Category: Guild Wars

Interview with ArenaNet’s Linsey Murdock

Linsey Murdock is the game designer for the Guild Wars® Live Team. She works exclusively on Guild Wars Live issues, bugs, added content, and general maintenance. The latest big addition to Guild Wars was an update to rebalance how players acquire some of the titles in game, and Linsey graciously took time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions about this major update.

What change in this update are you most proud of?

It’s hard to pick one thing from such a large build, but I suppose it would have to be the Storybooks. Condensing the entire storyline of the game into single-paragraph segments was pretty tough, but I think we pulled it off. Plus, I think bringing the book system into the other three games will really help revitalize those areas and reward players for repeating that content, much in the same way that the introduction of Hard Mode did.

Were any of the changes hard to implement or suggest because of the fact that prior design choices were going to be overwritten?

Not really. We are all interested in the game being as good as it can be, and so we recognize that as the game grows, previous design decisions may no longer be practical and/or could stand to be updated.

What change are you most curious as to how players will respond or change their play-styles in lieu of that change?

I am hoping that the reward updates to Challenge Missions and Jade Quarry/Fort Aspenwood will be enough to bring players back into those areas.

Were any of the changes made with Guild Wars 2 “achievement systems” in mind?

No, my work on Guild Wars® is completely independent of Guild Wars 2.

Was there a change that required major out-of-the-box thinking where ideas were pulled from really weird places?

We mostly just looked at each title we wanted to address and assessed the areas in which it could be improved. We didn’t borrow from other MMOs…I also don’t feel the changes we made were necessarily “out of the box.” They seemed much more like common sense to me.

With much of ArenaNet working on the upcoming Guild Wars 2, how much interest do those employees take in the Guild Wars Live Team, especially with this update?

Though they’re focused on GW2, there are still tons of people at ArenaNet who are extremely passionate about Guild Wars. We even have folks who stay late to put in overtime on Guild Wars after a full shift at their “day job” working on GW2.

Can you give us a short walkthrough of the design process you took for changing one of the titles?

We started with the Luxon/Kurzick title tracks, as we felt those were in the most dire need of adjustment. I took a look at the ways in which players currently gain faction, particularly the FFF (fast faction farming), and calculated a per-hour faction gain number to use as a base. I outlined my first impressions of how we should adjust the existing ways of gaining faction to bring them in line with the FFF, as well as how we should fix the issue of botting. I then ran my outline past a few people for feedback.

That initial assessment got the ball rolling, so from there I started doing detailed research on all the ways that players currently gain faction, as well as all the ways we felt they should be gaining faction. I went back and played through many areas of the game that we felt needed better rewards, in order to get a fresh picture in my head of how they played. I put together a number of spreadsheets to crunch the numbers and find the right balance.

I ran my ideas past a few different people to see if we were on the mark, and then tweaked the numbers according to their feedback. I built a design document with all the changes we wanted to make, and then sent it out to even more people for feedback—I particularly wanted to hear from Joe Kimmes, who would actually be programming the changes. Then I sent the design document to James Phinney for final approval. Once he signed off on the changes, I sent it to the rest of the designers to make absolutely sure that there weren’t any remaining issues.

Next I handed the document off to Joe for implementation while I went to work writing text for all of the Storybooks and designing a reward structure for them. Joe began implementation, and I continued to review the changes being made to make sure there weren’t any holes. We also added a few things here and there, and when implementation was complete we moved into the testing phase to make sure it all worked as intended. We kept on making tweaks and bug fixes as we got closer to build day.

Once everything was integrated over to our staging servers, another round of testing and bug-fixing began. After QA signed off on that, we were free to push it all up to the Live servers and run the build. And that’s pretty much it.

Cut Scene Stun

In preparation for the Lord of the Rings Online expansion, I have been trying to pump through the epic quests.  The other night I completed Book 5 with the help of my guild.  The last instance of Book 5 is a mission to stop a Gaunt Lord and Nazgul from resurrecting a dead, frozen dragon in the Misty Mountains.  Once we got to the actual site of the resurrection the whole party was stunned while the scene played out.  It was a really cool scene with the Gaunt Lord sacrificing fell souls and basically trying to zap the dragon back alive.  It was not so cool to see 6 people standing there for a minute wobbling like drunks when we should’ve been Nazgul-bashing. Continue reading Cut Scene Stun

Guild Lord vs. Keep Lord

Keep assaults in Warhammer Online feels a lot like a Mirror World Guild vs. Guild (GvG) battle in Guild Wars, but the little elemental differences are enough that one can nearly feel like a PvE raid (on top of more PvE), while another feels like a pure PvP playstyle.  The fundamentals of the Keep assaults and GvG are nearly identical: kill other players and NPCs to break through to the Guild/Keep Lord NPC and kill him/her/it to win.  Both games also herald it as a large part of the meat of their PvP game experience, but which is better?  I’ll compare the two in classic beatdown compare and constrast style. Continue reading Guild Lord vs. Keep Lord

