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Guild Wars: Factions Q&A Feature
Jon Wilcox
24/02/2006
TVG speaks to ArenaNet co-founder and President Jeff Strain about Guild Wars Factions and the MMO genre...
TVG was recently invited to preview ArenaNet's Guild Wars Factions, the second Campaign in the Guild Wars franchise. The event was the scene for many announcements of all things Guild Wars, not least the news that the original game is to be renamed Guild Wars Prophecies to reflect developments to the brand.
We managed to sit down with ArenaNet co-founder and President Jeff Strain and discuss his thoughts on the series so far, together with what the release of Factions will bring to players.
Guild Wars is now coming up to its first anniversary since its release. How do you feel its gone, and out of ten how do you rate it so far?
In all sincerity we couldn't be happier; this is the first product from a new company. We've blasted past a million [users] right off the bat very rapidly. We've got players all over the world, we wanted to have a global game that was a competitive game - we've just come off of our first World Championship. That was a lot of fun and very successful, frankly we couldn't be happier. It's been a great run; we're really excited about Factions and as I said earlier [in the demo] we're starting to see usage grow substantially and I think that it's these people who're coming back to Guild Wars saying "Hey, I remember Guild Wars, that was fun, that was quite a good game."
On a scale of one to ten, well, you know I'd say perhaps put it at eight. I think that technically we executed well and we've not had a lot of technical glitches. We've had essentially zero server downtime since we launched it, but I always think there's an opportunity to improve the gameplay experience.
"Our focus right now is on the PC because that's where the gamers are, if they go to 360 believe me we'll be there - we'll go where the gamers go."
You were saying that you've just off the back of the first World Championships, and that there's going to be a further Championship later this summer. Are they going to Campaign related so that the one in the summer will revolve around Factions; is there going to be one again for Prophecies, or will it be structured so that there are Campaign championships underneath an overall Guild Wars championship?
What we're going to start doing is make a World Champion for each Campaign. So we've just had the Guild Wars World Champion, this summer we're going to have a Factions World Champion, and then early next year we'll have a Campaign 3 World Champion. So the World Championship will be tied to each Campaign, which implies that there's going to be two World Championship events each year. What we'd like to do is host those in Europe and the US, and then potentially one of our Asian territories and kinda Round Robin it that way.
You're coming to the end of working on Factions at the moment, how are you going into Campaign 3, and assessing where you want to go with future Campaigns?
We're releasing two Campaigns a year but each of those Campaigns will have a full year of development. I'll reiterate it again, these are games, these are not expansion packs and so they have a full development cycle. The development teams are staggered so that means we started work on Factions right as Guild Wars was shipping, and Campaign 3 started last Fall so it's well into development. Obviously we're not really announcing any deals at the moment but I will say that if Guild Wars was an eight and Factions was a ten well that scale's going to have to be revised every time because in terms of the play experience and the visuals, we expect Campaign 3 to be as big a step over Factions as Factions is over the original Guild Wars.
You're introducing two new professions, the Assassin and the Ritualist, in Factions; can you talk about them and how they add to the overall experience laid down by the original six professions from Guild Wars Prophecies?
As you know the original Guild Wars had six professions and those were all chosen to become the archetypes; you've got your tank, you've got your healer, your energy controller, obviously the ranged attacker, all the kind of core fantasy characters that deal with the five colours of magic. With Factions and with future Campaigns we're branching up; those six core professions will persist in all Campaigns. You'll always be able to create Monk and a Necromancer, although they will be themed for that Campaign so if you create a new character in Factions, a Factions Necromancer will look and play slightly differently to an original Guild Wars Necromancer.
"We're releasing two Campaigns a year but each of those Campaigns will have a full year of development."
So what that gives us the ability to allow us to go crazy and innovative with the specific professions that we use. The Ritualist and the Assassin first of all were definitely challenging and fun to do. If you are an advanced player you can pull off some really cool combos, I think that there's a greater sense of satisfaction because your place in the battle can be very unique. They're designed to be well balanced enough so you could still play by yourself or by just hiring Henchmen, but really where they shine is when they're being played with other people. The Assassin produces some really new mechanics into the game in terms of spatial control; the assassin can warp in and out and a lot of the skill sets for the profession are based on the ability instantly teleport somewhere and back or to teleport members of your team.
And is that to counter-balance the Assassin's lower armour stats as a need to quickly retreat from a battle before teleporting back for another attack?
Yeah, although I don't know if you would say that the ability to teleport around was based on armour or vice-versa. We look at the way the game plays and ask what are some fundamentally new play experiences that we can introduce? The core Guild Wars professions focused on different aspects of skill like the Warrior deals and takes a lot of hits; Mesmers impact your energy and are affected by energy; the Rangers are focused on ranged attacks, and with Necromancers you're always looking for corpses - where they die and how they die is really important. With the Assassin we looked at what was being missed out and there wasn't really anything that was focused on spatial positioning and manipulating spatial positions so we thought it would be very cool if we added that in the Assassin.
