While Eye of the North was the primary topic of discussion last week, it was interesting to see how elements of Guild Wars 2 information was seeded in and around the game. It’s largely still a mystery as to what we’ll be doing and seeing in the next game, as it is still very much under construction. That said, I had the chance to speak with two of the Arena.net co-founders about their philosophy behind the upcoming game.

Jeff Strain and Mike O’Brien were on-hand and generous with their time; we discussed the reason for the sequel in the first place, the future of Guild Wars PvP, and how they make the game look so dang good.

Jeff Strain: We often call Eye of the North the spiritual successor to Guild Wars, to the original Guild Wars that we released in April of 2005. In all of the campaigns there were a lot of threads that were left open, intentionally, for future exploration. We want to give people a sense of coming home, and returning to the beginning. Feeling like they are seeing some resolution to a lot of these open things. One of the things that will happen with Eye of the North; when you finish playing it you will see clearly what your future is going to be in Guild Wars 2. I think it will be very clear to you where we’re going. This is something we haven’t revealed yet, it’s going to be the big surprise in the game. Coming home is kind of the spirit driving it.

MMOG Nation: Why do you think that Guild Wars needs a true sequel?

Mike O’Brien: We’ve been working on Guild Wars for a long time, and have an opportunity to really understand our fans. A lot of this comes from us thinking internally about what people would like to see in Guild Wars. There are a lot things we can do in a campaign or expansion, and a lot of things we can’t do in a campaign or expansion. We’re kind of ambitious people. We want to make Guild Wars the best game it can be. We don’t want to be in a position where there are fantastic things we want to do, but we can’t because they have to interact with design decisions we made many years ago.

So when we start to think about a certain level of high-level changes, such as adding a persistent world or redoing the movement mechanics so that it’s much more ‘joy of movement based’, jumping and running and that sort of thing, we start to see that that is a difficult change to make in a backwards compatible way. Why should we be constrained to do it in a backwards compatible way. Why shouldn’t we make the best Guild Wars game we can make?

MN: The traditional fantasy game elements that you’ve announced for Guild Wars II such as multiple races, many levels, why are you moving more in the direction of a more traditional game when I think part of the charm of Guild Wars is that you don’t use a lot of the standard fantasy tropes?

Mike O’Brien: You know, when you talk about traditional directions, I think you’re talking about things that not even just MMOs but just roleplaying games in general use. So I just have to clarify, Guild Wars is I think unique and innovative in ways that are deeper than just the issues you’re talking about here. Are you playing a human, etc. First of all, Guild Wars is kind of a hybrid between two genres. It combines strategy with roleplaying elements. Guild Wars is, I think, the most story-based online roleplaying experience that players have had. I think so many MMOs just try to put you in a world, and not tell a story. Guild Wars, because of the type of game it is, can really tell a story. What we wanted to do is we wanted to take the things that really separate Guild Wars, that makes it unique, and push those as far as we possibly can. Make Guild Wars the best Guild Wars it can be.

I’ve seen the same reaction on the forums that you’ve probably seen; ‘Why add races to the game? Everybody else has races’ Well, because we’re trying to make Guild Wars the best Guild Wars it can be. We want to tell the best story we can, and races are great for storytelling. We want to make characters with as much freedom of expression, freedom of appearance as we can. Races are a great way to have freedom in your character choice.

I think players worry about something that is not our intent. When players look at decisions like that, what they worry about is ‘Guild Wars is trying not to be Guild Wars. Guild Wars is trying to be some other game.’ We’re absolutely not trying to be some other game. What we are trying to do is say that we are defined by the fundamental intent of the game, not by minor implementation decisions that we’ve made in the past. Races or no races, that’s not what makes Guild Wars Guild Wars. What makes the game the way it is, is the way we tell a story. We want to push that as hard as we can, and do everything we can in order to make the best Guild Wars game we can.

MN: To that end, with Eye of the North you’re breaking from the campaign paradigm you’ve previously used. With the goal of making a game that will please fans, be the best it can be. There were some folks who really liked the campaign model, though, and I was wondering if you could talk about one thing that did work with that system?

