ZAM speaks to ArenaNet's Game Director on the future of GW2
No other MMO has made an impact on the industry as much as Guild Wars 2 (GW2) has this past year. Aside from the plethora of prizes it has won from journalists and the public alike, its launch has sent ripples through the industry that can be seen in various upcoming titles.
After launching ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 manifesto for the first half of 2013, Game Director Colin Johanson set a precious hour aside to talk to me about the response to the outline, the ideas behind the plotted course and what else might be over the horizon.
In part one of the interview, we focused on guesting, guild content, encounter design and more. Be sure to return tomorrow for part two which primarily concerns Guild Wars 2’s PvP content.
One of the features expected at launch of Guild Wars 2 was guesting. It will finally land on January 28 and I asked Colin what had caused such a delay to this much anticipated facility.
“Guesting has proved far more complicated than we thought it was going to be, we’ve actually had it almost done in the past two releases and each time right before we were getting ready to release it, QA found a major bug with it and we ended up having to pull back out and not release it.
The biggest thing is just making sure that it’s really stable, it’s easy to understand how to use and how to connect and it lets you know how to get to another server and how to communicate when you’re on that other world. Those are all challenges.
In the initial design we did it quick so, you know, “Let’s get people on different worlds and play with each other,” and we found that people didn’t understand where they were, there wasn’t very clear messaging on how to get there and the process needed to be really streamlined. So we cleaned that process up a bit and we found out there were some issues with it right before the WintersDay release, there were some bugs where players could have a lot of issues and couldn’t get back, or would get stuck and we figured we should wait and put out the version that is as clean and safe as possible rather than rush it out the door with any potential issues.
It’s taken longer than we would have liked but hopefully we’ve got a really stable and more polished version of it ready to go and we’re really excited to get this out there.”
I asked about the response from the public on guesting’s imminent arrival and what difference Johanson felt it will make to the game.
"The overarching response has been extremely positive. I think people who are really into WvW are thrilled to finally have a limiting factor that people will have to start taking where they live a lot more seriously now."
Though the system will help players join friends on different servers, it will not function across different regions (such as the EU and US). Fans who had been expecting cross-region guesting have voiced their confusion and disappointment. Something that Johanson was aware of and had anticipated:
“We definitely knew that was coming and we knew that is something that people really want to do. Unfortunately the way our server architecture is set up and the way our back end data structure is set up, it’s just not something that is feasible for us from a standpoint of providing a top quality experience.
In Guild Wars 2, because the worlds are giant, open, persistent world maps where there’re players all running around together; how the game runs and how the performance works is completely dependent on how close to the data center you are that you’re operating in. It is not a very good experience potentially to be playing with people across the entire world and it is something that is much more complicated for us to try to solve, so for the purposes of us trying to provide the best possible experiences for people that we can, it’s something that we didn’t want to do.
In Guild Wars 1 it was a lot easier for us to do and it was a sub-optimal experience, you would have a lot more latency and ping times were a lot worse, because of all of the things we do in Guild Wars 2, for example having 3D movement space and persistent maps, it’s much more difficult for us to do and having worlds that you live on, those are the big technical ramifications that prevent us from doing that.”
ZAM speaks to ArenaNet's Game Director on the future of GW2
A feature that has been partially disabled for a while is previewing item links. The community had also been waiting to see this facility added to the Trading Post (not only to just preview Twilight for hours on end, honest) before issues with the basic preview occurred. I asked Colin if there had been any movement in that area.
“I can give two answers to that. The immediate answer is that we’re going to be putting back in the ability to preview yourself in armors from other professions and other armor classes, all of that will go back in with the January release. If someone links an item in the world, you’ll be able to see it again and see it for you as a preview. That’s the first step to getting us there; getting that system fixed again and that will be out in the January release.
We actually do have a team that is working on building preview for the Trading Post; it’s coming along pretty well. It’s not something that will be in this month’s release, it’s probably still a ways off but that is something that they’re actively working on right now and you will see it at some point in game.”
