Guild Wars 2 in 2013: Arenanet reveal WvW certain capabilities, living stories

Guild Wars 2's game director, Colin Johanson, is an extremely glad bunny. "Items are good right now," he says, laughing. "We're having fun."

The reason items are fantastic? Guild Wars 2 is a success: critically, commercially & now, qualitatively.

The game's reached 3 million sales: a major and key milestone. As importantly, players are still playing & enjoying the Guild Wars 2 gold game. Player concurrency numbers, the volume of people playing the game at any 1 time, have already been frequently rising for the past 5 weeks. & now, speaking from ArenaNet's offices in Bellevue, near Seattle, Colin's outlining the plans the team have for the game in 2013. That consists of: new abilities for players in Guild Wars 2's World vs World, ambitious plans to tell a year long story, & help for players to enter Guild Wars 2's unstructured, but liberating end-game.

What's more: the aim for now, Colin explains, isn't necessarily attracting new players. It is about looking after the players they already have.

First, a brief lesson in MMO-economics. Every MMO developer lives & breathes their concurrency curve. In the lifecycle of an MMO, you are inclined to see an early spike, where fresh faced players log in for the very first time. That spike inevitably drops following launch: to a concurrency base. What takes place next determines the future of the game. "For games that are not doing well, that core base over time slowly drops. A large amount of them respond by going free-to-play, which causes them to spike back up & hit a new concurrency base."

There are a few games that have managed to grow their concurrency base in the period following launch. World of Warcraft. Eve Online. & now Guild Wars 2.

"We hit our flat concurrency numbers back in November, and we've commonly grown every single week for the past five weeks," says Colin. "Our core concurrency base that we hit back in November was genuinely exciting - although to see that number going up is, genuinely thrilling. primarily because a good deal of the pieces that will make the game more exciting are coming in January, February and March."

The biggest & most ambitious of those pieces is their commitment to a brand new form of storytelling. Over the subsequent 12 months, Guild Wars 2 will often drop new episodes of story content all through the game world.

The very first beats of those episodes were deployed in the recent Flame & Frost update, with refugees fleeing the Shiverpeak mountains, arriving in Hoelbrak plus the Black Citadel. Colin won't say what's brewing; however he will say how it will brew.

The plan is to develop numerous arcs, with content appearing in dungeons plus the open world. ArenaNet will make new sectors to explore & new events inside existing areas. A lot of those events will be permanently available to players. Others will disappear from the Guild Wars 2 item game as they are completed. "Should you don't see it in that period of time, you're not going to experience it," says Colin. "They could play out in dungeons, they could play out in the open world, it's really a matter where each storyline best fits."

It will feel, says Colin, "generally speaking like a pen & paper RPG, where you're on this long adventure," although playing out in a persistent MMO world.

The objective: to keep players logging in, week in, week out. Or day in, day out.

However there's a roadbump in that process: Guild Wars 2's endgame.

One challenge every high-end player faces as they reach Guild Wars 2's level cap is "what now." What do I do to occupy my time now I have stopped levelling. There's a lot to do: PvP, more questing, crafting, and aiming for 100% completion. Having said that Johanson acknowledges that it's poorly signposted - that players struggle to realize what they could, or will need to, be doing. That's changing.

"One of the items we tried to do in Guild Wars 2 is make it a game where you could play the game the way you want to play it," explains Colin. "We've left it extremely open ended. For the explorer kinds that is something that is particularly up their alley. For players who need more guidance or direction - who need to be shown: these are your alternatives, now pick 1 - I do not think the process we have does a awesome work of showing them what to do in our game. That is totally one of the things we plan to address this year."

The endgame focus highlights the kind of nuts & bolts background improvements MMOs need to stay competitive. There is tech work going on, too. Following oversubscribed earlier events, in which player numbers battered the Guild Wars 2 servers, the team are working on technology that ought to improve crowded scenes. Culling tech developed for Guild Wars 2's World vs World - that enables the game to intelligently remove players from your view to maintain frame & response rates - will be applied to the open world, prioritising creatures which are attacking you over other players. "Right now, we're at the point where you can see giant battles with 50 to 100 folks or so. We'd like to get to the point where you can see hundreds of individuals on screen."

And with the culling tech comes a reason to fight in World vs World, Guild Wars 2's ambitious open world competition. At the moment, players who want to fight in PvP landscapes do it for modest bonuses to health & crafting. There is no personal reason to fight. That's a issue that Arenanet intend to address.

"There needs to be more powerful incentives for people to play world versus world," says Colin. There are two programs in the works. The very first is a individual progression process that will unlock new skill-sets for players the more they play World versus World. Those skills, says Colin, "make your character more beneficial, but they don't make your character crucially more powerful. They won't enhance your strength or harm output. They just make you more functional."

The 2nd reason: Arenanet need to enhance the server rewards for fighting beyond a weekly win scenario. It will take the form of a brand new method "that offers reasons for your world to be fighting at any given time, rather than across the week," explains Colin. "You can be on day 6, & you're losing the week, although we want to give a reason for you to hold the region, even for an hour."

Guild Wars 2 success is heartwarming. It's an MMO without a subscription fee; & without an related gratis-to-play gouging. Its success denotes it can get better; & if it gets better, it may get more effective. The Guild Wars 2 team are not chasing growth for growth's sake; their first priority is to keep their existing players happy.

"Our focus is: how do we make it so the core group of players have the greatest attainable experience they can. If we continue to develop on that, that core group will be more excited, they'll play more often, and maybe some of those who took a break will come back."

That sounds like an invitation.

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