Playing Guild Wars 2 alone: what is open to you and what is not

A lot of people arrive at this game with the same worry: it is an MMO, so somewhere behind the front door there will be a wall, and the wall will be made of other people who already know each other.

The honest answer is that the wall exists and it is much further back than you think.

What needs nobody at all

Everything in this list is designed to be finished alone, and none of it is a reduced version of a group experience:

• the entire personal story, which runs in private instances
• every open-world map in the game, including every expansion
• map completion and the two Gifts of Exploration
• jumping puzzles, fishing and the festivals
• all crafting, the trading post, gathering, your home instance
• PvP, which matches you with strangers and needs no arrangement

That covers most of the game by hours played, and it is why so many players describe Guild Wars 2 as a single-player game with weather.

What needs strangers, not friends

The middle category is the one that confuses people coming from other MMOs.

Meta events, world bosses, the big map-wide fights: these want dozens of players and none of them want to know you. There is no group to join, no application, no schedule to keep. You walk in, you fight the thing, you get your reward, and nobody has spoken.

That works because of two design decisions this game made in 2012 and never reversed: you cannot steal a node or a kill from another player, and everyone who contributes gets full credit. Another player showing up is unambiguously good news for you, which is a rarer thing in the genre than it sounds.

So a solo player at 80 has an evening’s worth of large-scale content available every single day, without a guild, a voice channel or a friend online.

Where the wall is

Two things want a real group, and it is worth being precise about them rather than vague.

Raids are ten players and need coordination. Training runs exist every week and they are welcoming, but you are joining a group, and that is the thing some people specifically do not want.

High-tier fractals are five players, and past a certain level the group has to know the mechanics.

That is the list. Everything else that looks like a wall is a preference rather than a requirement.

The consequence people find surprising: legendary armour is available to a solo player. Obsidian armour comes out of open-world content with no raid, no PvP and no rank requirement. It is slower than the raid route, and it exists, which was not true of this game for its first decade.

What you lose, and it is worth saying

You will miss the thing this game is quietly best at, and it is not content.

Guild Wars 2 has an unusual social texture: the stranger who revives you mid-meta and never says anything, the hero point train commander dragging twenty people around a jungle for free, the person in map chat explaining a boss to somebody who asked. None of that requires you to join anything, and all of it happens around a solo player rather than to them.

Plenty of people play this way for years and are perfectly happy. But if you have been solo for six months and the game has started feeling like a very pretty chore list, the fix is usually not new content. It is joining one small guild and saying nothing for a fortnight.