ArenaNet's Design Director looks at past and future of Guild Wars

Over at massively.com, lots of interesting stuff from James Phinney:

http://www.massively.com/2010/04/26/...-of-guild-war/

Interesting....

Titles are grind.

Playing the game in a natural enjoyable way will not max anything.

And you can bet in this achievement obsessed gaming world, gw2 will have them from the start.

I'd like to hear the guy talk about the biggest mistakes they have made and explain what they should have done differently. This is kind of like patting himself on the back. I have not read the rest of this article but I will to see if this question was posed.

No one is forcing you to do them. Achievments you make go to gw2 so im not suprised they are from the start. They already nerfed them once which is a shame :S


One of the things I hope they change is the way the skills are so they dont have to nerf them over and over again I know they said they were going to but they have to be careful now that its actually going to be a mmorpg like KSing and stuff like that and the way the aoe's are.

He himself actually said that it was a softball interview. Kinda surprised the interviewer didn't ask harder questions after that comment

Yeah but the grind guild wars implemented has a minimal affect on the game, except the reputation titles, which i strongly oppose.

Beating all the missions and vanquishing all areas isn't natural? Exploring all the areas isn't natural - note that many people had already done this before they added the titles.

Titles aren't inherently grindy. Some of them are, some of them aren't. If, on release, there are titles in GW2 and the community immediately goes ZOMGWTFGRINDFESTFAIL, I will laugh. I won't be surprised, but I'll still laugh.

Well I heard in the new guildwars there is alot of grinding for the people who like it and there is a certian lvl where you dont have to grind anymore but once you get to that lvl where you choose I bet what you are working on next is those titles lol.

Sad, but so true.

It is beneficial to distinguish between the different types of titles. There are two main kinds, as I see it, and one is much more favorable than the other. Checklist titles, in which players must complete tasks A, B, and C (e.g. Skill Hunter, Guardian), are a hell of a lot more interesting than "complete task A, then do it again seven hundred times."

Maybe it's just me, but the checklist titles provide a deeper sense of involvement in the game.

I'm tempted to do Minister Cho's again to hear this.

Edit-Ah, there's a link in the article: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ3x0nmkXPo

This. Nothing wrong with stuff like Guardian and Skill Hunter. But, nobody is going to open ten thousand chests or drink ten thousand minutes' worth of alcohol in a normal course of play.

Elder Rhea is probably the worst voice acting, come to think of it, Factions in general was pretty bad in that category, rule of thumb, dont let game coders do the voice acting.

Agreed. Many of the "checklist" ones are what I'd consider to be a "good" title. Titles that simply require a lot of time and/or money are cheap annoying cop-outs, something that shouldn't be applicable for the KoaBD title track.

Maybe for you it won't max anything. But believe it or not, people actually have gotten MORE out of this game NOT even touching those silly ass titles then any of you title grinders ever will.

Title grinders = Tunnel vision.
Normal Players = Open minded.

And don't dare say I'm close minded for saying normal players are open minded, because it makes no sense. I'm not opening my mind to respect people who grind virtual numbers in a database that could very likely be prone to data loss at any time.

'Hey.. maybe it's just me, maybe I like to not waste my life grinding. I can guarantee you, whatever you get in GW2 for your titles, will not be worth a damn thing. It will not be game changing for you, it will not give you godmode powers over non GW1 veterans, and there will be SO MANY people using whatever the hell the reward is, it'll become OVERCOMMON and worn out so bad it'll make all of your eyes bleed. Just watch.

Since when has adding heroes been a good thing? They have been removed from pvp for completly overshadowing humans with certain aspects of the game. They also led to the collapse of any recgonizable population within districts, since people don't need other people nowadays when heroes can do everything for them. I had no problems when henchmen were added, because they still made the group functional if you were missing profs. on a team, but their terrible ai and skillbar punished you for not having a full team of humans. Heroes watered the concept of group work down.

Here's a hint as to solve your dilema, NEVER IMPLEMENT CONS OR PVE SKILLS IN THE GAME. If you want to push groups to be human, make the ally helpers weak, dumb, and unreliable, don't try to give humans wtfpwn skills because they WILL exploit them.

Because Eotn wasn't based on grinding at all...considering that, you know, the only things to do in that expansion was grind for armor and weaps.

Then let me ask you this, how many people on the dev team have maxed wisdom or treasure hunter? I've been playing casually for 4 years, and spent a lot of time doing the sanctum chest run before it was nerfed and I'm currently at 5k. Half of the Pve titles implemented atm are nothing but time and gold sinks, it's a braindead challenge to get them that takes hundreds and hundreds of hours to do.

Please keep the test krewe for GW 2. You should always value the opinion of people that actually play the game over "skill balancers". The updates I've seen from the test krewe show that game mechanics are being closley watched, compared to the NF skill updates (Avatar of melandru, Searing flames, etc.)

my2cents

I wouldnt have a problem with it if all titles were account wide i mean seriously who enjoys doing the same rep grind for eotn to top pve skills?

It is my opinion that the titles in EOTN and the number of titles in that expansion were solely to help sell units. And you know what? It worked. Same goes for the PvE only skills and the con sets. You can't get in an SC anymore without them. Those things are in there simply to make the players purchase the expansion so that they have to buy it to be competitive in PvE. I am surprised that the skills that were introduced in EOTN weren't kept meta in PvP to a larger extent as well. It would have made the PvP crowd also purchase at least the skill pack for it if not the game. When are we gonna start getting NEW info on GW2? I am sick of these interviews that are old information, or nothing at all.

AHHH Master Togo!

