A Letter to Our Fans [from Mike O'Brien]

I'm sure when its all said and done we will have a good GW2 but the wait for even the slightest bit of GW2 info is like pulling teeth at the dentists office, it hurts like hell.

I'm staying till I get my gwamm then probaly quit till gw2

I waited 8 years for fallout 3, I'm sure I can handle 2-3 years till GW2

What I don't get is all this hostility around the releasing of info about GW2/the release date/ANet's PR campaign. We all want to playing the same freakin' game! You are still going to at least buy the first game whenever it comes out, it's not like you will magically busy in 3 years, but not be busy in 2. This bickering is getting ridiculous. <_<

I like that line. That's good. We don't get a release date until "when it's done", and to top that, we won't get any real looks at what GW2 is going to be like until "closer to release".

ha ha ha, oh wow.

As far as many of us believe, GW2 development is sloooooooooooow. I don't really know how much of a negative or positive impact a restructuring will have, but it can't won't be some miracle of energy that puts GW2 out in 2010, so it doesn't really matter.

I'm of the belief that ANet knows what they did right with GW, what they did wrong with it, and what else they didn't do that can be done. Understandably, it would take some time to get all of those ideas to be collected and put into a working format. What I really hope is that they don't slip up on something key, because with all of the time that they're taking, missing out on something basic will make everything else that they succeeded in improving seem less spectacular.

Remainder of post deleted, because I don't want to be ranting too badly.

I'm telling you this because it's an asinine comparison. Blizzard got to choose when they first told the community about D3, and they chose to do it at a point when they could release a bunch of solid info about what the game would be like, including gameplay trailers. As you've now said, ANet didn't have that luxury. It's entirely possible that they hadn't even gotten past the concept mapping stage when they decided to put together their announcement for GW2, because they wanted to bundle it with GW:EN's release, which needed to happen for the HoM to make any sense. And again, they did release a substantial portion of the lore, and some concept art, with their announcement, as well as a preliminary feature list. The only deviation from the D3 timeline has been that they didn't release as much info initially, but that's not something you can hold against them, because they just didn't have that info when they needed to make the announcement.

As for the lack of updates since then, I point out two things: Blizzard did not, to my knowledge, release terribly much information in the time between announcing D3 and now, though it is starting to ramp it up a bit iirc. Secondly, if it's true that GW2 is coming in 2010/11/12, we may be more than 2 years away from the release date here, in which case we wouldn't even be at the "initial announcement" mark on the D3 release timeline. Any other company would have probably not said anything about a sequel at this point, and it's only because ANet had to discontinue expansions that they have a fanbase so rapidly clamoring for updates at such a relatively early point in development. None of the other major sequels that came out or are coming out soon - SC2, D3, Fallout 3, etc - had this kind of "omg no one will play the sequel because it's taking too long!" fervor surrounding their release.

So what is the solution here? We have the community divided on acceptance of a long wait with no GW content and limited GW2 news and those who are put out that we will appear to get basically nothing for 2 years while we wait for something concrete regarding GW2.

Guess it is a case for Anet of damned if they do or damned if they dont...would hate to be them at the moment

As soon as ANet knows a fairly general idea of what they're doing for GW2, show us something. Pictures, in-game. Footage, in-game. Not concept art. Something of anything they have at all, show it to us.

That will at least give us something to talk about amongst ourselves for a few months until we get itchy for even more info.

This brings me to an idea: I think I would give up my tri-monthly GW updates for a tri-monthly update/viewing of what's being developed in the GW2 universe.

DNF is still being worked on, somehow. They let evidence leak out every now and then. They will probably never release it but as of at least several months ago, it was being worked on, and there are playable versions.

Blizzard makes no pretense of working on Ghost and they haven't released anything since. They canned what Nihlistic was doing as low-quality and haven't prioritized starting over with someone else.

Everyone loves poking at DN:F but truly it is the exception, and not the rule. Most games that disappear quietly you never hear of again. They don't have people writing letters that are pretending to work on it for years on end.

Thanks for the ummm err "Info" but i hope you guys release it before December 21, 2012
Cause thats the end of the world if you believe the Mayan Calendar
and I'd really like to play a bit of GW2 before we all get wiped out.

Guild Wars comes out roughly one year after WoW, if not mistaken.

