Check out ZAM's early look at the return of the Super Adventure Box.

The Super Adventure Box (SAB) is returning to Guild Wars 2 later today! The extremely popular content that launched as an April Fool's joke earlier this year is coming back with more content, more rewards and a harder difficulty level.

The first change players will come across is the starting area within Super Adventure Box. This zone has been expanded and will function as a public area for players to meet and group up with others for the content. As with the original release of SAB, players can choose to go in solo or up to a full party of five players. Even on the new hardest difficulty, Tribulation Mode, ArenaNet expects most players will be going it alone.

The world houses have remained in the starting zone, but the Infantile and Tribulation clouds have been removed. Instead, players will first enter the house for either World 1 or World 2. This will port the party inside the house where it may select from the Infantile Cloud (easy), the NPC villager (normal) or the Tribulation Cloud (hard).

World 1 returns, with just a few changes in this patch. Josh Foreman, the lead designer behind SAB, said that it is largely unchanged with just a few more secret rooms and dig spots added. The achievements for World 1 are also coming back along with a new meta achievement. If you have already completed the achievements for World 1, you will unlock the meta as soon as the patch goes live. This meta for World 1 will reward a green version of the SAB backpack.

World 2 features the return of Rapids, the preview level from the last release which has reportedly seen very little changed. The other zones of World 2 are Pain Cliffs, an Asian themed level set atop high cliffs and bottomless drops, and Storm Top. World 2 will continue to have secret rooms and dig spots, and, according to Josh, there will be more total secret areas in World 2 than in World 1.

We were only shown Pain Cliffs, but there was a lot to see. This Asian themed level features pagodas and the ninjas first introduced in the World 2 preview in the last release. In following the ninja dojo theme, 2-2 will feature unspoken lessons that the players must learn. The first lesson is to always be a keen observer. Throughout the level there are poison dart traps that will kill any player caught in their line of fire. Observant players, however, will notice a small red bar along surfaces that function as the dart shooting mechanism. Once you see where the darts come from it won't be too difficult to avoid them.

Another lesson is teamwork. If you are adventuring with friends, there are new cooperative puzzles. Some of these require teamwork to time an attack, such as all players hitting a gong at the same time. With other puzzles this just means a return of ArenaNet's scaling system. In one example, a withered octopus is sitting on one side of a scale. In order to progress, players must feed the octopus fish so that the octopus gets heavier, weighs down the scale and raises the other side which will be used as a platform to move on to the next area. The more players there are in the instance, the more fish the octopus wants.

In zone 2-2, players will be meeting with a mini-boss. The main feature of this mini-boss is his glove, which upon defeat will drop for players to unlock a new skill. This glove allows the boss and players to push blocks, reflect projectiles and break special items. A block or item that the glove can be used on will glow and have the glove icon symbol on it. This is important because later on players will need to complete a push block puzzle. The hand will only show up on the side of a block the player needs to push from and when the block is in its final location it will stop glowing to indicate it no longer needs to be pushed.

Tribulation mode is making its debut for both World 1 and World 2. Anyone who has played or seen videos of I Wanna Be The Guy will understand how Tribulation mode will work. It is an unforgiving difficulty where the player is looking for the correct path, and most likely failing in the process. Josh commented that they could have done Tribulation in a more standard way, by making enemies hit harder or the player takes more damage, but they wanted to do something special and more interesting than that. While Tribulation is definitely unforgiving, there is a greater sense of accomplishment for beating something with that level of unfairness.

Speaking of accomplishments, there will be a load of new rewards with the SAB release. The World 1 meta will award a green SAB backpack and the World 2 meta will award the yellow backpack along with the Honors in Applied Jumping title. The blue weapons from the previous release will not be returning, replaced by the rest of the blue SAB weapon set. A Mini Moto will be purchasable with bauble bubbles from the actual Moto, which will be a mystic forge ingredient to make the Mini Princess Miya.

Tribulation mode will come with its own achievement panel, but these achievements do not include a meta or any special reward. Instead, the chest at the end of each zone will award a special item. Collect all three of these within a world, buy a weapon design blueprint from Moto and mystic forge them for a special SAB weapon. World 1 Tribulation weapons are green variants of the normal SAB weapon set and World 2 Tribulation weapons are yellow variants. All of the Tribulation weapons will be account bound, so anyone who wants them will have to earn the weapons themselves. While the normal blue weapon set will only have half of a complete set, players will be able to choose any weapon from the complete set for the Tribulation weapons.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams

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