooted lives in the middle of all that cold. It’s not forgiving, but that’s part of the appeal—the zone feels like it was built first for its natives and only secondarily for you, which makes carving a path through with a customised hero team feel satisfying in a way that a flatter, friendlier landscape never quite manages.
Seen from the vantage point of Guild Wars 2’s Icebrood Saga, Norrhart Domains and the wider Far Shiverpeaks take on a different tone. The later game revisits that northern band as Jormag’s influence spreads: glaciers have crept further south, icebrood patrols have taken over abandoned halls, and the sky itself feels heavier, as if the dragon is leaning in. Where the Eye of the North version of the region is content to be a self‑contained stretch of challenges and story hooks, the Icebrood maps tie it into a longer arc about Jormag’s awakening, the displacement of the norn and the Ebon Vanguard, and the slow encroachment of an enemy that prefers to tempt and freeze rather than simply smash. It’s the same mountain spine, but with the stakes dialled up and the old paths half‑buried under fresh sheets of ice.
Underneath that, the party you take through these places has changed almost as much as the maps. Heroes in Guild Wars were a quiet revolution when they arrived: recruitable named NPCs like Koss, Tahlkora or Vekk who joined your account permanently and could be configured with full skill bars, attribute spreads and equipment. They let you solo or duo content that had originally assumed a full human party, and they brought their own snatches of dialogue and personality along for the ride, which helped the world feel less empty even when you weren’t grouped. Over time, though, players wanted more control—more monks, more mesmers, more copies of a build that worked—than the fixed hero roster would allow.
The mercenary system was ArenaNet’s answer to that. Sold as an account upgrade near the end of Guild Wars’ active development, it let you turn your own level 20 characters into hero slots—mercenary heroes—with the same mechanical capabilities as the story‑recruited ones. Any fully levelled character could be duplicated this way, PvE or PvP, and you could then field a team of, say, three ritualists and three mesmers without having to rely on what the campaign’s hero list happened to offer. They shared names and appearances with their originals but otherwise behaved like normal heroes: you picked their skills, runes and weapons, you flagged them on the battlefield, and you could slot them in or out of any party composition.
In practice, that shift from fixed heroes to semi‑bespoke mercenaries was a gentle but definite tilt towards player agency. It didn’t replace the old companions or their stories, but it acknowledged how people were actually playing: theory‑crafting, building specialised teams, and wanting their own characters reflected in the squad standing at their back. Marching that little army out across somewhere like Norrhart Domains in 2024, with the snow still bright and the outlines just that bit sharper, feels like seeing two halves of Guild Wars’ appeal at once: the sharp, self‑contained landscapes of the original campaigns, and the slowly expanded toolset that let you explore them on your own terms.