MMO Mirror World – Storytelling

William Gibson wrote in his book Pattern Recognition about the concept of a Mirror World.  The Wikipedia masses define the newly-coined term “to acknowledge a locational-specific distinction in a manufactured object that emerged from a parallel development process, for example opposite-side driving or varied electrical outlets.”  I think the excellent term does not need to be so constrained, and it may be as broad as “fundamentally the same, but elementally different.”  This happens for better or worse all the time with MMOs.  Take, for instance, the way an MMO tells its story: Continue reading MMO Mirror World – Storytelling

Costume Brawl – PvP Done Right

As I explained in preparation for Guild Wars Halloween, Costume Brawl is something I was looking forward to big time, and now for this week I am having a blast playing the once-a-year PvP game.

The premise is quite simple.  Each profession has a set skill bar.  If you go in as a Warrior, every other Warrior will have the same skill/attribute set up as you.  The game is random 5 vs. 5 where the goal is to kill your opponents and control shrines (capture points).  Each shrine lends a bonus and increases the speed at which you get points for controlling the shrines.  First to 20 points wins.

I think it is brilliant for two reasons.  First, it is fast and fun.  You don’t have to wait for a party, and the gameplay is a great balance between deathmatch and zone control.  Killing people matters, but so does the skill of players surviving and snaring the other players.  If the battle is by one shrine, a good player can ninja-capture another shrine.  Winning is quick, and losing is quick.  If you lose you can go right back in with another team.  If you are stuck in a rut playing in the Random Arenas (4v4) or Alliance Battles (12v12) as your go to for casual PvP in Guild Wars, the game mechanic of Costume Brawl is a fresh breeze.

The second reason is the balance between professions.  Guild vs. Guild battles, Heroes’ Ascent, and to a lesser extent Team Arenas requires a web of protection and healing that normally comes from the PvP mainstay: Monks.  Without this crucial web, a team crumbles in the face of quick spikes of damage.  This places a daunting requirement on the Monks in Guild Wars PvP.  Costume Brawl takes out much of this required web and gives each profession one or two self-heals, which they must rely on more than their healbot teammate.  The average heal for each profession is about 100-150 so one profession does not clearly outshine another.  I would not say that Costume Brawl builds have a perfect one-on-one balance as some professions can easily beat down others, but all told, I think a team of 5 is usually balanced against the other random team.  In other words, PvP returns to its roots of being about skill, not build.

This also excites me for Guild Wars future with Guild Wars 2.  ArenaNet basically has a get out of jail free card with the restart, and they can remake Guild Wars 2 so that one profession (the Monk) is not absolutely required to win.  I think that across the MMO genre, players are getting tired of needing healbots for PvE and PvP.  It is nice to play Costume Brawl, which remains fun without the requisite of a spambot friend.
–Ravious

Guild Wars Halloween 2008

For a non-subscription game, Guild Wars has some fantastic holiday-like events that run through the year.  My favorite is by far the Guild Wars Halloween festival ith the runner up being the Dragon Festival.

Two of the cities, Lion’s Arch and Kamadan, are completely outfitted with tombstones, skeletons, and other Halloween-themed graphics. The circle of glowing mushrooms by a 2-story witch’s cauldron is a player-favorite meeting place/ dance zone. Farmers kill thousands of the denizens of Tyria (read: raptor babies) for Halloween candy and absinthe drops.

There are two jewels that make this festival rise above the others. First is the appearance of Mad King Thorn and his candy corn soldiers. The Mad King comes every few hours (this year on October 31) to play a deadly game of Simon Says, and hand out a festival hat. For a game that is often criticized as lacking community, this is a great time to meet hundreds of festival goers in the “persistent” cities.

The second jewel, is the one I am most looking forward to: Costume Brawl. Costume Brawl is a random 5v5 PvP game which is an amalgamation of capture point and deathmatch (it most closely resembles Guild Wars Hero Battles without the Heroes). The catch is that each class has a set skillbar. So if you enter as a Paragon, you will share the same skillbar with every other Paragon on the field. It is a great change of pace in a game where the player’s build can be so critical. This year they are adding a new map to the Costume Brawl game.

It will be another great Guild Wars festival, and I fully recommend dusting off your copy of the subscription-free MMO for the fun-filled weekend.
–Ravious

Guild Wars Mission Melting Pot

After a long hiatus from playing GW PvE (before WAR I signed on for some quick PvP action now and then), I decided to jump back in. Specifically, I wanted to try out the much heralded quest chain called Zinn’s Task, which requires players owning all three campaigns to hunt down some rogue golems.  The first thing you need to do to start the quest chain is get a new hero named M.O.X. and the Golem Training Guide.  The Golem Training Guide works as a book, which you open up and read, and you can enter a training mission by further using the book.  This led me to reminisce on all the different mission mechanics Guild Wars used throughout its nearly complete lifetime.

