Interviews// Guild Wars 2

While Guild Wars has had a good six years and, with a little luck, will have a few more yet, change is in the air. Guild Wars 2 is coming, with plenty of improvements and goodies promised. I sat down with Theo Nguyen of ArenaNet to find out more...


SPOnG: Guild Wars was famous for being an MMO without the subscription fee. Instead you released content via expansions for a price and thus negated the need for subscription. Will Guild Wars 2 follow the same model?

Theo Nguyen: Once you buy Guild Wars 2 it will be free to play, no subscription fee will be levied. As far as expansions go, we haven't hammered out the details of what we are going to be doing in that area. I can say for sure that there will be live updating that will have new content patched in after its release, just like the original Guild Wars.


SPOnG: What will happen to the original Guild Wars once its sequel is released?

Theo Nguyen: That's a great question, as I would also be concerned that the original game would be closed down. We do of course expect to see some migration from the original to its sequel, but we do expect there to be a hardcore niche that will want to keep playing the original game. I can say that we are committed to keeping Guild Wars so long as there are still players playing on it.


SPOnG: During your presentation on the game at EuroGamer Expo, you spoke about MMOs having gameplay elements that did not function as intended, and you wanted to eliminate that. Could you expand on this?

Theo Nguyen: We feel that the Massively Multiplayer aspect of MMOs has been forgotten and that this is in fact a really important part of these games. People want to play with other players, yet most MMOs give you the experience of playing along, together. It's a bunch of players who don't really want to interact with each other, because it makes the missions they are trying to complete harder.

To overcome this in Guild Wars 2, we make it more enjoyable for players to play together. For example, if you see me fighting a monster and you help me kill it, you get rewarded. You get XP, gold and sometimes even items. The game is designed for enhancing the multiplayer experience.


SPOnG: In the original Guild Wars, you had to select a maximum of eight skills from a library before venturing forth into an instanced area. Will Guild Wars 2 boast a similar mechanic?

Theo Nguyen: It's a little bit different in Guild Wars 2. You have a set of five skills initially, that is based on the weapon you are using. So if I'm using the one handed mace say, that will allow me to use different attacks that are dependent upon what weapon I am wielding. Alongside those skills you have another 6 slots that do other things that are not affected by the weapon you are holding. Say for example you can heal conditions, so if you're going to fight a necromancer, you can use that skill that removes the damage over time attack that the necromancer can unleash upon you.

We feel that this is a good balance as one problem with Guild Wars was that there was a vast number of skills, but only a handful of them were actually useful! This created the deception of having options that really weren't there.