Why did they stop making campaigns/expansions?

I was reading the Good/Bad/Ugly thread and a couple of posts really stood out to me as something, which in hindsight, seems really bizarre.

Why did they stop making campaigns and expansions? I understand the argument they made about campaigns. They didn't like having to recreate the tutorial part which most experienced players disliked and they didn't want to invest a lot of their resources into something few people were going to use, but they found another way to add content in the form of Eye of the North. Now they had expansions with all max level content that could be linked to any of the already released campaigns and it didn't cripple the world with new classes or large numbers of new skills.

I don't understand why they never even tried to continue making Guild Wars expansions, especially considering it's taking them so long to release Guild Wars 2. The game we all loved was essentially abandoned when there was still a player base and an active population wanting to play it. They could have had a healthy and thriving game population enjoying new content for at least two more years - they essentially abandoned the players and gave them a token skeleton crew. Is it so ridiculous to expect them to hire a new team to use the tools and game engine that already existed to create new content for their game? Why did they choose to essentially dump Guild Wars and never try to capitalise on it's potential in the time they were taking to develop Guild Wars 2? It doesn't seem fair to the fans that already invested so much into the franchise and the company at that point.

I didn't think it at the time, but in hindsight it seems like a really bizarre decision.

From what I remember the development team could not implement the new ideas/directions in GW1 and decided to move on to GW2 to do so. Something to do with the software.

They explained that in the May, 2007 PC Gamer article that first announced GW2. I don't know if the full contents of that article are (legally) on the web. I can't post scans because of copyright.

Summary:

6 month campaign model, the game engine, and game mechanics limited the features they wanted to include in Utopia(GW's canceled 4th campaign). Each successive campaign introduced new mechanics and new skills, and increased the tutorial portion in the beginning to explain said skills and mechanics. They wanted to add new features and new designs without increasing complexity of GW1 even further, so they started over.

The guru thread probably has most of the info from it if you have a read through the thread:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/p...t10133090.html

Anyways, the TLR is that I don't think they thought it would take 6 years to make GW:2.

This might be helpful.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/p...t10133090.html

In a way, GW2 is an expansion of GW1. It's just that they felt there needed to be significant reworking of the game in order to go forward with their ideas on how to develop the world and the game.

It's the reason it's being called Guild Wars 2... it really is Guild Wars 2.0. They'd gotten to 1.5, and realized there wasn't enough room to keep making 1.6, 1.7, etc.

It makes more sense to work with GW1 in a minimal way and focus largely on GW2, rather than splitting their resources more evenly between the two and compromising both in the process.

I've enjoyed my time in GW1, but just the simple fact that they get to transfer the Guild Wars franchise into a <i>real</i> MMORPG rather than "CORPG", makes me very, very happy.

GW1 has had a pretty good run. It's sad to see something we love go, but clinging to the old can also lead to stagnation. Look at WoW. As wildly successful as it is, even Blizzard has realized it can't last forever. At some point something new needs to be brought forward.

Edit: Ninja'ed!

That answer isn't really an answer, since they also stated in that article that they expected to beta GW2 in 2008.

The truth is that they made a horrible business decision based on an unrealistic estimate of GW2's release date. I guarantee you that the bosses would like to go back in time and derive some extra revenue from another PvE-focused expansion or two. Those expansions would have been cost-effective, even if they'd had to hire to put the content out and keep GW2 trucking along. They also would have helped with marketing the microtransactions that are currently the studio's only source of revenue.

I guess that remains to be seen. They've managed to stick it out to a launch this year without losing their backing, and if GW2 pays off in increased revenue over GW1, it will ultimately be a good business decision.

If someone had a time machine and told ArenaNet that they wouldn't be shipping GW2 until 2012, we would have seen more GW1 content after Eye of the North. It's sad to me because they could have told a more complete story in terms of bridging GW1 to GW2 with more content in between the two games. In the same way that Star Wars: The Old Republic is a few hundred years removed from Knights of the Old Republic, the stories are disjointed and only mildly connected. There are a lot of cliff hangers in GW1 that I don't see them ever explaining. It's too bad there won't really be any closure for some of the tales in GW1.

In my opinion, the PvE only skills in Eye of the North were a brilliant marketing scheme for the short term. When viewed from the long term, they really ended up hurting the overall feel of GW1.

I remember the article and that makes me lol.

The problem was they kept adding ideas to GW2 till it became this behemoth of a game that would take 5 years of development. I'm glad its the game most other game companies fear but GW1 players suffer at the hands of GW2's massive resource requirement. Not to mention the content they are bringing out is lackluster and can be completed in two days, one if you have the day off from work. The saddest part is they gave GW1 to a team that has no experience in skill balance.

