Guild Wars 2 Interview

Player vs. Player is the main subject of the latest two-pages interview Ten Ton Hammer has cooked up for ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2, in which Randy Price, Senior VP of Global Business at ArenaNet, talks about casual players’ transition between hot join matches and competitive tournament play, whether any kind of permanent reward will be offered for participating in World PvP and more. Here’s a snippet:

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you expect that more details on guilds and character association will be revealed once you begin talking more in depth about World vs. World PvP?

Randy: Well, for now I can give you some descriptions of how World vs. World works, but we’re going to be releasing tons of new information as we go along on how those things link up.

In the competitive environment that we were just talking about, everybody is on a level playing field. Everybody is max level and you’re going to be able to choose your gear, skills, profession, and race, and you’re going to be able to play on an equal playing field with everybody else.

In World v. World you take your exact character into it. If you’re level 1, you can take that level 1 into it where your server or shard is going up against two other shards over two week long battles. So if you’re a level 80 character, a level 60 character, whatever level it is, you’re taking yourself in there and you’re going to gain experience from your time playing there. So you’re going to be able to level all the way up in World v. World if you want. You’re going to get loot and rewards and be able to take down other players, and we have it set up so that you’ll take loot as if you’ve been out in the persistent PvE world and be able to take that gear back with you to that PvE environment.

One other side to it is that this is going on in a very large think of it almost like an RTS map – where over the two week event period you’re going to have castle sieges pop up, you’re going to have supply lines that you’re going to need to help defend. There will be places where you’re going to be able to enlist mercenaries to try to help you out, and all of these different battles are going on in real time, orchestrated over this period of two weeks.

Everybody on your shard has to be paying attention to this. The good news and the reason we do it as your shard vs. two other shards is so that nothing can get completely out of whack. It isn’t going to be a case where you’re like, that shard has everything dominated and there’s no hope for us. Instead, if that happens you can have two shards gang up on the one to help even things back out. I think that’s a very important and strategic side to this.