While speaking to Colin, it was obvious not only how passionate he is about the game, but also how aware the ArenaNet team is of the need to further strengthen its content, particularly in order to be responsive to the audience’s feedback. Guild Wars 2 is the fastest selling MMO in history, the dev team is not exactly headed in the wrong direction, but they are not resting on their laurels for a moment. One example of Johanson’s commitment to improving on the game’s initial success is in the approach to the much discussed topic of guilds.
“One of the things that we found is there aren’t as many things that give you the opportunity to get together as we would like. That’s something we knew on launch and want to keep building on and we’re really taking that opportunity to expand on that list even more as we move forward. The strength of your social network in any game and the capacity of fun things to do with that group are often directly relative to how your game does and how strong your social communities are going to be. We recognize those are really important things and they’re areas we’ll keep supporting and building on as we go forward. I think they’re directly tied to the pillars of what
Guild Wars 2 is as a game.”
The very mention of raids is enough to set blood pressure gauges spiking for many fans of GW2 due to ArenaNet’s pronounced move away from traditional gear-grind MMO raid content thus far. With the announcement of around five different content areas that a guilds will be able to participate in, I asked if these streams would involve instanced areas or if they would take place solely in the open world.
“I’ve seen a lot of comments on our forums, people saying “Are they adding instanced raids to the game?” and no, that is not the intent of this system at all. We really want to leverage our open world and make it as strong as we possibly can. We think that these missions that guilds can kick off are things that other people can come help them with; as long as they’re designed well and people don’t ruin the experience but just make it better.
It’s actually a better tool for the guild, it allows them to recruit that way and it allows them to have a larger impact on the world. It potentially allows people to see the guild out in the open world and get to know them more and recognize that they are a guild that creates this content and that’s just better for the communities of our games.”
Though the focus on the open world is the primary target for ArenaNet, Johanson didn’t rule out the possibility of instanced content in the future.
“We may look at, down the road, potentially doing some stuff that is specifically playing with instanced areas for guild missions as well, but in the short term our major goal for the first half of this year is making our world as strong and compelling as we possibly can. Taking advantage of the strength that provides to our game and so that’s the type of stuff we’ll see out of these missions. They will be able to create content that currently doesn’t exist. They’ll be able to create new events and other types of content that right now other people haven’t really seen, but I don’t think we’re going down the path of creating all new systems entirely for this initially, that may be something we look at doing as we expand the system in the future.”
Currently, the party size in Guild Wars 2 is limited to five. With new content arriving for guilds to do together, I asked Colin if this meant that larger groups would become an option.
“It’s something that we talk about a lot, certainly larger party size comes up in World vs. World sometimes, it’s not something we’re actually working on right now, but it is something we’re discussing: what systems would we potentially put in place to support this if we wanted to do it down the road? Currently, we’re not working on anything like that, but if we find that with the addition of the system, or as World vs. World continues to evolve, if we need to add systems like that, we’re certainly open to looking at them.”
Johanson went on to explain the dangers of ramping up party sizes and what effect it could have on the game.
“One of the strengths of
Guild Wars 2 is that the UI is really clean and streamlined, it’s not overwhelming, it’s easy to see what’s going on, so one of the challenges we’re going to have is we don’t want to lose that capacity to easily look at the screen and understand what’s going on. We really don’t want people to spend their time looking at the edges of the screen watching progress bars move up and down in all directions. We want them drawn to the middle of the screen and watching the action and watching the things that are going on in game. So if we did a system in the future that lets you see more and more of what’s going on, we have to build it with those things but keep in mind that we don’t want to just cover the screen in UI everywhere.”
ZAM speaks to ArenaNet's Game Director on the future of GW2
Another content area that will be getting a lot of attention in 2013 is that of dungeon encounters. I spoke of the number of mono-phased bosses in the dungeons at launch which have been in contrast to some of the more interesting dynamics in Fractals. Would we see further iteration on encounter dynamics?
