Four years old and still going strong. We chat with designer Mike O'Brien about the past, present and future.
by IGN PC Team
US, April 23, 2009 - Next week marks the fourth anniversary of Guild Wars, easily one of the most popular and successful MMOs, thanks to the overall quality of design, and its lack of subscription fees. To find out more about the state of Guild Wars four years after release, and to find out more about the upcoming sequel, Guild Wars 2, we recently talked with ArenaNet founder and Blizzard veteran Mike O'Brien.
IGNPC: It seems a bit surreal that we're talking about the fourth anniversary of Guild Wars already. It must be longer for you, though, as the game was in development for a while before its launch, and a concept before then. Just how old is the franchise, technically?
Mike O'Brien: We started developing Guild Wars shortly after founding the company in 2000, so we've actually been working on it for about nine years now. We invited the first external alpha testers to start playing the game with us in April 2002, so they've been playing the game for seven years.
Another fun statistic is that we did the first full build of the game in October 2001, which was 2,750 days ago, and since then we've done 27,500 builds.
IGNPC: What were the origins and inspirations for Guild Wars? Blizzard games are an obvious example, considering the roots of ArenaNet. But what were the driving thoughts behind the game's formation?
Mike O'Brien: Before Jeff, Pat, and I left Blizzard and founded ArenaNet, I was working on Warcraft III and Jeff was working on World of Warcraft. We often commented about how the two game genres borrow from each other. A strategy game is more fun when it's infused with roleplaying elements that give the player an emotional connection to the world, and a roleplaying game is more fun when it provides ways to compete with your friends and see whose character is better. It was natural for us to look for a game that could blend both genres.
At first it seemed like an impossible task, because online RPGs are all about persistent character progression, and persistent character progression seems like the last thing you want in a strategy game. We used to compare it to a chess game where whoever had been playing chess longer got to start the game with two queens. Who would play a game like that?
But one day in the summer of 2000, as we were talking about Magic: the Gathering, we realized that it was a perfect blend of persistent character progression and strategy. Instead of progressing your character by leveling up, you progress by collecting more spells and abilities, which don't make you strictly more powerful but do give you a wider variety of strategies that you can pursue. We realized that while almost all existing MMOs and online RPGs were based on the Dungeons & Dragons tradition, it was perfectly feasible to create one based on the Magic: the Gathering tradition instead. And that's how Guild Wars was born.
IGNPC: We've heard the franchise has sold six million copies, which is quite an accomplishment. What can you tell us about the average Guild Wars player, though? Are they likely to identify themselves as a hardcore or a casual gamer? How long do they stick with Guild Wars?
Mike O'Brien: Guild Wars tends to attract a very diverse audience of people who play the game in different ways and for different reasons, so that's not an easy question to answer. In general, younger players are more likely to identify themselves as hardcore gamers, whereas older players are more likely to be casual gamers. There is a strong female contingent across all age groups, but the majority of players are male. And since Guild Wars has no monthly fee, players keep coming back to it. Even after they stop playing daily or weekly, they still come back to check out holidays and other special events.
IGNPC: Four years ago, making an online game that had no subscription fee seemed like a big risk. Today, it seems that free-to-play seems to be the wave of the future. Yet many free-to-play games also rely on optional microtransactions. Do you think it's possible that Guild Wars will follow suit eventually?
Mike O'Brien: Well, we've been offering optional add-on content like additional character slots, mission packs, and unlock packs since long before microtransactions were all the rage. We view it as putting our money where our mouth is. Instead of forcing players to pay a certain amount every month like subscription games do, we offer players new content and upgrades that we think are compelling, and then the choice to buy or not to buy is entirely up to the player. That was an important part of Guild Wars and it will remain an important part of Guild Wars. But I think that's not really what you're asking.
Today what you generally see in the MMO space is two camps: big games with high production values and high system requirements which charge monthly fees, and small games that are developed inexpensively, have low system requirements, and are free-to-play. Guild Wars fits into neither of those camps. Guild Wars is a big game with high production values, but with modest system requirements and no monthly fees.
It's been four years since we pioneered this business model, and I thought we'd see more competition by now, but we haven't. Perhaps that's because it's a hard space in which to compete. If a game can't reach a broad enough audience, then it can't sustain itself without monthly fees. And if a game doesn't have high enough production values, then it has to be free-to-play because players won't pay for it. Whatever the reason, I think Guild Wars occupies a unique space in the industry and has a uniquely compelling value proposition for players, and that's a great place for us to be.
IGNPC: What do you think the future of subscription-based games in general? It seems everyone is chasing World of Warcraft, but is it going to be at a certain point that only Blizzard can sustain the model?
Mike O'Brien: No, that's not going to happen. First of all, there's plenty of room for games like EVE that attract a dedicated core audience that's perfectly willing to pay monthly fees, but don't reach a broad enough audience to sustain the game without the monthly fees. Games like that will continue to be successful with a subscription model. And second, there's plenty of room for a new game that offers players new experiences to become the next industry-changing phenomenon. In fact, it's at times like these when it seems like everyone is chasing an existing game that players are most ready for something new and exciting.
IGNPC: Can we expect Guild Wars 2 news this year? Will the game ship in 2009 or 2010?
Mike O'Brien: The Guild Wars 2 team is twice the size of the original Guild Wars team, so you can imagine the level of art, content, and production values we're putting into the game. The game is already beautiful, and is getting more so every day. In addition to the normal playtesting of everyday development, the entire team logs on every Wednesday to simply play the game together, and we always have a lot of fun.
I'd love to say more, but we're not ready to start making news just yet. Remember that we were public about our decision to work on Guild Wars 2 right from the beginning, so unlike most development teams, we didn't have a long period of working in secrecy before fans knew about the game and started wanting updates. So I know that it has been a long wait for the fans, but when they do see the game I think they'll agree it was worth it.
IGNPC: What's next for the original Guild Wars franchise? How many more years does it have? Do you plan to introduce any new content in terms of updates or patches or even expansions, or is everything going to transition to Guild Wars 2 at this point?
Mike O'Brien: We plan to keep supporting Guild Wars for a long time. We have a dedicated Live Team that's focused exclusively on Guild Wars, listening to the fans and looking at what type of new content we can release. You see that philosophy in practice this week, as our company is hard at work on Guild Wars 2 but taking time to release a major update to Guild Wars.
IGNPC: Last question. What are some of the lessons that ArenaNet has learned over the past four years? What assumptions did you get right? What did you get wrong?
Mike O'Brien: We were right to make an online RPG in the tradition of Magic: the Gathering instead of Dungeons & Dragons. We founded this company because we wanted to bring players innovative new experiences, and I think Guild Wars has done that. But since Guild Wars was really the first game of its kind, we made some mistakes and learned a lot along the way, and we can apply those lessons to Guild Wars 2.
For example, we were right to build the game around character skills, but we were wrong to let the number of skills grow to Magic: the Gathering-like proportions. It's unnecessary, and it's too much to absorb in a real-time setting. With Guild Wars 2 we can accomplish more with fewer skills.
We were right to believe strongly in the potential of instancing. Our use of instancing allows us to tell compelling stories, and to enable players to really impact the world in a way that's just not possible in most persistent-world games. But there are benefits of persistent worlds too, like the ability to casually make friends as you encounter people in the world, and there's no reason why Guild Wars 2 can't have the best of both worlds.
Overall, I think we were very right to take risks with both game design and business model. In a genre full of very similar games with similar business models, Guild Wars stands apart from the crowd. That's something we're proud of and that we'll continue to do.
IGNPC: Thank you for your time!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Discuss
