Guild Wars 2 Interview

IncGamers has put online a very interesting interview with ArenaNet’s lead game designer on Guild Wars 2 Eric Flannum. The subjects deals with a broad variety of subjects and it’s undoubtedly a worthy read in case you’re interested in the MMO. Here you can find part 1 of the interview and here part 2. Finally, a sampling from the interview:

IncGamers: With each playable race having their own unique story missions, how do you make co-op appealing to a player from a different race that is on a mission that doesn’t progress their own story?

Eric Flannum: Let’s say you and I are playing together and you’re a human and I’m a Norn, we’re playing in human lands and we’re doing your story. What happens is that you’ll get the really cool rewards for the mission but I’m going to get experience and gold and karma for helping you. So every time you complete a story step the game is going to say ‘˜well this guy helped you’ so we’re going to reward him as well.

Every single story step has awards that it hands out to every person that helped you. If we do happen to be on the same story step then we can choose to if there were any decisions made during the step have the outcome count for me as well. If I didn’t agree with the choice you made then I can just say no and go back and redo the mission the way I want to do it.

We try to allow people to bring in their friends and participate as much as possible, hopefully that will keep people playing the story steps together.

IG: How does the nitty-gritty of XP and loot sharing work?

EF: For just a monster.., each monster has a threshold of a percent of its health whereby if someone deals that threshold/percent of damage (it’s about five to ten percent), you get full credit for it. So, if a monster usually provides one hundred XP and I deal sixty percent damage before you come along and finish it off then we’ll both receive one hundred points. We never diminish it, you always get the full amount.

The idea is that by me coming along you get what you were going to get but you get it faster, so you see my presence as a really good thing. You then start to see other players in the world in a positive way as they help you get rewarded faster.

Loot is the same kind of thing. Instead of monsters dropping a bundle of loot and the players then having to divide it between themselves, you get the same roll on the loot table that everybody else gets so long as you’ve got credit for the kill. That means a monster carrying a rare item can drop that item for every single person.