Masters of Guild Wars

Guild Wars does not charge you a monthly fee, but hopes to keep you interested enough so that you'll buy a new campaign or add-on at full price every half-year. That concept turned out quite profitable for Guild Wars 1, but the task ahead in 2008 for Arenanet (owned by Korean MMOG giant nc soft) is how to make players switch from Guild Wars 1 to the planned Guild Wars 2. Jörg Langer talked to company heads Jeff Strain and Mike O'Brien (who co-founded the company that became Arenanet together with Patrick Wyatt), and also to Ben Miller, project lead of the GW1 add-on Eye of the North.

GG: Mike and Jeff, you are calling Guild Wars a “competitive” online role playing game. Do you see a trend or do you have market research saying that gamers from more traditional, Everquest style games are coming over to your side? Or do you mainly address a brand new audience?

Mike O’Brien: I think we have both audiences in the game. When I talk to people who are really hard core role players in Guild Wars, they say “I love the role playing aspects of Guild Wars, but I don’t think many people like to play the PvP aspects you’ve built in”. And then I talk to big PvP fans and they go: “Oh I love Guild Wars, but I’m not sure that anybody plays it as a role playing game.” That’s funny, but that’s also one of the things that obviously didn’t work out too well. We attract both audiences, but they don’t interact a lot. There is no “bridge” that really attracts role players to PvP and vice versa. In Guild Wars 1 we have this very fair, competitive PvP environment. By that, we have supported players who want to play it as a kind of e-sport. We have top guilds that we have flown around the world for attending competitions, we have given away hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash prices to top guilds. And all that stuff was brand new to role playing games, we were literally pushing competition into it.

GG: Also, the idea for players or guilds competing internationally was new.

Mike O’Brien: Exactly! In traditional MMOs, you could play only with a small group of people on a certain server. If we wanted to have competition, everybody would have to be able to compete against anybody else in the world. That was one of the things that we had to build into the game as a fundamental technology. I think that Guild Wars still is the only truly international online role playing game. But what we should have done is leading players more comfortably into PvP play. In Guild Wars 1, if I am a good role player and go into PvP for the first time, and my team has four players in it, I am taking up on of that slots – thereby taking it away from somebody who is better at PvP than I am. If that team loses, they will say “we lost because of this newbie learning how to play!” And that’s not a nice experience for me!

GG: So what do you plan to do in Guild Wars 2 to lower that barrier?

Mike O’Brien: We will have two kinds of PvP. We still have the e-sport kind, which is a fair, level playing field, and very competitive. But we also introduce “world PvP”. In Guild Wars 2, you’ll be playing in one persistent world. And, periodically, your world will connect to different worlds. And we’ll be competing for shared resources that can benefit our world. Even if I am a role player, I can go out there and help defend my world. If I am a low level character, I could help protect a trade route. If I am a high level player, I could try to take a key fortress. There will be a great variety. The nice thing about this form of PvP is that going out there is always better than not going out there. If I am a low level player, still, me going out there helps my team. And in fact, they can invite me and let me act as a higher level player, by one of them taking me under his wings. So temporarily, my character will rise up and fight better. But you don’t even need to form a team, you don’t need a special PvP character: In your world, everybody you meet is on your side. So you can just go into the mists between worlds, and start to hack away! If a hundred of the people of your world are out there, that’s great, but if 200 are, that’s even better. And I think that this is a much more casual form of PvP than in Guild Wars 1. And because of this system, the high end PvP, the structured Guild-vs-Guild, doesn’t need to be a bridge between role players and competitive players. So we can make that kind of PvP even more competitive! For example, in Guild Wars 1, you need to unlock certain features and maps when starting to go PvP. Which is a good thing for new players. But the ultra competitive players do not want that, they want to immediately have access to everything, they want to win or lose entirely based on their playing skill. By peeling PvP into two different modes, we can make each of those more appealing to the needs of the different populations.

 

GG: With GW1: Eye of the North, you have introduced the Hall of Monuments, and you have announced that players will be able to somehow transfer these accomplishments into Guild Wars. How will that work, Ben?