Jeff Strain: I’ll give you a couple of reasons. I think that one was that any time you ship a game that you’ve been pouring your heart and soul into for a number of years, there’s always a big list of things you wish you could have done. I think that across the first three Guild Wars campaigns, it was an opportunity for us as a development team to go add fun new things that we wanted to add to the game. Heroes, which we introduced in Nightfall, is a perfect example of that. I think we now see Heroes as a staple of the Guild Wars play experience, even though it wasn’t there in Prophecies. I think with every new campaign, we had an opportunity to sit down and say ‘What would we like to add to the game to fundamentally define the Guild Wars play experience that isn’t there yet?’ I think that was one big advantage for us, there was always an opportunity to do new stuff.

Artistically it allowed us to branch out and explore a lot of different styles and different visual representations. The campaign model was great for those reasons, and I think as with our discussion of Guild Wars II just a moment ago, I think that over time we started to feel like the game was ‘big enough.’ It had enough features, it had enough content, it had enough skills, enough playable professions … I think what we really wanted to do at that point was turn our focus inward and start filling in the details of this world that we’d already made, and focusing on giving players more stuff for their existing characters, instead of asking them to start a new play experience from the beginning.

MN: In previous interview you gave, Mr. Strain, you talked about the ‘battle against complexity’, and the problems that entails. Can you point to some areas in Guild Wars right now where think you folks didn’t succeed as much as you might have wanted to for keeping things simple for players?

Jeff Strain: So if I said that in a previous interview I was definitely just reflecting what I’m hearing around me every day, from this entire design team. I think Mike would be better placed to answer this question.

Mike O’Brien: Complexity in Guild Wars? It has ten professions in the game. It has 1150 skills, soon to be 1300 skills …

Jeff Strain: And do you know all of them by heart?

MN: Ahh, not at all.

Mike O’Brien: … it has three continents of content. It’s interesting, because Guild Wars has different audiences. I think some of the things we’ve added to Guild Wars are really compelling for current players. New professions, for example. A lot of people tell us that the biggest reason they bought a new campaign is because I wanted to play X specific profession. They get really excited about it. Conversely, we have to look at what it adds to the game over time, coming into the game and having to understand ten different professions and especially if you start to play the PvP aspect of it. Understanding what all of them can do against you, and if you’re forming a party what do you need in the party and all of that.

It’s just part of a growing knowledge base that a player needs to get into Guild Wars. And I think that’s something we were acutely aware of developing campaigns; some of the very things that make campaigns so exciting are the things that increase their complexity over time. You don’t want to just keep doing that forever. You don’t want to be in a place where you have twenty professions and 2500 skills, or something like that. Some of that is why we made the decision to do Eye of the North as an expansion and not a campaign.

Doing Eye of the North as an expansion really gets more into supporting what our existing customers really want from the game. People who are already playing Guild Wars, what do they really want from the game? They want new content to play, new things to explore, new things to do with the existing characters they already have, and with the existing mechanics and balance they already love. That’s what Eye of the North is giving them. I think Jeff was talking a minute ago about turning inward. I think that’s an important focus going forward for us. When we talk about Eye of the North and Guild Wars 1, and beyond to what we’ll be doing in Guild Wars 2, we really want to take the fundamental game that people really love, and giving them more and more things to do in the game they love … but not change the game out from under them. Not introduce quite as many new things for people to learn, over and over again.

I think that’s a valuable process we went through with Guild Wars 1. It’s a great game, with a fan following, but we ran the risk with Guild Wars 1 if we just kept doing campaigns, of over-complicating the game too much for our customers. That’s what we’ve learned recently, and I think we’ll be making the same kinds of decisions on Guild Wars 2.

MN: With Eye of the North, was one of the goals to not only keep things mechanically familiar, but to use this as an opportunity to resolve some of the stories you’ve started over the years? At the moment you’ve got a lot of balls in the air.

Jeff Strain: Absolutely. We often call Eye of the North the spiritual successor to Guild Wars, to the original Guild Wars that we released in April of 2005. In all of the campaigns there were a lot of threads that were left open, intentionally, for future exploration. We want to give people a sense of coming home, and returning to the beginning. Feeling like they are seeing some resolution to a lot of these open things. One of the things that will happen with Eye of the North; when you finish playing it you will see clearly what your future is going to be in Guild Wars 2. I think it will be very clear to you where we’re going. This is something we haven’t revealed yet, it’s going to be the big surprise in the game. Coming home is kind of the spirit driving it.

MN: Where did the dungeons come in? This is sort of a newish element to the game, a change up to the way you’ve had content in the game previously.

