Guild Wars 2 Developer Has Bold Plans For 2013

Last year was a good one for ArenaNet, more than three million copies of Guild Wars 2 have been sold and a large part of the feedback has been very positive. Even the user score on Metacritic is sat at 8.0 (I know amazing right?).

But this is a new year, and for any MMO to stay relevant, you need content, lots of content. ArenaNet though, aren’t going to be caught napping on their success. Just released on their website is a plan for the coming months, giving a sneak peak in to what is coming up for residents of Tyria.

I can’t claim to have too much affection for Guild Wars 2, or the first one for that matter. I lost interest very quickly with it, mostly due to the skill unlock system and I having a domestic, but there is plenty to like about the game, if I’m honest I was really surprised to have given up so early.

So maybe you’re like me and you’re looking for a reason to avoid talking to real people that you have to pretend to like, or maybe you just need some more content to add to something that has already cost you friends and relationships. Either way, there are big plans on the horizon.

One thing that sets GW2 apart from many other MMOs, is that it actually encourages the players to work together rather than cutting each other’s throats for a mineral patch or a rare spawn enemy. It genuinely does work, and given that any player can resurrect any other, along with being able to join in on powerful foes without worrying about who tagged it first, it makes for a much nicer playing environment.

My favourite thing by far though, is the dynamic questing. ArenaNet are being vocal about having big plans for their “evolving world” and I say more power to them. I will play devil’s advocate for a second and tell you that I felt they came up a little short on their promises for these world changing events. They were fun, some of them pretty epic, but I never once felt it had any real effect on the persistent world. Other than a merchant may not sell you anything for the next twenty minutes or so.

You can find grumpy corner shop owners in England without too much trouble, it’s not world changing, it’s inconvenient at worst. But if they say they can improve and work on this, then consider me interested, it’s by far the most exciting concept I have seen in an MMO since Blizzard came up with “phasing”.

ArenaNet wants us to play together, and it seems most of their plans for this year revolves around expanding on this. In their lengthy outlining of this on their website.

They depict a reward system that enables you to gain the most powerful gear by playing the way you want to. To make it worth your while to explore all of Tyria. Using daily achievements to funnel players to certain points on the map, they can make sure players are always running in to each other, this being the strength of MMOs. They also promise to give guilds achievements and activities to strive for together.

Then there is PvP, In GW2 you have WvW (world vs world) and your normal small team based games. The plan for improving this seems a little more vague, other than the talk of reducing or completely stopping “culling” (I confess I have no idea what this refers to).

There was mention of obtaining PvP unique skills, I do like the sound of this and admittedly it is something I had always wished they had done in WoW. Rather than trying to balance everything around PvP, which generally meant PvE came off a bit wonky at times.

Finally with mention of competitive gaming, the creation of setting up your own custom games and rules for practice, whilst also being able to watch competitive matches is a great step. Utilities like this might seem obvious, but so often they are overlooked.

A few more points mentioned but not expanded on are as follows.

• Leaderboards on our website where you can compare your abilities with other players to find out who is the best in the world.
• Expanded and re-designed encounters for bosses in dungeons and the open world.
• New types of achievements which tie into the new systems of achievement rewards.
• Continuing to improve the security of the game fighting botters and hackers, as well as improving the games stability by addressing bugs as quickly as possible when they are reported.
• Identifying existing parts of the game that can be improved and made more fun/exciting, and investing the time to ensure everything we’ve built really shines as we move forward.
• Improving the new player experience to make it easier for new players to learn how to play GW2, enter the game world, and more quickly learn the game without being overwhelmed.
• Improving the “looking for group” tool to make it easier to find other players to play with in the game.
• The improvements and fixes to the Fractal dungeons, detailed in Isaiah Cartwright’s blog post here.

 

One more thing that just appeared recently was Guesting, this comes just as they announce that free world transfers are to be stopped. Guesting will allow you to play on another world with friends in your region whilst still allowing you to be tied to your world. Any further transfers after January 28^th will come with a fee in gems.

Is the future bright for ArenaNet and GW2? I think I will withhold judgement until a bit more detail arises, I’m a touch sceptical when it comes to promises from developers, especially since ArenaNet have yet to sort out the performance issues in the game. GW2 remains heavily CPU bound and even with an overclocked i7 3770K, it still struggles quite a bit in places. Also, there is still no real support for SLI setups, I know a lot of people don’t have these, but still, the option would be nice. No 64bit client as of yet either (no idea why devs don’t do this) and it took WoW seven years to actually release one.

There is no denying they have made some great leaps forward in the genre, I don’t think they have quite realised those ideas fully quite yet and I think there are clearly some kinks to work out, but I am still excited to see where it goes from here.