Guild Wars 2 -- the even-more-massively-multiplayer sequel to ArenaNet and NCsoft's smash hit massively multiplayer role-playing game -- is coming. And if you ask us, it can't get here quick enough. We recently had the chance to pick Guild Wars 2 lead designer Eric Flannum's brain about the game, and he also had a few insightful things to say about the MMO scene as a whole.


GameSpy: You've unveiled all but two of the game's eight classes. So far, we have the Elementalist, Necromancer, Ranger, Warrior, Guardian, and Thief. Do you have any hints about the last two? Will we see the return of the Mesmer!?
Eric Flannum: We've given hints out, so I think it's safe for me to say that there is one brand new profession and one returning profession yet to be revealed.
GameSpy: How persistent are the game's dynamic events? To use one of your common examples, if a bunch of raiders wreck a village, and nobody saves it, what happens next? Do players have to group up and retake it by force, or do the raiders eventually "reset" and leave the village on their own, or what?
Eric Flannum: Events are fully persistent. In the example you give, the raiders will never reset on their own, unless players intervene.

GameSpy: What was the thought process behind removing the original Guild Wars' popular henchman/hero system? I'd say it was one of the game's strongest and most well-executed mechanics.
Eric Flannum: The henchman/hero system in Guild Wars is certainly one of the coolest things about the game, but it just didn't fit with what we were trying to accomplish in Guild Wars 2. First, we wanted Guild Wars 2 to be a persistent-world MMO with big, epic encounters. With a henchman system, that would mean that each player in the game is potentially running around with the equivalent of four other players. This would just kill system performance unless we optimized the game specifically around this feature. We also wanted to do away with restrictive profession roles so that there was no more "looking for healer" involved in putting together a party; instead, people can just play the game with their friends. Going this route also eliminated our need for the henchman/hero system, which exists primarily to fill missing party roles.
GameSpy: Is Gwen -- the original game's poor-victimized-child-turned-badass-mage and pseudo-mascot -- gonna show up anywhere?
Eric Flannum: Guild Wars 2 takes place 250 years after the first game, so Gwen will not be putting in an appearance. However, one of Gwen's descendants is Logan Thackeray, who leads a group called the Seraph in the human capital of Divinity's Reach.
GameSpy: We'd really love to hear some concrete details about the player-versus-player combat -- seeing as how it's called Guild Wars, and all!
Eric Flannum: We'll be releasing more details on PvP in the future, but I can say that we have two basic types of PvP: competitive PvP and World vs. World. First, we have what we call competitive PvP, and there are two primary ways to engage in it. Players can join games using a server browser, very similar to what you might experience in a first-person shooter. You can join games in progress, so you won't have to wait for auto-matching if you want to jump in for some quick PvP. For those who are more serious about their PvP, we have a tournament system that matches premade teams of players against each other. It's important to note that competitive PvP features no power progression, so everyone is on equal footing.

Then we have our World vs. World PvP, or WvW. This form of PvP features a massive war between three different worlds (what you might call servers or shards in other games), across four large maps. These maps are available all the time, and don't have player limits, so it's possible to have battles involving hundreds of players at a time. The game involves capturing and holding keeps and other strategic locations, and plays out like a giant strategy game where each player is an individual participant.

GameSpy: Here's kind of a high-concept question: A lot of MMOs are – well, how can we put it? They're World of Warcraft copycats. What is it about this genre that causes it to (largely) stagnate for years on end?
Eric Flannum: Although I'm not sure I'd go so far as saying most MMOs are "World of Warcraft copycats," I think some amount of stagnation is definitely going on in the MMO genre. Having gone through development on the first game and with what we've experienced developing Guild Wars 2, there's actually a pretty simple explanation for this: Developing an MMO is hard. I mean, really hard.

I've worked on a lot of different types of games, and while all of them present challenges, none of them compare to the difficulty of developing an MMO. You have complex network models to deal with. You have to create enough content and systems to support players getting not just 20 or 40 hours (which is a long time for most games), but hundreds or thousands of hours of play out the game. You have to deal with the community aspect of the game. The economics and balance of the game become much more involved in an environment where you have thousands of players interacting. The list goes on and on.

You don't see a lot of companies taking many chances, because developing such a complex game is not only hard, but also very expensive. Add to this the fact that you have a clear "number one" game that's making a ton of money. From that viewpoint, it becomes very easy for a company to become conservative and not take any chances that could cause the game to take longer to develop – or even risk it becoming a failure when it does launch. At ArenaNet, we see things quite differently; we think that the only way to compete in the MMO market is by taking risks. If we can deliver a fun and unique gameplay experience, then we believe we can attract many more players than we would by playing it safe.
GameSpy: To follow up on that, why do you think it's taking this genre so long to move beyond the basic "click on exclamation mark, do quest, get reward" model?
Eric Flannum: I think we've certainly seen some games dabble in alternate forms of content, but we haven't seen many of them really "go for it." What I mean by that is, you often see quests as a primary form of content with something else as a secondary form. This means that you're taking less risks, but it also means that you're structuring your entire game around a type of content that everyone else is using. With that structure in place, it's very hard to break away from many of the same conventions that those other games use... and so you run the risk of having your game feel very similar to other quest-based games.

This all stems from MMO developers being very risk-averse. Once we see more games taking chances and succeeding (and I certainly hope we do), I think we'll see a lot more MMOs that aren't based on standard quest systems.