Guild Wars 2 Interview
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GamesBeat: Can you give us an idea of what the development team does in the final weeks leading to launch on Guild Wars 2?
Mike Zadorojny: Right now, most of my team is playing the game. We spent all this time building it, and now we're making sure that it's pitched right and polished. We do these daily play sessions where we'll pick a dungeon on a map and we'll spend a couple of hours in the dungeon playing through in groups and going through the content. We give feedback to the dungeon guys. And for the rest of the day, we spend it playing one of these maps. We go through, and we look for things that are broken, things that don't feel right, things that players might run into problems with. And we continue to give feedback to each other. We're trying to make sure that this game is going to be the best possible thing that can it be when we launch it. We're just spending a lot of time in the game. Playing it. Looking at balance. Making sure the events are working. Things like that.
GamesBeat: What does someone like a concept artist do at this point during development? Where do you put staff members that don't necessarily have an ongoing responsibility right now?
Zadorojny: Well, it's the same thing. They're helping us make sure that the game is accessible to anybody. There are some projects that we're already looking toward postlaunch, too. We know we're going to be working on live content. We have a live team already getting situated. So some of those guys are already looking at that. But at the same time, they're also helping us make sure the game is polished.
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GamesBeat: These seem like two pretty big things to not have where you want them so close to launch. Would you say now that version 1.0 of Guild Wars 2 is exactly where you want it to be?
Zadorojny: Well, we're perfectionists. We always want to keep pushing the boundaries. You give us another week and we'll keep working with that, but then we'll ask for something more. We are where our content, when we launch Guild Wars 2 on day one, it's going to be a playable, successful experience and enjoyable for players who get their hands on the game. It wasn't a matter of being concerned that it wasn't ready to show. It was more like.our internal quality bar, where we want things to be, it just wasn't ready for that time frame.
