Kotaku
By: Brian D. Crecente
The Arena Net guys are messing with me.
Jeff Strain, former Blizzard coder and co-founder of the dev team behind Guild Wars, is clearly enjoying having me on the hook while I'm on the horn.
He's talking up Guild Wars 2 when I break in with the most, I believe, relavent question: Are you going to charge a monthly subscription fee this time around?
"With Guild Wars 2 we will be introducing a persistent world," he says, as almost an excuse. "We will have playable races. Everything you expect in a subscription system..."
He pauses for dramatic effect.
"...and we decided not to charge a subscription fee."
Strain and the people on his side of the phone call break into laughter.
"Funny," I say, genuinely amused.
The phone call is about two things, first that Guild Wars, what NC Soft believes to be the second largest massively multiplayer online game around, is getting a final expansion and that the final expansion will prepare gamers for Guild Wars 2.
Eye of the North
Eye of the North, set to hit this holiday, will be Guild War's first expansion. In the past the games that came out to bolster Guild Wars were all stand-alone titles which while they could be played with the original title, didn't need to be.
This first expansion brings you back to Tyria, the setting and storyline of the original Guild Wars.
In it, Strain says, you will be finding out what happened to some of the storylines and characters that peopled that first game.
The game will feature 18 new multi-level dungeons, 150 new skills across all ten Guild Wars professions, 10 new heroes and 40 new armor sets.
Because the game will require you to own one of the three Guild Wars campaigns the price will be less than a full campaign, Strain said.
Eye of the North, which will take place mostly underground, will also introduce three new races, but they won't be playable, at least not yet.
The Asura are an underground dwelling race that begin to come to the surface. They are ver "goblinesque" and the builders of the Guild Wars world.
The Norn are Viking savages of the mountains and the Sylvari are a kind of forest dwelling race which you witness the birth of the Eye of the North expansion.
While the character races won't be playable in the expansion, they will be in Guild Wars 2 as will the Guild Wars' perpetual enemy, the Charr.
A lot, it seems, that happens in this final expansion is about preparing for the launch of the new Guild Wars.
I asked Strain why Arena Net decided to stop producing expansions and campaigns and instead develop an entirely new game with Guild Wars 2.
Strain said that after shipping the last campaign, Nightfall, this past October the team sat back and evaluated where they were in terms of game design .
When they looked at what they had accomplished with Guild Wars and its campaigns they were happy with what they saw. Then they looked at what their gamers were asking for and it wasn't one more campaign, one more continent to explore, new professions to learn.
"What people wanted, I think, was more content for the existing models," Strain said.
So the team started creating a wishlist of all of the things they'd love to see added to Guild Wars and when they were done they realized it was too much to stuff into the existing game.
Instead it was a master plan for how to build the "ultimate Guild Wars game," Strain said.
But the plan required something to transition current players from the original campaigns into the new experience and, in many ways, that's where Eye of the North comes in.
Most central to that idea is the Eye's Hall of Monuments.
In the hall you can store achievements that can then be transferred to a Guild Wars 2 account.
This hall will be located in a sort of base of operations you can establish in Eye of the North. The instanced base will allow you to store not only the Eye of the North achievements in the form of monuments but the achievements earned in all three campaigns.
Every monument earned will unlock something, from heroes and pets to weapons, clothes and miniatures, in Guild Wars 2.
When you create your character in Guild Wars 2 you can choose a character from Guild War to inherit these unlocks from.
Kind of a neat idea, I think. To bad these new character don't also inherit some other attributes or traits from your Guild Wars characters, that would be fantastic.
Strain said the team decided to include this form of inter-character inheritance to make sure that all of the time players spent playing Guild Wars wouldn't be wasted.
Guild Wars 2
Since the game is essentially starting with a clean slate, Arena Net decided to make some pretty substantive changes to the game.
First, and most importantly though, the game will remain subscription free.
This time around the game will have a persistence world, one still set in Tyria, but now hundreds of years after the events that took place in the original Guild Wars.
"The big new feature is a persistent world," Strain said. "I think Guild Wars has some very radical departures from typical role-playng. One of those was the instancing model.
