by David Piner on Jan 13, 2015
Word on the street is that ArenaNet may be announcing their next expansion at PAX South, or so the community hopes. In a strange turn of events, it seems that a filing has been issued with the US Patent Office for the logo and name "Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns." Now this isn't a confirmation that we're going to see an expansion (simply a discovery by Redditors), that it's going to be named this, or that it's not an idea that they wanted to patent to keep the name from being taken, however. There is a logo created and anytime a logo is created, that's a lot of resources going into the design. You'd think the simple logos would come cheap, but the time of the professional designers, the QA testing, the brand consultants, the legal fees, etc. is enormous when all added together, especially considering it's such a back and forth process. Below you can see a screencap of the filing on the US Patent Website:
Oh boy oh boy oh boy. Anyway from here, the logo goes through a process to make sure it's not used anywhere else and that it's legal and if so it'll be issued as a trademark to NCSoft. Kind of a big deal huh?
So is this an expansion? I don't know, I couldn't tell you and I don't know. I would think that it would be, considering there is a new logo for it, but it could be a major content update or just DLC. Who knows! However, it's super fun to think about, no? If it is an expansion, we can obviously assume that it's going to focus on Mad King Thorn and our epic journey to turn his evil heart god or well anything to do with the Nightmare Court. I would suspect that we can see a lot of focus on the Sylvari, the nightmares in the Dream of Dreams, and really cool nightmare enemies, with a lot of focus I would imagine in Maguuma Jungle.
The logo has a green dragon. Green has five letters in it. Five is divided by 2.5 which is close to 3. Half Life: 3 confirmed. Anyway, jokes aside, it looks like the patch, DLC, expansion, whatever is going to focus on Mordremoth, the dragon awoken early by Scarlet. I would hypothesis that with the expansion will come a horrible event across all of Tyria, as each dragon's awakening has caused a catastrophe of some kind. It's only natural that the update focuses on the dragon, in addition to the disruptions in the ley lines, and other effects from Scarlet awakening the dragon early.
We probably won't hear anything official from ArenaNet until sometime at PAX South when they're going to be hosting a panel. Until then, let's all leave our thoughts on why this entire expansion is focused around Mad King Thorn (or the Nightmare Court if you want to be boring). Until then, stare at some unused concept art of a green dragon.