The guided tour from the designers of Eye of the North was a thorough experience. We even had a few plot details spoiled for us, but rest assured I won’t do the same here. Suffice it to say I feel like I got the full monty.

Even with all that, I know we barely scratched the surface of GWEN. It’s easily the size of one of their other expansions all by itself, and looking at the map it’s immediately obvious just how much space has been added to the surface of Tyria. Of course … we didn’t start on the surface.

Below is my tale of the far North: starting in the depths of a dungeon, meeting the heroes of the story, touring the Hall of Monuments, Oola’s Lab, facing down an assault by the Charr, site-seeing in the prettiest parts of the North, and playing the three new mini-games on offer.

We begin with a race …

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I bet you’ve been wondering about all the stuff I said I was going to lay on you from my trip to Seattle? Well, two long plane trips, two scheduled family dinners, and a round of EverQuest 2 later, I now have time to get everything down in blog format.

We’ll start here with my impressions from the hands-on walkthrough of the expansion, and follow that up with two interviews. It’s going to be a busy Friday here, so I hope you’re interested in this Guild Wars thingie; from the comments on the morning briefing it sounds like a lot of you are.

This here is of course where I have to try to think with my blogger hat on, and not let my memories of the event be coloured by the general human propensity to empathize with people we’ve met face to face. It’s a challenging line to walk, and if I slip a bit here I apologize in advance.

That said, I do want to start off by giving you my ‘high level’ impressions of the trip.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North (GWEN) is not a strange beast tacked on to the end of the game as a stopgap to keep people from leaving before GWII comes out. It’s not a cheap marketing ploy; if it is a marketing ploy, it’s a ridiculously expensive one. The folks at Arena.net are focused, intelligent, and passionate game makers.

If their goal was merely to put on an attitude of dedication for the press, they did an incredible job of it. An entire wall is covered in statements people have sent in praising them for their work on the game. Everywhere in the Arena.net offices are reams and reams of concept work from the people they have slaving away in the art pens. I’m not going to lie and say it was some sort of magical land where everyone was happy, mining the fun from the rich veins of gaming they discovered underneath their corporate office complex. It was an office. People were at desks (albeit desks with toys), typing at PCs, earning their paycheck. It wasn’t a magical experience.

What it was, though, was a group of people that clearly put in a lot of fricking overtime making this game. It’s a group of people who have poured their souls into a package of entertainment. And they’re working still; we saw several gamebreaking bugs still hanging around because of a previous build we were working off of. They still have a few last minute things to nail down, some kinks to work out. But (and this is a big but) they still enjoy playing the game. I watched them very carefully whenever one of the designers sat down at a terminal: in between discussing new features and plot elements, these guys were still having fun playing their own work.

I dunno what better yardstick I can give you than to say that they still like (and obviously play) their own game. Bad designers don’t play their own game. Good designers play their game but don’t like it. Great designers, I think, are the ones who can still get excited about a trip through a dungeon or quest even though they’ve played it a hundred times before and (perhaps) made it themselves.

By my vote, that’s the mark of designers who have done good work.

I’ll try to share my impressions of the game itself, and you let me know if you agree.

Other Coverage:

There were, of course, several other folks at Arena on Tuesday. Check out their impressions from the same event:

• Gamespot Interview (watch for my air elementalist near the end of the video; I’m the guy in the coat)
• Destructoid
• GameSpy With Jeff Grubb (wanted to write this article really bad)
• IGN
• Games Radar

Last week, to mark the release of the first version of the Multiverse Platform, Corey Bridges took some time out of his day to talk with me about the company’s ambitious plans. A free product for everyone to develop with, Multiverse hopes to be nothing less than a creativity engine for individuals and groups looking for inspiration.

Below are my notes and some quotes from our conversation, which touched on the platform, Multiverse’s goals, and some creative folks that have already put the technology to good use. And … I even managed not to ask about Firefly. Go me.

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No joke: this excites me more than Gods and Heroes. My wife is going to be thrilled by this. Nice job.

    SAN DIEGO, California & NEW YORK, New York (AUGUST 9, 2007) — Through a deal that joins two of the world’s most innovative entertainment brands, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), a global leader in the online gaming industry, is teaming up with Sir Richard Branson and Deepak Chopra’s Virgin Comics to bring the popular, India-based Ramayan 3392 A.D. comic book universe to life as an MMO video game initially for the PC.

The deal was announced today by John Smedley, President of SOE and Sharad Devarajan, Co-Founder and CEO of Virgin Comics.

