Guild Wars 2 MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Ten Ton Hammer: With so much uproar and devastation, has that shaken people’s belief in the gods at all? Are they still going to play an important role in the future?

Jeff Grubb: Yes and no. At the end of Nightfall - after Abaddon was defeated and Kormir became the new Goddess of Truth - the gods pulled back. They basically said, “Humanity, we’ve been mucking with you, we’ve been too hands-on, we’re going to step back and this world is yours to do with and succeed or fail as you can.” So the gods are somewhat like parents and humanity has been riding a two-wheeler for the first time. They’ve been running along behind and they’ve just released the seat and the kid is going back and forth across the highway, and the parent wants to grab the seat again, but the kid has to learn for itself.

That’s what humanity is doing right now. They’re not doing as well as you would expect after being left on their own, but the gods are not as involved as they were. Humanity’s faith in the gods is still strong and there’s still response, but not to the same level of interference that you’ve seen previously.

Ten Ton Hammer: Somewhat related to that then, we there still be travel to some of the special areas of Guild Wars 1 such as the Underworld or the Fissure of Woe?

Jeff Grubb: The potential always exists. It’s a big world, it’s a growing world. We’re taking care of the basics at this point so I never say never.


Ten Ton Hammer: A lot of people view Guild Wars as more of a PvP game for obvious reasons. From a lore perspective, with Guild Wars 2 how have you shifted the gameplay focus from more of a player vs. player focus in the face of the massive upheavals that set the stage for the overall storyline?

Mike O’Brien: I think people have different opinions of Guild Wars. For example some people think it’s just a PvP game, but it really has both strong PvP and PvE. With Guild Wars 1 we put a lot of focus into telling stories for an online role playing game, and you didn’t see that with a lot of our competitors. That’s an area where we really want to focus and do even more storytelling in Guild Wars 2.

So if people think of it as just a PvP game or just a PvE game then they’re really missing half the picture. When we started building Guild Wars, our goal was to make a great role playing game, and bring that experience into online gameplay, but not fall into the traps of MMOs where online needs to mean grinding or signing your life away. So just an online role playing game, but then let’s also recognize that people put a lot of time and effort into building up their characters. Sometimes when you’ve built up your characters you like to see, “hey, how does my character stack up against your character? Let’s fight!”

So we tried to make that aspect to the game so that you can play the game, build up your character and then see how they stack up against your friends or you and your friends can compete. So I think Guild Wars 1 had those two aspects to it. We really tried to support the competition aspect, and I think we’ve done so a lot earlier than some of our competitors. You’ve probably seen how we took top guilds and flew them out to Taipei and to Leipzig and gave away $100,000 cash prizes and that kind of thing.

We want to do all of that with Guild Wars 2 also, but I’d like to have a much smoother transition, and not have people get into the game and think that it’s only for PvP or that kind of thing. So for Guild Wars 2 what we’re doing is making two different kinds of PvP. One kind is world PvP.

Guild Wars 2, because it has a persistent world now you’ll be on a server, and servers will compete against different servers. So you and all your friends can just go to the front lines and fight against other servers and try to take control of different resources that benefit your entire world. And that kind of PvP I think is really easy to get into because it’s not like you have to try to get onto a team and then if you’re not doing a good job your teammates aren’t saying, “Hey, you’re using up a slot in our team that someone else could be using.” It’s just the more the merrier – you can just walk out there and start fighting. If your world can get 300 people instead of 200 people then that’s all the better for your world, so let’s all get out there and fight, right?

I think that can be much more broadly appealing for people who are really coming to Guild Wars as a PvE game that really just want to check out what competition is like. But then at the high end we’ll still have support for level playing field, team on team competitive PvP that we’ve always had. I think that by splitting that off it allows us to make that more pure, more of a true e-sport.

In Guild Wars 1 as you play PvP you’d be unlocking your skills and abilities so that you’d be exposed to more and more depth and complexity over time. But at the real e-sport level you want it to be all about your player skill, you don’t want it to be a case of “you unlocked more than I did therefore you can try a different strategy before I can try it.” So for Guild Wars 2, for the real e-sport PvP we’re going to make it completely open right from the beginning. You can go in and have access to every skill in the game or every item in the game.

Jeff Grubb: One thing we’ve discovered over Guild Wars 1 is that people interact with MMOs differently. There are those who like to solo, those who like to group, those who like to PvP and even different types of PvP. As we do Guild Wars 2 we’re looking at all those different groups and even people who do some of one and some of the other as well. So one thing that gets back to one of the philosophies of Guild Wars is to take the game at your own pace and as you choose to.