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Guild Wars 2!

Posted by GuildWars2 Mar. 10, 2009 @ 1:26 AM EDT

Dev Corner: Imagining Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet's James Phinney talks about developing Guild Wars 2%u2122
Every great game starts with a simple question: What do we want to play next? If you aren't passionate about the game you're working on, it is already doomed to mediocrity. And the best way to make sure you're passionate? Make something you want to play.

For the team at ArenaNet, the idea of making Guild Wars 2 started with a single conversation about all the things we wanted to do in the next Guild Wars® campaign. Very quickly it became clear that we could move the game forward by leaps and bounds... but only if we were willing to rebuild it from the ground up. Here's what we thought we could accomplish:

Give players immense freedom of movement. The underlying systems in Guild Wars allowed us to make a very responsive, yet hack-proof game, but they also prevented us from giving players the ability to jump and swim and explore their environment freely. We'll still keep movement hack-proof, but we want players in Guild Wars 2 to simply enjoy moving around.
Allow players to encounter each other in common, persistent areas. The instancing of Guild Wars gave us a ton of story-telling and gameplay advantages over our competitors, but instanced areas and persistent areas each have their strengths and weaknesses. We want to give players the best of both worlds.
Let players choose from multiple playable races (including our own unique addition to the fantasy genre, the Charr). Our team takes a lot of pride in the look and feel of each of the professions in the game, but some of the early technical choices we made for them prevented us from even considering introducing playable races. Now we have a chance to make new choices that give players more options.
Give players deeper options for character advancement. We knew this would be the most controversial of our new goals. Could we do this without creating a game full of grind? As avid fans and players of RPGs, massively multiplayer or otherwise, we saw many untapped opportunities for making this work.
Make everything about Guild Wars better. When you look back honestly on a game you've made, there are always things you wish you could have done better. Could we create a stronger economy with better options for trading? Definitely. Could we address player concerns about the relationship between PvP and PvE? With a new system, yes. Could we give players more and better storage? Yes! The list goes on and on.
Beyond the sweeping gameplay improvements that we are introducing, we also know that any sequel worth its salt needs to show major graphical improvements. Let's face it, a lot of people love this game because it is beautiful. We fully intend to stay true to the Guild Wars tradition of looking better than the competition while featuring surprisingly inclusive system specs. (And, as a designer, I've got some very talented and hard-working programmers and artists to thank for that!)

Even so, not having to worry about backward-compatibility with the original Guild Wars engine and tools gives us an abundance of opportunities to make Guild Wars 2 jaw-droppingly beautiful. At the same time, new budgets for textures and poly-counts, and a whole new bag of tricks from our in-house graphics gurus, mean that every environment, character, and effect we're making truly looks like a whole new game.

Getting excited about new graphics and new gameplay ideas is only part of the equation for us, though. As some fans noted when Guild Wars 2 was announced, by adding persistent areas and extensive character advancement to Guild Wars, we risked creating another me-too MMO in the Everquest tradition. Plenty of those games already exist, though, and making yet another has never been our goal. Instead, from the start, we talked a lot about the core principles of Guild Wars.

Guild Wars isn't a hassle to play. Fundamentally, we made a choice to not build a game around time-sinks and inconvenience. Our streaming updates, instant map travel, character templates, account-wide storage, easily removed death penalty, and myriad of core features are all based on this principle. Although some details would need to change, we wanted the sequel to stay true to this tradition.
Guild Wars lets you play the way you want to play. We've had a few years now of observing our players and their tendencies and preferences. Whether their play-style focuses on exploration, story, wealth, collection, achievements, socializing, PvP, playing solo or with strangers or friends, our goal is to give them a rich and rewarding experience playing the game they want to play. With Guild Wars 2, we'd seek to diversify their options even further.
Guild Wars encourages skillful play. If you're going to spend as much time playing a game as people spend playing their favorite online RPG, it had better engage you socially, viscerally, and, yes, intellectually. From the very foundation of the Guild Wars design, we've tried to create a game that rewards clever and active play. We're confident we'll do an even better job this time around.
Guild Wars tells a story. We've learned a lot over the years about running events in common areas, and how to get the best effect out of instances. Guild Wars 2 gives us an opportunity to take that knowledge and apply it in even better ways.
Guild Wars has no monthly fee. Let's face it: one of the reasons that Guild Wars has enjoyed so much success is that people like owning a game after they buy it. They like being able to take a break without a subscription continuing to drain their bank account. They like being able to buy and experience other games, too. Now we plan to bring that same model to a game with persistent areas, playable races, freedom of movement, incredible depth, spectacular graphics, and gameplay that builds on the best of Guild Wars while taking things to new heights.
Yowza. Looking back on what I've written, I'm a little surprised at how effusive I've been. Thing is . . . that's just the sort of energy and enthusiasm we're feeling around the office right now. I believe it's because all of the guiding principles, lessons learned, and new ideas amount to one simple thing: we are moving forward, making the best Guild Wars we know how to make. And we can't wait to play it.

