Guild Wars 2 Interviews and Preview

ArenaNet’s developers are not only busy working on Guild Wars 2 to make it to the beta testing stage this year but also promoting their game, the results of these efforts being interviews popping up left and right.

Strategy Informer has a second Q&A with designers Jon Peters and Eric Flannum, this time on the newly revealed profession, the Engineer:

Strategy Informer: Can you give us an outline of what the engineer’s all about?

Jon Peters: He’s one of our medium armour professions and one of the most technically advanced professions in Guild Wars 2. The game takes place two hundred and fifty years after the first one so the engineer is our opportunity to take advantage of the advanced technology of the world.

He uses explosives, turrets and other gadgets to control the battlefield.

One of the unique things about him is that while most professions have two weapon sets that they swap between the engineer has a single weapon set but he has access to kits which when activated modify his weapon skills. For example, if he adds the grenade kit to his skill bar and clicks that he’ll swap out his weapon skills out for thrown, poison and flashbang grenades. He can be one of the more complex and versatile professions that we have.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun quizzes Martin Kerstein on Guild Wars 2 approach when compares to the usual MMO grinding/questing fare:

RPS: You were talking about needing 10,000 designers to make a proper solo experience what’s the comfortable middleground between having that meat of content and where you have to have some of the traditional MMO treadmill content purely to be practical?

Martin Kerstein: The good thing is that events are, like I say, cyclical but the cycles vary. We have small events, which might cycle a little faster; we have really big challenging events. I don’t know the exact cycles, but it really isn’t like you hand in your quest and then you see a respawn of exactly the same thing. You defend the fort against Centaurs and you push them back, all of a sudden you will see the NPCs and the merchants come back, they bring in guards and you keep pushing the Centaurs further, maybe back to their stronghold. Then as long as you keep them confined, your village is safe. If the players then decide ‘˜ah, I don’t want to stay here anymore’ and go somewhere else, then all of a sudden the centaurs find there’s nobody there to keep them from taking over the village so they start pushing forwards.

The good thing is those events run even if there are no players involved if there are no players, the enemy will take over and you’ll have to get it back before you can actually do anything. That’s why it feels more organic and breathing. If you log out in the evening and you know ‘˜ok, we had control of that stronghold over there’ but you look in the next day and it’s ‘˜holy crap, what happened? Where did all these monsters come from, where are the merchants, what happened to this town?’ It’s changing all of the time, not having the exact same guys standing in the exact same spots, always saying the same stuff.

And finally, GameReactor has a video preview of the game.