Ben Miller: In Eye of the North, the Hall of Monuments is meant to immortalize all the GW1 players’ accomplishments. Things that have taken them hundreds of hours to do. We do not want them to lose all that when we release Guild Wars 2. So the Hall tracks the Titles that you’ve done, the Campaigns you’ve completed, the Heroes you’ve collected, the Mini Pets you’ve gotten. Your high-end armor and weapons. And all this is going to be inherited by your Guild Wars 2 character! There, you’ll be able to look different from a player who just started his career with GW2.

Mike O’Brien: Let me add this just so that there is no misunderstanding: Our goal is not that you’re skipping over all the fun content of Guild Wars 2. Our goal is that you’ll be recognized by other players for what you’ve done in the past. If you’ve been accomplishing a lot of things for a lot of time in GW1, you’ll be a veteran in GW2. People should be able to look at you and say: “Wow, that really is an old timer, he’s been playing from the beginning.” You’ll be standing out!

GG: But being such a member of the “Old Guard” won’t catapult me to level 10 or something like that?

Mike O’Brien: That’s not our intention. We want other players in Guild Wars 2 to know, whether you’re level 1 or level 10, that you’ve accomplished great things in the past. And you’ll have access to some cool toys that other people probably won’t have access to. Like a really cool pet or a really cool companion that has a rare, interesting skill.

GG: ArenaNet and Guild Wars seem to have become the biggest competition for Blizzard’s World Of WarCraft. Why did you leave Blizzard in the first place, where you had big responsibilities?

Mike O’Brien: There are a couple of reasons. At that time, in 2000, I was heading up the WarCraft 3 team, Jeff was heading up the World of WarCraft team and Patrick Wyatt [the third founder, --ed.] was heading up the Battlenet group. The three of us have known each other for a long time and really wanted to be able to work together on one great project. So that was one of our motivations. But we also had two visions. We had been working on the Battlenet, and at that time it was being just used to provide online connectivity for retail games. We had a vision of making a gaming infrastructure for games that would be specifically designed for the Internet. What could you do if you could assume that everybody had to connect to the Internet in order to play the game? How much more compelling and dynamic would that game be! You wouldn’t have a CD full of static content that could never be changed again, but would stream just the files player would need as they go from from place to place.

GG: And the second vision?

Mike O’Brien: The second vision was about breaking with tradition. Jeff and I wanted to be a lot more innovative than we could be at Blizzard. Jeff was working on a role playing game and tried to get strategy elements and competition into it. When players spend hundreds of hours to build up their character, what do they want do do? They want to compete against their friends! But a game like Diablo was not remotely set up to allow for competition. And I was looking at the strategy side and wanted to get more role playing in. If a strategy game feels dead, if it feels like you’re just moving pieces across a board, than it’s boring. You need to feel like you’re fighting over something that you care about! It needs to feel like a world, which you can connect to, which you are defending. So we wanted to create a game that would cross the boundaries between those two genres. But we had no idea how to achieve that at that time.

GG: Why would that be difficult?

Mike O’Brien: A role playing is about your strength depends on how long you play it. That’s the complete opposite to a strategy game, where your strength depends on how well you play the game.

Guild Wars Prophecies was the original campaign, spawning two further campaings and one major add-on, Eye of the North.

 

 GG: Jeff, you were heading World of WarCraft from the beginning – why was it not possible to include Mike's and your idea into that upcoming game at Blizzard?

Jeff Strain: Companies often find themselves in a situation where they have to make products that meet what their players’ expectations are, based on what they’ve done in the past. It’s very difficult for a company with an entrenched history to make radical changes or take big risks on something that is highly innovative. Mike and Patrick and I spend a lot of time talking about what could be if we were able to do something that was built from the ground up as a completely new experience. It became quickly apparent to us that because of Blizzard’s established history with its existing franchises, that they were not in the position to try something radically new. Blizzard has always done a great job of taking an existing play mechanic and polishing it up, and that works well for them. But we really wanted to push harder and take some chances. That was the reason we felt we should do that in the context of a brand new company instead of try to make an existing company change it’s course.

GG: So in March 2000, you’ve founded Triforge and quickly renamed it to ArenaNet and had a go.