Assuming that Guild Wars had launch before WoW. It would probably be the game that already sold 11 million copies like WoW, and WoW would probably be free to play like Guild Wars. (or this could be because WoW has more Asian community then Guild Wars, but i am gonna go with the first assumption)

One of the thing that players who play WoW don't move to Guild Wars is that they already are, sort of residents in WoW or other MMORPGs.

Assuming the above, if Guild Wars 2 delay further, more players are going to jump ship, suppose during those time, these players get hooked on other Pay to play MMORPG and has in those 2 year develop many high level characters, it is very likely they will not return because who wants to abandon their characters that they PAY money to create and level up, right? but abandoning Guild Wars is easy because you don't have to Pay and can return anytime.

Just a thought.

I don't mind if it takes until 2011 for them to complete it. I'd like to see someone with 10 GWAMMs, one of each profession, on their account and this time will give that opportunity.

There are bugs built in to the GW1 platform which cannot be resolved b ythe means of a patch and I just hope that GW2 is free of them (among other possible bugs). Take yer time.

Me: WTB utopia.

ANet: WTS Utopia

me: Shure How much?

ANet: Nvm, how about GW2

Me: Shure, when?

ANet: ....

Me: ??

ANet: l8er

Me: WTF ANet Scammer

Me: WTB Utopia


---------
(Please tell me if that is not accurate, ill modify it if needed. )

Only missing bit is when ANet swapped GW:EN into the trade window.

I lol'd IRL. You can't be serious.

Also.-

WoW was released Nov. 23rd 2004.

Guild Wars: End of April 28th, 2005.

I.E. Less than 6 months apart.

it adapted into eye of the north daze, but i wouldn't mind if they give us the chronomancer.

thinking out loud Cacheelma, who knows right. what if Guild Wars had been release first?

lol oh yeah. i had a feeling i was missing something

I wouldn't be suprised if many people switched back to Diablo anyway.

I don't think that GW2 will have the succes that GW1 had. They say they sold 5,8mil. accounts but how many people do you know with multiple accounts? Also, I expect more games to join the non-fee strategy like GW.

Anet could have made a goldmine with GW1. More content. More support. And via the online shop: selling mini-pets in the online store, selling rare skin weapons for money (Not the 0,05% chance that an item drops)

If I'm not convinced with the first screenshots they will release then I go for what I allready liked: Diablo 3. Which probably will be released 2010/2011 as well. Does Anet really want to challenge Blizzards DIII? They'll lose I'm afraid.

Until then I've a few games that I await: Star Ocean 4 and Final Fantasy XIII. I don't play that many games.

We would be 6 months closer to GW2 release at this point. But we would still have to wait for more than a year at least.

If GW was released 6 months earlier, the game was prolly not that polished as it was now on release.

I had a wow account in those days. When GW came out I had it on release and never looked back to wow again. Simply because GW suited my gaming needs more.

You cracked me up with your second to last post there.


About Diablo3. I think a lot of peeps will play both. On top it's not bad to release GW2 after Diablo3 imo. Let folks hack and slash for several months first, GW2 mechanics will be a fresh breeze after that. Fans of GW1 will buy GW2, like fans from the Diablo series will buy Diablo3, even if years passed. Both titles will have totally new people coming in too.

In the long run, a lot will depend on the fun factor, gameplay and gamemechanics, replay value and endgame content of both titles.

Blizzard has a better strategic position at the moment though. They can wait for Diablo3 to release and go for SC2 first, which will be most likely an instant succes and will dominate the rts market. Versus Anet that has only one game, so the timing must be right. Probably the reason why they say nothing specific about GW2. Which results in no screenshots either.

The problem I have and I assume a lot of players is that there's nothing out there that satisfies me atm. And I tested a lot of stuff last year, EVE, Warhammer online, some 'hot' FPS etc. And that's why people like me would like to see more content in GW1 yes. Or Diablo3, I expect that can satisfy my gaming needs too, so now would be a great time to release it Blizzard

Can anyone explain the obsessive need that some people have for screen shots? It seems to me that screen shots from a game 2 years away would have no useful purpose. I also would like to know why those same people have such a distrust of ANET. What has ANET done to warrant that distrust?

I'm still confused why people think they can only play either GW2 or D3. Have you guys not been playing any other games for the past 4 years?

Probably because you are a hardcore gamer (and the minority in the market) and casual or semi-casual gamers purchase fewer games, take my wife. She is a casual gamer, and has purchased 5 games in the last four years, GW, Factions, NF, Eotn, and supreme commander.

