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

Ten Ton Hammer: Speaking of the PvP aspects in terms of solo players, one of the things that really changed the face of Guild Wars PvP was the introduction of Hero Battles. Will that type of PvP experience also being transitioned into Guild Wars 2?

Mike O’Brien: I can’t directly answer your question because we really haven’t announced what we’re doing with companions this time around. One thing I will say is that companions, pets and minions is a very active area of development. Some people have been publishing articles assuming that things we talked about early on back in 2007 about the companion system is a canonical companion system so that’s how it’s going to work in Guild Wars 2. That’s something that we are actively working on and doing a lot of design on as we speak so I’m sure there will be a lot of iteration of how that works before we make any announcements on it.


Ten Ton Hammer: It definitely looked in the trailer as though you want to stick to more of the photorealistic style of Guild Wars, is that the case with Guild Wars 2?

Daniel Dociu: I wouldn’t describe the look of Guild Wars 1 as photorealistic – it did have a certain degree of stylization. We’re trying to find a good balance between how far we want to stylize our world before we scare our fan base away. The stronger or further out there your visual style is, the more people either love it or hate it. The narrower it is, the more you narrow your fan base.

We didn’t want to go that route; rather we wanted to keep the game accessible not just from a story standpoint and gameplay standpoint, but also from a visual standpoint. So we’re trying to find our position in this continuum that is basically building upon what we’ve done with the first game but evolving it and distancing ourselves a little bit from conventional fantasy, but not to the extreme of alienating or fan base.

We are known in the industry for having a strong art team that has generated volumes and volumes of concept art – we’ve released three or four art books so far. With Guild Wars 1 our engine had certain limitations that didn’t allow us to translate that concept art as faithfully into in-game assets. So this time around with the in-game engine going through this really deep overhaul evolving it leaps and bounds beyond what it used to be, we can tackle the challenge of translating these concepts into in-game assets a lot truer to the initial vision.

We want to make this kind of the trademark of the game – to have this seamless transition between concept art and cinematics as a storytelling tool through in-game footage. So rather than in-game cinematics being a jarring moment or a wakeup call that removes you from the immersion with the game, the two will blend a lot more seamlessly. We’ll accomplish this by applying this more painterly, hand crafted style across the board.

Ten Ton Hammer: When I initially saw some of the screenshots for Guild Wars 2 I actually thought they were concept art so you’ve definitely achieved that transition from what we’ve been shown so far. How will this effect what type of systems will be able to run the game? Are you still aiming for allowing a broader spectrum of systems to be able to run the game?

Mike O’Brien: Guild Wars 1 was kind of famous for being able to run on a very broad range of systems which is still very important to us. We do a lot of things to make sure Guild Wars can have a broad appeal - everything from the game design, the business model and the system requirements all go hand in hand – so we’ve always focused on keeping the system requirements as low as we can, and we’re still doing that with Guild Wars 2. I like to say that Guild Wars is beautiful, but it’s beautiful because of the hand crafted nature of the art, not because we’re trying to push more polygons.

Ten Ton Hammer: One of the things that I enjoyed in the first game from a visual standpoint is how some of the excellent concept art would show up in game as murals or artwork on some of the walls of interior spaces. Will you continue to use concept assets in a similar way in Guild Wars 2?

Jeff Grubb: We’ll be doing even more of that kind of thing in Guild Wars 2 actually. In a lot of ways we’re now able to take the more painterly art and actually apply that to the world to really tie everything together visually much more so than we were able to previously.