As each of the campaigns was released we took greater and greater pains to do that.
On the other hand, there are things we missed out on, like the more organic type of community building where you wandering through the area and hook-up with other people."
"In Guild Wars 2 we wanted to have the best of both worlds. We are retaining the strengths of instanced areas, but we are also integrating a persistenced world. We are not making a World of Warcraft clone here, we are not trying to do what other MMOs have done."
Arena Net's new spin is sort of an amalgam of both instanced and massive environments, where instanced events can have domino effects on other parts of the world, or zone..
Here's one example of this Strain used:
You are wandering through the countryside and you see a dragon flying overhead. You and a group try to stave off the dragon. If you are successful the nearby town gives you a treasure.
But if you don't drive off the dragon, the bridge will be destroyed. This will lead to a team of carpenters gathering at the bridge to try to fix it and then you will have to protect them from bandits.
"The idea is that there will always be something going on in the world," Strain said.
He said that there will be hundreds of these types of events that happen in the world, some daily, some hourly, some will be triggered by specific player actions.
"That is what persistence allows us to do. That is the type of content and play experience that we can offer in Guild Wars 2 that we couldn't offer in Guild Wars."
Another major change will be in the way the game handles player versus player.
In Guild Wars 2, the same character you use in-game will be used for player-versus-player conflicts that will take place in the Mists, the place between the many worlds, aka servers, of this new Guild Wars. Despite having several worlds, the game uses a global database so you can instantly transfer between worlds, Strain said.
And these inter-world battles in the Mists, which Strain says almost play like a large real-time strategy game, can have a real impact on the worlds.
"By achieving victories in these battles there will be benefits to your world," Strain said. "Bonuses, advantages, maybe everyone gets increased energy regeneration or healing rate or enhanced loot drop rate."
Strain says the world-versus-world match-ups will be shuffled every couple of weeks to make sure things stay fair.
Every week or every two weeks we will shuffle who is matched up.
Arena Net, it seems, is trying to tackle many of the biggest drawbacks most current massively multiplayer online games face. Chief among them is level capping. Why, once you top out, should you stick around in a game?
Guild Wars 2 is trying to deal with that issue by using a system with a high level cap once that could be set to 100 or even boundless.
"So there is not a level 20 cap," Strain said. "Either it will be a high level like 100 or unbounded, we haven't decided."
Besides these significant changes to the game, Guild Wars 2 will also introduce plenty of smaller ones, like the ability for your characters to do things like jump, swim, even climb trees.
The combat though, Strain says, will remain purely RPG
"Our belief is that role players aren't playing a RPG because they want a twitch action," Strain said, "there is a difference between playing a game like an RPG and playing a game like God of War."
Guild Wars 2 is expected to hit public beta next year, but now release date has yet been set.
Comments
Wow, I'm pretty suprised that they're sticking with the whole "no subscription" thing. I'm impressed though, I'll definately be picking this game up.
I'm glad they're continuing to offer it for free. I wasn't very impressed with the original Guild Wars (I have Guild Wars: Factions, I believe), but that's simply because I'm not a fan of MMORPGs in general--the actual game is a fairly good MMORPG (for what that is worth).
Couple that with playing for free and it was an automatic winner in my opinion.
great article!
This is why i love ArenaNet, and why I don't play other MMORPG games. I don't pay for a game more than once. Fortunately, it seems ArenaNet agrees with that philosophy.
awesome. i thought gw2 was gonna be subscription but this is just sweet.
I have avoided MMORPGs like the plague, mainly because of subscription fees. This, however, sounds very entertaining, especially the idea of there being no leval cap.
This definitely sounds interesting, but with no set release date I'm afraid some of these interesting concepts might end up on the proverbial cutting room floor.
Still, it's nice to see that the free MMO model is in fact viable in the long term.
@Limey:
Exactly!
Guild Wars is still officially 'subscription free' for me because I haven't purchased any 'expansions'.
I felt GW was dull and lacking the true feeling of an MMO. GW imo shouldn't even be called an MMO since it's more of an online game with a big lobby feature.