Indeed, this interview was pretty much a waste of time and had nothing new, just the realization that ANet's design director loves grind... or I can't explain his thoughts on GW grindtastic titles.

Consider GW's lifetime: 5 years for game content playable in 150h or so? The rest is just grind. I think we can safely assume that no other MMO managed to get grind to this level, they all had to release some new content to keep players entertained. But not ANet. They could call it quits 3 years ago and give us numbers to push up for over 3 years.

And if the design director lists that those titles keeping players busy for 3 years with almost no content addition at all (except more grind: the weekly grind for nick's items, the zcoins grind for new storage, etc)... is one of the best things in GW, then I'm really worried about GW2 being full of grind from the start.

I was willing to grind some for the big promise GW2, but if that isn't back to the original GW values (no grind) then I'm not interested.

This is such a weird response. At the start, the "live team" gave us grenth's footprint and weekly updates. There was also an Alpha Test running from prior to launch to Nightfall.

But now that we get updates every other month, they've really nailed that live team issue have they? It's great they've finally listening to the community with a private group of players who test updates which is totally unprecedented?

It's always a bit hard to read sarcasm, but think he was being sarcastic when he said that, because that was the most interesting question in the interview.

I lol'd.

On topic, very softball article with nothing of importance, really. Nice to see his views on the game over the past few years, though.

They were removed from PvP because, well, its player vs player. AI are meant to fill in when a person or two are missing, not the other way around. And no, they didn't really lead to less human parties. I mean, yeah, they did, but the main reason of human parties becoming less popular wasn't completely because of them. The main reasons would be 1) Lots of GW players are terrible, and 2) As the game aged, it was much harder to find a party.

Overall, adding heroes was a very positive thing.

I think they are meaning the live team as it is, not the whole crew working on something (as what would have happened with Grenth's Footprint/Sorrow's Furnace). The way I read it is that he is talking about a Live Team separate from the developers dedicated to the game as is, not those who are also working on new content/campaigns.

As for the sarcasm, he could have been, but the whole interview did kinda seem softball (no real pushing for anything)

There isn't so much a problem with Heroes as much as there is a problem with Guild Wars.

Way back in the day (more like two years ago), I was playing Expert in L4D1 with bots. It's real hard to get used to but possible, and the fact that they can never deliver friendly fire is a HUGE bonus. On the times I wanted to try something different I booted up a campaign on Expert and saw how far I could get (and it was usually pretty darn far! Beat two campaigns this way!)

But even still I tried to play with other people as much as possible. It wasn't for efficiency or anything, but because it was fun. Beating a campaign with 3 computers is nowhere near as satisfying as plowing through with three people, nor does rolling with CPU's bring out any "woo-hoo"s or "hell yeah"s. Even failing with people was a lot more enjoyable than with a computer.

So why, in Guild Wars, am I avoiding playing with others like it were the plague?

I feel that there are a variety of reasons:

1. One difficulty: For years there was only one difficulty setting to accommodate for several types of player skill. I really feel this to be a problem in numerous MMO's and I contribute it largely to the fact that many are open-world. I hope ANet is able to get over this hurdle with GW2, otherwise we're gonna be stuck at Thundeternal Grove forever.

2. Choices: With more variety comes more bad builds. There will always be more inefficient builds as opposed to solid ones. However, I personally feel that there's way way way too much bad as opposed to the good. ANet has acknowledged that there were way too many skills in GW1, so hopefully they keep it really, really toned down for GW2.

3. "LF ONE MORE MONK": Creating a well-balanced PUG was a pain in the ass. "LFM" meant having to sit in an outpost, doing nothing, and waiting for the final slots to fill up. Being hasty with lines like "maybe we'll be fine with one monk" and other scary thoughts often times lead down to death.

I was hoping GW's Party Search would've helped things a bit. I was hoping it would allow me to LFG even if I was out adventuring or farming it up. Instead it just meant I didn't have to spam the same message every few moments.

4. Failure: Losing happens in every game, but not every game hasn't painful. The reason I've personally been so discouraged in PUGs is when you get a good party going, you get enough monks, and you get an overall party balance set up - and you die at the last boss of the mission.
That. Is. Devastating. I fully believe one of the biggest PUG killers to be the fact that the missions in 3/4th of the campaigns result in a restart if everyone dies. That's nearly akin to having to start over an entire campaign in L4D if the survivors are all killed or incapacitated!
In GW:EN things were better, with res shrines acting as checkpoints. But things are still the same in the other campaigns.

5. Protect the NPC: Okay this just sucks. Never do this again for a mission, ANet. Having to heal one more person is an easy-concept, I know, but not easy for quite a few out there. Fortunately - like what they did with the above in the "failure" section - ANet took note of how annoying this was as well, and made NPC=RESTART very very rare in GW:EN.

Cookies to anyone who actually reads this wall of text.

wow, stop acting like a bunch of douche bags.

No wonder the devs go to gwg2.

Have your opinions, disagree with everything in the article. I don't like some of the grind either

but the tone of this thread is lame.

1) Devs go to gw2g because, well, GW1 is old news, and GW2 is still in super hype. Of course they'd rather talk to their future GW2 cash cows (I mean community) rather than their old GW1 community.

2) You do realize that the community from gw2g is mainly from here, and it's going to be the exact same eventually, right?

Agreeing with The Drunknard..

I doubt it. Both ArenNet and their fansites have learned some hard lessons in handling a community over the past five years. Those lessons aren't going to be wasted.

1) You have a good point there.

2) Yes, I realize that but the way people behave over there is completely different. It's a non-hostile experience.

2b) as to things eventually being "the same" at gwg2 in the future.....