Guild Wars 2 Interview- We talk to ArenaNet about how the MMORPG has been doing post launch

It seems like these unique touches you’ve given to the genre are some of the things that are really endearing to the Guild Wars 2 community. But when you’re working with a genre like the RPG or the MMORPG, genres that have got so many well-worn stereotypes, do you find it quite difficult being creative and innovating within the genre?

I wouldn’t say we found it difficult to be creative or innovative. I think the challenge we had was getting people to accept that creativity and innovation is acceptable in an MMO. I think you said it best, there are a ton of stereotypes. When people hear the word ‘MMO’, there’re very specific expectations they have about a game. They just come in and say ‘that game won’t have a storyline’ or ‘it’s going to be super grinding’ or ‘I’m gonna have to fight other players all the time, I’m always going to be competing with other people’ or ‘I can’t play with other people without someone getting in the way.’

There’s really just a lot of expectations that come with that MMO genre. And trying to get people to accept that you can make a gw2 gold game that doesn’t have one of those things is a really different thing to do. We wanted this big, open, living world experience, and I remember the very first time that we beta tested the game, or rather alpha tested it internally, we brought it a bunch of testers and we popped their characters out in the open world,  and we said ‘Alright! Go play the game.’ And they turned around and said ‘Where do I go? I don’t have a quest blog that tells me that I should go here, then go here, then go here.’ So I said, ‘You can just roam around the world.’ And he said, ‘I don’t understand. I can just run around and find stuff?’ I’m like ‘Yeah! Go play the game, it’s okay!’ It really took years of building on messaging. Just because people have had so many years of this extremely linear, streamlined experience where they don’t have this open world and they don’t have this sense of exploration.

It was something that we knew from the start we wanted to build on. But getting people to accept it and understand it was a really hard thing to do.

Interesting. As you said, these alpha testers wanted a lot of hand-holding while they were playing. I mean, this is something that seems to come up a lot in commentary, particularly online journalism- how games today are too easy. There’s too much handholding. People are looking back to the SNES days, going ‘Well, these games were hard!’ I mean, what do you think about how you had to balance the difficulty of Guild Wars 2 to accommodate so many people, to try and make it accessible yet challenging?

Yeah, it’s really hard. It’s still something that we’re working a lot on- making sure there is stuff that is challenging for the really great players but also so new players can feel they can log in every day and there’s a lot of fun stuff around to do. And every month we’re updating the game, that’s still something we’re continuing to work on, to provide more and more stuff for people in all of those categories.

I think one of the hardest things about an MMO, to make an MMO really successful, is that you need to be approachable enough that the casual gamer can get into it, but you need to be deep and rich enough that the advanced player can play for years and still find new things and still discover things in the game and continue to grow. That’s a really, really careful balance to walk. I think that you’re always on the risk of upsetting the casual players by making the game too hardcore, and you’re at risk of upsetting your day-to-day hardcore players by making the game too casual.

It’s definitely something that’s really challenging. You see a lot of the MMOs falling into one of the two categories. They’re either really casual games or they’re very niche games, and a really hardcore group of players play it for a really, really long time, but they can’t attract the casual audience, because the game isn’t approachable enough or casual enough. And I think we’ve done a really good job with buy Guild Wars 2 gold so far, we’re kind of bridging the gap between those two, providing a game that allows the casual gamer to really get into it and go and have fun and just enjoy themselves and provide depth for the player who’s looking for more. And I think that, in particular for both of those groups, we’re gonna continue to build the game and make sure there’s enough for both of them as we go forward.

Considering you worked on Guild Wars 1 as well, I’m just curious about how you found working within the MMO genre with the shadow of World of Warcraft. I don’t know if that’s the right way to put it, but obviously, working in that genre the popularity of World of Warcraft must have been something you guys were considering. Were you trying to compete with WoW directly, or…?