James Phinney, Guild Wars Game Design Team Lead

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Feb. 15, 2009 | 12:46 AM brownyoshi says:
ill just post this for you Hamlet
Dev Corner: Imagining Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet's James Phinney talks about developing Guild Wars 2%u2122
Every great game starts with a simple question: What do we want to play next? If you aren't passionate about the game you're working on, it is already doomed to mediocrity. And the best way to make sure you're passionate? Make something you want to play.

For the team at ArenaNet, the idea of making Guild Wars 2 started with a single conversation about all the things we wanted to do in the next Guild Wars® campaign. Very quickly it became clear that we could move the game forward by leaps and bounds... but only if we were willing to rebuild it from the ground up. Here's what we thought we could accomplish:

Give players immense freedom of movement. The underlying systems in Guild Wars allowed us to make a very responsive, yet hack-proof game, but they also prevented us from giving players the ability to jump and swim and explore their environment freely. We'll still keep movement hack-proof, but we want players in Guild Wars 2 to simply enjoy moving around.
Allow players to encounter each other in common, persistent areas. The instancing of Guild Wars gave us a ton of story-telling and gameplay advantages over our competitors, but instanced areas and persistent areas each have their strengths and weaknesses. We want to give players the best of both worlds.
Let players choose from multiple playable races (including our own unique addition to the fantasy genre, the Charr). Our team takes a lot of pride in the look and feel of each of the professions in the game, but some of the early technical choices we made for them prevented us from even considering introducing playable races. Now we have a chance to make new choices that give players more options.
Give players deeper options for character advancement. We knew this would be the most controversial of our new goals. Could we do this without creating a game full of grind? As avid fans and players of RPGs, massively multiplayer or otherwise, we saw many untapped opportunities for making this work.
Make everything about Guild Wars better. When you look back honestly on a game you've made, there are always things you wish you could have done better. Could we create a stronger economy with better options for trading? Definitely. Could we address player concerns about the relationship between PvP and PvE? With a new system, yes. Could we give players more and better storage? Yes! The list goes on and on.
Beyond the sweeping gameplay improvements that we are introducing, we also know that any sequel worth its salt needs to show major graphical improvements. Let's face it, a lot of people love this game because it is beautiful. We fully intend to stay true to the Guild Wars tradition of looking better than the competition while featuring surprisingly inclusive system specs. (And, as a designer, I've got some very talented and hard-working programmers and artists to thank for that!)

Even so, not having to worry about backward-compatibility with the original Guild Wars engine and tools gives us an abundance of opportunities to make Guild Wars 2 jaw-droppingly beautiful. At the same time, new budgets for textures and poly-counts, and a whole new bag of tricks from our in-house graphics gurus, mean that every environment, character, and effect we're making truly looks like a whole new game.

Getting excited about new graphics and new gameplay ideas is only part of the equation for us, though. As some fans noted when Guild Wars 2 was announced, by adding persistent areas and extensive character advancement to Guild Wars, we risked creating another me-too MMO in the Everquest tradition. Plenty of those games already exist, though, and making yet another has never been our goal. Instead, from the start, we talked a lot about the core principles of Guild Wars.

Guild Wars isn't a hassle to play. Fundamentally, we made a choice to not build a game around time-sinks and inconvenience. Our streaming updates, instant map travel, character templates, account-wide storage, easily removed death penalty, and myriad of core features are all based on this principle. Although some details would need to change, we wanted the sequel to stay true to this tradition.
Guild Wars lets you play the way you want to play. We've had a few years now of observing our players and their tendencies and preferences. Whether their play-style focuses on exploration, story, wealth, collection, achievements, socializing, PvP, playing solo or with strangers or friends, our goal is to give them a rich and rewarding experience playing the game they want to play. With Guild Wars 2, we'd seek to diversify their options even further.
Guild Wars encourages skillful play. If you're going to spend as much time playing a game as people spend playing their favorite online RPG, it had better engage you socially, viscerally, and, yes, intellectually. From the very foundation of the Guild Wars design, we've tried to create a game that rewards clever and active play. We're confident we'll do an even better job this time around.
Guild Wars tells a story. We've learned a lot over the years about running events in common areas, and how to get the best effect out of instances. Guild Wars 2 gives us an opportunity to take that knowledge and apply it in even better ways.
Guild Wars has no monthly fee. Let's face it: one of the reasons that Guild Wars has enjoyed so much success is that people like owning a game after they buy it. They like being able to take a break without a subscription continuing to drain their bank account. They like being able to buy and experience other games, too. Now we plan to bring that same model to a game with persistent areas, playable races, freedom of movement, incredible depth, spectacular graphics, and gameplay that builds on the best of Guild Wars while taking things to new heights.
Yowza. Looking back on what I've written, I'm a little surprised at how effusive I've been. Thing is . . . that's just the sort of energy and enthusiasm we're feeling around the office right now. I believe it's because all of the guiding principles, lessons learned, and new ideas amount to one simple thing: we are moving forward, making the best Guild Wars we know how to make. And we can't wait to play it.

