Guild Wars 2 Interview

Bit-tech has put out a three-pages-long interview with ArenaNet’s lead content designer Colin Johanson for our reading pleasure, the subject of which is fairly obviously their upcoming MMO Guild Wars 2. Here’s a sampling:

BG: Why make Guild Wars 2 a sequel to an MMO, when the model is normally to build on the original and expand, expand, expand? Surely you’re requiring players to know a certain amount about the fiction just in order to approach the second game?

CJ: You actually don’t need to know anything about the first game to appreciate Guild Wars 2. All of the history and lore of the first game is contained within the second, and we’ve made the story so it teaches you the history of the world – you never need to have played Guild Wars to understand what’s going on. That’s very important to us we don’t want to alienate new players.

We made Guild Wars 2 because we were making expansions for Guild Wars and there was this one called Utopia that was based around these giant world events where the world you play in was constantly changing. We wanted to do this and have a really strong driven storyline, we wanted to make combat more action orientated and what we realised was that this expansion was drastically changing the game that everybody who plays Guild Wars was used to, and they were probably going to be upset if we released an expansion that massively changes the game they’ve spent the last five years playing. We decided that, rather than make an expansion that does all these things, we should instead make a brand new game – then people who love Guild Wars and that style of game can continue to play that.

It’s something you don’t usually run into in the MMO industry – a part two. You also don’t usually announce you’re starting a new MMO the day you begin building it, but we didn’t want our fans to think there were more expansions coming for the first one, so we said, ‘˜hey, as of tomorrow we’re starting work on Guild Wars 2’.

…

BG: The MMO market’s been almost flooded with lots of free-to-play titles, and with big name titles such as Star Wars: The Old Republic and Blizzard’s Project Titan on the horizon, do you feel threatened?

CJ: To be honest, no, we don’t. We don’t directly compete with a lot of the games that charge monthly fees because Guild Wars is a buy-it-once, play-it-free game.

With Guild Wars 2 the world is bigger, it’s a true free-to-roam world like you’d find in any good MMO, and the production value is leaps and bounds above anything else we’ve done, and hopefully anything anyone else out there is doing. If we make an amazing game that’s free to play, that’s going to be where everyone goes. If you look at other free-to-play games no-one’s doing anything of that quality.

BG: That’s very expensive to do. Are you still comfortable with the pay-once, free-to play model rather than the subscription model?

CJ: Absolutely.