Well, it’s obviously an elephant in the room when you’re making an MMO. With Guild Wars 1, we decided to not compete with World of Warcraft and we made a game that was very different, that was distinctly different and free-to-play and it was really a completely different game type. We called it a cooperative RPG, not MMORPG. People ended up playing it like an MMO and it kind of adopted that name overtime but we always thought of it as a co-op RPG. And we never intended for it to directly compete with World of Warcraft.

We’re definitely going after a different audience and some people from World of Warcraft would also be interested in this game. But we didn’t just want to make Guild Wars 1 again. So we decided with Guild Wars 2, let’s make a pure MMO, let’s make a giant open world game and let’s try to accomplish the things that people really want to see in an open world MMO, which is a truly living, breathing world that changes and you can just explore to have a great time. That’s really what we set out to do and sure, we wanted to compete with World of Warcraft. We wanted to compete with every game in the genre when we were putting that game out and make a game that basically defines where the genre of MMOs is going. I think the MMO genre had stagnated a lot, and over the course of 7-10 years before Guild Wars 2 came out, there wasn’t a lot of innovation. It was all just ‘Let’s make a game, and World of Warcraft is working, so we should make exactly what they’re making’, and as MMO players, first and foremost, most of us working here were kind of tired with that, because if we wanted to play that game, we could just go play that game. And we didn’t see any reason to make that game again, because there’s plenty of them we can already go and play.

So we wanted to do something different, but we wanted to definitely appeal to that core MMO audience, and that also extends to the RPG audience out there that was looking for an MMO that was more than just an open world quest that you just marauded through. We wanted to make something that was really more like a true RPG, like a Skyrim, where there’s this big open world for all these experiences for you to have. And it just so happens that you can do them with all your friends. I think that appeals to MMO players, it appeals to WoW players, and it appeals to people who play any MMOs out there. Or RPGs.

Yeah, the whole WoW vs Guild Wars thing- the one thing that initially got me into Guild Wars was the lack of a monthly subscription.

Uh huh.

But at that time, it seemed like kind of inevitable that Guild Wars 1 would not have a monthly subscription. But now, you have more and more games that are dropping the freemium model, with microtransactios. Did you guys consider microtransactions in Guild Wars 2?

I think that just like there are stereotypes with MMOs, there are stereotypes with free-to-play games. There’s an expectation with most F2P games that they are inherently very casual, and they are games that will probably rip you off with microtransactions, so that you can actually play the game you want to play, because they make all their money off microtransactions. Then you play the game, you’re an hour in and something pops up saying you can’t go any further unless you pay us $6.99 to do this thing. Those stereotypes were one of the reasons why we didn’t want to do a free-to-play game.

We didn’t want to get caught up in a system where we have to build microtransactions like that to say profitable. I think there’s a real danger there, if we head down that path. And with the one-time upfront box-fee, which is what most game players are used to, we’re still approachable. We don’t charge you monthly fee, so we’re not limiting the approachability of the game by having you basically have to decide whether you’re gonna stick with us for a long time or not. You can make that choice on month-to-month basis or day-to-day basis and it’s not costing you anything to make that decision. And looking back at growing up as a game player, I don’t have a problem with paying forty or fifty or sixty bucks for a video game and then getting to play it for my whole life. It’s always felt weird to me that I buy a game and I have to keep paying to play that game. When I grew up playing Mario and Zelda, all these games were- one I bought it, I had it. That’s cool, I got it. I don’t have to pay for microtransactions to get little features. I don’t have to pay a monthly fee to keep playing it. And that’s really what Guild Wars 2 is all about.

We have microtransactions in the game, but none of them are mandatory, none of them are ever things that you’ll need to use during the game. They’re all bonus things that people can use if they want. But at the end of the day, you can buy our game and you can play it forever, and you’ll never need to pay for anything more than the core box, and that’s something that respects the gamers, respects the time and commitment the gamers want to put into the game, and respects sort of a tradition of the gaming industry. And that’s something that is really important to us.

In our conversation so far, we’ve had a lot of talk about gaming now and gaming in the past and the kind of interface between the two and kind of charting how PC development has gone over the years. With the PC, as a platform, now being more and more dominated by startup and independent developers, how did you feel making a Triple-A title like Guild Wars 2? Do you think Triple-A production on the PC is being threatened by the rise of indie gaming?

