You Thought That Was It for Guild Wars 2?

It’s been a while since Guild Wars 2 has been under the spotlights, which has prompted the folks at Eurogamer to ask the team at ArenaNet what’s going on with the title. As for whether their answers are convincing or not, I’ll leave it to the readers to judge, with a few snippets to get you started:

Concern: Look at NCSoft’s financial reports: ArenaNet sales are steadily dropping. There’s no subscription fee to keep the bank-balance ticking over, no paid expansion on the horizon. Fewer sales means less investment means less new content means fewer sales, doesn’t it?

“If you look at any game ever made, a year after release, sales are always dropping – that’s just very normal,” responded Colin Johanson. “We’re also very happy with the rate the sales have been dropping down. It’s actually dropped much less than we would have forecasted.

“Something people forget about a lot is that we’re already the fastest-selling MMO in history, so even if sales are declining a little bit, that’s on the fastest selling MMO in history. We don’t really have a problem with that.

“And we are only available in Europe, North America and Australia. We haven’t launched in China, Korea, Russia, Southeast Asia, Brazil – many of the world’s biggest PC gaming hotbeds are places that the game is not yet even available.

“We’re extremely pumped about adding to each of these regions – we think that that sales number is going to take off again, and we’re going to see a resurgence in territories we are out in as more and more players from other parts of the world get invested. And also as some of the really big projects we’re working on in the background come to fruition, we’re going to see a spike again in users.

“Sales-wise we’re just following what any game would naturally follow.”

As for dwindling investment, it appears to be a myth: ArenaNet had a whopping 300 people when Guild Wars 2 launched, and now… now there are 350 and counting – ArenaNet is hiring.

…

Concern: ArenaNet won’t stop banging on about the Living World update plan and so will stick with it even if it’s not working.

Not true. ArenaNet is changing it this year.

The original idea was to have four story teams making a month’s worth of content each, to be released in fortnightly bumps, and whatever mechanical features were ready at that time could be rolled in and included. ‘An online world updated more frequently than any other’ was the dream, but the reality was confusion.

“It’s very distracting to players,” observed Johanson. “It’s almost a muddled message, where we put these releases out and we want them to be excited about the story, to follow the story, and we also want them to be excited about the features that are coming with it. And either one or the other tends to be the thing that people cling onto.” And the other thing, people ignore.

“What we’re going to do this year is we’re actually separating the two of those out.”

All the big mechanical features ArenaNet is working on will be held back for a bumper update presumably in the spring/summer.

“When [Living World Season One] ends [on 4th March], we’re going to take a break for a little bit and then we’re going to do one really big feature patch that is more akin to what people see from some of our [MMO] competitors,” said Johanson, “where they bundle a lot of features together into a really big patch every now and then.

“We’re going to provide that experience and have this huge feature build that has a whole lot of gameplay-changing elements, a lot of quality of life improvements, a lot of features bundled together into one big patch. And that’ll come some time not too far after Season One completes.”