Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

The team at GuildWars2Hub.com has been hard atwork to bring Guild Wars 2 fans the best original content available each week. Case in point: this week the exclusive interview series continues with an epic two-part discussion with Colin Johanson.

As always, Colin's answers are extremely thoughtful, and provide plenty of insights on the design philosophy for Guild Wars 2:

Lewis B: Some of the content I experienced during the first Beta Weekend Event I thought was incredibly difficult, and it felt like the difficulty had been ramped up significantly from previous phases. (I could barely solo some content!) How is the process of fine-tuning difficulty working out? It must be difficult finding that line between playability but not wishing for people to walk through content...

Colin: We’re constantly testing and tweaking everything in the game to try and find those sweet spots we’re really happy with. As I mentioned earlier, the level 1-5 areas were oftentimes too difficult for new players back in the first beta event, and we did a lot of work to make those a little easier for the second beta event. Another change we made between beta event one and two is we raised the level that mobs start to learn various abilities. Other than bosses, things like mobs using AoE skills now occur a little later in the game, and mobs using various conditions have been pushed back based on the condition they used. All of this was to provide a slightly better learning progression in the game, so when you get to the point where creatures are using their full sets of abilities, you are far enough along playtime-wise to better understand how to deal with those situations.

Some things were just straight-up balanced wrong, too—hello, flame shaman!—and we’ve been identifying and trying to address those as well. That’s another area where the beta surveys are a huge help to us, as well as our own internal data mining, which gives us stats on how often people die in various areas of the game—the anomalies are clear, and we’re able to find and fix those easily using those data metrics (hello, Avatar of Balthazar story boss!).

Be sure to check out this epic two-part interview by visiting the handy links provided below:

• Exclusive Interview with Colin Johanson - Part One
• Exclusive Interview with Colin Johanson - Part Two