Today's major update brings Guild Wars 2 its first raid since over 5 years.

Last year, Guild Wars 2 adopted a new expansion cycle, replacing the old sporadic releases with smaller, more regular ones. Expansions launch with two maps of the open world and a few new features. The rest of the year is filled out by major quarterly updates.

Secrets of the Obscure was ArenaNet's first attempt to work at this scale. It tried to cram in too much story, and later updates suffered for it. Janthir Wilds is this year's attempt to adapt and evolve. The studio has taken what it learned and adapted to better fit the new structure.

So far, has been mostly a success. The big test for this year's expansion will be today with the release of Godspawn, the first quarterly update. Instead of expanding the map, the first raid in five years is added.

This is a bit of a risk. The fact that the player base of the game tends to be more casual is one reason why it's been so many years since the studio released a new raiding wing. There are plenty of players who spend their time wandering open world maps, completing meta-events and searching for achievements. The raid LFG menu is much quieter.

ArenaNet's solution is two-fold. The first is that the normal mode which launches today is designed to be at the lower end of the difficulty spectrum. This is an attempt to bridge a gap between two very diverse sets of players. The studio plans to add challenge mode for all bosses and a legendary mode for final boss in a future update. This will be similar to the recent Strike missions, which are shortform boss encounters that use raid-lite mechanics. This last difficulty is similar to the legendary version of Temple of Febe Strike, a recent mission that took the top team of the game nine days to defeat.

Second, the map and bosses from the new raid will be reused in other parts of the game, including the story for this update and the new Convergence 50-player event. Each encounter is designed to have its own unique twist. The Convergence is a game that I played in a preview last week. It takes the form of an adventure the Kodan leader Stoic alder tells to some cubs, with randomisation of events and challenges, as he misremembers or embellishes certain elements of the story.

It's an interesting idea, and I can see why the current approach of the game to reintroducing raids makes sense. The chance to see the area you'll be raiding may make it less intimidating for players to jump in, even if the mechanics have been changed. From a development standpoint, this is probably the only way that we'll ever see another raid due to the lower player base and the time and resource it takes to create one.

As someone who has run every raid in the game, I admit that I have some doubts as to how this approach will work. It's a thrill to discover a new custom space, designed for the encounter that you've fought toward--the shifting platforms in Xera, or the gothic extravagance in Dhuum. Or whatever the hell is going on with Qadim. This alternative approach, which involves re-mixing a single space into different forms, is very sensible. I can understand and even agree with the reasoning. There's a part that can't but feel it lessens impact of the most aspirational activity in the game.

This tension is much more than Guild Wars 2. The biggest challenge for any live-service game is to satisfy the needs of a playerbase that's often at odds in terms of their skill, experience, and expectations. There will always be compromises.

So far, I'm generally happy with the refinement of Janthir Wilds' release schedule. The first map of the expansion is a great success. It's a return to some of those classic open world zones and feels full of interesting things to discover. (Alas the second map is a bit barren, so even though things are going in the right directions, there are still improvements that can be made. Although I'm not a fan of , this compromise yet, I'm still interested to see what the players think--and how they adapt and refine this particular experiment in the future. It's a risk, but I'd love to see it pay off.