I agree with Ate of DK, I expect D3 to come out in late 2010 or mid 2011 and if ANET releases in the same time frame as D3 it will be bad for ANET. I wonder how many of NCSoft's investors have made this connection yet?

Regardless of how good GW2 is D3 will beat it hands down in revenue. Blizzard knows how to numb the opposition and they have been doing it for years.

That said, there is no reason to believe GW2 will not have a great fan-base if they really incorporate lessons learned from GW1 correctly in GW2.

Meanwhile Mike...

Your original game is dead and you lost your player base. Good luck.

I wonder how many people would have preferred expansions like gw:en once a year until gw2 came out. I mean I think allot of people feel the bait and switch now. I personally know alot of people after gw:en just thinking, well gw2 beta coming in a year and I can forgive how rushed and cut cornered gw:en is, to what is now, guessing beta might be 2 years away and the best things coming to gw1 is storage upgrade, this sucks.
Personally I think they need to get some more resources to gw1, and release some mini-transaction content. Make a new dungeon and charge $5 for it, but have it uw, fow or sf quality, not cut and paste gw:en quality. Do this very 4-6 months, and I bet the game wouldn't be nearly as dead.

I believe that the storage was mentioned as among other things. I don't think you should complain until we see what we get, then if you aren't happy feel free.

For the most part it is just cynicism of companies in general, on the other hand GW:EN is another reason.

Let's try not to be quite so sensationalist.

Yes, it is. If you read the post I quoted, you'd understand why I made the comparison.

I know I'll be playing The Sims3 . Sims has alignments ! good and evil (i don't know what for exactly because how you play already determine what alignmet your sims are but whatever, i have a desperate need to mod some sims item. and they "stole" my slider for coloring skintone and hair idea i should have patent it lol ...

Gun Pierson:
you never know Gun, I have friends who play WoW (i don't) that would not move over from that game no matter how I try to explain to them that GW is better :P some of them have try GW but eventually gone back and abandon GW. i am currenty trying to get them to give me their mini pets lol or better still give me their accounts, Yay Xunlai! which reminds me, i need to submit my prediction soon.

While Anet never did actually set a release date, they did set an original target for a beta in 2008/2009 and the game in 2009/2010 if I recall correctly. I don't mind that NCSoft pushed back the "target date"(A highly political term for release date) and Anet "forgot" that target date, so long as the game comes to market as an outstanding product. With that said - Anet, please do not forget to deliver.

This makes me happy ^_^ I was worried for a bit about the future of my favorite game. Thank you for addressing this, Mike!

Fixed.

I'd argue they didn't learn the lessons, but that is off topic. The problem here (and a reason they are allowed to get away to this half assed letter to the fans) is because with Anet's marketing model, their main focus is going to be new players. Keeping old players around is on their list, but it is a much lower priority.

A very pretty way of saying absolutely nothing. Basically ANet propaganda - and bad propaganda at that. "We've got everything under control folks - honest!"

First of all, i apologize for making this my first post and skipping an introduction. For better or worse i mostly lurk, but i felt i had to toss my .02 into this discussion.

I'll have to congratulate Billiard, i believe he had some very valid points. Have to say i didn't read *everything*, so apologies beforehand if i repeat stuff that has been said.

Back on topic, i think one has to look at what has happened to NCSoft and Anet recently to make some sense out of this. Whatever any of us ends up saying, it's pretty much speculation, but it might be a good hint. I'm talking specifically about a couple of keys factors:

1 - NCSoft has a very good domain in the Asian market, but has yet to get a solid grasp in the EU/US market.

If you take a look at their IR Report from November, available here, there are a couple of interesting facts to read about, most importantly, they expect the EU/US market to grow at a faster rate than the Asian market in the next few years. I believe they are very well aware of this, and while Aion and Blade&Soul are very ambitious projects, they are more targeted at the Asian market, and their foothold on the western market will probably pale in comparison. As far as upcoming release, GW2 is the most suitable to western tastes.

(On a side note, you can also see a predicted timeline of releases with GW2 expected to release *before* Blade&Soul, which is scheduled for CBT in Q4 2009 on the earnings report. This IR Report is from Novemeber. The inconsistency can be due to the data on the IR Report being older, despite release in November most likely, but who knows)

2 - The Tabula Rasa failure and the subsequent shift in the NCSoft western offices

I will not go in length into this, but i found a couple of post from Adam Martin's blog to be very interesting (former CTO of the Brighton dev studio), namely:

About the failure of TR
About NCWest restructuring

Basically, TR was NCSoft's hope for getting a foothold the western market, and it failed to do so after a long and expensive dev cycle. On the other hand, GW, although not a massive hit, has performed probably better than they expected at first, earning a lot of respect and credit in the online gaming community, finding a healthy niche of players, and generating an interesting revenue, considering the company's size and resources, and the revenue method used (no subscription fee).