Guild Wars Prophecies gave us the mission mechanic for Guild Wars, where you entered an instanced story event with objectives and a definite endpoint. These were unlike the vanilla MMO quests that occured in a sandbox-style zone (persistent or not). Missions were vignettes of story, objective, and activity where if you failed a restart was required. For Prophecies, the mission had its own outpost to start from and the mission area was completely designed and used only for that mission.

The later products of ArenaNet slowly shifted the mechanics and definition of a “mission.” In Factions, missions were nearly identicaly to Prophecies, but you could return and explore the area later on without having to enter the mission. In Nightfall, the missions started from an NPC in an outpost instead of being outpost-wide, and although some content was gated by mission completion, much of the time you could explore the zone prior to the mission.

The Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North, had probably the biggest change in mission mechanics, which were nearly the same as Nightfall, except that you couldn’t fail by merely dying and some missions started in explorable areas instead of outposts. If you died you would resurrect at a rez point without the whole mission-story resetting. NPCs were also “unkillable” in that regard (no instant fail from NPC death), but they gained death penalty the same as the players. Then, the Bonus Mission Pack brought us full circle back to Prophecies, where each mission had its own separate zone and if you failed (by dying or an NPC dying) you had to restart completely.

It is interesting how one of their core storytelling mechanics evolved and changed at every step of the way, and leaves the answer wide open as to what Guild War 2’s mission mechanics will be.  Personally, I preferred the Eye of the North style missions the best where there was no insta-fail, but for mission outposts I would prefer something more similar to Prophecies/Factions.—Ravious

WAR makes me want to…

Warhammer Online makes me want to play more Guild Wars.  It’s a very weird feeling.  I have a brand new, shiny, nice MMO that I really enjoy playing, and I keep thinking about Guild Wars PvP and the PvE content I have yet to play.

Warhammer Online reminded me a lot about Guild Wars when I started playing. The feel of the skills, combat and PvP (especially with body blocking, at which I feel I am quite skilled at using) really hit home. Prior to Warhammer Online’s Open Beta, I had been playing Lord of the Rings Online and Team Fortress 2 pretty evenly. Guild Wars really had not been touched, except for the occasional 20 minutes of Alliance Battles and the festival events. I had honestly moved on from primarily playing Guild Wars until such a time when ArenaNet will announce exactly how the Hall of Monuments will give rewards in Guild Wars 2.

But, thank Mythic for bringing me back to the light. The Open RvR is far too different than anything in Guild Wars, so I think it was largely due to the scenarios in Warhammer Online that made me pine for the quick, spiky action of Guild Wars PvP.  I am probably going to take week-long sabbatical from Warhammer when Guild Wars Costume Brawl gets re-released for Halloween.  I really didn’t think Warhammer Online would have any competition for my time until 2009, and it’s a weird feeling when you are so wrong.  Feels like blowing the dust out of Nintendo cartridges.
–Ravious

Selling Slots

Kill Ten Rats authors have previously come out for selling RMT fluff, and have featured games that use that funding model. What games will sell you more character slots? Guild Wars does. Sword of the New World effectively does so, selling slots for in-game currency that you can buy with meatspace dollars.

For the player, this offers convenience and potential savings. All your characters are associated with one account, so you have one monthly fee, you need not re-buy the expansions, and any special account upgrades (RMT fluff, veteran rewards, etc.) apply to your new characters. Keep all your characters on the same global name in City of Heroes.

For the developer, this has some advantages over trying to sell second accounts. You have fewer of the problems that arise from people using multiple characters at once, many who will not but another account will pay a one-time upgrade fee (maybe multiple times), and you get that money now. Policing for discipline is easier when the player is not a hydra. The only ongoing cost is storing more characters per account (perhaps not insubstantial).

Let’s say $5 for one additional slot per server, and you must buy at least four at a time to prevent transaction costs from eating the money. Alternately, you could have several subscription options, some of which offer more character slots or other premium services, but you would need to decide what to do if a guy with a 16-character account wants to cut back to a non-premium account.

: Zubon

How Players Are Affected By Solo Activities

world_of_warcraft_1.jpgPreviously, I discussed some of the reasons why I prefer to solo through most MMO content. This got me to thinking about something I’ve noticed since switching back from World of Warcraft to Guild Wars. Players in World of Warcraft, despite the ease with which the game can be soloed, seem to be far more likely to form pick-up groups than players in Guild Wars. I began to think about why this might be. I’ve come to the conclusion that this, like so many other things in life, is determined by a number of factors adding up to an individual’s experience within a game. Continue reading How Players Are Affected By Solo Activities