Uh, I don’t know if ‘threatened’ is the right term, but I would say that when you make a game like Guild Wars 2, when you make one of the huge MMOs, you’re gambling your entire company on that game, because it takes so long to make it and it takes so much money to make it that you can’t afford to fail. If the game is even mildly popular instead of really popular, odds are you’re gonna have to fire a whole bunch of people.

The risk that comes with it is incredible. And I think seeing more and more companies that are stepping away, thinking ‘We don’t want to take a risk by making a big this big, it’s too expensive, it’s too risky and our whole could fall if we don’t succeed’. You don’t have to worry with the indie game model, you know. You can make two or three or four or five games that aren’t crazy successful, and they’re not very expensive to make, and they don’t take a lot of people, but the second you make Angry Birds, when you make that one that really explodes, you’re crazy profitable and you have enough to hold your company for ages. And I think that’s the biggest thing, in why we’re seeing more and more of that. It’s very easy to form those companies, it’s very easy to make a small indie gaming company, and you’re not risking your entire company on one game when you build stuff. You really have the capacity to make a lot of games and stay in business even if your game isn’t hugely popular. You can sell a small number of copies and keep everyone employed to keep your company going. And I think that’s part of why we’re seeing more and more of that going forward.

It’s that the risk of making these big companies, and in particular, MMOs is just crazy. I really don’t think we’re gonna see that many more MMO companies in the future. I think too many companies have attempted to be WoW and folded and failed. And you’re gonna start seeing very few companies taking risks making games as big as Guild Wars 2.

The whole high risk/high reward thing you just mentioned is very interesting with regard to piracy on the PC platform. It’s quite a big issue at the moment for a lot of people. But I suppose the MMORPG is safe from piracy, due to the online nature. But, you know, even things like WoW have seen hacked servers and people pirating the game and stuff like that. Were you concerned with piracy while you were making Guild Wars 2?

Piracy is not something we were worried about at all. You have to log in to our servers for verification and everything, because it’s an online game. We’re in the position in the PC market where we really don’t have to deal with piracy. We do have to deal with, however, a boatload of security issues. You know, there’s always hackers, there are always people stealing other people’s credit cards and using those to get into the game. They’re always people trying to steal other people’s accounts. That stuff never goes away. This is something we didn’t experience much in Guild Wars 1, because the game wasn’t as popular as Guild Wars 2 is. The popularity of Guild Wars 2 means that we’re attracting all sorts of people from every corner of the internet, and they’re trying to come in and cause problems in the game.

So we hired and built an entire internal security team that basically monitors the game, protects people’s accounts, gets rid of hackers and modders, and they’re actually to the point right now where the game has a ridiculously low rate of reports of people doing those kinds of activities. It’s way lower than any other game I’ve seen before. And it’s something we’re really proud of, especially with the population we’ve got. But that fight will never end. Every day there are people trying to take advantage of the game and our userbase or something. But as long as we’re a crazy popular game, we’re always gonna have to fight that.

Well, yeah, evil’s a society that never goes away. [Laughs]

[Laughs]

Yeah, regarding the kind of popularity of Guild Wars 2, you guys are at the moment working on a Mac port, and obviously that’s going to extend your popularity. But have you guys considered a Linux port? Do you think Linux users will be able to get their hands on Guild Wars 2 in the future?

You know, it’s something that we check around every now and then, but there’s no one actively working on it right now, and we won’t be working on it in the near future. But we have talked about it, yes.

Fair enough. Regarding other kinds of ports- the MMORPG is one of those genres that’s only ever on PC. But we’ve seen some MMOs on consoles in the past. Have you ever considered porting Guild Wars 2 or making a console MMO, ever?

We had a small team that was investigating it at one time, and who knows what might happen someday. But right now our focus is on making the Guild Wars 2 PC experience the greatest MMO we possibly can, and that’s pretty much what all of our research and all of our company time is going into.

