Guild Wars 2 in 2013: Arenanet reveal WvW particular abilities, living stories

Guild Wars 2's game director, Colin Johanson, is an incredibly glad bunny. "Factors are excellent right now," he says, laughing. "We are having fun."

The reason factors are remarkable? Guild Wars two is a success: intrinsically, commercially and now, qualitatively.
The game's reached 3 million sales: a important & crucial milestone. As importantly, players are nonetheless playing & enjoying the gw2 gold game. Player concurrency numbers, the degree of people playing the game at any one time, have actually been primarily rising for the past 5 weeks. & now, speaking from ArenaNet's offices in Bellevue, near Seattle, Colin's outlining the plans the team have for the game in 2013. That includes: new skill-sets for players in Guild Wars 2's World vs World, ambitious plans to tell a year lengthy story, and help for players to enter Guild Wars 2's unstructured, then again liberating end-game.

What is more: the objective for now, Colin explains, isn't necessarily captivating new players. It is about looking after the players they already have.

First, a brief lesson in MMO-economics. Every MMO developer lives & breathes their concurrency curve. In the lifecycle of an MMO, you tend to see an early spike, where fresh faced players log in for the 1st time. That spike inevitably drops following launch: to a concurrency base. What takes place next determines the future of the game. "For games that are not doing well, that core base over time slowly drops. A whole lot of them respond by going zero cost-to-play, which causes them to spike back up & hit a brand new concurrency base."

There are a few games that have managed to grow their concurrency base in the period following launch. World of Warcraft. Eve Online. And now Guild Wars 2.

"We hit our flat concurrency numbers back in November, and we have constantly grown every single week for the past five weeks," says Colin. "Our core concurrency base that we hit back in November was really thrilling - nevertheless to see that number going up is often, genuinely exciting. especially since a whole lot of the pieces that will make the game more thrilling are coming in January, February and March."

The biggest & most ambitious of those pieces is their commitment to a brand new form of storytelling. Over the subsequent 12 months, Guild Wars 2 will usually drop new episodes of story content all through the game world.

The very first beats of those episodes were deployed in the recent Flame and Frost update, with refugees fleeing the Shiverpeak mountains, arriving in Hoelbrak plus the Black Citadel. Colin will not say what is brewing; but he will say how it will brew.

The plan is to create a number of arcs, with content appearing in dungeons and the open world. ArenaNet will generate new sections to explore & new events inside existing sectors. Some of those events will be permanently obtainable to players. Others will disappear from the game as they are completed. "If you do not see it in that period of time, you are not going to experience it," says Colin. "They might play out in dungeons, they may play out in the open world, it's really a matter where each storyline best fits."

It will feel, says Colin, "practically like a pen & paper RPG, where you are on this lengthy adventure," yet playing out in a persistent MMO world.

The aim: to keep players logging in, week in, week out. Or day in, day out.

But there's a roadbump in that process: Guild Wars 2's endgame.

1 challenge every high-end player faces as they reach Guild Wars 2's level cap is "what now." What do I do to occupy my time now I have stopped levelling. There is a lot to do: PvP, more questing, crafting, & aiming for 100% completion. But Johanson acknowledges that it is poorly signposted - that players struggle to comprehend what they could, or ought to, be doing. That is altering.

"1 of the factors we attempted to do in Guild Wars 2 is make it a game where you can play the game the way you need to play it," explains Colin. "We've left it extremely open ended. For the explorer types that is something that is particularly up their alley. For players who want more guidance or direction - who want to be shown: these are your solutions, now pick 1 - I don't think the procedure we have does a awesome work of showing them what to do within our game. That's absolutely one of the things we plan to address this year."

The endgame focus highlights the kind of nuts & bolts background improvements MMOs need to remain competitive. There is tech work going on, too. Following oversubscribed preceding events, in which player numbers battered the Guild Wars 2 servers, the team are working on technology that need to improve crowded scenes. Culling tech developed for Guild Wars 2's World vs World - that allows the game to intelligently remove players from your view to sustain frame & response rates - will be applied to the open world, prioritising creatures that are attacking you over other players. "Right now, we are at the point where you could see giant battles with 50 to 100 men and women or so. We'd like to get to the point where you could see hundreds of individuals on display."

And with the culling tech comes a reason to fight in World vs World, Guild Wars 2's ambitious open world competition. At the moment, players who want to fight in PvP landscapes do it for insignificant bonuses to health & crafting. There's no private reason to fight. That's a issue that Arenanet intend to address.

"There demands to be more powerful incentives for folks to play world versus world," says Colin. There are 2 methods in the works. The 1st is a private progression system that will unlock new abilities for Guild Wars 2 gold players the more they play World versus World. Those abilities, says Colin, "make your character more beneficial, yet they do not make your character fundamentally more potent. They won't grow your strength or harm output. They just make you more functional."

The 2nd reason: Arenanet need to enhance the server rewards for fighting beyond a weekly win scenario. It will take the form of a new process "that supplies reasons for your world to be fighting at any given time, instead of across the week," explains Colin. "You may be on day six, & you're losing the week, yet we've got to give a reason for you to hold the region, even for an hour."

Guild Wars two success is heartwarming. It's an MMO without a subscription fee; and without an associated gratis-to-play gouging. Its success indicates it can get better; and if it gets better, it could get more prosperous. The Guild Wars 2 team aren't chasing growth for growth's sake; their first priority is to keep their existing players pleased.

"Our focus is: how do we make it so the core group of players have the greatest achievable experience they can. If we continue to deliver on that, that core group will be more excited, they'll play more normally, & perhaps some of those that took a break will come back."

That sounds like an invitation.