Guild Wars Mini-Interview #39
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Q: Players who have participated in the last couple of betas have seen a few changes in the interface. Will the interface from the March BWE be the final one we will see on release as well?
A: The interface that you saw in March was only another one of many in our iterative design process. (Iterative design) means that you design something, and then analyze it, redesign it, analyze again, design yet again, and so forth. You (iterate) concept after concept and of course you are always moving towards what will be the final product, be it art, programming, animation, a mission map, the details of a quest, storyline expansions, spell effects and statistics. even a draft for the Knowledge Base or an interview.
Iterative design isn't always a straight path. Sometimes it involves taking a genuine detour in order to investigate a potential new concept. For an example of this, you might consider the various ways that your characters have stored items over the last several months. You may remember when there was one single large inventory window, just a holding page for a mass of unsorted items. Another month, you had one small and three or four smaller inventory bags, which was both good (for sorting) and not so good for sales and trading, since the bags were rather cumbersome to use. Now you have one bag at a modest size and the ability to acquire or purchase additional inventory bags. The newest system helps make sales and trade go ever so much more smoothly, as you are not required to sort through your bags in order to conduct a transaction.
In short, the interface has undergone major changes since the March BWE, and will probably have more changes before release. As you know, few things are permanent or (set in stone) when a game is in the beta phase. We're going to be looking at the feedback that we receive from players as a result of the April BWE before we consider any UI feature to be permanent.