I came close to getting W but never did. I think I will be getting 2 though. Sounds pretty cool.
Not impressed one bit. They take away most of Guild Wars' unique traits and risk making it nothing else than a poor man's WoW.
Plus, this development probably signifies the failure of the Guild War buisness model. You cannot do two new professions twice a year, because you soon run out of unique skills.
@Anthriel:
The level cap for PVP is still there, they've already said that for PVP everyone will still remain on an even playing field. It's only PVE that you can now reach unlimited levels, and it also seems like it will be purely cosmetic. I'm a big time Guild Wars fan, and I really don't see the problem with that, all they're doing is expanding the replayabilty of the PVE.
And they only ever added four new classes, and all of them are still pretty unique.
I can't really see any reason to complain here, they're offering something for free, that other companies force us to pay for. If you'd rather stick to WoW, then by all means go ahead, but I've always prefered Guild Wars, and this new sequel just seals the deal.
I liked nightfall,even though factions was kind of meh.I really hope they fix how the story is explained because that was one of the biggest flaws on Guild Wars,you couldnt really give a damn about the story even if you try(except in nightfall,it was kind of cool).
Also they should work on how the abilities look,most of the Elementalist abilities look like fire works.
I hope they introduce new abilities and please give the damn monk something,is so damn boring to play as a monk.Yes every pary needs a monk but why you want to be a character that is only there to help others.Although is needed give him speed or something to make it fun like in NVN.
@radink: Guild Wars isn't an MMOG. ArenaNet have never called GW an MMOG. It's the uninformed gamers who have decided that, because GW is an online game that has some similarities to MMOGs, it surely must be an MMOG as well.
As a long-time GW player, I am cautiously optimistic about the GW2 information. I'm very eager to learn what happens in Eye of the North and what GW2 holds in terms of story.
@ Anthriel: I share some of your misgivings about GW2 coming more in line with other MMOGs, but I think (and hope) there are enough differences that it isn't simply a "WoW clone". However, I don't think GW1 was a failure.
I really enjoyed the original GW, but never did pick up the Xpacs.
However GW2 sounds like it will be a great game, and the fact that theres no subscription fee again appeals to the cheap bastard inside me.
Guild Wars was great, Factions sucked, and Nightfall was crap. I won't be getting the next expansion pack, but I'll greatly consider GW2.
So it IS true. This was "leaked" a while ago in some rag, I think. But I guess it's not just a rumor any more.
By the way...
G.uild W.ars + E.yes of the N.orth =
GWEN!
@justhesh:
Yes, the PC Gamer article has pictures of her. ;)
She would appear to be a mesmer, and is most likely one of the new heroes.
Guild Wars was a big disappointment. It tried to "kill" WoW, but end up failing miserably.
I'm all for the poor man's WoW! The subscription fee is what killed that game for me. Here's looking forward to more news about GW2...
@ moonfirelol: If GW "tried to 'kill' WoW", then why did ArenaNet make a game that is so completely different from what WoW is like? Surely if your game is trying to be a "WoW-killer" would you not try to take the WoW model (which is pretty similar to most MMORPGs, let's be honest), copy most of it, tweak it a bit, put your own spin on it, then release it?
I don't think ArenaNet were trying to "kill WoW" as you say. I think they were trying to provide something different from other online games, and in that respect they succeeded. ArenaNet did not create another bog-standard MMOG, or even an MMOG at all.
There is enough room in the online gaming market for different types of games to exist. Just look at some the new online games in development: on based on White Wolf's World of Darkness (modern gothic horror), Exanimus (zombie MMORPG), Aion: The Tower of Eternity (demons, angels, draconic races in PvPvE conflict, flight, aerial combat), etc.
Online games do not begin or end with WoW.
@moonfirelol:
Uh...who told you that? Beause it's not at all true.
@brinstar:
Exactly! It's an entirely different model than WoW. Guild Wars is far from being a failure.
My only problem with Guild Wars (besides the still not real-time combat) was the districting of the towns, it was a pain in the butt when playing friends.
