Guild Wars 2 Interview Insanity
ArenaNet's immensely popular RPG/MMORPG outside-the-box hybrid Guild Wars is finally getting a real expansion pack that goes beyond merely adding additional campaigns and new professions. Eye of the North will also be the last addition to the game. Guild Wars isn't saying goodbye, though - if anything, it's movin' on up.
Drop those comparisons between Everquest and Everquest II: ArenaNet's new venture, Guild Wars 2, will neither upstage nor supplant the original game. As far as ArenaNet is concerned, Guild Wars 2 will complete Guild Wars.
ArenaNet co-founder Mike O'Brian puts it in a nutshell for us:
"In looking at the design, we got a lot of things right. The problem was that after two years we also saw a lot of ways in which the core gameplay could be improved. These weren't things that could be addressed by adding new layers on top of the original game, though. They involved going in and making upgrades and improvements to the fundamental gameplay systems. In the end we made the decision that in order to truly make the ultimate version of Guild Wars we were going to have to make Guild Wars 2."
Co-founder Jeff Strain speaks the truth that many fans of the current iteration of Guild Wars may not want to hear, while others, myself included, may cry "Hallelujah!"
"What we found was that while players understood and appreciated that, at the end of the day, they still want to level their character. They want an unambiguous tangible marker that displays their progress in the game. We want to give them that, but every system in the game is built around a level 20 character. Raising the cap in the current game breaks every piece of content we have."
To that extent, Guild Wars 2 will have a much higher level cap, and perhaps no level cap at all. I'll be interested to see how they implement that while retaining the core gameplay of skill competency and strategy.
Make the jump to read more incredulous Guild Warsian developments!
Another stumbling block to player friendliness in the original Guild Wars is the tension between the totally instanced world and the populated hubs, which often leave me feeling a little shy and stupid taking my automated henchmen out into the world all by my lonesome. I love the instanced single-player fun of the campaign, but wish the price I pay - a punishingly shallow social system - wasn't so steep.
"What you lose in an entirely instanced game is a lot of social opportunities," Mike O'Brian said. "There's a lot to be said for running into the same people over and over again."
This doesn't mean that the shard flexibility and self-direction in terms of servers and social structure of the original game will be lessened - ArenaNet wants to create a "neighborhood feeling" while still allowing players to switch worlds easily, a goal that dovetails with introducing gradations of difficulty into PvP. As yours truly can attest, being a PvP newbie in Guild Wars can be fairly brutal. The new system, which introduces an area between worlds called "The Mists," will incorporate an elaborate-sounding World PvP system. As a bridge between the RPG experience and the hardcore PvP experience, the Mists offers a variety of PvP objectives, from large and difficult to small and noob-friendly. In the Mists, nobody's a noob, and the PvP adventures in the Mists will teach gamers how to become involved in high-end PvP if they'd like, while preventing a syndrome that many WoW gamers will recognize - stats and gear schizophrenia: speccing out differently depending on your current play style and objective.
But what about the story?
Guild Wars 2 will take place about 250 years after the events in Eye of the North, according to GW2 design lead Eric Flannum:
"The general theme is one where humanity, dominant in Guild Wars, is besieged on all sides and they're worried that their day is coming to an end... The Charr in Ascalon have all but taken over and a whole bunch of non-human races that we'll be introducing in Eye of the North have finally reached an equal footing with humanity. That allows us to set up a four way competitive dynamic but we're also introducing a fifth faction, a common enemy that threatens the whole world."
I'm most excited to hear that the world of GW2 will be structured less linearly than the original, with a world designed less for a spine of a single storyline with relatively unimportant quests, but instead with more room for multiple story arcs.
Nor will GW2 be about abandoning the experience of Guild Wars; the designers have included a feature in the Eye of the North expansion pack for Guild Wars that will persist into Guild Wars 2: the Hall of Monuments, where Guild Wars players may store their armor, weapons and achievements. When they return for Guild Wars 2, their "descendants" will be entitled to that previous content - continuity of player experience seems to be a big focus (rightly so) at ArenaNet:
"Eye of the North provides a direct bridge to Guild Wars 2," O'Brian said. "We want everyone to eventually move on to Guild Wars 2."
ArenaNet will not be shutting down Guild Wars, but they do expect most players to migrate eventually:
"ArenaNet is the Guild Wars company," Strain concluded. "We've got about 100 people here focused on nothing but what's best for Guild Wars. The new campaigns were great, but in the end, that wasn't what our players wanted. They wanted a deeper experience that we just weren't going to be able to provide for them in the original. Thus Guild Wars 2."
Color me moist. A Guild Wars experience with more room to level, more room to tell a story, and friendlier PvP? And different races? Sign me up, ArenaNet people. Pretty please.
Guild Wars 2 Interview [GameSpy]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 30 April 2007
Other stuff like this: ArenaNet, eye of the north, guild wars, guild wars 2, MMORPG, NCsoft, PC