Factions' look is very oriental; why did you choose the oriental/Far Eastern cultures as the basis for this Campaign, and what does it offer you to do compared to other cultures that were looked at?
We're going to have a lot of people place this, it's a global player base; we literally have players from all over the world, so we didn't want to pick out a mono-culture like 'European medieval' and that's it forever. Asia has a very rich fantasy tradition like Europe does, the Middle East does. Basically any major civilisation had a very rich fantasy history even though they really don't call it fantasy, whether it was their gods or whatever, it was reflected in their imaginations and its unique architectural style and I think that our goal for each Campaign is to be influenced by those cultures.
In both Guild Wars and Factions you're getting away from the usual fantasy classes seen in other MMOs and of course Tolkien; how fine a line is it to draw between sticking with certain traditions whilst at the same time making yourself more original?
You know, fantasy is always a challenge. You have to walk a very tight line; you definitely don't want to produce just another what we call 'men in tights' fantasy, how many clichéd fantasy games can there be? But on the other hand you don't want to be so innovative and deviate from what people know about fantasy so far that you lose that connection. Fantasy's cool because it gives players information: if I see a dragon I know something. I know that it's probably a badass, I know that they breath out something, and I know that I should probably have at least eight guys watching my back, and that's cool. Whereas if you see a six-armed tentacle creature that no-one's ever seen before you don't know much about it so you lose that connection with that world. So the goal is to be innovative but stay true to what fantasy is all about.
Guild Wars and Factions is story-driven to a point and after the story's been completed there's the whole community . How does this increase longevity of a Campaign? Are you guys going to continue supporting past Campaigns including Prophecies with new quests or is it a case of providing new content through the new Campaigns?
We're always refining the game experience even if it's not content related for example, we've just rolled off the new Observer Mode Technology, which just invigorated the gaming. People are exposed to a level of play that they would never have seen before; millions of people around the world like to watch professional soccer, but not everyone's a professional soccer player but it's still entertaining to watch. That's something that we've got by releasing the Observer Mode, it's not something that we're going to charge for or tie to a specific Campaign.
On the other hand new content is something that we will reserve for Campaigns; we did the update last year because we knew it was going to be a while before Factions, but now that we're delivering Campaigns on a two per year cycle I really think that we'll be providing enough content for people.
It seems to be an interesting time for online gaming at the moment with the continued use of broadband and an increase in MMO gamers, but there does seem to be a danger that people will be drowning in the selection of MMOs on the market. How hard is it to be in MMO development?
In general I think it's incredibly difficult. When we started developing the technology for Guild Wars back in 2000, there were eighty announced MMOs in development. Everybody was looking at Everquest and saying "Oh my God, they're printing money, we can do the same", and I think that as we've seen the top two or three can be really successful and a lot of the rest have gone down, even large triple-A titles like Acheron's Call 2 which was a loud and clear wake-up call that you've got to do something different.
"...a lot of the rest have gone down, even large triple-A titles like Acheron's Call 2..."
It wasn't difficult for us with what you're asking for because we knew that from day one that we were going to turn over the apple cart from a design standpoint and a business standpoint, we were going to be completely different and do some very different things and just challenge the fundamentals. So whatever you may say about Guild Wars, nobody can accuse us of being another 'me too' MMO. I think that's the challenge for all developers of online games is that gamers demand just as much innovation in this industry and with this genre as they do any other genre. You couldn't just pop out a real-time strategy game that didn't really bring something new to the table right now, people demand innovation and I think it's the same with MMOs; there's a lot of products and not all of them are going to be successful. You've got to be willing to do something unique and different, and that means with the kind of budgets that these kind of game have these days, that means taking a risk and making a big, big bet. If you're not willing to place that big, big bet, go and make an offline console game or something.
"...whatever you may say about Guild Wars, nobody can accuse us of being another 'me too' MMO."
With the Xbox 360 already available and PlayStation3 coming, would bringing Guild Wars over to the console market something that you'd be interested in doing?
We haven't said no, it's something that we're keeping an eye on. We'd be prepared to work on consoles, our technology is platform neutral. On the other hand, it's still the case that the vast majority of online players play on PC and until that changes we don't feel any strong compulsion to start developing for the consoles; we're not EA. ArenaNet is a developer for passionate gamers and we just don't have the resources to go develop for sixteen platforms simultaneously. Our focus right now is on the PC because that's where the gamers are, if they go to 360 believe me we'll be there - we'll go where the gamers go.
During the demo the Jade Sea really stood out for me and was reminiscent of old medieval Japanese artwork of waves, they really were quite impressive.
Our art team is absolutely great, and you're the first person to catch that detail that even the shape of the waves are from the old Japanese woodcuts; nobody's noticed that before, everything was so rigorously designed.
The obvious oriental design and architecture was there but those waves were really cool, thank-you very much for that.
Thank-you very much.
TVG would like to thank Jeff Strain for taking our questions; we'll have more on Guild Wars Factions very soon including a preview of the game.
FARLEY
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