Jeff Strain: It gave us the opportunity to just explore where we wanted to explore. And I think Guild Wars reflects that, mainly in good ways, but also in some ways that didn’t work out. Anytime you’re being innovative and make bold decisions to try new things, sometimes things work out spectacularly well for you. That is what happened to Guild Wars, on the whole. But you can also look back at things that you could have done better. I think the best thing is to be in the position to make a successor to a a game that was built to be innovative, and that is just what we are doing right now with Guild Wars 2. We can now look at business models and design directions, we can avoid the things that didn’t work out so well and can reinforce what did work out well. For those reasons, we’re really excited about Guild Wars 2, it will be the ultimate expression of what we wanted to achieve with Guild Wars.

GG: When you finally announced a release date for Guild Wars 1 in early 2003, you had already been acquired by nc Soft. It’s hard to believe that there was no clash of ideas – at that time, nc soft had been successful for years with their visions for the MMO genre.

Mike O’Brien: Let me talk a little bit about the time between founding our new company and the acquisition by nc Soft. We were doing a lot of things that were radically different. We felt it was important to have the freedom of following our ideas. We funded our company through venture capital. We were doing things that were shocking to existing companies. We were building an online game and were not going to charge any monthly fees for it! And there were no comparable games to our game which the investors could look at to see what we were doing better. Is it a strategy game? Is it role playing? Also, the way in that we were developing: We started an alpha test as early as 2002. So a lot about Guild Wars was untraditional. We could take the game to certain level, using venture capital, but we knew that, eventually, we would need a strong industry partner, also. A partner who not only can give you funding but also marketing, and who can publish the game. We kept talking to all the different companies out there. And I have to say, a lot of those companies really didn’t get the idea of Online, or were scared of it. When we met nc Soft, it was the complete opposite. We sat down and started to tell them some of the radical ideas we were working on, and they were going: “Yes, I can see that if you do this, that will lead you to that. And it will be so much better than this.” And we kept saying, “yes, that is the next step in our presentation”. Everybody at nc Soft understands Online. And nc Soft is a company that fundamentally believes that it has to take risks. nc Soft is going to succeed if they can broaden what people think about online games, and if they can bring more and more people into online gaming. So it was a perfect match.

The 2nd Campaign, Factions, introduced Asian themes and cities. It firmly established Guild Wars as one of the major MMOGs in the world.

 

 

GG: Jeff, let’s talk about the art and graphics in Guild Wars 1 and 2. Obviously, World of WarCraft is very successful with its cartoonish fantasy look. What do think, is there a universal form of art that appeals two both Western and Eastern audiences?

Jeff Strain: First and foremost, we have a very artistic graphics team here at ArenaNet. Their goal was not to achieve realism. Through the use of illuminating and lighting techniques, through the over-the-top scale of the architecture, they embrace the concept of a fantasy world. Even though our style is a lot more detailed than that of WoW and more realistic in terms of colors and textures, the overall composition leaves no doubt that this is a fantasy world. One of the biggest challenges any art team has in the fantasy genre is finding and adopting a style that is unique to your world. There’s a lot of fantasy games out there, and a lot of them look the same. There’s this core, Tolkien inspired fantasy aspect that a lot of games don’t deviate too far from. So you have to create a style that people will see as new. Also, some of our campaigns are themed around an existing culture – Factions has a strong Asian feel to it, Nightfall has a strong Northern African feel. We are not trying to reproduce specific cultures, but we want to use certain elements and themes of different cultures to give a stronger feel of identity to the locations.

GG: But are there deliberate decisions of using graphics that appeal to Western and Eastern audiences at the same time? One could argue that American or European players might prefer art that looks like High Fantasy, whereas the majority of Asian players might prefer a style influenced by how typical Mangas look.

Jeff Strain: We are not trying to adopt a style that is appealing to any one culture or region. You could say that the art of Guild Wars was created to look like it was created by an art team out of Washington. But we tried to make it iconic enough and fantasy-like enough that people see it for its unique style. And not like it was meant to look like it was developed in Asia, for example.

GG: How many active players does Guild Wars have? 3.5 million is a number that is circulating. And also, how do players streams move from the original game to Nightfall, and from there to Factions, and now hopefully to Eye of the North?