To correctly answer the OP its because GW1 is RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOed due to the massive skill pool and there isnt enough money with GW2 being developed.

You know, I was just saying this to my brother earlier today, that they should have made at least one more full campaign, maybe two or three but without any new classes and minimal new skills. Oh, and finished the realms of the Gods as a purchasable add-on.

The important factor right now, in my opinion, is that if they had not started GW2 back then and if they had continued with their campaign / expansion model:

1. they would have been frustrated with the increasing amount of cool things that they could not have included, and either:
   1. they would have grown bored of the game and slowly stopped caring for it, instead of really caring for it (or at least saying so) but not having the power to translate it into actual updates;
   2. they would have grown bored of the game and sold it to a random MMO-herding society;
   3. they would have started working on GW2 later anyway, with less optimal enthousiasm (and we would be waiting 2014 or so);
2. we would have grown bored of the game, as it happens with any seven years old game however often there is new content; instead of being a company with a bright (if slightly uncertain) future like now, they would have been a company of the past, releasing new-but-always-the-same content in a dated game with dated graphics and mechanics;
3. the skill balance, counting several more hundreds of them (and several more professions) would be even worse than now, and those who quit because of it would have quit anyway.

I for one think it was a good decision in the right time (even though I am still not sure if I will like GW2).

ummmm no... hell no. It is a terrible idea to create microtransaction content that splits the community.

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Its not about what they want its about what the customer wants. Doing what they wanted is what caused all this angst towards Anet. By the time GW2 does come out the only thing people will be thinking when installing the game is its about RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing time Anet. Then their going to run through content that they watched on youtube 100 times because they had to feed their fans something while GW1 collects dust.

I agree, and I bet in hindsight they think the same. GW was pretty successful (7m copies) so i'm sure NC would have let them get more staff etc if needed. IMO just an EotN style ex-pack with no new skills/classes (maybe a few pve only ones) and throw in a few new pvp maps (for free) for all formats every 9-12months. Then, they could also sell the extra realms for say $10 (for all) which would be great too. Perhaps even break them up and sell through the down time between expacks for ~$4.

The primary reason I suggest that is because it's the first thing I would have done to give the community something to do while the next campaign was completed.

When the new campaign launched, I'd have made the new realms freely available to everyone who had it, and given the people who bought the DLC an equivalent discount for the new campaign.

That's a retarded business model that will only piss people off. Give them the content in between for free then charge the full price for the campaign.

WiK, HotN, WoC all say hello... All free content...

We're forgetting the most important reason:

NCSoft told ANet to make a new game because not many people were PvP playing, so they assumed GW wouldn't last another year or so.

Also, am I the only person that would have been okay if they couldn't generate new campaigns in six months? I mean, I could wait a year and be perfectly fine, maybe 18 months tops, but it felt like they forced themselves to work at that kind of spitfire rate and instead of explaining why they could take extra time to make it better, they just said screw it and start fresh.

I thought it was because of the graphics. The game graphics have gotten better as each of the campaigns came out. With EotN the gfx were pretty damn good. Maybe the devs wanted to push the graphics further, cue GW2?

Tbh I can't believe it's b/c of the grahics...pc's are capable of soo much more than any of the of the screens or vids I've seen fom GW2. On the same note they really don't look that much better than GW1.

But you have to remember that the game has the potential to be big. It will no doubt cater for lower end PC's while giving peeps with high end computers allowance to run the game with drooly graphics.

If the requirements to run GW2 are too much then they'll lose potential sales.

I doubt GW2 will look as awesome as a modded Skyrim but it's a different type of game!

I remember a discussion panel they held (at GDC?) a year or two back.

Part of why they started making GW2, was that they wanted the ability to add public, large group type quests (the precursors to the dynamic events that are the basis for content in GW2), but to do that they needed to change large chunks of how the game worked. The problem with changing the game so drastically was that there were a lot of people who loved it the way it was - ArenaNet didn't feel it fair to change the game that much when people loved it the way it was. So they decided splitting it out to another game would be better.

The panel discussed how they experimented with some of the changes using the GW1 engine...and how people hunting in the gw.dat file found some of the quests/skills/icons from those tests and were speculating on what the new content meant and when it'd be released.

Between skill balancing becoming very unwieldy, the desire to drop traditional quests, the wish to make the game an open world instead of instanced, etc, they needed to make a break between "existing game" and "changed, new game".

I can't check from work, but I think this was the panel (they spoke about Utopia, etc):
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013691...Dynamic_Events
And the discussion thread in GW2Guru about that vid: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/...gdc-t8341.html

From what I remember before gw ever came out was that they planned to release a new campaign every 6 months or so. It kinda worried me a little bit at the time because it almost sounded like a subscription ($15 monthly for wow/ $60 every 6 months or $10 month for GW). That obviously didn't happen due to all the reasons mentioned above, but also probably because they were making money so why add more when they can sit back and make money off existing content. GW was 2nd to WoW and that means that they sold a lot of games and made a lot of money.