Sure. This is one of those questions that I really hate asking. I’m sure you get it all the time, but I feel obliged to. Even though you guys are going to be supporting Guild Wars 2, like you did with the original, for a long time now, what are the chances of you guys starting up on a sequel? Within the next, you know, five or so years. I mean, you think we’re gonna get a Guild Wars 3?

[Laughs] Well, I can’t speak for five years from now, and I have no idea what we may end up doing then.

[Laughs]

But it’s certainly not something we’re looking to do anytime in the short term. We’re focused on making the game we’ve got as amazing as we possibly can, every month giving out the kind of releases you would expect you would have to pay for, but we’re gonna give them out for free. And, you know, developing expansions down the road to continue to build on the things we’ve done with the game. And that’s really the 100% of our focus right now. We haven’t even talked about Guild Wars 3 at all at this point.

Fair enough. Trying to predict that far into the future is a little difficult. Just one more final question, I’m sure you’ve got stuff to be getting on with. I’m just interested in what you thought about the addictive element of MMORPGs. You get stories popping up regularly about people getting serious addiction to certain types of games and some people have even died from playing StarCraft too much. Considering how addictive the MMORPG is meant to be, did you feel any kind of weird weight or responsibility, making Guild Wars 2? Because it’s a pretty addictive game. I wouldn’t be surprised if people would have been losing sleep playing Guild Wars 2.

Yeah, that’s one of the weird things about being a game developer. You know, you want to make these games that people are going to love, and we go to game shows, and we meet our fans, and we hear these stories of people who met their wife or husband in our game or I’ve met some fans over the years that got really, really sick, and they said Guild Wars 2 is the thing that helped carry them through when they were unwell. And they continued, and after that they got their lives back, but they look back and that is one of the things that helped carry them and, you know, those moments make you really, really proud as a game developer. They make you feel like, ‘Hey, the thing we’re doing is really making a difference in some weird sort of way that helps make people’s lives better.’

And then there’s always the opposite end of that spectrum of people who get too involved in something or don’t have the self-control to regulate how much they play it. We’ve tried to build Guild Wars 2 as a game that you can jump into, play for a while and jump back out again. You don’t have to log in for six straight hours. We’ve always had things like that. In Guild Wars 1, we had messages that popped up that said ‘You’ve been playing for two hours, you might want to take a break.’ We try to consciously think of stuff like that and find ways to build into our game. You know, messaging and systems that help encourage people to play our game. And we love it that they play every day. But we don’t want them to play every day at the cost of their real life, at the cost of their relationships, at the cost of their happiness. And I think that that’s a really tough thing to do. As a game developer, and especially as an MMO developer, you have to make a game that people want to play every day. But at the same time you have to make a game that they don’t play for 24 hours and kill themselves every day. Finding that careful line between the two of those is a really difficult thing. And I’m proud to say, so far with Guild Wars 2, we haven’t heard any major reports of issues there.

It seems like our playerbase understands what it needs to do and understands that it’s a game that’s built around playing and having fun, but it’s okay to take a break. And hopefully that’s something that continues forward. But it’s definitely tough. Any game developer and any part of gaming will always have to deal with that for the rest of time. They’re making something that can be addictive. I mean, as great as the community aspects of an MMO can be, where you build all these great relationships, there can also be some negatives that come there too. I don’t really know a great way to try to respond to that other than just as a developer, trying to make games that allow people to take breaks. You know, give messages, or encourage them to play the game, but also to go out and enjoy real life and enjoy those moments you have outside of the game.

I think if somebody is playing a game all day, they’re probably not very happy. They should be playing games and playing other stuff, and enjoying life. And Guild Wars or any other game should be just an element of the things that they enjoy. It’s not the thing that drives their entire life, you know.

We want to thank AreaNet and Colin for their time and a wonderful chat. We hope you guys enjoyed the interview. Tell us what you think in your comments below. You can also give our mega-review of Guild Wars 2 a look here.