Jeff Strain: We don’t share the numbers of players, but I can share some general trends. One of the things we’re watching very closely is: How many gamers play every day? Whatever the size of your total user base is, that’s the important number. Since April 2005, when we released the original Guild Wars, the number of players per day went consistently upwards. That has been something of a surprise to us, because Guild Wars was not built to be a sticky game! It was always our expectation that we’d see a large number of players in the months following the release of a new campaign, and that this number would drop over time until the release of the next expansion. That is not at all how it has happened! Our player base stays consistent even between two releases. One of the hidden benefits of our business model is that players don’t have to feel that they are married to the game. You don’t have to think about staying married or getting divorced in any given month – which is the case with all subscription based MMOs. You can put the game in the shelf and then can come back later on. While players-per-day-numbers have been going up constantly, we do see spikes of people coming back into the game when we release new content.

GG: But that will only work economically as long as you are providing new expansions or add-ons on a regular base – otherwise, you will not make money from the existing players.

Jeff Strain: Actually, we have been surprised by the longevity of the campaigns! The original Guild Wars of April 2005 is still a very strong selling title, there is a lot of new players coming in on a day-to-day basis. The reasons for that, I think, are the ongoing strength of the community and the fact that we support the game so very well and so constantly. Even between commercial expansions, there are new updates constantly. And they are not cosmetic changes, but real, meaty, new features and content.

In Nightfall, the third Guild Wars campaign, players are visiting landscapes that are resembling North African regions. The first three campaigns are stand-alones, you don't need to play them in a certain order.

 

GG: Guild Wars has introduced a new kind of business model into the Massively Multiplayer genre. Many other games use the subscription model, many casual MMOs try to make money by being essentially free but charging for better equipment or special moves. What do you think will be the major business model in MMO gaming in the future?

Jeff Strain: I hope the answer is: all of them! The business model behind GW was to break this notion in the industry that all MMOs must be subscription based. But we’re not saying that there must be no subscription models. There’s room for all kinds of business models, and for all kinds of games. We hope the overwhelming success of our game is a message to all those developers in the industry to innovate – not only their gameplay, but also their business model. The model must be complimentary to the design of their game, and vice versa. We certainly couldn’t take GW and say, “from tomorrow, it will be subscription based!” You can’t simply adopt our model and use it for World of WarCraft. And you cannot take the WoW model and use it for Guild Wars. What we hope to see over the next five years in the industry is all kind of experimentation, because it is definitely not a one-size-fits-all kind of genre.

GG: What about the free MMOs, where you only pay for better equipment, meaning: when you really like the game and spend more time with it.

Jeff Strain: That’s a great model for those kind of games. The design of those games itself supports the business model. But if you’re probing whether we find those other business models attractive: We won’t change how Guild Wars works! Our model is: You pay once for it and then never again!

Mike O’Brien: When we started, everybody in the industry told us we were crazy. Our point was, “there’s room for much more.” I think that players reward innovation, they like new ideas. I am happy today to see that lots of different developers are doing lots of different business models, and I wish them luck, and I think that most of them will succeed.

GG: But you could imagine to also try different approaches to what you’re doing right now?

Mike O’Brien: Do we find other business models exciting? Of course we do. But what we really believe is: Players want a game that is strongly supportive. And we’ve seen it time and again in this industry that companies spread themselves too thin. That instead of doing a great job with one game, they’re doing five games. They’re coming out with one game, and shortly after they’ll have to stop supporting it in order to do the next. That’s not us! ArenaNet has grown to 135 employees now, and we’re here to make Guild Wars the best game in the universe. Guild Wars has a certain business model: Buy it once and play it for as long as you like. Guild Wars 2 will have the same model.

Eye of the North is the only one of the four Guild Wars installments that is a add-on in the true sense of the meaning.

GG: You’ve already announced that Guild Wars 1 will still be actively supported by its own team when the successor has been released. But there will come the time, when, after all, Guild Wars 1 will be over.

Jeff Strain: Our goal is to make Guild Wars 2 so phenomenally cool that no one will even consider not to play it! If we succeed in that, then we expect the vast majority of players is going to play Guild Wars 2. However, some will be willing to continue GW1. And as long as there are people who play Guild Wars 1, we will keep that game going. We’re not going to shut down servers and kick thousands of people out! There may come a time where we will not keep adding new content to GW1, though.

GG: So the last 5.000 players will still be running around in GW1 in 2050.

Jeff Strain: If they want to play it, we’ll keep the servers running.

Interview (c) 2007 Jörg Langer