New MMORPG from Blizzards finest'

[Dreamer128]

Guild Wars Interview
ArenaNet Co-Founders Patrick Wyatt, Mike O'Brien and Jeff Strain on their competitive quest-based RPG project

July 04, 2003 - In the spring of 2000, Patrick Wyatt, Mike O'Brien and Jeff Strain announced the formation of a new studio called Triforge. Such news is not unusual, but this instance definitely caught the industry's attention. The three were and are senior, highly accomplished developers, with combined credits including major roles on the mega-hits Diablo, WarCraft II and StarCraft. At the time they decided to leave Blizzard, they were leading development teams on separate projects, so the start-up gave them the opportunity to work closely together again. Their stated goal was to focus on titles that would advance the state of the art of multiplayer Internet gaming. Although no details were forthcoming and we really didn't expect to learn very much for at least a while, we made sure to add the company to the list of those we watch closely.


A few months later, the team adopted a new name, ArenaNet. Late last year, it was acquired by NCsoft, and this April, Guild Wars was officially revealed. The press release described it as a "mission-based competitive online role playing game", which raised our interest level, but there was more. For example, characters will be persistent, and will be able to gain many abilities and items. Gameplay options will include cooperative group combat, single-player adventures and large-scale guild battles, all of which will emphasize player skill over duration of playing time. The underlying technology will stream updates to gamers while they're online, and in North America at least, there will be no monthly subscription fee. Although the projected release date of late next year is still some time away, the Co-Founders did agree to tell us about their project.


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Jonric: How would you summarize Guild Wars? What kind of game have you set out to create, what are the primary factors that have influenced its design and gameplay experience?






ArenaNet Team: Guild Wars is a competitive online role-playing game, which we believe to be a new genre. While Guild Wars was influenced by a good many games of the past, including a number that we developed ourselves, and while it includes many of the positive elements of today's massively multiplayer games, Guild Wars is the first role-playing game to be designed from the ground up for competitive play. Whether you are battling against monsters to attain a quest goal, or working with your guild to reach the highest levels of tournament play, you'll find that you're rewarded more for your gaming skills than for the number of hours you've played. And best of all, Guild Wars will be giving players all of this without the monthly fee that has become the hallmark of online games.

Jonric: What led you to adopt the concept of a mission-based game with persistent characters and a non-persistent gameworld?

ArenaNet Team: Guild Wars includes persistent gaming areas, and these areas are great places to meet people and make new friends. But once you form a party and go on a quest, you and your friends get your own unique copy of the quest, and that eliminates the things that are real problems in most persistent world games, such as waiting for monsters to spawn, having someone prey on other players by stealing the items that drop from a monster kill, standing in line to tackle the boss monster; and endless, monotonous travel. We feel that most games require that the gamer spend too much time preparing to have fun, rather than actually having fun.

Jonric: Why do you feel this approach will be commercially viable without having to implement subscription charges?






ArenaNet Team: We're well aware that one of the biggest factors limiting the adoption of today's crop of massively multiplayer games is the monthly subscription fee they charge. Without a monthly fee, we know that we'll make less money per copy sold, but at the same time, we expect to attract a lot more players to our gaming world. Gamers also benefit from this, because the more people who participate in a gaming community, the more vibrant and exciting it becomes, as each new player adds to the role-playing and competitive aspects of the game. Having a large gaming community is also beneficial because it means that there are more people online to play with at any given time, and it's great for us because it means that there are more advocates who are going to tell their friends about our game!

Jonric: What does the Guild Wars site mean when it says you are "familiar with the complex issues surrounding online games"?

ArenaNet Team: One of the complex issues we're addressing is eliminating the many drawbacks found in existing online games. It's not particularly rewarding to spend two hours preparing to have fun, whether it's making trips to buy spell components, experiencing days of trial and error to learn a spell, or running halfway across a huge map, dying, and getting into a corpse retrieval situation. It's not fun to be forced to stand in line to challenge the boss monster and then lose the reward to an item grabber. And it's not fun to build a character only to discover that the early choices you made, before you had even had a chance to play, resulted in serious drawbacks and a "gimped" character.
Jonric: Also referring to the site, what are the keys to "creating a game that's both easy to learn and compelling to play long term, and yet doesn't require players to spend hundreds of hours slogging through the preparation just to get to the fun bits"?


ArenaNet Team: With Guild Wars, we allow players to start right in and have fun, and to continue to have fun along the way. Because our game is quest-based, we focus on rewards for completing quests instead of negatives such as crippling death penalties or horrendous corpse retrieval issues. The only choices you'll need to make when you create a character have to do with what the character looks like. Any choices you make that affect gameplay are made after you have enough knowledge to make good decisions.

For example, you'll be able to try each character profession in the game to learn its strengths and weaknesses, and to evaluate whether you enjoy the way that profession plays, before you commit to a particular choice. We've announced three of those professions, by the way, which are the Warrior, the Necromancer and the Ranger, and we'll continue to announce new professions in the future.

