But now the developer needed to figure out how to keep players invested, especially without the aforementioned gear and level treadmill. ArenaNet got people interested and got them into a new virtual world. With any MMO, however, launch is only the beginning. That launch met with continued hype and rave reviews. Guild Wars 2 gained a ton of buzz during its many betas and leading up to is August 2012 launch. Guild Wars 1 fans and MMO veterans alike reacted to these unique spins on the genre. Despite being much more ambitious than its predecessor, it was to maintain the original game’s “buy-to-play” model, where players paid for the boxed game and received any updates and additional content free of charge. Oh, and on top of it all, Guild Wars 2 was to avoid a subscription fee. And the huge open world was built around the concept of events happening all the time that multiple players could jump into and out of and work together to accomplish things. Players could share tags for creatures, and loot would be evenly distributed between everyone. With that in mind, ArenaNet built a very different game with Guild Wars 2. “We really wanted to make a game where any time you see another player, you’re happy to see them,” O’Brien says. Whoever tagged a monster first or got the last bit of damage in would get loot, which led to frustration, anger and generally not always liking it when other players were in the same area as you, despite that also seemingly being a core draw of an online experience. In classic examples from the genre, like EverQuest, players would often compete for the same kills. The second tentpole for Guild Wars 2 was to improve player interaction and cooperation, an issue MMOs have always struggled with. “We love the fact that Guild Wars 2 is not a treadmill game” Instead, once you reached the endgame, you could focus on learning new abilities, exploring new areas, mastering new sides to your profession. They call their approach “horizontal progression.” The game would launch with a level cap of 80, but that level cap, they promised, would not go up. Where most MMORPGs keep players hooked by increasing the level cap and adding new and more difficult-to-get sets of armor, ArenaNet vowed to take a different path. You’re never really gonna get to the end.” You know the developer is going to just keep adding new runway in front of you. “We really tried to distance ourselves from MMOs for a long time, because so much of it is - you get in, and you’re just on this treadmill. “We love the fact that Guild Wars 2 is not a treadmill game,” says O’Brien. Firstly and most importantly: no endless upward progression. The growing team knew it wanted to create a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, but it also knew that it wanted to separate itself, to stand out from glut of MMOs on the market and in development.īuilding off of the first Guild Wars, ArenaNet laid out two major tentpoles for how this game would be different from the competition. Given the success of its first game and grand visions of something bigger, ArenaNet more than doubled its size to 135 people as development of Guild Wars 2 ramped up. A lot of the goal of Guild Wars 2 was just realizing that we had grown and we could now take on what we wished we could have been building with the first game.” “It was very limited by what we could accomplish as a team. “For Guild Wars 1, we were a tiny team making a game that was really pure at heart and very small,” O’Brien says. But that first game was much smaller and much less ambitious than what it had in mind now. Owned by Korean publisher NCSoft and based in Bellevue, Washington, the company had made a name for itself with the original Guild Wars. When ArenaNet began working on Guild Wars 2 10 years ago, the company was a mere 60 people. And with Path of Fire launching just a month and a half after being announced, it’s ready to turn some heads again. The developer is now setting a breakneck pace for creating new content. But in five years, and after a rocky first expansion, ArenaNet has learned a ton of lessons. In fact, it’s only the second in the game’s five-year lifespan. The just-announced Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire is the next of those expansions ( full details here), the next punctuation mark in the story of Guild Wars 2. But sometimes you want to accomplish something big, and you’re going to accomplish it in an expansion pack. “Hopefully it all flows together, live releases and expansion packs. “We’re shipping content all the time,” O’Brien says. It’s not that they need to be completely different from the consistent stream of content being added to the game in patches rather, they need to be big. ArenaNet president and Guild Wars 2 game director Mike O’Brien has a very specific approach that he wants his game to take toward paid expansion sets.
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