Guild Wars - Jeff Strain Interview

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » October 29, 2004, 2:05 am

This came off of GameSpy at http://archive.gamespy.com/landing/guildwars/

ArenaNet founder Jeff Strain left Blizzard to forge his own studio, and now he and his team are looking to create a whole new class of massively multiplayer games. Guild Wars has unique gameplay and a unique business model. How will it all come together? We sat down for a quick chat about the logistics of putting together a game like Guild Wars.

GameSpy: The Worldwide Preview Event is almost here! For people who missed the E3 event, this will be their first crack at the game. How would you pitch Guild Wars to the uninitiated in five sentences or less?

Strain: Guild Wars is a competitive online role playing game that rewards players for their skill more than for the number of hours that they can play. It offers an involving story set in a beautiful world, and allows each player to discover the depth of the story through multiplayer cooperative, multiplayer competitive, and single-player missions. It's about always having fun, rather than preparing to have fun, and avoids such traditional drawbacks as endless travel, spawn camping, item looting, and excessive death penalties.

The game features intelligent streaming technology which will allow us to share new adventures with players, to incorporate seasonal and time-specific elements such as updates on the winning tournament team, and to quickly correct exploits and cheats when they arise. And, best of all, Guild Wars offers all this without charging a monthly fee.

GameSpy: Over two-hundred thousand people checked out the game during your E3 launch event. After that intense testing, did the focus of game development shift? What have you been working the most at in the past couple of months?

Strain: Yes, the focus of development certainly expanded after our E3 for Everyone Event. In response to player feedback we decided to put more emphasis on the single-player aspects of the game. Without shorting multiplayer cooperative or competitive gameplay, we broadened the single-player options, expanded our hunting grounds to allow exploration by parties, and generally extended that aspect of the game.

GameSpy: The international audience is also being introduced to the game. Asian and European servers will go live for the event! How was the reaction when you recently showed the game to gamers in Korea?

Strain: We have received a great deal of solid feedback as a result of our alpha test in Korea. One significant outcome of the test resulted in us paying a lot more attention to the first hour of the game, that is, to the early player experience. We've focused some of our recent developmental efforts on assuring that those joining the early game are able to play with ease and to enjoy the progress of their starting-level characters.

GameSpy: And what about the European audience? Do you find that different groups around the world look to get something different out of the game?

Strain: People in different parts of the world have somewhat different expectations about the early game experience and the user interface. For instance, U.S. gamers are more keyboard oriented; Korean gamers lean more towards mouse use. Some gamers expect a game to start out quite simply; others enjoy a complex challenge right from the outset.

But in the end, what we all want is a great game. We want a game that that offers depth of content and an excellent skill system; that gives us an interesting story, that embraces different playing styles, and that is well supported by the developer. A great game is a great game, and no matter where you come from, that's what it's all about.

GameSpy: Early in the Guild Wars development process you made the decision that there would be no monthly fees. So far it's still the only big-name MMOG to try this business model. Does this surprise you? Is the MMOG business climate today what you expected it would be when you made that decision a couple years ago?

Strain: The fact that Guild Wars is the only big-name MMOG to ditch the subscription fee does surprise us, yes. Our business model will work, and what we are doing could be done by others. We find it surprising that others have not or are not trying to do the same thing. But, at the time some of our founders developed Battle.net, no one had created a free online gaming network, either, so I guess it's fair to say that we're accustomed to being innovative.

The business climate is exactly what we expected it to be at this time. When we began developing Guild Wars, there were more than 80 announced MMORPG titles under development worldwide. There are far fewer now, and the fact that the numbers have dropped so dramatically proves what we have said all along: that people do not want to pay -- are not willing to pay -- a monthly fee for every game that they play.

GameSpy: In such a competitive online game, people will almost certainly try to cheat. What has your team done to prevent this? Did your experience developing Battle.net help you out a great deal?

Strain: We're quite aware that some people will try to cheat and exploit any game that they buy. Our Battle.net experience was very illustrative of the creativity that people will use to try to hack, cheat, or exploit a game. Leveraging that experience to develop the ArenaNet global gaming network, we are confident that we can resolve cheats and exploits in a timely and effective manner. One of the reasons we chose to develop a purely server hosted network, and our unique on-demand streaming technology, was because of our focus on cheat and exploit prevention. We're committed to bringing people an excellent gaming experience in a cheat-free environment.

GameSpy: Now that it's all coming together, are parts of the game really surprising you? Are you seeing unexpected gameplay from the people in-house and your alpha testers?