Jonric: A third quote says "...Guild Wars has been designed to reward gamers for their playing skill, and not solely for the number of hours they've spent gaming, which enables well-balanced competitive missions between players of almost all skill levels." How do you intend to accomplish this while keeping character advancement meaningful, and without the game being a clickfest?






ArenaNet Team: We've designed the Guild Wars skill system to accomplish this goal. Because we have defined a "power curve" that flattens rapidly over time, characters do not become ever more powerful, but instead acquire a wider variety of skills and therefore a larger number of possible strategies as time goes on. Each individual strategy is no more powerful than another, so a high level character - even with many times the number of skills - is not strictly better than a lower level character with only a dozen skills; he just has more choices.

This means that even a player who is just starting out will have skills that can help the team. Furthermore, buddies who like to play together will be able to continue to adventure together over the long term, because even though one may have less time to play each week, he'll still have valuable strategies to contribute to the partnership over the long term.

To imagine how it works, think about playing Magic: The Gathering. In Magic, you might own hundreds of cards, but choose only a small number to use for each game. You choose those cards based on the strategy you plan to use in a specific encounter. So like Magic, when you play Guild Wars, you have to think about your skill options, consider which ones might be needed in a particular mission, and then take it a step further and consider what your teammates are bringing to the mix. From your character's inventory of several dozens of skills (chosen from the game's hundreds of skills), you'll select a small number of skills to take into that mission. And when the next mission rolls around, you may set yourself up with an entirely different group of skills.

Jonric: How will the quest system work, how much variety will there be in terms of different types, and how will you keep them from becoming repetitive or even stale?






ArenaNet Team: Guild Wars has a world "overview" map that players can use to jump directly into any quest or town. Some areas or missions are designed for solo play, others are more appropriate for parties, and a few are major challenges designed for a whole guild to tackle. When you complete the primary goal of a quest, all of the adjacent quests on the world map will be unlocked, allowing you to continue progressing through the world.

However, even after you have completed the primary goal of the mission, there will be other secondary or hidden goals to challenge you. Some of these missions are much harder than the main quest, so often when you go back and play old quests that you played long ago, you can find that you're powerful enough to explore new areas of the map and find hidden items that you could never get to before.

We'll also continue to release new content for Guild Wars in a variety of ways. In addition to releasing expansion sets about twice a year, we'll continue to support existing players by adding new maps, quests, treasures and monsters from time to time in order to build an ongoing adventure and story that players can enjoy.

Jonric: In light of the title, how important is the guild system, and what kinds of features and elements are you building into the game to support them?


ArenaNet Team: As you might imagine from the name Guild Wars, we believe that guilds can be an exciting part of online games, and we'd like to make it easy for players of all skill levels to participate. To join a guild is to become part of a community of players who extend the game play experience together, enhance the fiction of the game world, provide positive motivation and support, and just have fun as a team. A good gaming experience can be more even fun when shared with friends, so many of the features we'll be adding are designed to help players become part of the community, and to provide rewards to guilds for helping and recruiting new players. In addition to the game features that we've previously pioneered that are now considered standard fare in games, like online chat and matchmaking, we're adding support for guild forums, messaging, buddy lists, item storage, Guild Halls, guild tournaments, and more. All of these features are integrated into the game, and are accessible even while you're in the middle of a mission.

Jonric: The title also implies player vs. player. How will this aspect work, and will players have the option to opt out?






ArenaNet Team: Player versus player combat can lead to some intense and exciting experiences, but you will always have the choice to participate in PvP, and will never find yourself at the mercy of a player killer. Because Guild Wars is a mission based game, you can choose to enter either cooperative or competitive missions - you'll never find yourself unexpectedly under attack by other players, which eliminates a great deal of the grief inflicted by less savory players.

Think of a game like StarCraft; when you want to play with your friends, you form a team and play cooperatively against the computer. On the other hand, when you want to challenge other players, you enter a melee game and play competitively. Similarly, in Guild Wars, you can play a quest with your friends, or you can head to a battleground to compete head to head with other teams or guilds. The choice is always yours.

Jonric: What are the primary advantages and pitfalls associated with streaming technology, and to what extent are any of them related to the style of game you're making?

ArenaNet Team: Streaming downloads are great from the player's standpoint because you can immediately receive updates and additions to the gaming world, including new missions, monsters and spells; see changes to the world caused by in-game events designed to evolve the game story; and view the results of guild versus guild tournaments that directly alter the game world. Our alpha testers have already had the chance to see this process in action, as we have been releasing an average of five updates a day for over a year. On the pitfall side, it has taken a long time to develop the technology, but we're excited to be showing the fruits of several years of labor to the gaming community.

Jonric: What kinds of gamers do you see as your core target market, and what will make Guild Wars stand out in their eyes relative to other fantasy RPGs of the same generation?

ArenaNet Team: We've always tried to develop our games to be approachable to the largest audience of gamers we can. Initially, the game should be easy to play and help players learn what they need to know to overcome later challenges, while providing a depth of play that will keep them coming back for the long term, which we call "emergent complexity."

