Guild Wars 2 Interview

Eurogamer interviews lead content designer Colin Johanson about the creative process of making MMOs, as ArenaNet chips away at the upcoming MMO sequel Guild Wars 2.

Eurogamer: Can you give examples of this creative fearlessness at work in Guild Wars 2?

Colin Johanson: I think one of the core ones for me is taking the holy trinity [of MMO character classes] you have your front line, you have your healer and you have your ranged character, basically and just throwing it out the window.

We’re basically saying, listen, this as a core game mechanic is tired, we can do something better, we can do something more interesting than this. Let’s not do it, let’s try to do something else. And that’s what we’ve spent many years now perfecting and working on, and getting to the point that we feel we have a combat system that doesn’t need it and, we feel, works better without it.

I think the dynamic event system… even early on, when we would tell our fans, “Hey, we’re going to make this game system that doesn’t have quests in it,” the response was, “Woooooah, don’t do that! I really like quests, it’s all I know. How do I get through a game without seeing a guy with a question mark over his head and running over and talking to him?”

We said, well, why do you need that? And it’s something where, again, we didn’t know if it was going to work or not, but we built it and started playing with it and fell in love with it.