So, what do they do? Shift powers and resources from Garriot brothers & company, to the hands of Anet folks. can you see where i'm going with this already? Maybe trying to take a successful business model one step further?

Conclusion?

So, summing up, this is what i believed happened: GW2 started as a split from a campaign that was starting to feature too many changes to be just that, a campaign. So, at first, it was a fairly unambitious project. More than GW, no doubt, but still relatively small. And so, it was announced, because the development cycle was expect to be relatively small.

The things start to shake in TR development. there are doubts on it's success, and a lot of people inside just *know* deep down that it's gonna crash and burn. Meanwhile, the folks at NCSoft in Korea start thinking of a backup plan not to lose the US/EU market completely, in the worst case scenario. Imagine the most likely project to be on their sights? that's right, GW2!

At which point, GW2 can probably become a far more ambitious project, so they order to keep it under wraps. Things progress, and TR fails. What happens next? The Origin (Garriots etc) people is replaced by Anet people at the head of NCWest, the GW2 dev team grows considerably, and still does to this date (just take a look at the jobs offered by Anet on the PlayNC website), and, as Mike says in this letter, they are having "strong support and financial backing" from NCSoft.

All of this is why, to me, they are being very silent about. Just look at AoC and WAR. What's wrong with those games? Not that much actually, they're fairly enjoyable games. So what's all the fuss about? The hype! Such games were called time and time again "wow-killer", and of course, they failed to meet such expectations. Now, i'm not saying that with GW2 growing into a much more ambitious project than it initially was, they expect it to compete with WoW, but i believe they *are* targeting a much broader audience. If any details about it were to be release, i'm pretty sure people would start calling it wow-killer, the great white hope and stuff like that. That would but damage it's possible outcome because of expectations, put pressure on the dev team that they don't need or want, and possibly even make other companies work harder and faster in upcoming releases.

So sit tight, let it be a sleeper, and have faith. I can't believe that a team that developed a game with such an intelligent design and attention to detail as GW could possibly fail. If anything, the only thing that concerns me is the size of the company at this point. GW's dev team was relatively small, and worked on an open, creative, laid-back, and family-like environment, which might not be the case at this point with GW2. But again, the less pressure, the more they can work in an environment like this again.

Note: i'm not saying GW2 is NCSoft's next big hope or anything like that. Only that with Aion and B&S covering their Asian market, GW2 is probably their best shot at the time for filling a portion in their gap in the EU/US market.

Bottom line: i'm just speculating here, and can be dead wrong about most or all of this, but i just say let'em do their thing and have faith

To be fair.. anet are being lazy with the infomation. its only takes 5 mins every couple days to say something.. its not a big task to keep the community more happy. and they could try to be a little less vague. if they dont know when there will be a beta for example. And it would stop people making assumptions creating debate and getting worked up over nothing... i guess !...Also WTB Auction house for GW2 !!!

I won't buy GW2 until GW1 gets fixed.

I have to agree with both Billiard and Aemroth, which they touched up on my points from before. Since it, all has to do with lofty ambitions, poor economic down turn, and stiff competition.

I still like the irony in what Garriott called Guild Wars a “failed experiment,” in which his project has failed and theirs has flourished. Guild Wars still holds onto their successes and all awhile, they will continue to move forward. Garriott on the other hand (while he did apologies) will find it much more difficult to get his next project off the ground (pun intended).

However presently I think A-net needs to stop making swift generalizations of their upcoming projects in the near future. Furthermore, they need to pick up some better PR/CR ethics in the near future. If they want to be dead silent about their work after the initial hype (May 2007 PC Gamer magazine), then they should not be shocked at the negative feedback from the overall community. I understand that it gives them leeway to spin that information for saying something to the point of “they never actually said that,” but they should be aware of the consequences of doing this to their fans by now. It’s my only current complaint about the company so far, since EotN has been out.

Well informed and written post!

I really don't know if A-Net has the time nor efforts to fix GW1 before GW2 launch. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't most of the A-Net team assign to GW 2?