TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Jeff Strain: Any time you're releasing the sequel to an MMOG, it's a scary time. The thing that you have to realize is that having communities change en masse from one game to the next is always a tough proposition. It's why so many MMOGs that come into the market get lost. They don't strongly differentiate themselves from what's out there and they can't pull that player base off from existing games. They could say that their features are better or that their combat is more up-to--date, but that just doesn't do it.,"

In many ways, when you're releasing a sequel to an MMOG you're actually competing with yourself. Guild Wars 2 is going to be everything that the original Guild Wars was times 10. It's going to be an overwhelmingly cool game. But we have to be sensitive to the fact that Guild Wars has a very large and very active player base. We need to make that migration from one game to the other as easy and fun as we can.

One of the things we look at is what keeps people glued where they are. Part of it is, I've invested all this money and time into my characters and I can walk around town with this bad-ass swagger, why would I want to leave? We don't want to take that away from people.

The Hall of Monuments is kind of like taking a snap-shot of your bad-assness, and then will let you take that bad-assness forward into Guild Wars 2.  It's kind of visual representation of what your character has accomplished. When you get into Guild Wars 2, you can physically access that Hall of Monuments and use all those statues to unlock special things in Guild Wars 2. You won't be able to give any of those things away. So, your Guild Wars character is a bad-ass and your Guild Wars 2 character can walk into the Hall of Monuments and walk out looking like a bad-ass.

Jeff: It's definitely serving a dual purpose. One side is serving as a method of transferring your legacy into Guild Wars 2, but it certainly is a place where you can go to show off. We've gone to great lengths to make the Hall look cool, and the idea is for you to be able to take your friends in there and say "Hey, look at all this cool stuff!"

Jeff: That's a good question. We are committed to supporting Guild Wars as long as their is one player in the game going through the content, and we'll make sure it functions smoothly and that there's no bugs making it hard for players to have a good time. But are we going to be producing a lot of content for the original game after Guild Wars 2 comes out? Probably not. I mean, this is where all of our design focus and energy is going, and I think if we release Guild Wars 2 and DON'T see a vast majority of our player base going to Guild Wars 2, we've obviously done something wrong.

But yes, as long as there are players in the original Guild Wars, we are going to support it and keep it running. However, we understand players won't play both because Guild Wars 2 is going to be better in every way.

Jeff: I don't know exactly what the timing will be, but I will tell you that we aren't going to allow new players to Guild Wars 2 to go back and get those items in the Hall of Monuments. Our intent is to reward players who are playing Guild Wars right now. We have so many people who have stepped up to make Guild Wars successful and have invested so much time into their characters. The whole point of this [the Hall of Monuments] is to reward those gamers. We want to say, "Thanks for playing those one, two, or three years in our original game. We appreciate you guys getting into the game early, and we want to reward you for that."

So I can't imagine that we'll let somebody coming into Guild Wars six months after Guild Wars 2 ships and letting them have rights to all of the same opportunities our original players had. Our expectation is that a lot of people are going to be getting a lot of stuff in the original Guild Wars in the several months leading up to Guild Wars 2.