A surprise to be sure, and a welcome one at that! Everyone knows that the upcoming expansion for Guild Wars 2, Visions of Eternity, is just around the corner and will include all sorts of updates to whet players’ appetites for more content. Preoccupied with that launch, we sure didn’t expect to see something new and familiar drop in the middle of last week, but that’s exactly what happened. Push, the PvP game mode that ArenaNet had been working on all year, got a surprise release last week just in time for me to actually play and share my thoughts.

Now, I’d gotten my hands on Push in both of the last two beta windows for it earlier this year and at the end of last year. At a high level, I thought the mode had a lot of potential but still needed some tweaking. What does it take to make a more impressive and exciting PvP mode? Something new and innovative will no doubt help. But how much innovation pushes the envelope too far and keeps players away? And on the flip side, how much is so little that it barely registers as interesting enough to be played? With Push, ArenaNet attempts to thread that needle and come away with a fun new game mode.

Let me take you through everything that’s changed in this release as well as my final thoughts on Push.

When we last saw our heroes, Push mode had made considerable adjustments to its look and feel as well as the overall interface and even many of the game mechanics. At that time, I had found just about everything was a huge improvement over the first beta because that first beta was a beta indeed – a rough, raw, developmental version of the combat mode designed and released purely to get player feedback. Exactly what a beta is meant to be.

The map was a barren snow zone with a few obstacles scattered about to get the general battle pathing understood. The primary objective was simply the Super Adventure Box’s cloud mascot! It was evident that none of the assets for the mode were final, but that was OK. It was rough but a good first look for the community.

And let me make a tangential point for a moment. Honestly, as a normie who just loves PvP and is always pining for more openness and testing, I thought the betas were really great. We had an Overthinking not too terribly long ago where the team here at MassivelyOP explained its collective thoughts on early access and testing, and as I explained, I usually find I don’t have time to go and join test servers or whatever is set up for players to experiment in.

But for me, that sort of testing is very different from what we got with testing Push. It wasn’t closed off to a select group (at least not by the time I saw it), and it wasn’t a wholly separate server where players didn’t get to play their actual, permanent characters. Few things turn me off from playing a game more than knowing a character wipe is coming and that I shouldn’t get attached. These are the kinds of tests I actually enjoy.

In the last beta, we got a full look at the realized Push game mode, much advanced compared to the first one, the most obvious change being the visuals and the zone being polished up with a nice coat of paint. Instead of a drab snow map, we were in a full Canthan-themed underground bunker or something. The UI was greatly improved to assist players during a match too. A custom meter showing my team’s distance to the goal versus the opponents’ was implemented, making it so dead simple to see how well the match is (or isn’t!) going.

It has been about four months or so since that last beta and apparently about a year since the initial one. Now, we have the fully realized Push PvP mode. So much changed in the jump from beta 1 to beta 2; I could only expect some real refinement and updates to show up with the full release. Something that really knocks my socks off again, right? Well, not so much. This time around really was simply refinement. Some might call it polish, but I’d say it was more of a spit-shine.

With the surprise release of Push dropping, we got a handful of truly new updates, and I found them to be pretty underwhelming. I suppose the community feedback ArenaNet was looking towards wasn’t my type of feedback. Instead of reducing the player count, which was my top suggestion, we got a few cosmetic updates and some general balancing.

For those not as familiar with the game mode, here’s the gist: In addition to capturing the primary objective and escorting it to the opponents base to win, you can also fight over secondary objectives, which when communed with provide some bonuses. The fights all happen so fast that I’m usually not sure which ones result in which bonus, but I’m sure they’re all very important. If memory serves correctly, getting to these communing points involved going up a flight of stairs, which meant they were kind of out of the way of combat. Now they are very close to the normal path and not so high up. The devs have also added some teleports, but I don’t think I saw anyone intentionally use those. Most likely I just didn’t know where they were.

Overall, I had a good time in my matches. They felt quick and snappy, and the fights were close. I don’t think I had a single blowout, although by design, a blowout finishes extremely quickly, which I love. In Push, if one team is dominating the other that much, then the objective will just push into the base and end the match. It’s truly fantastic. As anyone who knows me knows, nothing annoys me more than a long drawn-out fight that was lost within the first couple of minutes of the match.

All of that said, I still believe the community, and the game mode, would be better served with a smaller team size. Not only would queues pop sooner (since you could nearly field two full matches), but the fights themselves would be much more interesting. As gorgeous as Guild Wars 2’s animations are, you just really can’t look at them that closely in a fight. Not to mention that when you’ve got 10 players laying down fields all on top of each other, the best you can do is try to dodge out of the fire.

Push is available now for all players; just go into the Mists, uncheck Conquest and Stronghold, and queue right up.

Every other week, Massively OP’s Sam Kash delivers Fight or Kite, our trip through the state of PvP across the MMORPG industry. Whether he’s sitting in a queue or rolling with the zerg, Sam’s all about the adrenaline rush of a good battle. Because when you boil it down, the whole reason we PvP (other than to pwn noobs) is to have fun fighting a new and unpredictable enemy!