Jeff Strain: When we started looking at all the environments we’ve previously explored in Guild Wars campaigns … in the original Guild Wars there were a couple of underground settings, and then we released a sort of mini-expansion called Sorrow’s Furnace in September of 2005. It was very popular with our players, and took place largely underground. It was something that we never really got into as much as we wanted to, and so when we started thinking about coming back to Tyria, coming back to this part of the world, we started kicking around the idea of really exploring the underground part of the world.

I think what’s fun for me as a gamer is that we didn’t just use it as a backdrop, use it as a setting, we’ve also added mechanics to the game to support this notion of a kind of traditional fantasy dungeon crawl. Where you can see key locations for stairs to different levels, or where the bosses are lurking. You can discover dungeon maps and there are some classic traps to work around. More of a free-form exploration kind of play style. There’s not just one way to get through these dungeons. Really it was driven by the idea that ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to go back to this popular part of the world and do another full-fledged experience.’

MN: Along the line of technologies in the game, a lot of people I’ve talked to about Guild Wars have remarked on the fact that the game is beautiful. And yet, it’s not a very system-demanding title. What do you guys attribute the beauty and low graphical requirements to?

Jeff Strain: The key difference is understanding that there is a difference between graphics and art. I think that a lot of times companies get obsessed with graphics, with the latest specular this, that, or the other. Bump mapping, shading … all these kinds of technical terms that sound really good. As Guild Wars has evolved we’ve certainly added new graphics technologies, but at its heart what has always made our game stand apart is the supreme quality of our art. It’s a very artistic game. You don’t see us taking human models and trying to morph a picture of a person onto their face.

We’ve always striven to provide a very artistic world. I think that in some ways if you are successful in doing that then the graphics technology is almost secondary. Fortunately for us, we also happen to have a very high-quality scalable graphics engine. Over time we’ve been able to take greater and greater advantage of it. One of the reason that every campaign looks better than the previous campaign is that our art team really knows how to use our engine and development tools. The core answer is that we have a very strong focus on art first and then we use the graphics as a tool to represent that.

MN: Looking ahead to Guild Wars 2 again, is that also going to be the focus? Are you going to be moving to a DX10/Vista setup, or is there going to be an effort to make sure as many people can run the game as possible?

Mike O’Brien: There’s definitely going to be an effort to make sure as many people can run the game as possible. That’s something we’re very proud of with Guild Wars 1. Guild Wars 1 works on five year old systems at this point. We take that very seriously. We’re not trying to make a game that’s a showcase that only a couple of people can play. We’re trying to make a game that looks beautiful no matter what hardware you throw at it. Certainly Guild Wars 2 will have higher requirements than Guild Wars 1 because, hey, time has passed. But we’re going to maintain true to our philosophy: any reasonable system should run the game. We’re not going to say only the latest graphics card and only the latest operating system.

Jeff Strain: We just shake our heads sometimes. So many high profile games come out … and they’re beautiful, you know? They have all kinds of great lighting effects, but if you don’t have a high end machine purchased in the last six months you just can’t really run it well. We just shake our heads and think no matter how beautiful it is, people still need to be able to play your game. I think that’s one of the reasons Guild Wars has really done well. On a world-wide basis, people can run it and it looks great on average hardware. So, you can bet that will continue to be a key focus for Guild Wars 2.

Mike O’Brien: You know, the programming team here takes a lot of pride in that fact, and I think they’re right to do that. [Jeff was] talking about the artist’s tools, and how we’ve encouraged them not to be defined by the graphical capabilities of the engine, but to be defined by their art. I think that’s absolutely true. Our artists have the tools they need and then have the freedom and creativity to take this engine and turn it into so much more than the sum of its parts.

We’re always blown away by what they can do. We make the engine, and then we go to the art room and they say ‘Check this out’, and it’s amazing what they’ve managed to pull off. I think it’s the same thing with the programmers. This is what you get when you hire a team that are passionate about the game. The programmers should be given the props for what they’ve done too. The fact that the game runs on the systems that it runs on, and that it runs well. How little memory it uses, and how stable it is. The programmers, also, kind of are half-artists themselves. They take an artistic pride in the creation of this game. And so I just want to say I’m proud of the job the team has done. Making an engine on the art and technology side that can run with so little hardware behind it is a great accomplishment.

MN: On a more technical note: the level cap in Guild Wars 2 is going to be much higher than the one in Guild Wars right now. It seems like there’s the possibility that the higher level of granularity there would be a downside for PvP. Is PvP going to be as strong a focus in the next game as this one, or is going to emphasize the PvE game more?

