Guild Wars 2 Interview
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Q: You've mentioned that Guild Wars 2 will be more "persistent" than the first game, perhaps offering less instanced content. How is exactly is it all going to work?
A: In Guild Wars everybody plays in the same world and you can play with anyone you meet who has the game; you never run into the problem where you play on a different server to someone and can't adventure with them.
But a downside is you might never meet people from a random pick-up group you once went adventuring with again, because the world is so enormous.
So in Guild Wars 2 we want to have a big "persistent world" where you're out running into other people as you play. You could be fighting a dragon attacking a tower for instance, and other players will choose to come to your aid, rather than having you shut off from other players in your own instance of the world. Although some elements of the game will remain instanced - like in Guild Wars - such as dungeons, because it's cool and natural for them to be.
But when the world becomes persistent like that, then obviously you don't want everybody in the same instance of the world. If you've got hundreds of thousands of people online, you don't want them all standing in the same valley and tripping over each other.
So Guild Wars 2 will have different "persistent worlds", different servers so to speak, where you can build up a reputation and run into the same people over and over, naturally making friends by bumping into and adventuring with other people.
But what we can do is unify them with our single unified database from Guild Wars, which will allow people to move from server to server, right across worlds.
So we can get all those strengths and yet keep the aspect of a single international game, where anybody can go to any server to play with or compete against anyone in the world.
I think that's an example of how we can take all the things that have made Guild Wars strong in the past and accentuate them by adding these new improvements and new technology in Guild Wars 2.
