Guild Wars 2 Interview
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Lewis B: When we spoke at Eurogamer last year, you mentioned being nervous before the reveal of Guild Wars 2 at gamescom, when showing it for the first time. Do you feel the same apprehension going into each beta weekend?
Colin: Less so now than the very first gamescom; that moment of working on anything for 3+ years of your life and showing it for the first time is incredibly nerve-wracking. I don't think I slept more than an hour or two on the flight to Germany or over the couple days before the show. Once we let people play at gamescom and PAX two years ago, we had a pretty clear sense we were on the right track, and people were getting behind the game we were making.
Back then it was more of a stomach-churning (what happens if no one likes it as much as we do) nervousness. You only get one chance to make a first impression, after all. Now it's more of a nervous excitement as the game edges closer to release with each beta weekend. We went from three years of work before getting feedback to now every month or two we're getting to iterate and then get comments from an insane amount of people in our beta weekends that certainly helps a lot.
Pride and hubris are dangerous things in this industry, though; they've killed many potentially great games in the past when teams assured themselves they had a hit and didn't listen to the feedback. It's important that we're always a little bit nervous about anything we do and come at it with a sense of apprehension and humility. It's not just our game; it's a game we're making for all the fans of Guild Wars 2 as well. Always being respectful of that, and being willing to recognize when decisions we made aren't working, are both extremely important to the success of the game, which is a big part of our development philosophy and strategy.
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Lewis B: Changing subject a little, how does it feel knowing that the industry is already beginning to adopt core concepts from GW2? The announcement of Elder Scrolls Online sees them replicate many of the ideas you've developed (skills linked to weapons being one of them). Is this finally the beginning of a shift in the genre mentality and content?
Colin: Video games is a truly copycat industry; if something is successful, you're going to see it repeated all over the place by other games it's just the nature of the industry. If you look at World of Warcraft, for example, and the massive amount of success that game has had, nearly everything that followed it was a knockoff of most of the core fundamental mechanics and ideas used in WoW. For that matter, WoW itself was mostly a knockoff of the core fundamental ideas from early MMOs, like EverQuest, but finely polished and made more approachable for a casual audience. When the original Guild Wars first came out, the idea of doing an MMO that didn't have a monthly fee was borderline unheard of. People thought we were crazy, and here we are seven years later and there are MMOs without monthly fees everywhere. If the core design ideas of Guild Wars 2 start being adopted by a lot of new games in the genre, it's a sign that our game is a success, so that'd certainly be exciting for us! It might also signify a fundamental shift away from the games using a lot of the core mechanics and content models of the first generation of MMOs (EQ, WoW, Guild Wars, etc.) and into different content models, which is pretty exciting as well.
All that being said, I'd love to say to other developers that part of what is going to make Guild Wars 2 a success is not repeating what has been successful for other MMOs, but instead asking how can we do what other MMOs have done differently, or better. This is an industry where making a game is insanely expensive; there is no game harder to make than an MMO, period. Usually you're betting your company on the game because the development costs are so high, which is part of the reason why I think you see so little innovation in the genre the risk is just incredible, so it's much easier to play it safe. The problem with playing it safe is that you'll never make the next great game; at best you'll make a good, solid game that is fun but nothing spectacular. To do the spectacular, to change a genre, it requires taking risks and doing something new, it requires pushing the limits and asking fundamental questions about why we do things as a genre. We've tried to do this in Guild Wars 2, and we're going to continue to ask those questions going into the future after Guild Wars 2's release. We hope other folks out there can learn lessons from some of the decisions we made in our game, but I'd encourage them to try to find ways to make games that are different and take the genre in exciting new directions if they truly want to help push the genre forward.