Mike O’Brien: Actually, I think the PvP game will be stronger in the next game than in the current one. I’ll take a second and talk about our PvP plans for Guild Wars 2. In Guild Wars 1 we built the game to be the game it is: a hybrid between two genres. Because of the kind of experience you get in online games where you put so much effort into your character, you spend so many hours building up your character, and then you want to see ‘how did I do’? You want to see how you stack up, you want to duel your friends and see who built the better character. If I win you’re like ‘aw darn it, I can’t believe you beat me that way. I’m going to improve my character and we’ll have another showdown.’ Guild Wars had us doing things very differently from a traditional game to support that. I think Guild Wars set a lot of firsts in competitive roleplaying. It is the first e-sport competitive roleplaying game, it was the first roleplaying game to have world championships where we’re giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash prizes, flying people around the globe, televising matches. You didn’t see anything like that until the first Guild Wars.

I think we’ve succeeded with that, but I also don’t think we’ve gone far enough. I think that one thing that’s the downside to that in Guild Wars is that the game can be so competitive; somebody who is just a roleplayer and not a competitive gamer, you can get into the competitive aspect of the game and get on a team and just get worked. Worse than that is your teammates saying ‘It’s your fault that we got worked.’ The game is so fair sometimes that if a team loses, ‘Well it’s because we had somebody not pulling his weight and we should get somebody who can do better on our team.’ That’s something we can do a much better job with in Guild Wars 2.

In Guild Wars 2 we’re actually planning on having two really fundamentally different types of competition. One is the same balance/structured e-sport kind of competition we have today. Another on is just the ‘get out there and fight’ kind of game. Everybody doesn’t have to be balanced, everybody doesn’t have to be the same level, it doesn’t have to have the same number of players on each side. If you want to fight, go fight. And I think there is a lot of Guild Wars would like that kind of thing. They build up their characters in Guild Wars and just want to jump into a match, go kick some butt. They don’t want to have to become an expert at PvP, and get into a great PvP guild, and have that be a bunch of pressure. They just want to go out there and kick some butt.

I think that’s going to be a really positive thing for Guild Wars 2. In Guild Wars 1 they often define themselves by what they do. ‘I mostly roleplay’ or ‘I mostly PvP’. In Guild Wars 2 I think we have the opportunity of building the kind of game where everybody participates in all the parts of the game. I mostly roleplay, but sometimes my friends aren’t on and I want to go kick some butt. Sometimes my friends are on and I want to go kick some butt with my friends. It should be much more of a community. I think that a great thing about having a ‘kick butt’ casual type of PvP is that we can make the e-sport style of PvP into even more of an e-sport. In Guild Wars 1 the e-sport side of PvP has to satisfy many different audiences, not just the e-sport people. It has to satisfy the first-timers, and want to try it out but want to get rewarded as they’re playing. By splitting it into two pieces you can really say ‘If you’re casual about PvP this is for you’ and ‘If you want to be one of the top guilds and compete worldwide, then this is for you.’ Either way, you can see who’s the best. Given that, I’m really excited about the PvP aspect of Guild Wars 2.

I know what you’re asking, because I know that some players worry. ‘Oh, isn’t changing the level cap going to make Guild Wars less of a PvP game than it was before?’ I think no. You have to understand that we’ve been making Guild Wars for a long time and we’ve been thinking for a long time how to make the perfect Guild Wars. Guild Wars was so new and different when it came out that we didn’t know what would happen with the game. I think we succeeded in some places and failed in others, but we have years now of experience in learning how to build the best Guild Wars game possible. I’m really excited about Guild Wars 2, I think it’s going to be a better game all around: a better roleplaying experience for the roleplayers and a better PvP experience for the PvPers.

MN: One last easy question. In Guild Wars Eye of the North, what’s an element that really speaks to you personally?

Mike O’Brien: For me, it’s the Heroes you get to play with. I know its different for everyone, but I love having the variety in the Heroes this time around. The way that playing with all those Heroes gives you a little bit of a look into the future of the Guild Wars series.

Jeff Strain: For me it is revisiting lands that are like Ascalon before it was scorched in the original game. The homeland of the Charr will be very familiar to those folks who played the first few levels of the Prophecies game. Again, it will be like coming home and it’s a big part of the story here. It just gives you a tingling sensation … yeah, this is how it was before it all got burned up. It’s great.

MN: Thank you both so much for your time.