Guild Wars Factions Interview

Warcry has posted a candid interview with ArenaNet’s Jeff Strain, quizzing the company’s co-founder about Guild Wars Factions, among other things. Check it out:

Q: Right. One of the things I was doing, I was looking at the new screenshots that you had up for the armors from Factions. Some of the stuff I saw on the Assassins and Ritualists kind of reminded me of some of the artwork from Cyberpunk and Rifts. Now what are you guys’ RPG background? Do you guys, you know, still play table top games?

A: Yeah, well, first of all ArenaNet is a company of 110 developers. We have a lot of people working on Guild Wars and Guild Wars campaigns, so you know, the RPG history and culture of the company is quite vast. I mean, you always hear companies say we only hire gamers, but we take it to kind of an obsessive level. Everyone we hire goes through a battery of questions about their gaming background and if you say you played Daggerfall, then we’re going to go into specific questions about every Daggerfall NPC and character and make sure you really played it. As you walk through the office around lunch time, there’ll be one room with about twelve people in it playing Warhammer fantasy battles, another room has a group of about 15 people playing Magic the Gathering, and you’ll walk into another room that has a bunch of people in it playing Battlefield 1942. We kind of have, at any given time, five or six kind of hot games both pen and paper, Dungeons and Dragons obviously, and all the way into videogames and electronic games. It’s just a very rich gaming culture around here. So I really do think you see that reflected in our art style, just a myriad of influences across both electronic and traditional mediums.