In order to attract this broad audience, we made the game easy to learn by building an intuitive interface for Guild Wars. We made it mission-based so people can have fun and achieve a sense of accomplishment even if they don't have three to five hours to play in one sitting. We designed the character system so that the outcome of combat is determined by which player is the most skilled, not by which player spent the most hours building up his character.

We also designed Guild Wars from the ground up to be a competitive game so that players of different experience levels can compete against each other, and as a side bonus of that system, enabled friends to continue to play together even when they have characters with different experience levels. Finally, we created new server technology so that Guild Wars will not have a monthly subscription fee. We believe that all these aspects of Guild Wars will make it stand out, and give players a game that they'll want to play for a long time.
Jonric: What is the current status of development, and what kind of schedule do you expect with respect to further alpha testing and then beta leading up to release?


ArenaNet Team: We will be releasing Guild Wars in the second half of 2004. We've been conducting our alpha test for more than a year now, and it's going extraordinarily well. It has been extremely gratifying to pioneer the concept of having external testers join the game, to become involved in every facet of the design, from art to gameplay. As far as we know, we're the first company to host an alpha test for a major title, and we will soon be conducting this novel program simultaneously on several continents.






In the future, we'll open a large-scale beta test prior to the release of the game. The reason we are so thoroughly testing the game, and at so many levels, is because we have learned through experience that setting a short, arbitrary test window is just not enough, and that allowing the time and depth of involvement that we're presently achieving with the external testing will help us make the best game possible.

Jonric: Are there other important aspects, features et al that you'd like to note for our readers, anything you'd like to tell them, or something you want to ask?

ArenaNet Team: We noticed at E3 that many of the visitors to our booth were particularly excited about a few of the keys points concerning Guild Wars:

- They loved the fact that we were offering a first-class game without a monthly subscription fee, and that we will continue to support and expand the game both with free content and with regular expansion sets.

- They liked the idea of mission-based game, with the many advantages of that type of game design.

- They were excited about the competitive aspects of the game that were designed in from the beginning, and which give gamers an array of choices about the ways that they can play.

- And they were delighted with our "no servers, no shards" technology, which allows gamers to play with anyone, anywhere, at any time, with no artificial boundaries between players or game worlds. Using this technology, Guild Wars players can unequivocally answer the question, "Who is the world champion?"

Jonric, we'd like to thank you for the opportunity to answer these questions about our game. You've provided a great forum to gamers for many years, and we look forward to being able to talk with you again as our game approaches its release.

Of course, Patrick Wyatt, Mike O'Brien and Jeff Strain are the ones who really deserve to be thanked. We have been monitoring ArenaNet's progress ever since we first learned of its existence, and having seen Guild Wars' successful debut at this year's E3 trade show, we are especially pleased for the chance to find out more about it directly from the company's accomplished principals. Naturally, we're even keener now, so we will look forward to talking again too.

[Source: http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/427/427305p4.html]

[ 03-04-2004, 07:56 AM: Message edited by: Dreamer128 ]

[Dreamer128]

Official website of this game is www.guildwars.com
Also, be sure to check out some of the screenshots at http://www.guildwars.com/gallery/gws.../gallery3.html
I think this is probably the best looking Online RPG to date [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]

[ 03-06-2004, 08:05 AM: Message edited by: Dreamer128 ]

[Kakero]

Another new Blizzard MMORPG? Look nice but on Blizzard main site I don't see any news about this.

[Link]

No no it's not a Blizzard game. The three guys mentioned left Blizzard a while back, and they came up with this new game. It's 'famous' because they were behind a lot of ideas at Blizzard (including lead design for Battle.net).

The screenshots look awsome. I was amazed about this game when I read about it in my gaming magazine, but it keeps getting better. And it's supposedly free (or something?!)

[Dreamer128]

No monthly fee. [img]smile.gif[/img] Hey Link, I assume you also read PCGameplay?

WOW!!!!THAT IS AWESOMNE~!!!!!!

WHEEE!!!awesome graphics too [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[The Fallen One]

Nice!, the screens are spectacular, i wonder if the real game will be like that ?

[Dreamer128]

Originally posted by The Fallen One: Nice!, the screens are spectacular, i wonder if the real game will be like that ?

They claim it's all taken from ingame. Quite amazing [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Link]

Yepz [img]smile.gif[/img] PCGameplay all the way baby. I started reading PCGamer a couple of years ago, but at a certain point I got into PCGameplay. I like their writing and opinions a lot more (even if they're Belgian [img]tongue.gif[/img] ).

At a certain point they had a reviewer called Koen DeMeulemeester who had some brilliant pieces of writing. If I read them over again now, I still end up laughing although I know what it's going to say.

[Dreamer128]

Yeah, PcGameplay is the only choice when living in The Netherlands. I really like their columns. Do you recall an (old) article about one of their reviewers trying to get ADSL from BelgaCom ("Ik ben geen ochtendmens"). I couldn't stop laughing after reading that one