Guild Wars 2 Interview
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Q. You mention in the manifesto that Guild Wars 2 isn't designed to "suck your life away" - do you think certain MMOs, like World of Warcraft, are engineered to be as addictive as possible?
Mike O'Brien: I'm not going to speak specifically about any one MMO, but I definitely think that there's a whole batch of MMOs out there that are crafted to have very precise reward schedules, where a lot of the focus of the game is on anticipating the next reward. And that's where it starts to turn into grinding - having to play monotonously to get to the next reward. Throughout ArenaNet's history we've been focused on the moment-to-moment gameplay. Players should be able to get to the fun part of the game as soon as they sit down and play. Let's give players something meaningful in half an hour.
Eric Flannum: We released this graph which shows the typical MMO levelling progression as a kind of ever-increasing curve, the higher the level you are the more time it takes you to get to the next level, to the point where, in old school MMOs certainly, you're taking a week to go up a level. Our graph shows a similar kind of progression right at the beginning and then a flattening off. There's a hypothetical time period after which levelling simply takes too long and we never want to go past that. We're tweaking the numbers, but we're thinking it won't be much more than an hour and a half between levels, or somewhere in that neighbourhood.
We want our levels to come frequently enough that you get that sense of clear progression and accomplishment. but we don't ever want it to be the case that that sense of progression isn't easily obtained.
