Interview: ArenaNet on Guild Wars 2
With Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet are toting the very serious threat of turning MMORPG conventions on their heads. Mike O'Brien explains what's wrong with the genre, and how his studio is going to fix it...
Following the publication of their manifesto (which is also in video form, at the end of this article), we caught up with ArenaNet's co-founder and studio head Mike O'Brien, and Guild Wars 2 lead designer Eric Flannum, to find out what inspired their outcry - and more importantly, how they plan to change things for the better...
Q. So you guys recently published your manifesto. Do you think there's something fundamentally wrong with MMORPGs, as they stand?
Mike O'Brien: Well, I think that online worlds have so much more potential. If you can cast your mind back in time to when Ultima Online had been announced but not yet released, we all believed that in truly free online worlds in which things could really change according to the actions taken by players. Persistent impact on the world, you know - social activities that you could have with other players that make the game truly a social multiplayer game.
The MMO industry has been kind of stuck in a rut, with a lot of games working identically. We're trying to get back to that joy, that early promise. We're looking at all these things online worlds were meant to be and thinking: we can make that happen. So this is our manifesto, this is our way of saying we, as an industry, can be more than this...
Q. Would you say a large part of the problem stems from developers attempting to emulate World of Warcraft's success?
Eric Flannum: I think that is a problem, not for every game out there but certainly for a lot of games. If you look at certain successful MMOs like EVE Online or the original Guild Wars, those are games that did things differently. We sold six million copies of Guild Wars 1 and we were certainly a game that took a lot of chances.
Now, one of the arguments we came up against was whether Guild Wars 1 was really an MMO, and that was one of the things that we wanted to change, the perception that we weren't an MMO and that that was why we could get away with not charging a monthly fee. So that was one of the goals of Guild Wars 2, to say hey, here's an MMO - watch how we can build an MMO and not have to charge a monthly fee.
It's very easy for people to fall into this trap of not wanting to take chances. MMOs are huge investments in both time and money, they're one of the most costly types of games to make - maybe the most complicated and costly games to make. When you consider that, it's really easy to become extremely risk averse. We decided early on: let's be different, let's examine all of the issues that we see with the current MMO market and let's try to make a game that addresses all of those.
Mike O'Brien: It's not just a risk averse MMO industry, it's a risk averse game industry, and that was why we founded ArenaNet - we wanted to bring players new experiences. We believed at the end of the day that gaming is all about experiencing new things.
Q. You mention in the manifesto that Guild Wars 2 isn't designed to "suck your life away" - do you think certain MMOs, like World of Warcraft, are engineered to be as addictive as possible?
Mike O'Brien: I'm not going to speak specifically about any one MMO, but I definitely think that there's a whole batch of MMOs out there that are crafted to have very precise reward schedules, where a lot of the focus of the game is on anticipating the next reward. And that's where it starts to turn into grinding - having to play monotonously to get to the next reward. Throughout ArenaNet's history we've been focused on the moment-to-moment gameplay. Players should be able to get to the fun part of the game as soon as they sit down and play. Let's give players something meaningful in half an hour.
Eric Flannum: We released this graph which shows the typical MMO levelling progression as a kind of ever-increasing curve, the higher the level you are the more time it takes you to get to the next level, to the point where, in old school MMOs certainly, you're taking a week to go up a level. Our graph shows a similar kind of progression right at the beginning and then a flattening off. There's a hypothetical time period after which levelling simply takes too long and we never want to go past that. We're tweaking the numbers, but we're thinking it won't be much more than an hour and a half between levels, or somewhere in that neighbourhood.
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