More Articles on Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 Q&A - Part 2Guild Wars 2 Q&A - Part OneNCsoft Lifts Lid On Guild Wars Sequel
Guild Wars 2 Q&A - Part One Feature
Jon Wilcox
04/04/2007
TVG speaks to the team at ArenaNet about their follow-up to the successful subscription-free MMO...
ArenaNet and NCsoft's MMO Guild Wars has been nothing but a success over the past couple of years. An unusual business model that has seen the Seattle-based outfit produce three instalments in the expanding universe since the game launched in April 2005, coupled with the more than attractive omission of a subscription fee, has led to sales in excess of 3 million units.
Towards the end of March, ArenaNet and NCsoft announced plans to release the fourth instalment, Eye of the North, which will arrive later in 2007. Taking players back to the land of Tyria, location of the first instalment (Guild Wars: Prophecies), Eye of the North will be the only edition that will require players to have one of its predecessors. It'll also act as a bridge to Guild Wars 2, the first fully-fledged sequel, which will be set over a century after the events of the original.
TVG caught up with Mike O'Brien, one of the founders of ArenaNet, and Game Designers Ben Miller and Eric Flannum to discuss their plans for the sequel...
The decision to produce a fully-fledged sequel to Guild Wars is an obvious opportunity for the team at ArenaNet to build on the foundations laid by the original; what are the key areas being improved for the sequel?
O'Brien: Our goal Guild Wars 2 is to take a game that's very unique, keep what players love about Guild Wars, and enhance the areas that we thought could have been better. Guild Wars is not like anything that came before it, and for our first attempt we think we hit 90% [of our goals], but there were some decisions that we'd love to tweak and you can't do that without making a full sequel. So Guild Wars 2 is the game that we all wish Guild Wars could become, and I think our goal with Guild Wars 2 is to make the game that players all wish Guild Wars could become. Let me talk about some of the areas where we're changing things in Guild Wars 2.
The first thing is that Guild Wars is an entirely instanced game, which was a reaction to some of the problems that exist in traditional MMOs in that it froze up a lot of the issues that people encounter like Spawn Camping, waiting in line to complete boss monsters, and kill stealing - things like that. But I also think that there are benefits from persistence also that Guild Wars 1 doesn't have. One of the benefits from persistence is that as you're exploring the world, you can naturally run into people. You can be out there fighting and somebody can walk by and offer to help, and you can make a friend, and then logging in the next day you're more likely to see the same people again.
In Guild Wars 1 everybody played on the same servers, which means that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world. That means that if you make a friend today, you're not necessarily going to run into them again unless you add them to your friend's list and make an effort to meet up. So in Guild Wars 2 we're keeping the instanced aspect of the game, but we're also adding a persistent world on top of that. We're going to have the outside 'explorable' area as a persistent world so you'll run into the same people over and over, but when you go into a mission or a dungeon it'll be instanced, so you'll have benefits that Guild Wars 1 got from instancing.
So Guild Wars 2 will follow a more traditional structure of an MMO?
I think that by adding a persistent world we get a lot of these benefits that traditional MMOs get, but it's misleading to say that it's traditional in that sense. We don't want it to play differently than Guild Wars does, as I said our goal is to make it a natural sequel to Guild Wars. For example, in traditional MMOs, when you're in a persistent world it's a very quest based, party-based experience, and there are issues where people in my party can kill-steal people in your party. I think we're going to design the combat mechanics and event mechanics in the persistent space of Guild Wars 2 to play more like Guild Wars 1 does, where there aren't many opportunities for players to get in each other's way. We have a whole event system for Guild Wars 2 that we've been talking about; Eric do you want to talk about that?
Flannum: There are a couple of problems that you get in a normal MMO. One is the kill-stealing, and the second is that players need to be reading from the same page so far as quests go, what step of the quest you're on - a lot of the games have some Quest Sharing which does help - but it's still often a problem trying to ensure that you're having the same content as your friends. There are times when you feel that you can't play that character because you're going to advance past that area, and you want to save those things so you can do them with your friends. So the Event System circumvents a lot of that stuff, for instance in an area you might have a dragon that shows up occasionally. It'll send a big event message to everybody in that zone saying that "Hey, the dragon is here!" You'll be able to see that and try to fight the dragon off with as many players that want to participate in that - and all those players will get rewarded.