“Ramayan has inspired the lives of millions of people through the ages. The re-imagining of this great ancient epic through the creativity of a game platform re-affirms the fact that Ramayan is one of the greatest stories ever told,” said Deepak Chopra. “The fact that the same creative team of young Indians that created the story will be involved in working with SOE’s game development team, is a testament to the innovative and mythic minds of these gifted Indian creators who will take a new generation to new frontiers across the seas of consciousness into new realms of mystery, magic, adventure, and transformation.”

We’re having an informal look at the game right now, with the designers standing around the room and doing a Q&A while we look at the game.

Some tidbits from the morning -

• Current official number sold is over 4 million.
• Something like 95% of all players have a max level character.
• The goal is not only to allow for ‘more level 20 content’, but to allow for more variety in player skill without falling back on ‘hard mode’.
• Dungeons were to include an element of exploration, and introduce some tactical components to the game.
• Unlockable mission map features give dungeons a ‘zelda vibe’. You can find a mini-map that shows where the puzzles are, where the bosses are at. They’re trying to step back from their reliance on the green arrows.  “Hey, secret room!”
• The expansion is the ’size’ of Factions, but everything is level 20 stuff. Instead of having content eaten up by 1-20 content, it’s all high-level all the time.
• Gameplay is more free-flowing. Instead of relentlessly following the main story, players should feel free to follow the sideline content to fruition.
• There are sort of ’story bubbles’ that lets you experience a bunch of content in one area. There are the three racial representatives when you first get into the gameworld, and (within those racial bubbles) you can pretty much play things out of order.
• Fighting tournaments, dwarven boxing, polymock: all elements meant to give you ’stuff to do’ outside of the story. (I hope you believe it when someone other than Smed says it’s necessary.)
• Technology innovations mean this is “the most beautiful game we’ve ever made”. The battle engine has a system that allows music to react to the flow of combat in interesting ways. Monsters are going to use a little better tactics (warriors up front, healers in the back). The AI stuff and the music may eventually make it back to the other games, shaders and art they’d like to do but at the moment they’re not planning on it.
• Technology isn’t the focus. The focus is on the play experience. Give players the freedom to do what they want. Players who want a directed experience can grab quests and do that, folks who want to explore can go out and do that.
• Strong narrative and story in this one especially. They see this as a true sequel to Prophecies.
• The main story quests end in instanced areas, similar to missions. Allows for some different things that they haven’t done yet.
• PvE-only skills allow them to be a little more directly for fun. “Be outrageous.” PvE-only skills are given out as quest rewards during the game. “You help a dwarf find some ale, and you get a skill that works better when you’re drunk.”
• A bunch of the team is already off of this game, working on Guild Wars II.
• That said, they’ve got a ton of people working on the old game. “We’re going to work on Guild Wars 1 for as long as people are playing Guild Wars 1 … We made a promise to the players.”

The Big Picture -
The destroyers come from below, causing huge devastation. The asura come from below, the norns from the north, and the charr from their homeland. As a well-known adventurers, our job is to go out and help the NPC races to get it done. The destroyers are a primal force .. that they’re not going to spoil. They would say that the dwarves know these guys; they’re the race’s ancestral enemy. Dwarven Armageddon.

The decision to do a sequel was rooted in plans for future expansions. A lot of what they wanted to do required them to revisit some fundamental elements of the game.  Not having a subscription model is incredibly freeing for them; they don’t have to worry about multiple games consuming the playerbase. After two years, they can see tons of places where they know they should have done things differently.

For the designers, it’s all about ‘bad grind’ vs. ‘good grind’. Guild Wars players are much more focused on collecting than gaining more power. They see that as good thing; why should it be bad that people have to work for specific rewards. With GW II they’re looking to add the variety of power on top of collecting.

Here’s my set over at Flickr for the game. Of course, my camera broke this past week, so no Arena.net studio photos.

I’m in the Pac-Norwest for the first time in several years because Arena.net is having an event today showing some press types Eye of the North. Somehow, I’ve been invited as well.

So, over the course of the day I’ll have impressions of the game and (as of right now) I’m uploading a bunch of screenshots I was just given to my Flickr account.

I’m going to be upfront about this too: I’m here on Arena’s dime. This is actually technically my first expedition for the blog here; as you can imagine I have no budget for travel. And ehh … this isn’t really a Slashdot thing.  So, if this is a love-fest with no downside be aware it’s possible that I’ve been co-opted by the economic realities of modern society.

I have mentioned before, though, how much I like Guild Wars. I hope you won’t throw the tomatoes too hard.