Guild Wars 2 Interview

The folks at Lazygamer offer an interview for ArenaNet’s upcoming Guild Wars 2, with lead content designer Colin Johansen, who offers an overview of the game’s races, the dynamic difficulty scaling, how the choices in the game will work and more. Here’s an excerpt:

With the drop in and out gameplay, does that not mean that certain quests will be easy if we just quickly grab a hundred players to join us?

There’s going to be a more dynamic scaling of difficulty in the game. It will still be challenging, but players wont be able to cheat their way through in a numbers game. For instance, if you fight the Pirate Queen at her stronghold, with a small party, you’ll face off against her small army of undead skeletons. But if you want to gather a group of hundreds of players, then you’ll need to storm her base from the front, take down her towers and board a ship that has magical cannons that you can fire at her base, before taking on her army.

Once you’ve beaten her, you’ll even find that there are less undead pirates around to harass you for the next couple of hours, thanks to the vacuum of power that you left.

What about choices in the game? Can a choice that seems noble at first wind up biting you in the backside?

Oh yeah, we have most definitely experimented with that concept. If what you do doesn’t effect the world, then its a meaningless choice, so there must still be some sort of cause and effect for the game. When you make a decision, it must be real, permanent, and have an impact on your character.

You’ve spoken about dynamic events that will happen in the Guild Wars world, but how many will there be, and whats to stop them from getting monotonous?

We’re looking at having around 1500 events happen, so its going to take people a long time to get through all of them. As for variation, we want each quest to be unique, so that’s why you’ll have specific objectives and tools with which to complete them.