James Phinney, Guild Wars Game Design Team Lead

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Feb. 15, 2009 | 12:47 AM brownyoshi says:
This too
June 28, 2007 - Eye of the North is the fourth retail package for ArenaNet's Guild Wars, and the first that isn't a standalone product. To run it, you'll need one of the previous versions, be it Prophecies, Factions, or Nightfall. The studio's focus this time around was higher level content, putting together a total of 18 expansive dungeons for level 20 characters along with plenty of additional skills, items, and enemy types. The storyline is back in the realm of Tyria, the setting for Guild Wars Prophecies.

We recently got on the phone with Chris Lye, Director of Marketing at ArenaNet, and Ben Miller, Design Lead for Guild Wars Eye of the North, to find out exactly what to expect from the expansion, as well as the upcoming sequel, Guild Wars 2.

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IGN: For Eye of the North, this is the first Guild Wars product that's expansion only. What was behind the decision to do that instead of making another standalone?

Ben Miller: We have a large established player base and a lot of them have level twenty characters that have gone through every campaign that we've released. There was really less pressure on our end to make a brand new starting area like we would if we'd made a brand new level one through twenty progression like we did with the other campaigns. Guild Wars, primarily, the game really starts when you're at level twenty and in Factions and Nightfall we facilitated you getting to level twenty rather quickly in the grand scheme of things. It was a natural progression for us to come out with a product that didn't have a starting area. The other thing is with a campaign, they take a lot of our creative effort, such as making a tutorial area or developing two new professions, we were able to take the time and devote that creative energy into making the Eye of the North expansion something cool, something that's new, and something that has a lot of really compelling content in it.

Chris Lye: Between Guild Wars and the other two campaigns we really ended up introducing a new area, a new culture with each of the campaigns. And one of the other important things about Guild Wars: Eye of the North is that we just felt that the original content of Tyria, there was so much stuff introduced there, so many storylines that we wanted to go deeper into, that it really made sense to have an expansion that allows you to focus on an area that we've already introduced and really go into depth there.

Ben Miller: Creatively, at least, there's such compelling stuff in Prophecies, such as the Charr and the White Mantle, the Maguuma Jungle, all of the races and cultures that we introduced that, having the chance to go back to an already established foundation we had created and pour more of our heart and soul into it was something that was different from what we had done and it was a nice, refreshing change.

IGN: Is ArenaNet still split into two development teams where each is simultaneously working on a different campaign?

Ben Miller: That's how we were structured for the campaign model. Right now with the expansion content there's basically a team working on it, the vast majority of people working on the expansion while people are also developing Guild Wars 2.

IGN: How far along is Guild Wars 2 at this point?

Chris Lye: Development on Guild Wars 2 has been going on for a while. I mean I would say that probably it's fair to say that a lot of resources are focused on the expansion right now and then once the expansion is complete that'll, you know, basically everybody, all hands on deck for Guild Wars 2.

IGN: Since you guys have been cranking out these expansion for a while now, what kind of changes have you made to the development process, in terms of efficiency, procedurally, for getting these done?

Ben Miller: With the campaign model we had two distinct teams that were working on two distinct projects and what we found is that it's actually a lot more efficient to, as far as design-wise, not have that distinction in place as rigidly as we had previously. So people would be basically focusing on expansion content or focusing on Guild Wars 2's content as their different project required their different skill sets. We kind of did away with the strict, campaign-specific distinction. Also, one of the biggest benefits that we had throughout the process of doing this is we've got a good idea, design-wise, how long it takes to do things, how best to communicate with programmers, artists, and really fine tune not only our design process, but also our communication across all other departments. We've been able to basically efficiently foster good communication between the other departments and the design department. And that's just something it just takes time to do. Our design team, for the most part, has been together since campaign one. So, from Prophecies all the way to Eye of the North we've grown and matured as a team without a lot of turnover. We're really developing the Eye of the North expansion and Guild Wars 2 with a very veteran team, people that work very well together. The more time we do it, we just get better and better and more efficient at it. I hope that answers your question.

IGN: Yeah that works. Then after Eye of the North comes out is everyone diving into Guild Wars 2 development at that point, is it one hundred percent staff effort, or is there still a small team being set back to continue to monitor what's going on with all the previous campaigns?

Ben Miller: We all keep up on the current trends and the PvP metagames and stuff like that. We do have a subset of people that when live issues do come up we get them addressed quickly and efficiently. Those same people are also responsible for any live content that takes place for the holiday events. Even though we'll be focusing on Guild Wars 2, we already have processes in place that allow us to strongly support all areas of the live game.