Strain: We are seeing delightfully unexpected gameplay from our testers and staff on a frequent basis. Strategies that the designers never anticipated emerge daily, which is very exciting for us, and also very helpful as we work to balance the over 450 unique skills in the game. For instance, we might hear about a certain combination of skills that we've never considered before; we might even think it's not viable. But when we lose soundly to a team using those skills on the tournament battleground, we know we are doing our jobs. Then we go and nerf it so that the testers can't use it on us again. Kidding! Kidding!

GameSpy: Hah! Now people see the real reason stuff gets nerfed in their favorite games. But seriously, thanks for your time! We'll see you in the preview event...

Strain: You're welcome, and thanks to GameSpy for the opportunity to talk about Guild Wars!

Glad someone figured out that part in bold.

Trias · Post by **Trias** » October 29, 2004, 3:22 am

i had a chance to play guildwars last month, seems pretty neat so far...but i most likely won't buy it

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » October 29, 2004, 1:39 pm

Won't purchase another mmorpg here.. just waste time during beta and determine "Nope, hate it"

Zamtuk · Post by **Zamtuk** » October 30, 2004, 3:45 am

http://www.guildwars.net

go here to download the beta client for free to test out over the weekend.

good thing about this mmorpg is that there is no fee.

Pherr the Dorf · Post by **Pherr the Dorf** » October 30, 2004, 2:51 pm

Fun fricking game!

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » October 30, 2004, 6:40 pm

I like the "create-a-group" option when you don't have long to devote to a group.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » October 30, 2004, 7:17 pm

I've tried the game. It's cute but dunno how much staying power it has.

It's most likely however to attract all the kids that don't have a credit card and all the people who are too cheap to pay the monthly free on a regular MMOG.

Gemily · Post by **Gemily** » November 1, 2004, 6:18 am

Its a cute lil game to play while the servers are down during patches.
I liked it.

eOmniz · Post by **eOmniz** » November 2, 2004, 5:56 am

I played it quite a bit this weekend. I'll almost definitely pick it up when it comes out. It's extremely simple, there is no possibility for raid content from what I saw from beta, yet addictive and fun. The biggest attraction for me is the impossibility to play it for 8 hours or get too involved with a guild, as the current set up makes that just not possible. My friends said it was like Diablo2 done right, but I never played that so I can't comment on it.

It'll be something to play when I don't want to get tied up, like how War3/Unreal is for me now, something to do when EQ isn't the answer (assuming EQ is still in the equation at that time).

Edit - will throw in some more information about game play.

The set up during this open preview was you instantly got a lvl 15 character and the cap was 20. I'm not sure what the cap will be on release but it'll definitely start at 1. The non pvp content is basically a series of missions which open up more and more areas. There is no traveling between these areas, you simply open a map and click what region you want to be in. There are also some "exploratory" areas, I did not play much in these but I heard better loot dropped there although there was no objective, just farming grounds though. I could not figure out if these areas were instanced or not, all the missions were. If you dont have the right classes you can hire henchmen, who were weaker geared/leveled than your party but actually did a good job ... the clericish (monk) one was better than a real monk most of the time.

The towns were semi instanced, in that they were like the EQ chat rooms. It makes an instance of a town till that instance has a certain number of people then it makes a new one. I'm not sure if it will be the same on release, but you could move to a diff instance with a scroll bar if you were trying to meet someone or looking for something to buy etc. The tradeskilling was ... ridiculously simple, you just handed an npc various tradeskill drops and gold and they made you something. Not sure what that will be like on release.

The actual fighting was simple ... from what I saw a lot of the "boss" fights lasted a long time and required some cool strategizing but were not like EQ at all. Everyone had a TINY mana bar but it refilled fast as hell so it was very intense having to do things all the time, not like playing a cleric in eq or turning on autoattack and afking. The PVP on the other hand was insanely quick paced and you had to know a lot to even understand what was going on. Some of the pvp fights were king of the hill and there were tons of maps, you could do 4v4v4v4 or 8v8, both were tons of fun. It was just exciting and intense, nothing like EQ. Every round I'd think some class combination was insanely overpowered till I just realized a lot of the players knew 100x more about the game than I did.

So those were what I saw. I got two characters to 17 so didn't see that much, I saw level 20's that obviously had insane gear that I had no idea about. The whole game is a cool idea and pretty innovative imho.

Kwonryu DragonFist · December 11, 2005, 3:33 pm

New class coming to Guildwars.

The Assassin!

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » December 11, 2005, 3:48 pm

I assume I'll have to buy an expansion? No thanks, there's a reason this game has no monthly fee. =P