Will Tuttle, Editor in Chief: So Ryan, you just informed me that you'll be out of the office for about six months after Guild Wars 2 comes out. I had absolutely no idea this game was even on your radar. What gives?
Ryan Scott, Executive Editor: I was obsessed -- obsessed -- with the first Guild Wars like no other game I've ever played. I don't even want to think about how many hours I sank into that game. The awkward postscript is that I had a bit of a public meltdown when I finally quit, which got picked up by a bunch of popular Guild Wars forums. In retrospect, I apologize for being such a ragenaut. But anyway, I'm keenly interested in this sequel, especially now that I've had a chance to sit down and play a bit of it.
Will Tuttle: A quick Google search found this gem of a quote: "It's like running an Olympic marathon, only to discover that your ultimate reward is a punch in the face." And did you really play for 394 hours? Good lord man, that is dedication. So anyway, before we get into what's new, could you share what you liked and didn't like about the first game? I mean, since you had close to 400 hours played, I'm going to assume it wasn't all bad. And as someone who's sunk over 100 hours into multiple offline RPG, I'm dying to know why you didn't tire of it earlier.
Ryan Scott: Guild Wars is unique in that it offers a plethora of options, but forces you to really narrowly define how your character works. You have a primary class (my main character was a ranger), and while you're in the hub towns, you can switch your secondary class to any of the other classes (warrior, monk, mesmer, etc.). This combination dictates which weapons and skills you're able to use; each class has dozens of collectible skills, but you can only take eight of them into an instanced quest area. So you really have to drill down with regard to what your strategy encompasses for any given situation. It's vaguely similar to games like Magic: The Gathering. My buddies and I had some pretty wild skill setups for the various sorts of farming and end-game instances that we ran.
As far as what I didn't like... well, Guild Wars is a world of purely instanced areas, dotted with hub towns where you can meet up with and recruit other players. So, as massively multiplayer online games go, Guild Wars fits the mold in a relatively loose sense. And I'm happy that Guild Wars 2 is actually going in a more persistent-world direction.
Will Tuttle: Why did they decide to go in that direction? Was this something a lot of people wanted to see changed?
Ryan Scott: I think it's something that a lot of people got kinda tired of. Guild Wars has more in common with Diablo than with, say, World of Warcraft; I think ArenaNet wanted to develop a real MMO this time. I, for one, am happy to see Guild Wars developed into a persistent-state world. It's one of the few games of its kind with a story I actually bothered to pay attention to.
Will Tuttle: What made the story so good? I've heard you say before that you generally just click through quest text when you play MMOs. And did you get an idea of whether Guild Wars 2 is a continuation of the first game's story, or if it's a standalone sequel?
Ryan Scott: The first Guild Wars' quartet of campaigns each followed very linear story sequences. I mean, you had your dumb kill-10-of-these quests just like in any other MMO, but it was all held together by a specific narrative arc that told a full story. And it was all voiced-acted with cut-scenes and stuff. For whatever reason, it interested me, and made me care what happened to these characters. Guild Wars 2 jumps ahead some two-and-a-half centuries into the world's future, so everything's all different and weird. I suppose all the old characters are dead at this point, so who knows what's going on now. But it's definitely a continuation of Guild Wars' story. I just hope the world's awesome Asia and Africa analogs (introduced in GW1 expansions, but inaccessible in GW2, as far as anyone knows) make it in at some point.
Will Tuttle: Which classes did you check out? Have the classes changed much as far as you could tell?
Ryan Scott: So far, the four announced classes are the warrior, ranger, necromancer, and elementalist (basically a typical mage-type class). I checked out the ranger, since that's my strongest frame of reference; I was pleasantly surprised at some of the baseline mechanics. In the first Guild Wars, you pool points into any of several class-based disciplines, and the ranger has access to -- among others -- a line of Beast Mastery skills. This gives you access to controllable pets, but the problem is, the Beast Mastery tree sucks, and it gimps your character relative to the other available options. In Guild Wars 2, pets are built into the ranger class regardless of what you do; you actually choose a pet during character creation, and it's with you from the start. Since I favor pet classes in MMOs, I am a fan of this change.
Every class also has the ability to self-heal (and, in the ranger's case, heal pets). Since Guild Wars' monk filled the token healer role, I'm curious as to what they'll do with that class (if it's even in this game at all).
Will Tuttle: You mentioned the "kill-10-of-these" quests that we've seen in so many MMOs before. What sorts of quests did you take on in Guild Wars 2?
Ryan Scott: The main thing that grabbed my attention was the dynamic world events. At one point, some giant monster showed up, and all the players in the area could choose to undertake a communal quest to kill it (or, alternatively, ignore it). The idea is similar to the public quests from Warhammer Online -- a good idea from a fairly flawed game. And I'm all for games capitalizing on good ideas from other games.