Guild Wars 2 – Design Manifesto by Mike O’Brien

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

ArenaNet has opened up a new blog with Mike O’brien posting a huge article about their perspective on Guild Wars and where they see Guild Wars 2 going. Included are new screenshots as well!

“We’re not going to rest on our laurels now. We started this company to innovate and bring players new experiences. Guild Wars 2 is the perfect game for Guild Wars players, but it’s not just the same game repeated again. We took this opportunity to question everything, and we have some exciting answers for you today.

The first thing you should know about Guild Wars 2 is that, this time around, there’s no question that it’s an MMORPG. It’s an enormous, persistent, living, social world, filled with a wide variety of combat and non-combat activities. There’s so much depth here that you’re never going to run out of new things to discover.

So if you love MMORPGs, you should check out Guild Wars 2. But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee.”

See the entire article here: Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto then head over to our forums to discuss it here: New ArenaNet Blog – Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto

Guild Wars 2 Screenshots:

Guild Wars 2 Q&A Part 2 | ZAM

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

The folks over at ZAM have finally put up the much awaited part 2 of their Q&A with ArenaNet’s Mike O’Brien, Daniel Dociu and Jeff Grubb. Click here to check it out.

Want to share your thoughts or speculation? Head over to Shew’s thread, where he was  kind enough to pick out some of the most interesting bits of information:

- The world is zoned.
- Instances are used for story-telling, but the outposts and environment are persistent.
- After dealing with individual conflicts, the races come together and eventually fight in Orr.
- The story is broken down into acts.
- PvP will have some sort of ranking system.
- GW2 will use the Havoc physics engine.

If you have yet to read part 1, see that story here. Thanks to Shew and Sabre Wolf for bringing this to our attention.

Guild Wars 2 Q&A Part 1 | ZAM

Monday, September 21st, 2009

The folks over at ZAM have just put up part 1 of a Q&A with ArenaNet’s Jeff Grubb, Daniel Dociu and Mike O’Brien. Nothing ground breaking, but some more interesting insight into the development of Guild Wars 2 and the decisions they have made along the way.

“Normally in this industry, if you’re working on a new game, you just keep it secret until you’re ready to talk,” O’Brien said. “With Guild Wars I, we had been releasing content regularly, [so] we had to tell our fans we’re going to stop working on new campaigns for Guild Wars I and do Guild Wars 2 instead now. So we announced it before we even started working on it. It killed us to have to be developing in the dark, because obviously we’re making cool stuff and we want people to see what we’re working on. But we wanted to get the game to the point where it really shows what it is.”

Read the rest of the interview here, then head over to Sabre Wolf’s thread to discuss the story.

[EDIT: Part 2 is up, here.]

Guild Wars 2 | MMORPG

Monday, September 14th, 2009

MMORPG.com has up a Guild Wars 2 interview with Mike O’Brien, Studio Head and Co-founder for you to read through:

“We’ve spent two years re-writing from the ground up,” said Mike. “We’ve rebuilt and enhanced our game engine. We have a radically enhanced graphics engine, day/night cycles, new physics, animation and movement through the world.”

You can read the full interview here and then head over to our forum thread by Tr0n in our Tyrian Assembly: MMORPG Guild Wars 2 Preview Interview

The Future of Tyria: A Guild Wars 2 Interview | TenTonHammer

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Ten Ton Hammer has an interview up with Jeff Grubb, Mike O’Brien, and Daniel Dociu. Thanks to Shew for finding it and giving us a great summary of the key point in our Tyrian Assembly forum. Points touched on in the interview include the upcoming “Fall of Ascalon” Novel, story and lore, PvP, art direction and more:

There will be places that we’ve been calling ‘legacy sites’ in design as we go through the maps. So this was a place that was important place in Guild Wars 1 – what’s there now? How has it changed? Who’s living there? Are there ruins? People who are fans of Guild Wars 1 will see areas and say, “this was a location that I remember well” while new players will say, “wow, that’s really cool, I wonder if there’s a story behind it.” That sort of thing helps us both with old players and new.

Check out the full interview at TenTonHammer.com then head to our forums for discussion: The Future of Tyria: An Exclusive Guild Wars 2 Interview.

More Guild Wars 2 Interviews and Previews

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Pause.com was able to talk to Mike O’Brien about the events system in their Guild Wars 2 Exclusive: A Few Questions with Mike O’Brien:

Mike O’Brien: Events have a feeling similar to what you’re describing, but it’s not schedule-driven because we don’t want the world to have a fixed schedule. Instead, events respond to what the players are doing in the world. If the players raid the centaur camp and clear out the centaurs, then there won’t be a centaur attack on the garrison. But if the players let the centaur population get out of control, then the centaurs will become emboldened and start doing raids.

Head to our forums to discuss here.

Gamedrone.net also put up a Complete Guild Wars 2 Preview so you can catch up on all the latest.

Guild Wars 2 runs on a heavily modified Guild Wars engine that features a number of notable improvements beyond the requisite visual upgrades. Chief amongst these innovations is a completely different world design that is centres itself around a persistent open world, rather than the instanced world design of the original games.

Head to our forums to discuss this preview here.

06/28/09 – A Letter To Our Fans

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

 A Letter To Our Fans

By Mike O’Brien

To our fans,

There have been some published rumors over the past few days about Guild Wars 2 delays, and I’m writing you today to set the record straight.

You’ve all seen announcements about restructuring at NCsoft West, and it’s natural to wonder whether that restructuring impacts ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 development. In fact, the reason NCsoft West is restructuring itself is so that the company can put all of its focus into its top-tier games like Guild Wars 2. Our team continues to grow, and has the strong support and financial backing we need to achieve our goal of making Guild Wars 2 the best online role-playing game ever created.

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