Getting to the mechanics of the game, they probably made twice as many character types as needed and had 10 times the amount of skills. Way too ambitious. No way to remotely balance all that. Would have been much better having a lot less skills and only adding new skills and character skins as expansions came out. So there would always be healer, magic user, warrior, necro, mesmer, and ranger or a thief type class. But each expansion would add the choice of creating one of those classes from the expansion and a new line of skills for them to use. Then you could have Ranger (w/ rit skills)/X or Warrior (w/ derv skills)/Y as the series progressed. Better to balance existing characters and skills than to bring a whole new line out to further mess things up.

Too late for any of that now. If you enjoyed what gw1 brought to the table and like where gw2 is going or don't even know, but still want to try it, then do it. It should be fun. Just be aware that they will probably handle things the way they did with gw1. They will provide new content at their own pace and stop when they decide to no matter how many are willing to pay for new content. They will over promise at the beginning. They will say things are limited time only and then sell those items 6 months later. Instead of new content, they will add grind and other bs to keep towns looking busy in hopes that it wll help sell old content to new players. Besides that crap, it was a fun game.

I'm hoping diablo 3 comes out 1st so I can get hooked on that instead. Too many broken promises from this company that too many accept for whatever reason. Either way GW2 looks freaking amazing.

And you don't think blizzard doesn't breaks promises?... lol

Back when GW was in alpha/beta stage the graphics looked very much the same as WoW started with (before either game went live). It was only after Blizzard released a few screen shots that ArenaNet changed the graphical style for Guild Wars. I am very happy they did because if they had not, I would not be playing it.
As already mentioned, ArenaNet had planned on GW2 being live by the middle of 2010 at the latest. That was pushed back for several reasons; Silvary rework, Dynamic Events rework, art style rework and several others changes. It should be noted that it is not uncommon for a developer to change things once in a while, but some of the changes ArenaNet have done are huge by any standard almost a huge as the chage that occured during TablaRosa's development.

A few of my RL friends and I have been listening to the NCSoft quarterly conference calls, we all agree that it sounds like something is going on behind closed doors. The speculation is that NCSoft is upset that GW2 is so far behind schedule. That is only speculation (from a few of my RL friends when we sat down; listened to and talked about the last few calls) and more than likely does not reflect reality.

In my view Anet could'nt afford to do both. I'm sure they would have loved to have done what Blizzard have done with WoW and have two whole fully equipped teams on the go (one doing pandaville and the other Titan). One dealing and creating GW1 expansions and the other working on GW2

Back in the day, I never really quite bought the reasons why they cancelled Utopia and did'nt make any more expansions. I mean I would have loved a new chapter and expansions even without a starter area, new skills, professions and game mechanics. If it's not broke dont fix it...

I also think Anet had a cash cow (GW1) which it was willing to bleed slowly dry until a new one could be developed. I don't blame them for that, it's a common business practice, but it does make me a little sad as to thinking what could have been.

Also, remember GW1 was never designed to be a full on MMO that people play for 7 years. It was designed to be a 'dip in and out' game where if you got bored youd go play something else for a while without it costing you any more money.

Although we hoped that the 2008 figure was correct (and back in 2007 that seemed so far away) there were many who said that it takes 5+ years to make an MMO and the figure was wrong. Well guess what it's nearly 5 years since 2007 and the announcement.

I also think they knew how the quality had dropped in EOTN. Yes it has some wonderful areas, but it also has a lot of cut and paste dungeons and PvE skill grind that make up a lot of the content.

So to sum up. I believe Anet did not in 2007 have the resources to do both develop GW2 and give GW1 the attention and quality it deserved. So they took a gutsy call and hoped people had enough brand loyalty to wait.

Time for a little reading between the lines

"Each campaign was adding new complexity that made it harder to draw in new players" (note that COMPLEXITY was their main complaint with 10 million skills/professions/mechanics, and not balance!)

Now what does an expansion pack like Eye of the North fail to do? Draw in new players! They can't buy it as a standalone! It only sells to existing fans.

In short, Anet wasn't completely happy or confident in their existing GW1 players, and started Utopia (leading into GW2) by brainstorming how to expand their base. 5 million copies sounds like alot until you divide it by 3 or 4. That's pretty niche compared to WoW's 10 million active subscriptions. They wanted a bigger audience, and GW2 is an entirely different game and MMO through and through to poach some of that group that would dwarf the population of GW1's golden days.

Keep people happy till GW2? They don't care that much. They have bigger fish to fry.