My goal this month in Guild Wars 2 was to get a Super Adventure Box skin. The most relaxing way, I felt, to do so was to run through the first three zones on about 9 days. Each zone gets me 2 bauble bubbles, of which I would need 50 to get my virtual tourist t-shirt. My “daily†was a nice refreshing jaunt through the first world.
Along the way I started to consider the achievements for Super Adventure Box. I had already read Jeromai’s pleasure and pain of completing some, and to be honest it didn’t sound like fun. But, I needed help finding where to buy upgrades, and I noticed that the dedicated Guild Wars 2 wikites had been super thorough with producing a guide for each zone. I did not feel up to using hours of my time to find all the baubles or shops in a zone myself. I was more than happy to follow a guide.
My biggest hold up, to be honest, is hard mode. I know that I can get all the achievements in this month’s Super Adventure Box content, but hard mode might become a nightmare. Did I want to use my time to chase after achievements now to “complete†that tab knowing that later on hard mode might make sure that there will always be a hole in that achievements tab? I don’t know yet.
I do know that finding all the stuff in Sunny Glade using the wiki guide was fun. It took me to a few places I had not considered, and it also helped me in hinting where the developers seemed to like to hide things. Once I started to understand how the developers were thinking, I became more capable of finding things on my own.
Since I got my 50th bauble bubble last night, I feel like my time in Super Adventure Box is winding down. I haven’t even touched WvW since the update, and Mrs. Ravious is gung-ho on destroying all the dredge listening devices she can. I will likely be roped in to helping her so I don’t have to listen to her complain about that “damn veteran mob ambushâ€.
Still, Super Adventure Box was a really fun side dish in Guild Wars 2. I enjoyed it, and I might very well go back later in the month to knock out another achievement or two. Knowing that Super Adventure Box will be turned off for a time definitely keeps the content and achievement availability near the surface of my thoughts. This is unlike the swath of puzzles and mini-dungeon achievements I might get to some day.
–Ravious
It actually takes a very short time if you follow a guide, by the way.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my post, but I meant to say that I spent an excessive amount of time in the Box because I was having a blast discovering things. An OCD blast, to be sure, but a blast.
(I was that gamer who would try to move to every suspicious looking square in a jRPG and press A / dig it up because there’s bound to be something hidden there, somewhere!)
In an interesting contrast of priorities, I haven’t bought a skin yet. I think I ought to have enough soon, one character has 40-some and another has 8ish baubles, but I’ve skipped days in the SAB – which has now boiled down to a leisurely run through all three worlds and collecting 500 baubles for two extra BBs – once all the guides came out and stuff was ‘known’ so to speak.