Ten Ton Hammer:
How many hours do you expect players to spend crawling through a
single-dungeon? Will players be able to start the dungeon where they
left off, even if they were grouped with other players?
style="font-weight: bold;">Ben: All the
dungeons themselves vary in length. While none are super short, they do
span all difficulty and all time investment ranges that we have seen
current Guild Wars
players playing. So in other words, big brother is
watching and making an awesomely tuned experience for you!
Ten Ton Hammer:
Once these dungeons are defeated, what else is their for these
max-level characters to do in the latest
style="font-style: italic;">Guild Wars
expansion?
style="font-weight: bold;">Ben: Well this is
the perfect opportunity to clarify that GW:EN is more than just 18
multi level dungeons! There are a ton of above ground maps to explore
that are just breathtakingly beautiful. When I say that, I want you to
get the full breadth of my meaning. Get ready to replace your print
screen button because everywhere you look is a veritable screen shot
and you are gonna wear that sucker out. There is also the main
character-driven narrative with fully voiced cinematics, ten new heroes
to unlock, mini games like the Norn Tournament or Polymock to play and
increase your skill with, reputation with various NPC groups to earn,
and more new stuff to unlock. So, you know, just a handful of things...
alt="Eye of the North" title="Eye of the North"
name="photo_j" border="0" height="113" width="150">
There will be other activities for players to
participate in aside from the 18 new multi-part dungeons in GW:EN.
Ten Ton Hammer:
There are an estimated 150 new skills going into the game, yet many of
these are focused mainly on PvE. Why did you make this switch from a
PvP to a PvE focus, and how will these skills affect PvE in the world
outside of GW: EN? Are all the skills combat-oriented?
style="font-weight: bold;">Ben: We
didn’t really switch our focus away from PvP. There are just
a lot of skills in Guild Wars! Each new campaign exponentially made the
game more complex for someone coming in. With GW:EN we aren't really
complicating the competitive element with two new professions or making
the tumultuous introduction of hundreds of new skills and thousands of
new permutations.
The
new PvE skills will make PvE outside of GW:EN more interesting as we
have provided a wider arsenal for the player to choose from when
combating different challenges.
style="font-style: italic;">Guild
Wars in general is combat-oriented, so we wanted all the
skills to be
viable tactical choices. It did free us up however to pursue less
combat oriented side effects as well. Most of them are earned through
the side quests available in GW:EN and in general serve a deeper RPG
role than some skills have in the past.
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">I also want to stress here
that we aren’t dictating people grind for title points to
level these bad boys up or that we will require you use the PvE skills
in a blocking "you need to bring" this skill kind of way. If gaining
title points is your thing cool, if not there is plenty of other
content to dig into. Your build is your build, these are just cool, new
options to augment it. So have fun with them!
Ten Ton Hammer:
As the prologue of Guild
Wars 2, GW:EN sports some unique features
that will allow players to have some immortalization in
style="font-style: italic;">Guild Wars 2,
via the Hall of Monuments. Players will be able to see everything that
their former character was able to do, but you’ve also
mentioned some other forms of inheritance. What might these be? Gold?
Weapons? Magic items? Do you have any examples for us?
style="font-weight: bold;">Ben: Just to recap,
the Hall Of Monuments will dynamically reflect all your character's
achievements across all Guild
Wars content. While GW2 is still a ways
out, the specifics of what inheriting those achievements will mean is
impossible to tell. Generally speaking however we want characters that
have invested their time and skill into achieving things in GW to be
appreciably and noticeably unique in GW2. Whatever form that takes is
really up to the specific mechanics of GW2, but you can imagine things
like unique companions, or armor being on the list of things we would
consider. Whatever the case is you will only be able to get that stuff
if you have been a long time player of
style="font-style: italic;">Guild Wars.
alt="Hall of Monuments" title="Hall of Monuments"
name="photo_j" border="0" height="113" width="150">
The Hall of Monuments will document all the
achievements of your characters in the original
style="font-style: italic;">Guild Wars.
Ten Ton Hammer:
Finally, did you expect to be making a full-blown MMORPG sequel for
Guild Wars?
When the game was originally released, the entire ArenaNet
team seemed pretty against the concept of
style="font-style: italic;"> Guild Wars being a
full-blown
MMORPG, how have things changed to elicit the creation of a sequel
MMORPG? How does that change your thinking concerning any other
expansions to Guild Wars you may produce?
style="font-weight: bold;">Ben: I
don’t think anyone here is against persistence or other
trappings of full blown MMORPGs.
In
fact we all actively play and enjoy all kinds of MMO's. The key thing I
think is that we aren’t interested in making the same games
everyone else makes, and anything from us involving
style="font-style: italic;">Guild Wars will be
just as original and just as innovative as the original
style="font-style: italic;">Guild Wars.
Guild Wars 2
is the ultimate Guild
Wars experience, with persistence,
with instancing, with epic and awesome the likes of which no one has
dared dream in the online gaming space.
As to
what started us down this road?
When
we started making campaign 4, we really wanted something unique to the
Guild Wars
world and that was persistence. The more we wanted to do
with it the more it became more and more like a full blown sequel as we
thought of all the systems we could take a fresh stab at with all of
our lessons learned from the years in the trenches of the original
game. It became more and more the right set of games for us to make.
So if
you find yourself like me, staying up at night, wrestling with such
questions as, "Will Guild
Wars 2 have elements of MMO's, like
persistence?" or " Will Guild
Wars 2 be as unique and ground breaking
as Guild Wars
even though it seems to have more MMO elements?" And this
one really keeps me up these days, "Will GW:EN be the most epic, no
holds barred, kick ass, Guild
Wars experience to date?”
Let
me put that troubled mind at ease ;)
Absolutely!
Ten Ton Hammer is your
unofficial source for
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