“You definitely will, I’d argue strongly that many of the best creatures in the game are the ones that we built since we released, I think Fractals is a great example of the better creatures and I think Karka Island has some really interesting creature design, in particular some of the bosses there are creatures that just require more tactics and more thought when you’re fighting against them.
One of our big goals for 2013 is to look at all the bosses in the game, it’s going to be veterans, it’s going to be champions and this isn’t just limited to dungeons, we’re going to be looking at these guys in the open world as well. Just taking a pass through all of them and asking that question of “How do we make these even more exciting?”
If they’re a champion and they have a ton of health, one of the problems we have right now is for the simpler champions, once you’ve learned the pattern of skills that they have, it’s pretty easy to just figure out one tactic and you just do that against that pattern forever and they have so much health that after a while you’re just kind of doing the same thing over and over again for five minutes then they die and that’s really not that interesting.
It’s not exciting gameplay, there are certainly bosses where it’s not the case, but there are a lot of them that have that problem that we want to go through. This all plays off of that theme of how do we make the core world that we’ve already built even stronger and more compelling? We want to take those bosses that have a lot of health and give them phases and make them change your gameplay style as you go through, so they get more exciting. We want to do that in dungeons and we want to do that in the open world as well. We want to create tactics that require the part to work together more and to really have cohesive gameplay between everybody and require the tactical style of play that our combat system can allow and we just need to keep pushing the boundaries on that as we go forward.”
Along with a need for increasing the fun of fighting non-standard mobs, Johanson was also clear that more incentive is needed to get players leaping on creatures, such as veterans or champions, rather than sneaking around them to hit nodes. This is good news for those who have repeatedly slammed against high HP mobs, only to get a Dark Stained Claw.
“A lot of what we’re looking at this year is how do we ensure that our reward systems are strong enough across all of these creatures in the game and all the things you do to make it worthwhile. One of the things we want to do is to make sure we’re not forcing you to go play one specific part of the game as the best way to be rewarded. We want you to pick the parts of the game that you’re excited about and you want to play and ensure that you’re being rewarded for doing that. Making these creatures more exciting is one thing but we have to make sure you’re rewarded for the time you put into them as well.”
Moving on from the open world and into players’ own back yards, I asked if we could expect more personal story to be added to Guild Wars 2.
“Absolutely, we’re not working on that right now, but that is something we definitely talk about all the time and it is something you will see in the future. We’ll continue to expand on personal story, we may go back and revisit the existing ones and find ways to expand on those or offer new paths. We’re not really locked into anything at this point, but we have a whole lot of different stuff that we would like to do in expanding personal story as well. That’s something that down the road we’ll get more into. Our real focus right now is that core living world, things like personal story that play out in instances will kind of come second to that. But it’s definitely something we talk about all the time.”
Anyone who has played the game cannot help but be struck by the majesty of the cities inGuild Wars 2. Divinity’s Reach, in my opinion, is the most stunning player city in any current MMO. I asked Colin about what content we might look forward to in order to make cities more vital to players every day game time.
“That’s another one that’s on the high-level design stage right now of what do we want to do to accomplish that and how do we do it? It’s certainly not something that we have a team building anything for but it is something that we are definitely talking about.
If you look at the Norn city they have the Norn Keg Brawl activity which is kind of fun and unique for that city and our goal is to always have additional activities like that in other cities and that’s something we would like to do down the road for sure.
Those play out more in the instanced areas but there’s a lot of capacity to tell stories and do really compelling things in the cities. That’s really an area that as we get our core playable maps out in the open world strengthened, probably the next place that we would look to is the cities after that. Once we’re in a place where we feel the base maps that you level up in are really in an incredibly solid place then things like cities we would turn an eye to next.”
Tomorrow, in the second part of our interview, Colin talks about the challenges of making abilities as much fun as Mesmer Portal for other professions in WvW, the risk versus reward of design philosophy, the direction of Structured PVP and why ArenaNet is looking forward to making the generation of MMOs beyond Guild Wars 2 within the current game itself.