I hope their stubborn attitude about no subscription fee doesn't turn around and bite them in the ass. I certainly don't mind paying a fee for a persistent game, as long as it compels the developer to keep quality up and improve the game's infrastructure. You pay for what you get.
I love GW's world and atmosphere but could never get deep into the end game and all the collection of skills, etc. I just got behind and never caught up (actually, now that I think about it, I tried to keep up, but got those annoying error=007 disconnect errors for the longest time, I had to quit!).
I will definitely be keeping my eye on this as it develops.
@deussolinvictus:
"I hope their stubborn attitude about no subscription fee doesn't turn around and bite them in the ass."
What do you mean by that, exactly?
Sounds like GW2 could really open the floodgates, especially without a fee. Played the first a fair amount, but lost interest because my friends were all playing WoW, and I wanted to play with them.
Brian, what does the D. stand for?
@justhesh: Like I said, I would happily pay a fee if it ensured game quality. I worry slightly that ANet's business structure might be causing the gradual downfall of their customer service and server support. The interview even made it seem like they are getting somewhat reluctant towards their no-fee stance (long pregnant pause?). Like maybe now they may feel that they are stuck with it.
If they can somehow make this new game work with just the money made from box/expansion sales and not sacrifice support and services for it then more power to them.
@WinterSnowblind:
Actually, you may recall, that Gwen wished to be a Warrior like Devona and her father when she grew up, BUT that she much preferred the fashions of the Mesmers. So if she is in fact in the expansion, she may just be a warrior with a Mesmer armor set.
I'd actually rather pay a monthly fee than paying a lot of money upfront and hoping the game is worth that money. That way, if you only play one month and get bored after that, you only spent €10 instead of €50.
~Grauw
@deussolinvictus:
The no-fee plan has worked out splendidly for GW so far. And if you re-read the article, the long pause was for dramatic effect. He was simply pointing out the fact that GW2 will have subscription-fee quality features, while remaining a subscriptionless game.
Personally I have loved each game so far. Factions was a bit 'iffy' but Nightfall brought it back. I can't wait for the next expansion on the story, and also another collector's edition with a great artbook! (What can I say, I'm an artbook whore)
Good feature can't wait for GW:EN and GW2. It's funny people say the guild wars business model was a failure, it's the second most popular MMORPG and Anets North America's flagship product in terms of both number of customers and total profit. Not bad for a failed business model... :)
Sweetness!!! I can't wait for this game!! It's nice to see ArenaNet not forcing people into the whole "pay to play".
Increasing the level cap to 100, or unlimited is gonna make the game so much better! Hopefully you can bring your already level 20 and bring them up to 100!!
Guild Wars 2 you say? Pump it into my veins..
@Grauw:
But you still have to buy the game in the first place...
But GW2 could definitely be a good game if they make the world more open. The lack of jumping always bothered since it felt like I was stuck to the ground. And the terribly linear paths. Jumping is in, now I pray for a world where I can actually travel around in.
@Graedus: David. Whoops, I usually only use the D in my Rocky stories.
Man GW2 sounds great, hope it has physics (can't fall off a two inch ledge in GW :-P). That was my only beef with the original.
Im just concerned with what will happen to GW1. Sure they're giving us Eye of the North, but is that just to whet our appetites for GW2? Will GW1 still be playable or will they take down the servers? ArenaNet is a great company and I'd hope that they keep GW1 running and updated instead of leaving it to die and focusing on GW2...
Will this be free raoming like WoW now or do you still start in a city hub, pick up a group then go out in to the world which is instanced? If so then its still shit.
This is huge! The non-subscription model is the only way I've been able to convince my wife to play an MMO, and now she's hooked on Guild Wars. She's going to scream that we need to get a new computer when I tell her that GW2 is coming out!
THANK YOU NCSOFT!
@irnchriz:
I don't see where you get the "still" from.
I feel so excited about GW2 and GW:EN :D
Although Factions was quite boring to get through, Nightfall brought all the good stuff back to GW :D
I have no doubt that if anyone can be creative enough with the races that are coming and such, it's the ArenaNet team. They did after all bring us the Ritualist and the paragon ;)
Someone is a WoW fanboy...