But then we want those events to have consequences on the world. So for instance, if the players don't manage to defeat the dragon - perhaps not enough came to help or they're not strong enough - and it burns down a bridge or something like that. That then triggers the next event chain; perhaps workers from the nearby village start to head off and form caravans to repair the bridge, but bandits in the local area decide that it's a good time to go and rob some people, and attack the worker caravans. So the next event to show up for everybody is to go and help rescue the caravans, and everybody that participates in saving them will get rewarded for it once the caravans reach their destination. Our goal is to have a lot of different things like this going on in any given area at various times, so that when you get together with friends you're not going off to do a quest, you get together to "Go to that valley where the Char attack, and see what's happening." The idea is that there'll be Easter Egg events and events that happen quite regularly, so you'll never be quite sure what's going on in the zone.
So there's an actual Cause and Effect dynamic built into the game?
Yeah that's a big thing for us, to make these persistent areas feel like living worlds, like they're alive, and that a player's actions matter and have a real impact on the world.
And certain quests would only appear depending on the success or failure of an event?
Sure, for instance, you might go out and escort some workers that are going out to pick some mushrooms, and creatures from the nearby dungeon go out and attack them. If players are quick enough to help them, then a dungeon quest might appear where you'll have to rescue a bunch of captured workers. We definitely want to do a lot of things like that. You might have things like you go down into the nearest dungeon where a really tough boss is, but the party fails to defeat him - which gets him angry, and he comes out to retaliate. The idea is there's a lot of different ways to trigger these events, and so part of the fun is discovering "Hey, this is how we get the dragon out!"
Sounds pretty cool. I know that this is probably looking too far ahead for you guys, but the original Guild Wars saw a new instalment get released every six to nine months - is this something that you're looking to do with Guild Wars 2?
O'Brien: I think that the business model of Guild Wars 1 has worked really well for us. Guild Wars has blown out everybody's expectations of how big a game it could be, and it's filling a niche in the market that nothing else is filling - so we're really gratified by the success of Guild Wars 1 and we're not going to turn our back on that business model by any means. Guild Wars 2 will have some sort of expansion, but I think it's too early to know whether it'll be an expansion every six months or every year, or whether it'll be a mini-expansion every couple of months. I don't know those details yet, but the underlying business model where you can buy the game and play it for as long as you want and not play a monthly fee, and [decide when] future content comes out that...you want to pay for it [remains].
In that respect I think that a lot of people perceive Guild Wars as complimentary to other MMOs rather than be in direct competition with them; was this an intentional strategy so that ArenaNet wouldn't be cannibalising other NCsoft titles and other MMOs? Is this a strategy that you're taking with Guild Wars 2?
I think our motivation was to push online role-playing in new directions, to shake things up and experiment. ArenaNet started developing Guild Wars and this business model before we were a part of NCsoft and we talked with a lot of potential partners and publishers. The thing that we appreciated about NCsoft was that they got what we were trying to accomplish with Guild Wars, and they were excited about innovation and experimentation. If you look at NCsoft's product line up you see them pushing online game experiences in different directions, and trying out different business models. I wish that this was something that the entire industry was doing more of rather than look at the success of one game and saying "I want to make that same kind of game with that business model", that people would really try many different kinds of things in the online space.
That's fair enough, after all it's something that Turbine has tried doing with the Founder Members offer for the Lord of the Rings Online [a one off payment of £100 negates any future subscription]; I guess in some respects that's a third way of doing it away from the traditional subscription model and the model set by Guild Wars?
Absolutely, and it's great to see people experimenting; it'll be exciting to see how they do with that business model also.
TVG would likes to thank the team at ArenaNet for talking to us; the second part of the interview will be arriving tomorrow.
Anonymous
Date Added:Mon 16th Jun 2008 17:54
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Date Added:Sat 14th Jun 2008 16:52
Oh well i can't wait for gw2 its gonna be frickin awesome
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Date Added:Sun 23rd Mar 2008 23:26
-Yes you will still have classes but now you can also choose your race, you can be a: Human, Norn, Asura, Charr or a brand new Sylvari!
GW 2 Will rock! I have to hurry up and fill up my hall of monuments! I want my he... [ Read full comment... ]
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