Guild Wars 2 interview

ArenaNet has slowly been revealing more and more details about Guild Wars 2, slowly building up the hype for their next MMO and sequel to their immensely popular Guild Wars. Now it's time again, and the news this time are activities, feats, achievements and the personality system and a quick description of the four is in order to understand the following interview at all.

Activities are more or less mini-games that the players can get involved in, placed around in the various cities scattered across the world of Guild Wars 2. They include such honorable traditions as bar brawling, archery or snow ball fights.

Achievements are awarded for things you do in the game, while feats replace what is usually known as rest experience in other MMOs and reset daily. The personality system allows you to craft your character's actual personality, from being charming to barbaric - the last one can even unlock the option to punch characters you to talk to.

We sat down in a conference call with game designers John Stumme, Curtis Johnson and Ben Miller. We were also joined by lead game designer Eric Flannum.

You talk about activities as something that happens "on the side" of the rest of the game. How much priority do you put on creating these activities compared to other parts, like traditional MMO-things like questing and crafting?

John Stumme: Something like that, you know, we have equal priorities that we're working on - different people on the team are dedicated to working on different things. As it is right now, I've been in the one in charge of doing the activity stuff that we have for Divinity's Reach. It gets weighted with as much priority as we do for all the other things we are working on, putting it into the cities and stuff to make them awesome.

Alright. Because I was thinking about, you brought up the bar brawl, for example Funcom had something like that planned for Age of Conan, and I'm not sure that made it in at launch. Is there any risk that something similar would happen to the activities? Or is it an integral part of the game experience in itself?

John: These are getting built into the game itself, they will be there at launch. They are not something that we will tack on later, they are part of the cities.

Eric Flannum: One of the things I can say is that we tend to, you know, we were pretty tight-lipped about the game for a long time and we tend not to talk about things unless they are actually in the game. So when we talk about activities, like when we talk about the bar brawl, or the shooting gallery, because they are actually in the game you can go in and experience them right now. And so there is actually very little chance that most things we talk about are not going to make it into the game just because we run out of time or anything like that. Because, as I said, we tend not to talk about things unless we're very, very certain that we can do them. Certain as in they are in already.

Activities don't have a level requirement. Do you have any plans for rewards for them, and if so - how do you balance those rewards?

John: We are going to have rewards come out of the activities. An example that I've given is like for the bar brawl, while you are in there, you're knocking out people, you might get a tooth as a drop. And then we might have an NPC that is a collector that is associated with the activity and you're turning in teeth to him because it just so happens that he is the local dentist and you're basically sending business to him. So you can turn those items in for rewards. In terms of making them balanced, it's more about getting an aesthetic reward, like a weapon or an armor kind of thing, it's like a skin for that activity, you won't be able to get it anywhere else.

Will these activities be instanced at all or will people be able to watch them? Or like with the bar brawl, just jump in and take part of it at any time they like?

John: How they are working is going to depend specifically on which activity it is, because of how some of them are structured to work. So for example, using the snow ball fight; it's something that has one side as a definite winner, there's a scoring mechanic, you're going to queue up and it's going to be an instanced thing when it starts. But we could also have some that you can just jump into and join.

Right. How many of these activities do you have planned?

John: About 30-ish, I believe is what we're looking at.

You guys mentioned being able to break the game, and change the rules. How far can you go when it comes to these activities?

John: As far as it takes to make it fun.

But can you give any other example when you "break the game"?

John: Some examples that we can give...you know, we talk about so much of the game that is built on co-operation and working together and in activities we can take a break from that. Because sometimes you're just in the mood to do something different. The bar brawl is built around that chaotic, free-for-all feeling of the moment you're seeing in movies, when someone gets a chair to the back of the head from out of nowhere, even though he is fighting someone else. We can change those kinds of rules for scoring and stuff like that. Or in the case of one of the other activities in Divinity's Reach, imagine that you're playing polo, but polo had pitfalls and bombs and traps going off. Things that are completely off the wall that we can get in there.

Generally, MMOs are quite structured affairs. How did you decide, or how did the philosophy go, when you guys started to design these activities?

John: There's a couple of things that you want to do. Since they are tied to all the cities, you want something that feels appropriate to each of the races, and once you got something like that, you don't want the same kind of gameplay that is available everywhere else; then there would be no real reason to explore around. You want different compelling reasons, like "ah, I want to go to the Black Citadel because I can do this there!" or going to Divinity's Reach because they have these kinds of things there. So you want to have a wide variety of things that are there. We designers, we get the artists involved, some people from QA have gotten in when they got really cool ideas. And we sit down with them and talk it over and do what it takes to get that in there.

One of the things you are talking about now are "feats". Can you give some solid examples of what these feats will look like?

Curtis Johnson: Feats are kind of our answer to rest experience and daily rewards. Feats are things that the game is tracking about your playtime, they layer on top of everything you're doing. Like how many things you've killed, and at certain levels you get rewards for that. We keep track of how many things you've killed simultaneously, what variety of enemies you are encountering, and all this are specific areas that as you meet certain levels in them you get bonus rewards for that day.

You say that this is a way for casual players to keep up with the more hardcore players. Only like through rest experience, or any other forum of bonuses?

Curtis: It's experience point bonuses, it's gold bonuses, there might be specific items or buffs that you get through feats. Basically they help to make your initial playtime, like the first hour or two, be more efficient. And so a casual player that plays for a short time, compared to someone who plays three or four times as long, might get up to about half as much experience points. Those first hours are more efficient, and give you a larger reward.

Right. The hardcore versus casual debate is something that, which you guys probably know, have been going on for quite some time. I know you guys mostly want to talk about activities, feats, achievements and so on, but is there anything you can talk about that goes into that debate? You know, like the difference between different playstyles of MMO-players in general?

Eric: You mentioned some of the systems we have in place...it's not like we want to put them on exactly even playing fields, because you really can't do that. I mean, it's just going to be the case of somebody who plays 24/7 is going to get stronger in the game. What we can do is make it so that for casual players there is sort of this power plateau, that we talked a lot about when making the first game. In some games, you get to max level for example and you got this whole progression ahead of you, and a lot of that progression is very, very hardcore. Like it requires you to be in a raiding guild, or requires you to be a great PVP'er, things like that.

So our basic philosophy on it is that we want our power curve to be attainable by the average player at that level. So what that means can be like reasonable expectations for obtaining items. So let's say you're going into a dungeon, and you're trying to get an item that you would normally consider being a raid item in another game. In most games, what would happen is that the end-boss will drop one of like twenty different items, or five different items, and which item it drops is kind of random. So in order to get your armor set you'll have to run that dungeon dozens and dozens and dozens of times because not only is the boss not necessarily going to drop what you want, but there's probably other people competing for that as well. So you have to have DKP-systems, or that kind of thing, so what we've trying to do with our dungeons is that if you're participate in that dungeon you are guaranteed to get an item that you want.